This book is not so much a "biography" inasmuch it is a hagiography, and a rather pandering one at that. Weinberger writes in his afterword that it was during the first Gulf War that he "took comfort" in reading about Muhammad and the Koran. The result is a prime example of Romanticist Orientalism (as opposed to the more demonizing Orientalism).
This book is simply a collection of old Muslim hagiographies (contrary to the previous reviewer, these are already translated into English; Weinberger is not THAT great) from various eras and places of the Mideast. It's only about 50 pages and one could easily read the whole thing in about 10 minutes. Some are as short as one sentence, such as "The Prophet was born circumcised." Only the most devoted Muslim apologist and their Leftist Orientalist romantics would like this. I seriously can't believe Verso would publish this. They would have done better to reprint Maxime Rodinson's classic Marxist/secular biography of Muhammad (objective and fair, by the way). I guess since Muhammad isn't as loved in the West as Muslim apologists would like him to be (i.e., absolute awe and deference to the man), Verso probably thought it could "stick it" to the Western public and allow such idolization of him to be printed. Which is a mistake since the historical Muhammad is certainly more interesting and credible.
As tripe as this book may be, it's a cute little book and has a few interesting points and symbolisms I never heard before. I'm not sure if the points in the book are necessarily known and entirely believed by most Muslims (I hope they don't, as such beliefs would be insulting to them), but some are interesting and others are plain weird (Muhammad apparently made a bald man grow hair, suckled milk from his Uncle's breast, and most of Hell is filled with women engulfed by fire and hanging by their breast nipples by pierced chains, etc). I must say this is even worse than Karen Armstrong's hagiography "Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time". Tsk tsk
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