“There can be no doubt that Professor Rodinson’s book is the major contemporary Occidental work on the Prophet, and is essential reading.” —Edward W. Said, author of Orientalism and Out of Place
“An absorbing biography . . . Rodinson sensitively portrays a more than plausible Muhammad.” —The New Yorker
“In the best Voltairean tradition Rodinson delights in exposing his subject’s all too human amorous, acquisitive, vengeful nature. . . . [A] trenchant and (of course) timely piece of scholarship.” —Kirkus
“Maxime Rodinson, the distinguished scholar of the Arab and Muslim world. . . wrote to unveil the secrets of a world dimly understood by Europeans . . . Rodinson published some of the seminal texts in Middle Eastern studies, including Mohammed (1961), a biography still banned in parts of the Arab world for approaching the Prophet’s life from a sociological perspective . . . Although he remained an independent (or, as he quipped, ‘agnostic’) Marxist, he appreciated the powerful role that religion played in the Arab world at a time when many European leftist observers of the region preferred to see it as a form of false consciousness that would melt into air once the Arab masses awakened to their ‘true’ class interests.” —Adam Shatz, The Nation
“The most stimulating, balanced and sympathetic secular biography of the Prophet of Islam. . . the first real attempt to come to terms with a culture that could not be understood through sacred texts or works of exegesis alone.” —Tariq Ali, London Review of Books
