Description

Martin Lings’s Life of Muhammad is unlike any other. Based on Arabic sources of the eighth and ninth centuries, of which some important passages are translated here for the first time, it owes the freshness and directness of its approach to the words of the men and women who heard Muhammad speak and witnessed the events of his life. Martin Lings has an unusual gift for narrative. He has adopted a style which is at once extremely readable and reflects both the simplicity and grandeur of the story. The result is something that can be read with equal enjoyment by those already familiar with Muhanumad’s life and those coming to it for the first time.

This book was awarded a prize by the government of Pakistan, and selected as the best biography of the prophet in English at the National Seerat Conference held in 1983 at Islamabad. Since then it has been published in French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Dutch, Malay and Tamil, and is shortly to be published in Arabic, German, Urdu, Sindhi and Sinhalese. In 1990, after the book had attracted the attention of the Azhar University in Cairo, the author received a decoration from President Mubarak.