Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam across the Centuries

Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam across the Centuries. By Tarif Khalidi. New York: Doubleday, 2009. 327 pp. $26.

True to its title, this study by a professor of Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut chronicles the myriad images of Muhammad throughout the ages from the eighth-century biography by Ibn Ishaq to twentieth-century polemics and apologetics. Unfortunately, the book omits the more troubling images, the ones echoed in the behaviors of today's more troubling Muslims. Such an approach has an ancient pedigree: Writing some 1 ,200 years ago, Ibn Hisham, editor of the earliest biography of Muhammad, admitted honestly...