Muhammad biographies - recommendations?

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Canto
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Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 12:30 am

Muhammad biographies - recommendations?

Post by Canto » Sun Aug 01, 2010 3:01 am

I'm hoping for knowledgeable recommendations for a good biography of Islam's Muhammad. I would think he would be a very important person to know about considering that he is evidently admired by Islamic terrorist who quote him (perhaps in error).

A search at Amazon yields hundreds of titles and this is useless to me. A search at Google Books yields a more reasonable list starting with Maxime Rodinson's book which is evidently an old classic. A few books down the list is Robert Spencer's with the interesting title "The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion". What stuck me was that on Amazon.com that book has 342 reviews!, and was a New York Times best Seller. I guess that's a must have. I've heard somewhere that Karen Armstrong has a biography and that she & Mr Spencer are at odds. A number of these biographies listed by Google have extensive previews so you can read a lot at just that site about Muhammad from numerous authors. But I'm a bibliophile and I don't mind owning a number of such biographies but I wouldn't want to order a lemon.

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