Following Muhammad

Abstract

Following Muhammad is a scholarly, but not academic, book directed at the general reading public. Written by a religious studies scholar with an evident sympathy for Islam, it seeks to address western prejudices about Islam by presenting a clear, concise, and accessible picture of the faith in context. Although the author explores Islam’s historical evolution, his primary focus is to balance this with insights into how Muslims themselves understand their religion in contemporary as well as historical times. Although primarily directed toward non-Muslims, whose essentialist media-driven assumptions about Islam are constantly lamented by Ernst, it is also of interest to the Muslim reading public as a refreshing departure from standard accounts of Muslims and Islam. Although not a textbook, it could be profitably used as a text for discussion in a variety of courses. Two key issues to which Ernst returns repeatedly are, first, the erroneous western tendency of assuming that fundamentalists are the “true” representatives of Islam, and, second, the importance of recognizing the part colonialism has played in shaping contemporary developments in the Muslim world. By drawing comparisons with Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths, he highlights the unacceptability – and indeed absurdity – of many generic assumptions about Islam and Muslims. Instead, he stresses the importance of non-Muslims recognizing the diversity of faith and practice in time and space that characterizes Islam, just as it does all other world religions. The book is divided into six chapters organized in a thematic rather than a chronological manner in order to reflect the author’s self-proclaimed emphasis on “rethinking” Islam today. Chapter 1 explores western perceptions of, and prejudices toward, Islam in modern and medieval times and suggests ways to avoid such prejudices in our own time. Chapter 2 looks at what is meant by the term religion and how evolving western definitions of religion have shaped western perceptions of other faiths, including Islam. This is counterbalanced by a survey of how Muslims have defined Islam by assessing its historical vocabulary and the vocabulary used by present-day Muslims ...