San Antonio College Library

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. The author's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon...

Scholars debate the accuracy of the Koran, quest to discover the biographical history of Muhammad, and debate the precepts of Islamic law.

The richness of myth in Arab-Islamic culture has long been ignored or even denied. In Muhammad and the Golden Bough Jaroslav Stetkevych demonstrates the existence of a coherent pre-Islamic Arabian myth that was subsequently incorporated into Islamic poetic tradition and the Dur'an. The book dissects the intriguing Arab-Islamic myth built around Muhammad's unearthing of a "golden bough" from the grave of the last survivor of an ancient Arab people,...

[This book is a] biography of the Prophet Muhammad ... that highlights [his] spiritual and ethical teachings. --Dust jacket.