تولستوي, الأديب الروسي العظيم, كتب هذا الكتاب كدفاع عن الإسلام والنبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم, في مواجهة التزوير والتلفيق الذين تعرض لهما الدين الإسلامي على يدي جمعيات المبشرين في "قازان". يقدم تولستوي في هذا الكتاب حجة قوية وبرهانًا ضد المدعين, حيث يختار مجموعة من أحاديث النبي ويقدمها بعد مقدمة غنية بالمعلومات والأفكار. يقدم تولستوي نظرة نقدية حادة على الدين والأخلاق والحقائق التاريخية, مما يجعل هذا الكتاب قراءة مثيرة للاهتمام لأي شخص مهتم بالأدب الروسي أو الفلسفة الدينية.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.