Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage

Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

by Michael Muhammad Knight

Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority.

Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.

Genres: Islam

214 pages, Paperback

Published September 28, 2020

About the author

Michael Muhammad Knight (born 1977) is an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. His writings are popular among American Muslim youth. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as "one of the most necessary and, paradoxically enough, hopeful writers of Barack Obama's America," while The Guardian has described him as "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature," and his non-fiction work exemplifies the principles of gonzo journalism. Publishers Weekly describes him as "Islam's gonzo experimentalist." Within the American Muslim community, he has earned a reputation as an ostentatious cultural provocateur.

He obtained a master's degree from Harvard University in 2011 and is a Ph.D. student in islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

[Ltopo McFly]

As pretentious as its title. Knight writes in an overly scholarly way about various traditions (mostly from hadiths and not the Qur'an) about how Muhammad, Allah and various Muslim figues are anthropomorphized differently. Its not a bad subject but its a very thin one that Knight supports with unending citations that are only tenuously related to his own claims. Worse, Knight handles the subject of Muhammad's body mostly focusing on bodily functions and sex in a sarcastic and juvenile way that laughs at the presumed primitiveness of the traditions but still giving them a phony respect out of fear of offending Muslims. I'd respect Knight if he just was open in his snide hipster exploitation than pretend he finds deep intellectual commentary in them. Because Knight never tells us much about the culture or Islam through his collection of strange and rare Muslim writings from the Middle East. He's just showing off the curiosities he's collected and brought back for our entertainment and his own credibility as a fringe scholar. Despite being a Muslim, Knight is a classic Orientalist who sees Islam as just an exotic subculture and identity whose Otherness serves his white privilege and not the other way around He never represents Islam as anything more enriching than a more colorful and "punk" version of Christianity. And he oddly has very fundamentalist readings of the Qur'an that are sexist and even pederast in some obvious ploy to be accepted by his Salafist allies..