The Leadership of Muhammad: A Historical Reconstruction

by Joel Hayward

Given Prophet Muhammad’s immense impact on history, there are surprisingly few books that specifically analyse his leadership. The few that exist maintain that Muhammad was a wonderful leader because he was a wonderful man; that is, he succeeded in his mission because of his superior morality and personal qualities.

Although it is widely agreed that Muhammad was a moral and decent man, this explanation seems incomplete and almost inadequate. Joel Hayward approaches the Prophet’s leadership from a different vantage point by scrutinising ancient sources to ascertain whether Muhammad’s conscious actions, behaviour, and methods can provide any substantial and meaningful insights about the effectiveness of his strategic leadership.

Through meticulous research and rigorous analysis, Hayward demonstrates that Muhammad was an uncommonly astute and self-reflective man with the ability to create and communicate a believable strategic vision of a necessary and desirable future. This engaging yet deeply scholarly book makes a major contribution to both leadership studies and the Prophet’s biography.

Interested readers can learn more here by searching for the author's website.

The San Francisco Review of Books called The Leadership of Muhammad “ground breaking,” with reviewer Foluso Falaye describing it as “a great source of knowledge about Muhammad and the beginning of Islam.” He wrote that its “critical approach will appeal to academic minds, although the language is simple and direct enough to carry all readers along.” He added that, “in addition to being historically informative, it offers valuable lessons about leadership that could help world leaders, decision makers, teachers, and people from all walks of life to communicate and lead better.”

Genres: Islam, History, Nonfiction, Biography, Business

179 pages, Hardcover

Published July 31, 2021

About the author

Professor Joel Hayward, ZDaF, BA, MA Hons, PhD, is a New Zealand/British scholar and author who currently serves as Professor of Strategic Thought at the Rabdan Academy in the United Arab Emirates. The daily newspaper Al Khaleej called him “a world authority on international conflict and strategy”. The National newspaper called Hayward “eminent” and a “distinguished historian of warfare and military strategy”. Kirkus Reviews said that he “is undeniably one of academia’s most visible Islamic thinkers”. He is considered to be one of “the world’s five hundred most influential Muslims,” with his listing in the 2023 edition of The Muslim 500 noting that “he weaves together classical Islamic knowledge and methodologies and the source-critical Western historical method to make innovative yet carefully reasoned sense of complex historical issues that are still important in today’s world.” With the title of Shaykh, Hayward has earned ijazāt (teaching authorizations) in ʿAqīdah (Islamic theology) and Sīrah (the Prophet’s biography). He has held various academic leadership posts, including Director of the Institute for International and Civil Security at Khalifa University (UAE), Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (also at Khalifa University), Head of Air Power Studies at King’s College London, and Dean of the Royal Air Force College (both UK).

He is the author or editor of seventeen books and major monographs and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, mainly in the fields of strategic studies, military history, the Islamic ethics of war and conflict, and Islamic (esp. seventh-century) and western (esp. twentieth century) history. His best-selling books include a major analysis of German airpower during the Stalingrad campaign and a thematic investigation of Horatio Lord Nelson and his way of war. His recent books include Warfare in the Qurʾān (2012), War is Deceit: An Analysis of a Contentious Hadith on the Morality of Military Deception (2017), Civilian Immunity in Foundational Islamic Strategic Thought: A Historical Enquiry (2019), and The Leadership of Muhammad: A Historical Reconstruction. The latter won the prestigious prize of “Best International Non-Fiction Book” at the 2021 Sharjah International Book Awards. His newest book is The Warrior Prophet: Muhammad and War (2022).


Professor Hayward has given strategic advice to political and military leaders in several countries, has given policy advice to prominent sheikhs, and was tutor to His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales, Duke of Cambridge. In 2011 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2016 he was named as the “Best Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences” at the Middle East Education Leadership Awards. Professor Hayward is also active in the literary arts and has published three books of fiction and four collections of Islamic poetry.

Reviews

[Joel Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Leadership of Muhammad was a wonderful book to work on. I loved the research stage. The early Arabic sources are rich and vivid.

[Mohamed Amer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never knew most of the things I learned in this highly original, carefully researched book. It's scholarly yet can be understood by most readers.

[Mel Aitkenhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well written book about the founder of Islam. I'm not a Muslim, and adhere happily to another faith, but I did enjoy this and hope it does well. Muhammad clearly had something going for him, and in terms of his exceptional leadership qualities, Hayward explains precisely what made him so good.

[Samaira Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw a positive review in a Manhattan literary magazine, and was keen to read about the way my Prophet pbuh actually went about leading and creating a devoted followership. The author shocked me by correctly demonstrating that our traditional Muslim way of arguing that of course the Prophet must have been a perfect leader because he was a perfect man is inadequate as an explanation. Only a Muslim could utilize that argument. What about the other 3/4 of the world? They don't necessarily believe he was a Prophet, let alone a perfect man. So how could they make sense of his leadership? Joel Hayward is a Muslim, and his expertise with the Arabic sources is impressive, but he analyzes the Prophet's leadership skills without recourse to our Muslim bias. With great objectivity he demonstrates from the sources themselves the effective ways in which the Prophet pbuh thought, made decisions, planned, acted and communicated in ways that worked best in the context of seventh century Arabia. It really taught me a wealth of things I never knew, and had in fact never thought to inquire into.

[Amal Ismail · Rating 5 out of 5]

It must be very hard for a Muslim historian to write a truly objective analysis of Holy Prophet Muhammad ﷺ because we grow up loving him and seeing him as the best ever human. So I commend Joel Hayward for managing to putting his religious views out of the way so that he could study this topic with scientific objectivity. . He knows the earliest Arabic sources amazingly well and uses them to create a very detailed analysis of Muhammad's ﷺ leadership behavior. I was surprised and pleased that, for once, a Muslim scholar did not simply maintain that the Prophet's ﷺ great moral traits are precisely the things that made him a great leader. Joel Hayward says he agrees with this characterization of Muhammad, but entirely rejects it as the explanation for Muhammad’s leadership success. Instead he looks carefully and with a scholar's critical detachment at the things Muhammad ﷺ actually thought and did. The result is a lovely book that taught me things on virtually every page that I never knew.

[n.]

An accessible and objective analysis of the leadership qualities of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

[Rita Sousa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a Muslim and I knew nothing about Muhammad before I read this book. I was not especially interested in him (no disrespect). But I teach leadership so when I saw this book I made time to read it. I'm very pleased I made this decision. It is a fine book (detailed in expert research and fluently written) with very persuasive and systematic analysis of the leadership of Muhammad, a man I now feel considerable respect for. He was a remarkably effective leader despite having no formal education and no tribal leadership status that made people follow him. They followed him because of his intuitive and untaught but highly skilled strategic thinking, acting and influencing. He had great understanding of human nature and was able to create what the author calls a vision of a better future. Vision, as we know, is the essential element of leadership. Muhammad also proved a master of personal development through delegation, and he had an uncanny ability to develop the latent potential that he saw in certain people. He was also flexible enough to be able to compromise on all non-essentials if doing so would bring his higher goals to fruition. I may never read another book about Muhammad, and I am not a religious person, but I now have the strongest respect for him. He was a tremendous leader. He should be studied in today's leadership schools.

[Manal Daana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Joel Hayward has undoubtedly adopted an innovative approach to the Prophet’s (saaw) leadership. Although a Muslim himself, he did not start out with what he sees as the understandable but flawed logic found in many Islamic books on Muhammad. Those books say that Muhammad was devout, honest, compassionate, tolerant, patient, fair, decisive and courageous. The authors of these books insist that these moral traits are the very things that made Muhammad a great leader. Professor Hayward says he agrees with this characterization of Muhammad, but entirely rejects it as the explanation for Muhammad’s leadership success. “To say that his moral character was what made Muhammad an effective leader makes no sense,” Professor Hayward explains. “We simply cannot continue to claim that, just because he was both a very good man and a successful leader, we must conclude that he was a successful leader because he was very good man.” “That’s unsustainable,” Hayward says. “History reveals that very many deeply imperfect, corrupt or wickedly cruel people — including Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin and Mao Zedong — have been very successful leaders.” In terms of terms of what academics call “causality,” which means the actual reasons for something happening, Hayward says we have to look elsewhere to explain Muhammad’s effectiveness as a leader. Hayward points out that, “that while it can be true that a good person is a good leader, it can equally be true that a bad person is a good leader. Likewise, it can be true that a good person is a bad leader, and equally true that a bad person is a bad leader. Thus, a leader’s elevated morality does not necessarily cause leadership effectiveness.” Instead, Hayward meticulously investigated what the early Arabic sources reveal about Muhammad’s capacity and aptitude for leadership in order to make a determination as to whether, and to what degree, Muhammad consciously acted in ways that produced positive results, especially the results he actually sought, during his twenty-three years as a leader. Hayward’s command of the earliest Arabic sources is reminiscent of Martin Ling’s, and puts Hayward into a highly esteemed but very small cohort of western scholars who have such knowledge. Hayward also strenuously avoided the greatest mistake that today’s leadership writers make when they write about historical leaders. They use modern concepts, ideas and jargon to explain what in fact a leader 1,400 years ago could not possibly have been thinking. Hayward points out that this type of anachronism — attributing something to a period in which it did not yet exist — utterly ruins most books on Muhammad’s leadership. Instead, Hayward analyses and explains Muhammad’s leadership effectiveness only through the lens of seventh-century Arabia. In other words, he casts Muhammad as a man of his time whose main reference points for leadership were the things that brought success to the tribal leaders that he was able to observe and learn lessons from. That doesn’t mean that Muhammad didn’t have original ideas and methods. Hayward details these in the most thorough and fascinating way, and he is the first in fact to make sense of how Muhammad understood what we today call strategy. The result of this approach is a highly interesting and authoritative book. I really loved reading it and I learned a great deal in the process. It deserves to be very widely read, and will, I’m very sure, be recognized as the definitive book on the subject.

[Flamur Vehapi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have gone through a number of books and articles on the topic because I was interested in learning about leadership from an Islamic perspective and this is by far the best book available in the English language. It is a source of knowledge and wisdom for all of those interested on the subject. I just wish it was published a decade earlier when I was doing my own research on the subject. Dr. Hayward is an expert at his craft so I know you will enjoy and cherish this book. I highly recommend this great work, and I look forward to reading the author's future publications.

[Saalik Khaleem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first book by Professor Joel Hayward that I read and I can see why it was immediately celebrated and won prizes for scholarship. Hayward is a devout Muslim yet maintains the highest standards of academic objectivity and rigour. He is truly a master of the Classical Arabic sources yet, refreshingly for a Muslim, he maintains critical distance and doesn't push his analysis to satisfy Muslims' expectations. He lets the evidence speak for itself. And by the way, the conclusions are thoroughly acceptable to Muslims anyway. This is a FANTASTIC book!

[Khalida Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watch Joel Hayward's podcasts and you will want to read his books. This was the second I read and it's a really great book, full of original analysis that rests on very detailed analysis of the Arabic sources. I never learned as much from a single books as I learned from this one.

[Noor Saadeh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[M.R.K M.R.K · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Leadership of Muhammad was a great read, I will definetly re-read again sometime soon.

[Ibaa Al Rawahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book. I’m particularly moved by this perspective of the Prophet (PBUH) and his unique, inspiring leadership. Dr. Hayward’s analysis, especially in connecting the Prophet’s traits to his leadership, was the highlight for me. Five stars, hearts, and all the emotions—a truly remarkable read!

[Gary Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read many books on leadership, ordinarily about or by business leaders, and occasionally about military leaders. This was the first book I've read about the leadership of a religious icon (I hope I haven't used the word irreverently). It was eye-opening. Joel Hayward explained why Muhammad was able to motivate and inspire as well as how to create a realistic, carefully sequenced and achievable strategy for the attainment of major goals. He was a good prioritizer who understood the importance of devoting energy only to things that mattered most, whilst remaining flexible and able to compromise on, and even discard if necessary, things that mattered less. He delegated really well, understanding that he could not and should not do everything himself. By delegating to others he empowered them and earned their devotion and respect. That does not mean that he delegated to anyone who was unready for a role. First he made sure that person had been prepared properly through training and through proving his or her worth with smaller things.

[Zafar A · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stronger than John Adair's book of the same title. First, Hayward is a Muslim and Adair is not. This gives Hayward a huge advantage in terms of knowing the Arabic sources for the Holy Prophet's (s) life. He quotes and uses them reliably and accurately to build his analysis. Second, Hayward is a trained historian and Adair is not. This means that Hayward is able to contextualize his analysis of Muhammad's (s) ideas and behavior in terms of the context of seventh century Arabia. Hayward's book is very beautifully written and convincingly argued. It's a really fine book. It really is innovative in its approach.