The Many Lives of Muhammad: Sirah Writing in London

Abstract

I excavate the genesis of the set of books produced on the life of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in 1869-70 during the Indian Muslim reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s visit to England. This includes his Series of Essays on the Life of Mohammed (1870) and minor Orientalist John Davenport’s An Apology for Mohammed and the Koran (1869) both published in London. Among Syed Ahmed’s motivations to visit England in what has been called “a voyage to modernism” (Hasan and Zaidi) was to refute scholar-administrator Sir William Muir’s calumnious Life of Mahomet (1861). Drawing upon correspondence and archives at Aligarh, I look at the interconnected existence of these three sirah works with a view to exploring the impact of modernism, travel, and empire on their production. Specifically, I explore the linguistic and (con)textual strategies of intellectual production of the two works, highlighting the global nature of the enterprise of defending Muhammad, aided by print culture and translation, and its implications for the development of modern Islamic studies as a dialogic between England and South Asia. The thread weaving these together is the new form of knowledge production as displayed in Syed Ahmed’s travel and travel-writing for defending the honour of Islam on a global scale. I explore how the interplay of modernism and religion is reflected in Muslim intellectual responses within empire.