Muhammad’s Body

Michael Muhammad Knight’s thought-provoking and compelling new book joins a growing literature using materiality and embodiment as lenses for the study of Islam. Like Adam Bursi’s work on relics and ritual and Travis Zadeh’s work on the physicality of the Qur’an, it uses early Islamic texts to access a world of substances, bodies, and the forces and contacts that are understood to bind them. The texts themselves are understood not simply as carriers of meaning, but (to adapt an image that Knight uses throughout the book) as flows through the nodes of a network that transmits power and blessing as much as it transmits ideas. Knight’s immediate subject is the body of the Prophet Muhammad, but his larger project addresses (and critiques) the religious and scholarly structures that seek to channel and capture—if only partially and provisionally—the power and holiness of the prophetic body. Its central organizing concept is baraka

Aesthetics · Art · Blessing · Islam · Knight · Materiality (auditing) · Motif (music) · Power (physics) · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Education and Islamic Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy