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Misquoting Muhammad

The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy

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Misquoting Muhammad

By: Jonathan A.C. Brown
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
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About this listen

Sometimes rumor, sometimes based on fact and often misunderstood, the tenets of Islamic law and dogma were not set in the religion's founding moments. They were developed, like in other world religions, over centuries by the clerical class of Muslim scholars.

Misquoting Muhammad takes listeners back in time through Islamic civilization and traces how and why such controversies developed, offering an inside view into how key and controversial aspects of Islam took shape. Misquoting Muhammad lays out how Muslim intellectuals have sought to balance reason and revelation, weigh science and religion, and negotiate the eternal truths of scripture amid shifting values.

©2014 Jonathan A. C. Brown (P)2017 Tantor Islam Middle East Middle Ages Africa Iran Ancient History Crusade
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This is an important book on Hadith and the history of the legal tradition of Islam. Buy the book, not this.
Sadly the narrator is not able to pronounce any of the Arabic/non-European words to any form of fidelity and hence makes the entire text sound garbled or extremely alien to any listener. The sample has enough examples of this.
This should be on audible but the entire narration needs to be revised and ideally reviewed by the actual author.

excellent content, terrible narration

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The book is immaculate written. It is very clear that the author has done his due diligence and has delivered a very high quality book. Jonathan brown objectively puts forth arguments on a number of issues Islamic scholars grapple with and explores them masterfully. The narration is not of the highest quality however. Either way I highly recommend this audiobook.

Amazing presentation of the evolution and mainstays of the Islamic scholarly tradition

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I definitely recommend reading this book, but I recommend thinking about it deeply.
My only complaint is that the narrator really needs to learn how to pronounce people's names.
Otherwise the book is a very interesting travel through the inter madhab rivalries of the 10th century. It isn't supposed to be that, but long irrelevant rivalries are suddenly resurrected in Johnathon Browns head as he brings context and history to problems that only exist if you are trying to maintain a hanbali epistemological world view.
He does a very good job of describing these problems in context, and has done a better job of teaching me the difference between the madhabs than most other people. But I can't help feel that Hanafis and Malikis, who he continually, perhaps unintentionally, refers to as non-sunni, can simply dismiss most if not all the hadith problems he refers to.
This book goes on my recommended reading list.

The Hanbali alternate universe

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This will change many minds on Islam in a good way. well researched, will recommend this book to everyone.

very good

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The narrator for the life of him couldn’t come close to pronouncing of the plethora of Arabic (and French) words in the book. But the book itself is an incredibly rich insight into the history and living discourse of Sunni jurisprudence

Incredible book, terrible narrator

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