Review of ‘The Last Muslim’ - by Lesley Hazleton

If anyone is serious about exploring diversity and world history - you should check out some of the books I’ve been reading. Unfortunately these subjects are probably not on the mainstream diversity agenda - but they give an insight into important times in world history that have had a major impact on the world today. To ignore them means you are not getting the whole picture.

So this book I just finished is Lesley Hazleton’s book ‘The First Muslim’ - about the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

I’ve heard mixed reviews about this book so I wanted to try it for myself. I actually started reading this in Ramadan earlier this year(April), and it started off well. I was engaged with the simple story telling style and the insight into the characters. And then I stopped half-way, only to resume again earlier this month.

The premise of this book is that Hazleton wants to portray the Prophet as a ‘real person’ with real human emotions and feelings.

Hazleton mentions that traditional books about the Prophet paint him more in his role as messenger and an ‘ideal man’, but in her view “To idealize someone is also, in a way, to dehumanize them, so that despite the millions if not billions of words written about Muhammad, it can be hard to get any real sense of the man himself.“

However, Hazleton does say herself that she is “exerting the biographer’s privilege and real purpose, which is not merely to follow what happened but to uncover the meaning and relevance within the welter of events.”

While she does cover the key events and traditional stories about the Prophet’s life - I feel there is quite a bit of artistic license going on here, and I struggled with some of her theories.

My concern is that anyone reading the book with no background on the Prophet’s life, may take everything Hazleton says a bit too seriously and as fact! I don’t feel everything she is saying can be seen as a proper historic record - but more like conjecture.

So these are just some of my thoughts...what did you think when you read it?