Karen Armstrong is ignorant and she is a poor historian if any.

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 14, 2006 at 07:25

If you read her biography of Muhammad it is an absolute joke.

She does not know any Arabic the primary source of such historical study. She is clueless about methodolgies of historical research, and it comes loud and clear in such poor book.

She is very un-aware of the advances that have taken place in the sturdy of early Islam, and like them or not one have to contend with the likes of John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Micheal Cook, Ignaz Golziher, Henri Lammens and a long list of infidels.

However, Ms Karen makes it very clear that her book is very much dependent on Watt and Rodison's biographies of Muhammad (notice that Rodison's biography is not allowed to be read in Egypt) which makes her little book not an original work but a redaction of the work of other authors. So much for originality.

But the final nails in the coffin of such poor work is that no one that study early islam would read this nonsense, when we have far better than this nonsense, and more important is that there is an impasse in the research about the life of Muhammad because (thanks to Wansbrough) the Muslim sources that we have are unreliable to really answer the question: "what really happened."

So much for the ignorant Karen Armstrong.

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