The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation

A significant contribution to the history of interactive relationships between the Islamic world, Europe, and America By crossing disciplinary boundaries in the field of the humanities, this volume aims to elucidate Muhammad’s visualization in the West vis-à-vis his image in Islam. It does so not by relegating materials to geographical and/or linguistic spheres or by separating texts from images. Rather, it seeks to place various articles in thematic and theoretical conversation so as to explore more broadly how the Prophet has been constructed, visualized, narrated, encountered, revised, adapted, and adopted in multiple cultural traditions, in European and American traditions and in the world of Islam from the medieval era until the modern period. The first volume to discuss Euro-American literary and artistic traditions in conjunction with and as related to the history of representations of Muhammad in the Islamic world. It affords a more nuanced understanding of Euro-American relationships with Islamic lands from the earliest period until today.