100 books like The Battlefields of the Prophet Muhammad

This book combines the exciting travels in the deserts of Arabia with his spiritual journey to uncover the meaning of the faith practiced there. I find immense meaning and wisdom in his words as he explores a faith practiced by more than a quarter of the world’s population!

In one story, an old man explains what it means to pray, and it sunk into me that it is focused on the willing surrender to God, obeying His commands, and bringing peace within us and our destiny.

I admire Asad’s interpretation of 'unhappiness' when he sees unhappy faces while traveling in a subway. On reaching home, he finds an open page from Qur’an that translates to mean, “You are distracted by mutual competition in amassing (worldly benefits), until you reach the graves.” That really struck me. 

I am impressed with the author's substantial effort in examining the Holy Scriptures from the perspective of modern scientific knowledge. The author looks at various Quranic statements in the light of scientific discoveries and concludes that it can't be of human origin - that surely enhances that the Qur'an is a true Divine Book.

This book also has the noble purpose of promoting much-needed unity between the followers of Christianity and Islam and countering ignorant and false ideas about both religions. It was especially gratifying to learn of a Vatican document describing that Muslims profess the faith of Abraham and worship one God as Christians do – that gives me hope that we are all one.  

There are many verses in the Qur'an that give high importance to justice and command followers to strive against injustice. Two of my favorites are "firmly uphold justice even if it is against you, your family, etc." and "you are the best people brought out to promote good and prevent wrong." I found my purpose in life in this Divine Book.

In addition to overall guidance, The Holy Qur'an guides readers toward the fight against injustice. It is an invaluable read for those who are conscious of God, believe in the unseen, bow down in prayer, and are thankful for what has been provided to them.

This book is about the 2002 Gujarat riots in India and the coverup. It reads like a real-life thriller as you learn about the murder of the state’s Home Minister, the complicity of the state and its officials in the massacre, and how those who went along with the cover-up were rewarded. This book inspires me with the courage and conviction of the author-activist Rana Ayyub, who dares to speak up and continues to do so!

It will surprise and upset you that the politicians who are said to be complicit in the horrendous rapes, murders, and rioting have ascended to the national level of governance in India. When the author played tapes from her undercover investigation of Gujarat at a university of Chicago event, “everybody was stunned, numb, and there was just silence in the room.” 

While Boyarin challenges what we thought we knew about Judaism and Christianity, Fred Donner does the same for the history of the origins of Islam. Most of what we know, or think we know, about Muhammad comes from the hadiths (traditions), sayings, and deeds of the prophet that were transmitted orally and put down in writing two centuries after the prophet’s death. Leaving aside hadith and the traditional biographies of the prophet, Donner looks at what we can say about Muhammad and his first followers based on the Quran alone. While the terms “Islam” and “Muslim” are present in the Quran, Islam is not a "religion" apart from other monotheisms.

On the contrary, Muhammad had no intention of founding a new "religion," but saw himself as the successor to earlier prophets, from Adam to Jesus and the apostles, who all preached the same message: condemnation of idolatry, declaration of unity… show more.

The siege of Mecca in 1979 was one of the most consequential events in recent Saudi history. This book reads like a thriller, which makes sense because anyone familiar with Trofimov's work at the Wall Street Journal knows that he is a gifted storyteller and insightful analyst. The book provides context to the worldview that gave rise to al Qaeda.

Concerning the study of the hajj (i.e. Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca), I consider this book is pioneering primarily because it utilizes original sources and documentation left by Ottoman administrators to depict and recreate uneasy experiences of the pilgrims’ everyday life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Arabia. During these centuries, Mecca was under the control and authority of the Ottoman sultans, and the hajj pilgrimage was an extremely tough journey: long, arduous, and fraught with danger. This work has contributed to our understandings of the pilgrims’ conditions and mundane activities and the sultans’ policies of the pilgrimage.  

I read this book in two sittings. I couldn’t put it down.

The escape of Yasmine from a fundamentalist Muslim family is breathtaking, and it kept me turning the pages. I love her story of courage, resilience, betrayal, and hope. My emotions gyrated–anger–anxiety–sadness–hope.

I admire her passion to make a difference. Her sufferings have been transformed into energy that encourages me to confront any form of abuse, wherever it exists.

This is an extremely fine book that traces and discusses the origins or intellectual roots of Islamic renewal and reformism in Indonesia (and the Malay world in general). What makes this book special is that, among others, the author used rare academic sources (e.g., Arabic biographic dictionaries that have never before been analyzed or utilized as research materials) to reconstruct the history of Indonesia’s Islamic reformism. The book shows that an orthodox form of Islam in Southeast Asia was the product of intellectual and religious networks between Muslim societies in the archipelago and the Malay-Indonesian Islamic scholars in the Haramain (Mecca and Medina) who transmitted Islamic scholarships, knowledge, and discourses to them since the seventeenth century. 

The findings in this book have opened my eyes to a truly unique moment in the history of cross-cultural translation and non-Western philosophy by showing how pre-modern Indian metaphysical teachings in Sanskrit were refashioned by the Persian Sufi philosophical tradition in early modern South Asia. I particularly recommend Translating Wisdom because it clearly points to an alternative quest for wisdom for those who wish to escape the stranglehold of Anglo-American and European epistemic systems.