Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, authored about 20 books and is an internationally renowned expert on religion and also a powerful voice for interfaith understanding. She wrote Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet in 1993. (For her books I've read, click on her name.)

This new biography of Muhammad was carefully written and researched to focus on the man more than on the religion that succeeded him. She reveals to us his spirituality and faith, which many will find quite different from the religion often “misrepresented as cruel, intolerant, and inherently violent.” There is more historical data on his life than exists for any other major faith. Muhammad’s life was filled with struggle (what jihad means, not holy war) – tirelessly working against the prevailing greed, injustice and arrogance of the clans. She says he “literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-torn Arabia … so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution.” Submission to God’s will was his solution. “Paradigmatic figures are usually so far ahead of their time that their contemporaries fail to understand them, and, after their deaths, the movement splinters.”

In Karen Armstrong's conclusion she offers this wisdom: “If we are to avoid catastrophe, the Muslim and Western worlds must learn not merely to tolerate but to appreciate each other. A good place to start is with the figure of Muhammad: a complex man, who resists facile, ideologically-driven categorization, who sometimes did things that were difficult or impossible for us to accept, but who had profound genius and founded a religion and cultural tradition that was not based on the sword but whose name – “Islam” – signified peace and reconciliation.” For example, he returned to and “conquered” Mecca by refusing to fight and instead accepting whatever terms were offered him – this dismayed his followers at first, but confused and eventually convinced the enemy to accept the faith offered by this man of non-violence. When I had read The Koran (book 153), I felt it was dominated by statements of “fear and obedience,” but in this book Armstrong helped me to see the strong overtones of “tolerance and compassion” that I had missed on my own. As usual, here also she writes with clarity, thoroughness, and brilliance. I highly recommend this insightful book by a great writer on many religions.