Fr. Menezes' Biography of Muhammad Reconsidered

Note: The first and the last paragraph of my published review is presented here.  Click on "add a new discussion topic" below in order to post your response.  Click here to read the entire review in the Theological Review of the Episcopal Academy 4 (2008).

A storm has emerged regarding the biography of Muhammad written by Rev. J.L. Menezes, a Catholic missionary priest in India. The book was originally published in 1912 under the title, The Life and the Religion of Mohammed, by way of alerting Indian Muslims to the gross deficiencies of their prophet Muhammad. This book was recently republished by Roman Catholic Books, a self-styled conservative press devoted to "reprinting Catholic classics for the next century."  . . . .

The biography of Muhammad prepared by Fr. Menezes can only succeed in satisfying the incoherent antagonism of a misinformed public bent upon discrediting Islam at its very roots. The biography of Karen Armstrong, in contrast, is written by a Catholic scholar roughly a century later, when the Catholic Church had arrived at a much more sympathetic understanding of Islam. In this age, Catholics are encouraged to dialogue with Muslims in order to rightly understand the Muhammad and his legacy. Accordingly, those who want to understand and to prepare themselves to meet their Muslim neighbors would be well served by reading Karen Armstrong's biography. Fr. Menezes biography, meanwhile, remains a remnant of a fanatical era wherein character assassination and ugly half-truths served to instill fear and suspicion calculated to isolate us from our neighbors. Hopefully the age of inter-faith hatred will not return. To insure this, however, we need to listen to brave persons able to speak across the boundaries that separate us. Only then will we find an effective antidote to the poison of Islamophobia that has so dangerously passed into the American bloodstream following 9/11.