Muhammad Islam first general pdf download

Muhammad Islam first general

MUHAMMAD ISLAM FIRST GENERAL

Book Contents

• List of Maps xi
• Important Dates xiii
• Acknowledgments xv
• Introduction xvii
• The Land of Arabia 3
• The Strategic Setting 11
• Arab Warfare 23
• 4.Muhammad 53
• Insurgency 67
• Battle of Badr 86
• Battle of Uhud 108
• Battle of the Ditch 131
• Battles of Kheibar and Mu’ta 152
• Conquest of Mecca 166
• Battle of Hunayn 178
• The Tabuk Expedition and the Death of Muhammad 191
• Muhammad’s Military Legacy 205
• Notes 221
• Bibliography 241
• Index 245

Book’s Introduction

It is always difficult to be objective about the life of the founder of a great religion.

His personality is blurred by an aura of the miraculous, enhanced almost inevitably by the needs of his believers to believe.

The earliest biographers, those closest to his lifetime, are often preoccupied not with historical fact, but with glorifying in every way the memory of one they believe to have been the Messenger of God or even God himself.

 The result is a rich accretion of myth and miracle, mysterious portents and heavenly signs, of residues from other religions and traditions.

The biographies of saviors and messiahs cannot usually pass as history; they are rather the propaganda of an expanding faith.1 It is the task of the historian to locate and explicate the truth that lies behind the myth. At the root of the effort rests the

historian’s faith that the task can be accomplished at all.

This book is about the military life of Muhammad, the founder of the great world religion of Islam.

Any work about Muhammad confronts all of the problems noted above. Despite Muhammad’s outstanding military accomplishments, there is no biography of this great man that examines his military life in detail.

 Extant biographies of Muhammad have focused on his role as a great seer who founded the religion of Islam, or his achievements as a social revolutionary, or his abilities as a statesman and administrator who created new institutions to govern