There are many contemporary biographies of the Prophet Muhammad. But they make him feel distant or too difficult to emulate in our times. Joel Hayward’s The Leadership of Muhammad is certainly not such a work of seerah. It captivates right from the beginning. With each step, it transports readers to the very presence of the Prophet, allowing us to observe him, absorb his teachings, and intimately acquaint ourselves with his character. This compelling biography unfolds a profound desire to follow his example and yearn for his leadership. There are many layers to the Prophetic character that we experience in this book, revealing how he navigated the intricacies of seventh-century tribal Arabian society, characterised by numerous diverse and strong-willed personalities and rigid social structures.
Joel Hayward, The Leadership of Muhammad: A Historical Reconstruction (Claritas Books, Swansea, 2023)
A few years ago, I asked the question on social media: ‘why are Muslims so ungovernable?’ There wasn’t much of a meaningful response as it seems that others were equally perplexed. This has been a question that has consumed me in all the years I have been active in trying to address British Muslim concerns, work to create social reform, and engage in the wider society. I couldn’t understand why all these Muslim individuals and organisations, with all their knowledge of the history of Islam and of the Prophetic sunnah, were not able to address our issues or have any vision to elevate our communities. It seemed to me that their Islam was a top down, exclusive religion with every group claiming to be more worthy of leadership than the other, bothered only about representation not relevancy. While the big organisations were very good at forming a structure that gave people positions of power and authority, I seldom saw any purposeful attempt to work out what was required of them as representative organisations with any realistic long term strategic vision to address issues of social, political, and even economic concern.
The Leadership of Muhammad came as a much-needed antidote on our collective failure to understand, engage with or emulate the Prophetic model of leadership. In our complex and troubled world Hayward’s systematic explanation of the nature of the Prophet’s leadership makes complete sense while at the same time requires the questioning of every kind of leadership claim made by Muslim politicians and theologians certainly in our times. Caught between the infallible idealism of the Sufis and the harsh authoritarianism of the Salafis, it is difficult to find how our Prophet could have turned around the extreme tribalism of the Arabia of his time and establish a faith that expanded beyond our imagination. But times have changed since the rapid expansion of the early Islamic centuries and today we witness everywhere the loss of confidence in our ability to govern. While reading the book I felt a great comfort that the Prophetic leadership I sought was in between these pages.
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