Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (2009) — a Mini Book Review

© 2016 Peter Free

 

23 January 2016

 

 

Engaging soap opera, but lousy scholarship

 

Lesley Hazleton’s After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Anchor Books, 2009) will appeal to theatrically oriented readers, who care not a whit about properly engaged historical scholarship.

 

After the Prophet is unidirectionally oriented toward eliciting sympathy for Shia Muslims in their dispute with Sunnis over the Prophet Muhammad’s successors. The book’s inadequately few citations refer to entire works, rather than to specific pages or sections within those.

 

If this were not enough to diminish the book’s intellectual merit, Hazleton’s narrative dwells interminably upon the incessant stream of murderously partisan deceits — which the author “dolls” up with what can only be inventively imagined flourishes — but then quasi-miraculously concludes (in passing) that much more binds Muslims together than separates them. Though true, Hazleton’s superficial text does nothing to support her closing claim.

 

Indeed, the author’s account of the Sunni-Shia split almost entirely confines itself to the Seventh Century and ignores elements that (one might presume) occurred later. Hazleton’s journalistic background probably assumes that generating scattered “artistic” impressions” is historiographically adequate to serve as an overview of a centuries-complicated religious dispute. From an accuracy perspective, this is unlikely to be true.

 

Other than the obvious resentment engendered by the Sunnis’ allegedly stolen succession (from the Shias’ preferred Ali), Hazleton says nothing about other religious and/or cultural elements that separate the two main competing branches of Islam.

 

 

A sample

 

Hazleton claims to know things that she could not possibly actually know. In regard to a purportedly scandalous episode in which one of Muhammad’s wives is left behind in the desert and rescued by a young and handsome “knight”:

 

 

Aisha, in short, was used to having things her own way, so when she was left behind in the desert, she saw no reason to expect anything different. If there was the slightest murmur of panic at the back of her mind as the sun rose higher overhead and she took shelter under a scraggly acacia tree, she would never have acknowledged it, not even to herself. Of course she would be missed. Of course someone would be sent for her. The last thing anyone would expect was that she, the favorite wife of the Prophet, run after a pack of camels like some Beduin shepherd girl. That would be just too demeaning.

 

There is no doubt that Aisha was innocent of the charges against her [having a lurid affair with the young man who rescued her]. She may have been young and headstrong, but she also had a highly developed sense of politics. To risk her whole standing, let alone her father’s for a passing dalliance? That was out of the question. The favorite wife of the Prophet consorting with a mere warrior, and one who wasn’t even from one of the best families? She would never dream of it. Safwan had behaved as she had expected him to behave, the white knight to her maiden in distress. To imply anything beyond that was the most scurrilous slander. How could anyone thing such a thing?

 

Certainly Muhammad did not.

 

© 2009 Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Anchor Books, 2009) (at pages 25-27) (extracts)

 

 

After the Prophet is better than nothing on the subject, but it is preponderantly neither objective nor properly documented

 

A more demanding editor might have elevated Lesley Hazleton’s work to genuine scholarly and educational merit.

 

As it is, the book qualifies as historically inventive soap opera.