Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

Jonathan A. C. Brown's Misquoting Muhammad is a scholarly work aimed at a broad educated readership, examining how hadith, the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's sayings and actions, have been interpreted, contested and sometimes misused across Islamic history and into the modern period, written by a specialist in hadith studies and Islamic law. Its authority rests on Brown's close command of the classical hadith-critical tradition itself, which he presents as a sophisticated internal Muslim scholarly discipline rather than a modern Western import. Because the book engages contemporary controversies, including modern reformist and extremist uses of hadith, some of its specific interpretive judgments on those live debates have themselves drawn discussion from scholars and general readers who weigh the underlying sources differently than Brown does.