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

About the author

Jonathan A C Brown: Jonathan A C Brown (b. 1977 CE) is an American scholar of Islam and among the most widely read academic voices on hadith in the English language. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., in an Episcopalian family, he embraced Islam in 1997 as an undergraduate. He took his B.A. in history at Georgetown University and his doctorate in Islamic thought at the University of Chicago in 2006, with Arabic study in Cairo along the way. After teaching at the University of Washington, he returned to Georgetown, where he holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service and is affiliated with the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He follows the Hanbali school in law. Brown's scholarship centers on the hadith sciences, Islamic law, and the place of the Sunna in the modern world. His landmark study The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim examined how the great hadith collections gained their authority. His more accessible works, Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction, and Misquoting Muhammad, have introduced many readers to how the Prophet's words have been transmitted, interpreted, and contested. He has also written on slavery, race, and Islamic legal reform, and serves as editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law.