Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth - Softcover

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Jaroslav Stetkevych is Professor Emeritus of Arabic Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Modern Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments and The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasîb. His articles on classical and modern Arabic literature have appeared in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Ukrainian.

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The richness of myth in Arab-Islamic culture has long been ignored or even denied. In Muhammad and the Golden Bough Jaroslav Stetkevych demonstrates the existence of a coherent pre-Islamic Arabian myth that was subsequently incorporated into Islamic poetic tradition and the Dur'an. The book dissects the intriguing Arab-Islamic myth built around Muhammad's unearthing of a "golden bough" from the grave of the last survivor of an ancient Arab people, the Thamud, who, according to the myth, were destroyed by a divine scourge for their iniquity. In the myth the episode of the slaying of the she-camel of the prophet Salih, which precipitates the downfall of the Thamud, is symbolically linked with Muhammad, the discoverer of the golden bough. Through its development of a methodology for analyzing the mythic and folkloric material of pre-Islamic Arabia and the process of its incorporation into Islamic myth and Qur'anic exegesis, Muhammad and the Golden Bough offers compelling insights for students of Islam, comparative religion, and anthropology.