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

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Had he met Lady Montagu, her Neapolitan contemporary Giambattista Vico would have admitted himself appropriately impressed by her scientific discoveries and by the multiplying body of ‘facts’ in their new, modern world. But he also understood well that, since the birth of myths among ancient peoples, the truest stories have often been the ones that made sense of the world even if they later fell short of facts. The professor of rhetoric could not bring himself to endorse the new fad of reconfiguring ethics, language and education through the same scientific lens of mathematics and measurement. The world of human experience was too immense and clouded in the miasma of man’s own invented cultures to be measured so exactly. Poetry, not arid prose, was man’s original language, the common-sense probabilities of alert living his best guide, and rhetorical flourishes, not dry accuracy, his most convincing moments. In an inaugural address given before the University of Naples in 1708, Vico vented his disapproval. In public speaking, he observed, enthusiasts of the mathematical philosophy of Descartes might assume that nothing sways an audience like reasoned truth. While wise men might be so convinced, Vico objected, ‘the multitude, the vulgus,’ are in the end only carried by ‘corporeal images’ and carnal appeals to their fears and appetites. If ‘modern’ philosophers thirsted after truth, they were better off consulting the ‘invented examples’ of the poets than some cold review of ...