Jos.[eph] Morgan and Mohamed Rabadan: The first Muslim Biography of the Prophet Muhammad in English

By the time Joseph Morgan died (ca. 1750), he had lived longer in, and written more about, North Africa than any other Briton. This paper examines his first published work after his return to England ca. 1720: a translation of the life of the Prophet Muhammad which appeared in London in 1723 and 1725. While there had been previous biographies of the Prophet in English, Morgan's was the first that was completely based on an account by a Muslim Andalusian author, Mohamed Rabadan, who had written it in the first decade of the seventeenth century. It was partly based on the work of the thirteenth-century muhaddith, Abū al-Hasan Ahmad al-Bakrī and infused with Sufi imagery. This biography presented a highly positive view of the Prophet, the like of which had not existed before in any European language.