Reports relating supernatural events - or miracles - in the life of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 11/632) have been traditionally either ignored by those modern scholars attempting to determine the historicity of the source material or have been studied piecemeal in an attempt to determine their origins by those scholars who see them as secondary additions. The current study will examine both the sira/ta'rikh, the story of Muḥammad's life as told within larger works of universal history, and tafsir, exegetical, works of two medieval Muslim scholars, al-T&dotbelow;abari (d. 310/923) and Ibn Kathir (d. 773/1373), to attempt to determine how the reports of the supernatural fit into the story of Muḥammad's life as a whole. The result is that there is both a supernatural and mundane archetype for the life of Muḥammad, and that they appear to mirror each other almost perfectly. Whereas the story begins with God performing all the miracles for Muḥammad's benefit, by the time of his death in Medina, Muḥammad has completed his mastery over the forces of the supernatural, even to the point where it appears that God performs miracles directly in response to Muḥammad's prayers. Thus, as Muḥammad gained more control over the movement he founded, he gained an equal amount of control over the forces of the supernatural. Both al-T&dotbelow;abari and Ibn Kathir include reports that contain the supernatural archetype, but also include reports that diverge from it in important ways. While there is not one, overall theory to explain why each author made the changes he did to the supernatural archetype of Muḥammad's life, the examples in the following chapters indicate that the role of the supernatural versus the mundane, the politicization of the archetype, and authorial opinion were important to each scholar and help to support the argument that the miracle stories are integral to the life of Muḥammad as a whole, and deserve to be studied as such.

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This thesis presents a comparative study of two modern Muslim biographers of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Sayyid Ja$ rm sp{c}$far Murtada, the one a Sunni the other a Shispc$ = i. In dealing with their works on the { it s = i ra}, the intention is to focus on some aspects of the life of the Prophet of Islam from the time when he resided in Makka. After outlining the authors' scholarly backgrounds, sources, methods, and purposes, etc., the thesis deals with certain specific issues concerning the Prophet's birth, his nursing and the reason behind the custom of having foster-mothers, the controversial stories of the splitting of his chest and of his participation in the sacrilegious war, his state both before and after the announcement to him of his Mission, the authors' interpretations of his night journey and ascent to heaven and lastly their discussion about the Prophet and miracles. This research should not be considered as historical in nature; rather, it aims at clarifying the similarities and differences which may be discovered between our two biographers, and at comparing their respective Sunn = i and Sh = i$spc$ = i approaches.

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The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.

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