Kecia Ali is Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University.
Ali attempts to uncover not only the stories of the Prophet
Muhammad and those close to him but also the motivations behind
recording or retelling these stories... Ali traces the shifting
emphasis on the narratives through time and across several authors
who crafted these stories and deployed them either to legitimize or
discredit Muhammad's prophethood.--Muhammed Hassanali"Library
Journal" (09/05/2014)
Ali offers a controversial thesis: Biographies of Muhammad have
taken a Protestant turn. She focuses on Muhammad not as a source of
metaphysical truth or personal piety but as a historical person
with his own life story. Just as depictions of the historical Jesus
are ever-changing, refashioned to fit new circumstances, so is the
quest for the historical Muhammad... No one can finish Ali's book
without a renewed curiosity about reading, interpretation, and
authority.--Bruce R. Lawrence"Chronicle of Higher Education"
(10/06/2014)
Kecia Ali has written an engaging and accessible book for anyone
wishing to understand a wide variety of historical and current
perspectives on Muhammad's life.--Mona Siddiqui, University of
Edinburgh
The Lives of Muhammad is not merely a biography, but a biography of
biographies. It's a book devoted to unraveling the story of the
Muslim prophet over the last 1,500 years and a serious contribution
to the debate over what is real, what is apocryphal and what is
myth... The Lives of Muhammad has set the bar high and it is
[Ali's] best work to date. It is exhaustive, well-researched and an
amazing contribution to the humanities.--Shyam K.
Sriram"PopMatters" (11/11/2014)
[Ali] examines Muhammad biographies as a genre to which both Muslim
and non-Muslim authors have contributed... The modern telling of
Muhammad's biography appears in Ali's work as a collaboration
between Muslims and non-Muslims, revivalists and reformists,
sympathetic outsiders and antagonistic critics who drew not only
from a more or less stable outline of Muhammad's life, but also
from worldwide notions of great men and from certain
controversies... For Ali, the development of Muhammad's biography
serves to undermine the famed clash-of-civilizations thesis, in
which the West and the Muslim world exist as separate and
self-contained wholes. In her view, the mutual influence between
Muslim and non-Muslim writers presents a world of shared values and
assumptions about what constitutes authoritative evidence, in which
writers who aim to defend Muhammad and those who seek to discredit
him together produce a body of literature that is neither East nor
West... Ali's coverage of historical shifts among Muhammad's
followers and opponents alike challenges our ideas about universal
norms... The Lives of Muhammad leads its reader to rethink
assumptions about history, biography and the imagined East-West
divide... [It] serves to skillfully complicate modern debates over
Muhammad's life and character, and his relevance for modern
Muslims.--Michael Muhammad Knight"Washington Post" (12/15/2014)
Muhammad presents two violently incompatible faces to the
historian. For devout Muslims, relying both on the Quran and the
vast corpus of sacred traditions, the hadith, he serves as the
unimpeachable model for human behavior, not only in matters of
faith and ritual but in the most humdrum aspects of daily life,
from marital and business relations to personal hygiene, including
even the proper use of the toothpick. For non-Muslims, drawing on
the same sources, he has been viewed from the earliest times as
lustful and barbarous, as a raving impostor aping the ancient
prophets; nowadays he is further charged with misogyny and
pedophilia. The contrast is so stark as to appear irreconcilable.
Instead of attempting to skirt this divergence, Ali uses it to
structure her inquiry.--Eric Ormsby"Wall Street Journal"
(01/09/2015)
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