Muhammad Is Subject of Tonight’s Annual Gitner Lecture

Kecia Ali, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of religion and author of The Lives of Muhammed, will deliver the second annual Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family CAS Lecture tonight at the Tsai Performance Center. Photo by Vernon Doucette

Who was Muhammad? From freewheeling Wikipedia entries to scholarly theological tracts to the disturbingly prolific anti-Islam propaganda machine, every source offers a different spin on the life of the prophet. These countless biographies are fleshed out from the barest of facts, and can reveal as much about the biographer as about his or her subject. The topic has long fascinated Kecia Ali, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of religion, who has written books about Islam and the law, Islam and gender, and feminist reflections on the Q’uran. Researching her recently published The Lives of Muhammad, Ali became captivated not just by the Rashomon aspects of Muhammad’s biography, but by the way the narrative of his life has been molded to suit centuries of agendas, both religious and secular.

The post-9/11 demonization of Muslims may be on an unfortunate upswing, but the fixation on, and bending of, the details of Muhammad’s domestic life—one beloved wife much older than he, another still a child—have long been fodder for both enemies of Islam and colliding sects within the religion, notes Ali, who will discuss the topic at the annual Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family College of Arts & Sciences Lecture, Contesting Muhammad: Contemporary Controversies in Historical Perspective, tonight at the Tsai Performance Center.

Dominant media narratives portray violent, primitive Muslims continually poised to avenge real or perceived insults to their prophet, she says. Of course, the murderous shooters at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris this past January and last May’s Garland, Tex., Draw Mohammed event that left two Islamic extremists dead after they shot at police “are doing their part to support this interpretation, which fits into a broader story that there is a timeless clash of values between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West,’” says Ali. Extremist Muslims and those who condemn all Muslims as extremists both reflect this clash between Islam and the West. But the real story is far more interesting, revealing, and complex than this pat vision of a world divided, notes Ali, whose lecture will be followed by a response from Stephen Prothero, a CAS professor of religion, and Teena Purohit, a CAS assistant professor of religion.

The main objective of her lecture, Ali says, “is to step back from our immediate controversies and the violence they have generated to consider how Muhammad’s life has been understood over the centuries. This is a much more interesting and much more complicated story, and it reveals as much about fault lines and transformations within Western societies as it does about Islam as a tradition or Muhammad as an individual.” Muhammad has been a contested figure since he lived a millennium and a half ago, she says. His life story has been told by both Muslims and non-Muslims, in myriad ways.

“Muslim praise over the centuries has highlighted different aspects of his persona, from spiritual luminosity to diplomatic skill,” she says. “Non-Muslims’ criticisms have been deeply shaped by preoccupations closer to home: Muhammad has been, variously, a pagan, an arch-heretic, an antichrist, and an imposter. Yet over the last two centuries, two fairly separate streams of writing about Muhammad became inextricably intertwined.” Her talk will clarify, as she did in her recent book, how “there is no simple division between Muslim and Western views of the prophet.”

Now in its second year, the annual Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family College of Arts & Sciences Lecture is designed to highlight current CAS faculty members whose teaching and research addresses topics of major importance for the broad interest and benefit of the BU community. Ali, who joined the BU faculty in 2006, teaches a range of classes on Islam. Her research focuses on Islamic law, women and gender, ethics, and biography. Her books include Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (2006), Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010), and Imam Shafi‘i: Scholar and Saint (2011). She has coedited the revised edition of A Guide for Women in Religion, which provides guidance for careers in religious studies and theology (2014). She is active in the American Academy of Religion and currently is president of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics.

The second annual Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family College of Arts & Sciences Lecture, titled Contesting Muhammad: Contemporary Controversies in Historical Perspective, by Kecia Ali, is tonight, Thursday, September 17, at 6 p.m. at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave; it is free and open to the public. Take a Green Line B trolley to the BU Central stop. There will be an ASL interpreter on hand.