Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad

Year 2016, Volume: 48 Issue: 48, 461 - 465, 27.07.2016

Merve Uçar Nurcan

https://doi.org/10.18589/oa.588170

Abstract

Lives of Muhammad is not the life story of Prophet Muhammad. Rather
than tracing the true facts of Muhammad’s life, Kecia Ali examines the prophet’s
biographies written by both Muslims and non-Muslims in the centuries after his
death. As she states, “it is a book not about the life of Muhammad but about the
ways in which his life has been told” (p. 1) According to her, the perception of
Muhammad has dramatically changed over centuries. This diverse, multifaceted
and changeable nature of Sira literature is widely known. However, less wellknown is that since the nineteenth century, as Ali points out, “they [Muhammad’s
biographies] have become increasingly interdependent. In the twenty first century,
it makes no sense to speak of the Muslim views of Muhammad in opposition to
Western or Christian views” (p. 2).

Keywords

Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad

References

• Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014, 352 pp, ISBN 978-067-4050-60-0.