Author: Kecia Ali

Kecia Ali is an Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University. She writes on early Islamic law, women, ethics, and biography. Her books include Sexual Ethics and Islam (2006), Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (2010), Imam Shafi‘i: Scholar and Saint (2011), and The Lives of Muhammad (2014). She co-edited the revised edition of A Guide for Women in Religion (2014). She lives in the Boston area with her family and tweets as @kecia_ali.

There’s Something about Mary by Kecia Ali

Scholarly life – like life in general – requires balancing one’s own priorities with involvement in others’ project and plans. Say yes too frequently and you’ll never get anything written; say no too often and you miss the excitement give and take generates. A recent conversation at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting reminded me how enriching encounters in service to someone else’s agenda can be. I sat down with a scholar in another field working on a book for non-Muslims about how North American Muslims read and understand the Qur’an. We spent an hour talking about passages from Surat Al Imran (the third chapter of the Qur’an) that discuss Mary’s mother, Mary, Zacharias, John (“the Baptist”), and Jesus.

We had set up this meeting well in advance, but I suspect our talk would have been far less interesting had I not been primed by a panel I’d attended that morning, where one presenter spoke about the fluidity of Qur’anic descriptions of God’s participation in the creation of humanity and another read the story of Cain and Abel against the grain. The night before, I had also read a colleague’s work in progress on methodologies of feminist Qur’an interpretation so that she and I could discuss it that evening. Continue reading “There’s Something about Mary by Kecia Ali”

Muslim Masculinities: Men Have Gender Too by Kecia Ali

Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, another student in a history seminar casually referred to women as “people of gender.” He was not being ironic. At the time, I felt amused and superior and frustrated: not only did he not get it but he really didn’t get it. Two decades later, my amusement has taken on a rueful tinge: despite the formulaic acknowledgment that masculinity and femininity are reciprocally constructed, “gender” scholarship in my field, Islamic Studies, has focused almost exclusively on women.

That is, until recently. Scholars, especially anthropologists, have begun serious work on Muslim masculinities; increasingly, those of us more historically and textually inclined are joining the party. My own first forays into these waters treated the equivocal masculinity of enslaved males as part of a larger project on marriage in early Muslim law. In my current project on views of Muhammad, the question of masculinity emerges much more centrally, and in strikingly different ways in works by feminists and neo-traditionalists (who lay claim to reproducing the “authentic” tradition even as they are thoroughly modern in many ways). Continue reading “Muslim Masculinities: Men Have Gender Too by Kecia Ali”