Books by Kecia Ali

Jurists of the nascent Maliki, Hanafi, and Shafi'i legal schools frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. This title presents an analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage - its rights and obligations - using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery.

In this lucid and carefully constructed volume, feminist academic Kecia Ali examines classical Muslim texts and tries to evaluate whether a just system of sexual ethics is possible within an Islamic framework.

Kecia Ali delves into the many ways the Prophet's life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, she shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent.

Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (767-820) was one of Islam's foundational legal thinkers. Shafi'i considered law vital to social and cosmic order: the key obligation of each Muslim was to obey God, and it was through knowing and following the law that human beings fulfilled this duty. Drawing on the most recent scholarship on Shafi'i's work as well as her own investigations into his life and writings, Kecia Ali explores Shafi'i's innovative ideas about the nature of revelation and the necessary if subordinate role of human reason in extrapolating legal rules from revealed texts. This study sketches his life in his intellectual and social context, including his engagement with other early figures including Malik and Muhammad al-Shaybani. It explores the development and refinement of his legal method and substantive teachings as well as their transmission by his students. It also shows how he became the posthumous "e;patron saint"e; of a legal school, who remains today a figure of popular interest and veneration as well as a powerful symbol of orthodoxy.