Even for those ignorant of the tenets of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad looms large in the public imagination. In Paris last month, terrorists murdered 10 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, among them cartoonists who had lampooned the prophet. But how much do non-Muslims know about Muhammad and the life he lived, and how can both they and Muslims reconcile the vast range of narratives about his life? From meticulous scholarly accounts to the blatantly biased, biographers have focused on the prophet’s life from military campaigns to domestic intimacies.

In her new book, The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, 2014), Kecia Ali, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of religion, examines the many ways Muhammad’s story has been told by both Muslims and non-Muslims over the centuries and in the modern world. What captivates Ali is not the search for the facts, which she says will forever be elusive and a matter of debate, but how narratives about the prophet’s life differ and why.

Reviewing the book in the Washington Post, Michael Muhammad Knight writes, “The Lives of Muhammad is especially perceptive in discussing the criteria by which authors measure the truth or falsehood of the prophet’s mission. In [Ali’s] 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.”

Bostonia spoke with Ali about the unreliable nature of so-called facts, prevailing misconceptions about Muhammad, and how biographical narratives reflect the times.

Bostonia: How did the idea for the book take shape?

Ali: This book started off as a different sort of project. My interest in varying ways of looking at Muhammad emerged from my research on early Islamic law and looking at the ways that Muslim jurists from the 8th to the 10th century talked about his example in comparison to the way contemporary Muslims often did.

As I completed that project and moved on to others, I started getting interested in biography as a genre. After my book about marriage and divorce in early Islamic law, I wrote a short biography of one of the jurists whose works I’d looked at for that study. He was a foundational legal thinker, a legal theorist. In the process of writing that biography, I started reading about biography as a genre. I started thinking more expansively about the ways that Muhammad’s life, including his marriages, has been talked about beyond the confines of Muslim legal writings. That led to this project.

So Islam is the youngest of the world’s major religions. Don’t we know quite a bit about Muhammad’s life?

Well, yes and no.

Is there an indisputable record, if such a thing could exist?

There’s very little that’s indisputable. People often behave as though there is, write textbooks as though there is, and teach classes as though there is, as though we have a core set of indisputable facts about the life of Muhammad. But that’s not really my subject in this book. This is not a book about the historical facts of Muhammad’s life or the quest for the historical Muhammad. There are others engaged on that quest.

So this is more a book about biography than a biography.

Yes. In particular, I focus on Muhammad’s modern biographies, which in a paradoxical way are more interested in questions of historicity, facts, sources than their earlier counterparts and yet in practice continually reiterate selective, homogenized elements of Muhammad’s life story.

Certain details leap out of many mainstream biographies of Muhammad—e.g., that he married his wife Khadija when he was 25 and she 40, and she bore him six children, which doesn’t seem possible. Is this meant to be taken literally?

I think that literalism grows out of that same modern interest in finding facts embedded in original sources, which then get assessed as reliable or unreliable, true or untrue, but don’t get looked at in terms of symbolic weight.

Can you talk about the possible symbolism of this story?

Forty is a highly symbolic number. If we look at the Israelites wandering in the desert, if we look at Jesus, the flood, any ancient near-eastern narratives, we don’t think 40 meant to be exact. Yet with Khadija, it’s as if we say, “Oh, well yes, here’s her birth certificate and here’s her marriage certificate, so we can do the math and determine she was 40.” For early Muslim authors, isn’t it likely that 40 meant simply that she was an adult in the full bloom of social maturity? Now, though, the texts say she was 40, so many people assume she was actually 40, and then interpret what that means. For one 19th-century American evangelical, it meant their marriage was “transgressing a law of propriety which is found in the nature of things” because of the age gap between them. More recently, some have used her age to support the idea that because he was not intimidated by a powerful older woman, because he married Khadija, “Muhammad was a feminist.”

Is your book saying that ultimately there is no one truth?

I’m not so much interested in ascertaining what can be known for certain as in understanding the range of ways Muhammad’s life story has been told. I’m interested in how two fairly separate streams of writing about Muhammad became inextricably intertwined over the last two centuries so that Muslims writing laudatory biographies, scholars and journalists writing sympathetic biographies, and non-Muslims writing viciously critical biographies are all drawing on very similar, if not the same, sources and focusing on the same elements of his life story.

Can you talk about Muhammad’s supposed betrothal to another of his wives, Aisha, when she was six or seven years old? Anti-Islam tracts make much of this.

I talk at some length about Aisha’s age in my book. Her age comes up on occasion in the early biographical sources. Typically, she’s six or seven at marriage, when the marriage is contracted, and nine or occasionally ten, depending on the particular sources, when the marriage is consummated. More usually nine, and I give those references in the book.

But when those sources talk about Aisha, they’re generally much more interested in other things having to do with her life and with her marriage. She was a vital, sometimes controversial figure in the construction of early Muslim history. Again, it’s important to remember the stories that were told and remembered about her served several purposes. There were contests over legitimacy, there were factionalized struggles for power and prestige, and she was invoked in those struggles. So stories told about her, about her marriage, about her legacy, about her purity, about her merit all had an impact on those things. Her age was the least of it.

How did biographers’ interest in Muhammad’s marriages change over the centuries?

In medieval Christian biographies, Aisha’s age wasn’t important, if it was mentioned at all. A bigger concern was the sheer number of Muhammad’s wives and his perceived carnality, his lustful appetites. Oppression of women was not an issue for the medieval biographers. It was debauchery, lustfulness, and so forth—as well as ambition, which they saw as almost equally bad. Even centuries later, it wasn’t really a problem that Muhammad married Aisha when she was so young. If people mentioned it, they were usually titillated by it, this exotic, erotic East in which girls mature early. It’s part of an idea of warm climates and their effect on human development that goes back to the ancient Greeks but gets recycled to talk about Muslims, Arabia, India, and all these other hot places. The thing that was problematic for them about the marriage to Aisha is that Muhammad was doing it to create an alliance with her father. This was calculating ambition on his part, which proved he was perpetrating a deliberate fraud.

When did biographers begin to suggest Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha was indecent and wrong?

Toward occasionally the end of the 19th century but really in the 20th century shading toward the late 20th century, there starts to be non-Muslim criticism of Aisha’s youth at marriage. It’s really only in the 20th century that anybody starts to have any sort of significant problem with it. Before that, we’ve moved from lustfulness and debauchery being the problem to oppression of women being the problem, but the oppression of women is primarily manifested through polygamy. It’s not the age of the wives; it’s just that there are too many of them. But eventually, criticism does come to center on Aisha’s age. Muslim authors respond in two main ways. One way is to say, “No, no, those sources are wrong. Let’s recalculate her age based on other evidence.” Another response has been to say, and this probably the dominant response, “It was different then. Things were different.” And that comes with a part A and a part B. Part A is that it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Part B is a biological, climactic argument, which interestingly borrows from this Western discourse about how girls mature earlier in hot climates. So, whether it’s because it was back then or because of the climate where Muslims lived, or live, early marriage makes sense. So we see, even on this matter of Aisha’s age, an intertwining of Western and Muslim arguments, with each side taking what they can to make arguments that will help their case.

Do you think most biographies of Muhammad have some agenda?

Everybody has an agenda.

As a Muslim and as a scholar, how much do you think ordinary people know about Muhammad?

Our expert on religious literacy is my colleague Steve Prothero. He has shown that Americans are more religious and less religiously literate than many populations. That illiteracy extends to Islam and Muslims.

What is the most striking aspect of that?

It’s really all of a piece. The misapprehensions people have about Muhammad and the misapprehensions people have about Muslims center on the idea that Muslims are inherently violent and that Islam is marked by fanaticism. It’s not actually surprising that many people hold these views. There’s a new study, a book called Terrified by sociologist Christopher Bail which shows that between 2001 and 2008, anti-Muslim ideas and organizations that had been very much on the fringe of American discourses moved sharply to the center and now dominate. On a major American news channel, you can have someone say there are places in Europe where Muslims rule by sharia and where non-Muslims don’t enter, which is of course completely untrue.

Do you think there are a lot of non-Muslims who get Muhammad and Allah confused?

Yes. It’s an old error that Muslims worship Muhammad and that confusion still exists. Recently, an Amazon review of my first book (Sexual Ethics and Islam, Oneworld Books) criticized me for daring to call myself a feminist because I’m not, in the reader’s view, sufficiently critical of Islam. She wrote that my aim was “to defend the reputation of Allah as a holy prophet at all costs.” And then a commenter replies, “Allah isn’t a prophet.”

What are some of the other prevailing misconceptions?

There’s confusion about the relationship between Islam and Christianity and Judaism. Many people don’t realize that Muhammad laid claim to being a prophet in the biblical tradition of prophets, that Muslims recognize Jesus and Moses and Joseph as prophets. Those sorts of things are obscured from many Americans. I shouldn’t say “obscured,” though, because the information is out there, and not very hard to find.

The other big misperception is that Muslims and Muslim organizations don’t condemn terrorist attacks. It’s practically a reflex for Muslims to do that. It happens all the time. It’s sincere, it’s well meant, and it seldom gets reported. It’s a vicious cycle. If a Muslim condemns terrorism in the forest and no major network reports it, did it happen?

Ideally, who would you like to read this book aside from your colleagues?

I wrote it to be accessible to the general public, to nonspecialists. I would like students to read it. I would like religious believers to read it. I would like people in interfaith organizations to read it. I would like ordinary, educated Americans with an interest in Islam to read it. And these days, I imagine that’s most people.