At Wednesday night’s Perry Lecture in Religion, Cornell University Prof. David Powers presented his currently unpublished and potentially controversial argument regarding how the Prophet Muhammad came to be considered the “last” Islamic prophet.
In the lecture, titled “Making of the Last Prophet,” Powers argued that apart from Muhammad, the prophet’s adopted son Zayd ibn Thabit was the most important person in the early Muslim community. Though Zayd is a well-known figure to Muslims and historians of Islam, Powers said he is not usually considered theologically important.
About 30 people attended this year’s lecture, which was held Wednesday in the Block Museum Auditorium.
Powers, a professor of Islamic History, is a leading scholar of Islamic law, specifically medieval Islamic legal literature and Islamic law of inheritance, Northwestern Prof. Ruediger Seesemann said in his introduction. Although he said he was hesitant to use the term “revisionist,” Seesemann said Powers is someone who “thinks in new directions.”
Tina Howe, a doctoral student in Islamic studies, said she was familiar with Powers’s work before Wednesday’s lecture.
“I have always admired Professor Powers’s work and the way he combines textual analysis with social history,” Howe said. “He made an innovative argument, and I think it pushes the field in an interesting direction.”
The Perry Lecture was established in memory of Edmund F. Perry, former chairman of the department of religion, for the purpose of bringing distinguished lecturers to campus.
Powers structured his lecture around “extra-Quranic” stories about Zayd’s life and passages from the Quran that mention Zayd’s relationship with the prophet, and used the stories to make a case for a more crucial role for Zayd in the early Muslim community. The stories, he said, show that Zayd’s relationship with Muhammad helped to establish Muhammad as the “final prophet.”
Sam Fleischacker, a visiting professor of philosophy through the Brady Scholars program, enjoyed the way Powers presented his argument.
“He is a great storyteller – his presentation of argumentation through storytelling is very interesting,” he said.
Although the lecture was presented from a scholarly and not a religious perspective, Fleischacker said he “would be interested to see how a devout Muslim would take this interpretation.”
Sigrid Perry, an assistant librarian in NU’s McCormick Library of Special Collections, said even though Powers’s lecture was not in her field of expertise, she found “his explication very interesting and stimulating.”
Perry is also the daughter-in-law of the late Prof. Perry, and said that as a member of his family, she tries to attend the memorial lecture each year.
Powers will publish the ideas he presented in the lecture in his next book.
He said the thesis could prove controversial, as it is an argument that has never before been presented. In Islamic studies, it is taken for granted that Muhammad is the last prophet and there has, as a result, been little historical exploration as to how this idea was established.
“(The book) provides an alternative perspective on how history unfolded,” Powers said. “It took work for the doctrine of the last prophet to become rooted.”
