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The Forgotten Queen of Islam






The Forgotten Queens of Islam. By FATIMA MERNissi. Translated by MARY JO LAKE^LAND. Minneapolis: University of Min, nesota Press, 1993- PP- 238. $24-95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

In The Forgotten Queens of Islam, a short and very readable volume, Fatima Mernissi, perhaps the best known writer on women and Islam, establishes a historical foundation for women's political independence and their legitimacy as rulers in the Muslim world. In the course of her exposition she proposes a radically democratic orientation in early Islamic teaching, and so in the best fashion of feminist scholars progresses from a fairly narrow perspective to a very inclusive one, using the problem of "women's history" to open up critical perspectives on the history of an entire culture.

The introductory narrowness could hardly be more narrow, as Mernissi begins with the problem of Benazir Bhutto's novelty as political leader of Pakistan. The author reviews the received wisdom that in all of Islamic history no woman had ever before led a polity, then proceeds to explore the "forgotten" history of women leaders in the Islamic world. The wrenching leap backward in time from the twentieth to the seventh century is interrupted by a discussion of the difference between spiritual and mundane authority in Islamic theory and practice. For all undergraduates studying Islam this is a very clear and useful discussion, providing a concise but thoroughly accessible hermeneutics of Arabic and Koranic terminology. The primary point-that spiritual and secular authority were distinct, if interrelated-is fundamental to any student's understanding of Islamic history and is advantageous for the study of many other traditions (including Europe, Iran, and Tibet). Mernissi goes on to demonstrate that though women were evidently excluded from commanding religious authority (that is, they could not act as caliph or imam), they were not excluded from political authority (and could be sultans or queens).

Mernissi's examples include not only women who acted as titled leaders, but also those who resourcefully managed to extend their roles as courtesans or concubines to the political sphere. Parallels in the histories of China, Mongolia, India, and Tibet with respect to the enlargement of women's ostensibly domestic roles to include a frank exercise of power will readily suggest themselves to many readers. The heart of Mernissi's book, however, is a serial narrative of medieval "queens" of Islam. They include female sultans (sultana) among the Mamluks in Egypt and India as well as in the Maldive Islands and in Indonesia; Mongol empresses (khatun); Shi'ite queen (malika) in the Yemeni dynasties; and influential women in Sheba (Saba). The narrative portion of the book ends with a biography of Sitt al-Mulk ("lady of power"), whose story is a study in the ambiguities of female influence in the medieval world-capable but untitled, depending upon her private connections to make a public impact, poised among the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities of Cairo, always in a delicate balance between forces she hoped to manipulate without becoming subordinate to them. On the surface, the rather ruthless Sitt al-Mulk outwitted the traps that normally ensnared women of her class and background, but as her name implies-and as Mernissi states-she was unique. Her successes, such as they were, only underscore the conditions under which most women achieved little if any independence.

The book concludes with a short but intriguing account of the "Medina Democracy." In my reading the essay combines many threads from classic scholarship on Islam dealing with the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty with new questions relating to theories of human rights, individuality, and the place of women (the latter being less explicit than one would expect here). The conventional narrative of the idealism in the original notion of the caliphate and the community being distorted by the power politics that emerged after the founding of the dynasty is extended here to include an unresolvable paradox that Mernissi ascribes to all Islamic societies: the inclusive, communitarian, nearly egalitarian ethos of early Koranic teaching conflicts with the seclusion, segregation, and transcendence of the historical caliphate and religious authority generally. Thus all Muslims are members simultaneously of an open, participatory ideal community (whose values have a kind of parallel in current expressions of "global" values, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and of a society that is fragmented, hierarchical, and necessarily restricted in expression.

The material presented in The Forgotten Queens of Islam is clear and interesting, and it should enlighten undergraduates who are inclined to make broad and unqualified generalizations about the role of women in Islamic political history. Its geographical scope is also appealing, so that students are reminded of the range of the Islamic world. Readers more specialized in either Islamic or world history will probably find the text too spare for its apparent ambitions. For instance, the pre-Islamic period would have provided a rich backdrop to Mernissi's discussion here, whether with reference to female (or ungendered) deities of the earlier time, or to the early political histories of North Africa, Arabia, and Yemen. The "little queens of Sheba" here are Fatimids, and the original article gets only a very passing mention. The place of women in the religious community as prescribed in the Koran and later revised in the commentaries is alluded to, but the treatment is too fleeting for students to read this as a case study in the evolution of an inegalitarian social philosophy. The treatment of Mongol (Ilkhanid) empresses is cursory, and much too little is made of the profound differences in expectation between elite Mongol women and elite Arab women. In powerful Mongol families, women were expected to wield influence and sometimes formal power on their own, and the sobriquet "lady of power" would have had little meaning in Mongolian, where such a thing was not exceptional. Perhaps most evident in the scattershot approach of the book is the huge chronological gap between the story and its moral: the introductory and concluding passages, which are evidently meant to bear the burden of the book's significance, are preoccupied with contemporary concerns, while the history presented is all medieval. But the book is a valuable introduction to Mernissi's perspective, and students seeking more depth can read her Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (New York: Halsted Press, 1976) or Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Inquiry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, iggi), also translated by Mary jo Lakeland.

PAMELA K. CROSSLEY

Dartmouth University