Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i
F. Kennedy, New York University
Executive Editors
James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge
Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University
Editors
Julia Bray, University of Oxford
Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles
Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania
Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago
Devin J. Stewart, Emory University
Managing Editor
Chip Rossetti
Digital Production Manager
Stuart Brown
Assistant Editor
Gemma Juan-Simó
Letter from the General Editor
The Library of Arabic Literature is a new series offering Arabic editions and English translations of key works of classical and pre-modern Arabic literature, as well as anthologies and thematic readers. Books in the series are edited and translated by distinguished scholars of Arabic and Islamic studies, and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages. The Library of Arabic Literature includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.
Supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute, and established in partnership with NYU Press, the Library of Arabic Literature produces authoritative Arabic editions and modern, lucid English translations, with the goal of introducing the Arabic literary heritage to scholars and students, as well as to a general audience of readers.
Philip F. Kennedy
General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature
For Marianne
Abbreviations
| ad | anno Domini = Gregorian (Christian) year |
| ah | anno Hegirae = Hijrah (Muslim) year |
| art. | article |
| Ar. | Arabic |
| c. | century |
| ca. | circa = about, approximately |
| cf. | confer = compare |
| d. | died |
| ed. | editor, edition, edited by |
| EI2 | Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second edition |
| EI3 | Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three [Third edition] |
| EIran | Encyclopaedia Iranica |
| esp. | especially |
| f., ff. | folio, folios |
| fl. | flourished |
| lit. | literally |
| MS | manuscript |
| n. | note |
| n.d. | no date |
| n.p. | no place |
| no. | number |
| p., pp. | page, pages |
| pl. | plural |
| Q | Qurʾan |
| r. | ruled |
| vol., vols. | volume, volumes |
Foreword
“Muted” was the epithet used to describe female subjects by the anthropologists Edwin and Shirley Ardener in an influential critique of their discipline and its methods, published in 1975; they identified a systemic problem, that fieldworkers consistently sought out the men’s story, set down what they heard, and attended above all to male activities; in most cases, the researchers had little access to women, but they also did not try to listen to them or elicit their stories.1 Consequently, women disappeared from the record, their voices were not registered, and the whole picture suffered from distortion.
The Ardeners provided a polemical but persuasive angle of view on a widespread discomfort with cultural assumptions, and their work spurred a new generation of readers and researchers to begin listening in to “muted groups” of individuals from the past, those muffled female participants whose “labour created our world” (to borrow Angela Carter’s phrase about storytellers, ballad-singers, and other cultural keepers of memory). The impulse was part of the broadly feminist program of those years, but it grew larger than that political movement, as scholars in history, literature, social studies, and indeed almost every area of inquiry pursued the new archaeology, unearthing remarkable new material about women’s lives and deeds, and often bringing forgotten figures back to consciousness. The findings did not only fill in gaps in the view, but also transformed the whole horizon and realigned contemporary understanding in crucial ways. Historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie excavated provincial archives and tuned in to the voices of female witnesses and defendants; literary scholars returned to and in some cases revived familiar and not unsuccessful writers (Christine de Pisan, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson) to illuminate the social and psychological radiation of their works as women. Some of the ignorance—and the bigotry that arises from ignorance—began to lift, with many powerful reverberations for the position of women today. It is sobering to remember that less than a hundred years ago, Oxford and Cambridge did not award degrees to women (until 1920 and 1947 respectively), though they had begun to allow women to sit (successfully) for the exams. Now women have reached numerical parity at undergraduate and graduate levels in many subjects, and have entered every discipline as teachers and professors—Maryam Mirzakhani has won the Fields Medal in Mathematics and Julia Bray holds the Laudian Chair of Arabic at Oxford. (I do realize that Julia Bray, as project editor of this volume, may dislike being singled out for praise, but her appointment seems to me a great cause for pride and pleasure, and so I hope she will not mind my drawing attention to it.)
If low expectations, combined with misunderstanding and social prejudice, have muted women in the Western tradition, the silence that has wrapped women in the East is even deeper. In the United States and Europe, the voices of women from the Islamic past are often eroticized and trivialized—through harem romances and desert epics, advertising and propaganda. Rimsky-Korsakov’s luscious music for Shéhérazade was adapted for Fokine’s ballet of 1910 and accompanies a plot in which orientalist assumptions of savagery, lasciviousness, slavery, and tyranny are taken to torrid extremes. Ways of selecting and presenting stories from the Arabian Nights have exacerbated the problem: heroines who are adventurous and courageous and have strong, interior passions and resourceful ideas (Zumurrud, Badr, Tawaddud, and many others—they abound in the work) were overlooked in favor of the insipid love interest, like the princess in Aladdin, who is almost entirely silent and, when she does speak, foolish. Collections