Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i

      FOREWORD

      MARINA WARNER

      “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 of the Arabian Nights selected for children frequently cut the frame tale and present the Nights as a bunch of stories, without the decisive organizing principle provided by Shahrazad’s stratagem, thus muting the female storyteller as pictured in the book and omitting the crucial rationale, her ransom tale-telling.

      Consorts of the Caliphs is a work of historical biography, not an anthology of fictions, and it gives voice to the spirited, learned, influential women of the medieval past in the Abbasid empire. It unbinds our ears and eyes to some of what they said and did. The author/compiler Ibn al-Sāʿī was himself a poet and a librarian, and through patient sifting of archival memories, both oral and written, he communicates precious echoes and fragments from a period spanning five hundred years: the earliest woman whose life he sets before us was the wife of Caliph al-Manṣūr (reigned 136–58/754–75), while the latest, Shāhān, died in 652/1254–55. In the entry on Zubaydah, who died in 532/1137–38, Ibn al-Sāʿī’s epitaph is brief: “She was lovely and praised for her beauty.” This is uncharacteristically reticent. For the early years, Ibn al-Sāʿī fills in the blanks with stories he has gathered from chains of sources; for the later period, within living memory, he passes on what he has heard. Women’s words rise from the page in many registers—passionate high poetry, mordant quips and sallies, and prayerful thoughts. The effect is vivid and fleeting, a series of lantern slides within a laconic yet impassioned account that comes across clearly now and again but then breaks up or fades. Slaves, “dependents,” lovers and wives are glimpsed—dazzlingly accomplished individuals in some cases, who survive by their wits, risking all with their tongues; their adopted sobriquets give a flavor of their spiritedness: Ghādir (“Inconstance”), Ghaḍīḍ (“Luscious”), Qurrat al-ʿAyn (“Solace”), Ḍirār (“Damage”), Sarīrah (“Secret”), and even Qabīḥah (“Ugly”).

      In other cases, the women, august or beggared, full of years or plucked before their time, pass by in a roll of honor, on a pervasive note of reverence and elegy. Ibn al-Sāʿī’s book conveys their mobility, the complexity of the roles they fulfilled, the variety of their ethnic and religious origins, and their high status. Their circumstances reveal the intermingling of ethnic origins and faiths. The term “slave” itself, used here after careful thought on the part of the translators and their editors, clearly needs more attention from historians, since the term, as habitually used in English, does not capture the ambiguities in the situation of Faḍl, for example, whose raunchy flytings the translators have met with matching boldness:²

      He moaned and groaned and whined all night,

      And creaked just like a door-hinge.

      Some of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s material reads like fabulist literature. Anecdotes and personalities have intermingled with the stories of the Arabian Nights and grown into the stuff of legend: the passion of Maḥbūbah and al-Mutawakkil, for instance, a brief, dramatic tale of mutual dreaming and reconciliation, appears in the complete cycle of the Arabian Nights (as rendered by Malcolm Lyons for Penguin or Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel for the Pléiade). Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Barmakids, including the vizier Jaʿfar, have become mythic as well as historical heroes. However, the historically-minded author of Consorts of the Caliphs is also an accountant, and the enormous prices paid (one hundred thousand gold dinars to the slave ʿArīb for her own slave Bidʿah, for example) or spent on wedding gifts (thousands of pearls and heavy candles of ambergris for Būrān)