In an attempt to shed light on the often obscured role of women in the making of Arab Muslim culture, a group of feminist researchers, under the rubric of the Women and Memory Forum (WMF), embarked on multidisciplinary research that deconstructs and reconstructs the dominant narratives. Their findings were included in a WMF volume published by Elles, a relatively new pan-Arab feminist publishing house, entitled, Qera’t Nisswiya fi Al-Tarikh Al-Thaqafi Al-Arabi (Feminist Readings in Arab Cultural History). In over 300 pages, through a sequence of research papers, each taking up a chapter with references and footnotes, the book revisits accounts of consequential women in the Arab Muslim history across the Arabic-speaking expanse from the Arabian Peninsula to the western end of North Africa.
From the accounts of the spouses of Prophet Muhammad and the post-Muhammad Sajah bint Al-Harith, the seventh-century self-proclaimed woman prophet to those of Mai Zaideh, Fatema Mernissi and Radwa Ashour in the 20th century, this volume questions and inevitably disputes every single narrative. In the process, one point is often underlined: history was written by men in the most gender biased registers, either fully dropping the role of women or painting it in an unfair light. This was either a function of the dominance of patriarchal thinking or that of colonial-Orientalist norms. Islam, the authors argue, cannot be blamed for its presentations by patriarchal societies or colonial and Orientalist interpretations. Equally, they argue that the West cannot be credited with granting women a fairer representation as part of a promised modernity, simply because that modernity was never an exclusive product of the Western culture.
In her chapter on the history of Sajah bint Al-Harith, the Saudi historian Hatoon Al-Fassi recalls that the case of this woman, who claimed to receive divine revelations immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, recives hardly any attention compared to men who made the same claim. While acknowledging the fact that these claims were made as part of a tribal power struggle in seventh-century Arabia, Al-Fassi argues that giving very little attention to Sajah bint Al-Harith is not an oversight on the part of those who wrote the history of Horoub Al-Riddah (Wars of Apostasy) but rather a deliberate act to bend history to fit the patriarchal norms that predominated when this history were written, a few centuries after the death of the Prophet. Ultimately, Al-Fassi argues that it is hard to separate the narrative from the narrator or, for that matter, the dominant patriarchal norms of that narrator’s society.
Amira Abou-Taleb, a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Theology in Helsinki, argues that there is a desperate need for applying a critical take to accounts of women in the early years of Islam, during the life of Prophet Muhammad and right after his death. The fact of the matter, she notes, is that it took a few centuries for this history to be written and consequently it takes much hard work to compare and contrast the dominant narratives, which more often than not portray women in a very negative light. “These accounts are forcibly hanging there in the collective consciousness of Arab women and it is only fair to liberate this shared consciousness from an unfair weight,” Abou Taleb wrote.
Delving in the most sensitive history of the relation between the spouses of Prophet Muhammad, in her chapter titled “The Theme of Jealousy in Ibn Sa’d’s Description of the Mothers of the Believers in Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kubra”, Abou Taleb disputes every single account included in one of the most significant reference books on early Islamic history, written during the Abbasid age, under the third Islamic caliphate, which reigned from the end of the eighth century to the middle of the 13th century. Taking this book to task, Abou Taleb notes the discriminatory, patriarchal concept of the book which leaves the history of women to the very end, including that of the spouses of the Prophet, Oumahat Al-Moumenin (or “Mothers of the Believers”). She equally notes the many discrepancies in the chapters that the author, Abou Abdullah Mohammed bin Saad, who lived between AD 784 and 845, used to claim that these women were just trapped in a game of jealousy.
Contrasting the narratives in Kitab Al-Tabqat Al-Koubra with those of other, earlier and later manuscripts, Abou Taleb notes that there is enough reason to argue that the spouses of the Prophet were inconsequential women caught up in a catfight over the attention of their husband who is ultimately the Messenger of the Almighty. But the opposite is true, according to the findings of Abou Taleb. The spouses of the Prophet were actively and openly engaged in politics and society. “It is very curious that Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kobra dedicated the least number of pages in the segment allocated to the biographies of the spouses of Prophet Muhammad to his first wife Khadija bint Khuwiylad,” Abou Taleb wrote. Khadija was not just the Prophet’s first spouse , who married him on her initiative before the revelation. She was also a trader, employer and employee of the Prophet. She was the first to embrace Islam and until her death, the Prophet remained in a strictly monogamous marriage with her.
Examining a later phase of Arab Muslim history, Hoda Al-Saadi, an adjunct faculty member at the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilisation at the AUC, examined court rulings on personal status matters during the Mamluk Dynasty, between the 13th and the 16th centuries. While examining the discrepancies of the rulings, Al-Saadi made some interesting observations. Of these, she noted that the rulings on many cases were often subject to disagreement between the scholars, who were relatively liberated from state and social influences, and judges who were ultimately state employees. Al-Saadi also notes that similar cases received different rulings depending on the local culture and the societal norms. “This is actually how these cases contributed to the evolution of fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence],” she wrote. It was then, she added, that some rulings proposed the right of women to receive half of the wealth of their husbands on husband-initiated divorce.
This and other rulings that did justice to women, in line with the established Islamic concept of women’s dignity, were often marginalised as history of fiqh was written in line with the growing patriarchal tendencies embraced by the populations of the expanding Muslim lands. In a subsequent chapter dedicated to the understanding and interpretation of the Islamic text, Nesma Al-Saqqan, assistant professor anthropology, blamed the growing patriarchal tendencies for introducing some changes, slight or significant, to the understanding of Islamic texts, on the rights and duties of Muslim women as prescribed by the Quran. In order to recall, and for that matter reclaim, the original objectives of Islamic Shariaa, Al-Saqqan argues for the need to revisit historical and etymological dictionaries to better understand the text, away from the influences of sexist biases embedded in historical glossaries.
In a subsequent chapter Sara Maged, a researcher in feminism, adds that convoluted concepts on the role, rights and duties of women in Islam have prevailed for centuries, allowing for Islamic establishments to pass what are arguably convoluted edicts. A most obvious case for confusion, she wrote, are the edicts related to the rights of married women to work and earn money as opposed to the responsibility of husbands to provide for their wives. In some cases, Maged notes, there is a debate among scholars at the beginning of the 21st century on whether or not a man is responsible to provide for the medical treatment of an ill wife – while holding the right to allow the wife or not to allow her to have a salaried job. Today, she noted, the conflict remains unresolved between the many scholars and religious establishments whose positions on women’s rights within the framework of marriage range from more to less traditional – with no space yet in those religious establishments for a progressive take.
Beyond its criticism of the patriarchal influences on the presentation of the role and status of women across the Arab Muslim culture, Feminist Readings in Arab Cultural History is also very critical of the uncalled-for discrimination imposed on Islamist women writers in the 20th century – simply for the fact of their Islamism – at a time where the cultural scene was highly influenced by leftist authors with a close association to Western culture. Examining the literary work of Fawziya Mahran and Aisha Abdel-Rahman, two Islamist literary figures who lived in Egypt in the 20th century, Maguda Hassabelnabi, professor of English literature, highlights the clear Quranic intertextuality.
Another act of academic discrimination is spotted in the following chapter, by yet another professor of English literature, Faten Morsi. Going through the production of Egyptian author Radwa Ashour, Moroccan author Fatema Mernissi and Palestinian-American author and scholar Laila Abou Loghd, Morsi argues that the uncompromising anti-colonial sentiment they subscribed to does not work in their favour. The cultural input of those three authors, Morsi argues, was designed to refute cultural colonialism, which often persists after the independence of the colonised nations – beyond the questions of patriarchal influences. However, she added that, significant as it is, their work does not receive the recognition it merits.
It is remarkable how the statements of Morsi on those mid 20th-century authors match with those made by Lebanese researcher Dana Al-Shohbari on the unfortunate marginalisation of the equally anti-colonial contributions of the early 20th-century Palestinian-Lebanese poet and essayist Mai Ziadeh, who resided in Cairo for the majority of her adult life. Ziadeh’s voice, Al-Shobari noted, is no less significant to modernity than that of Virginia Woolf, the English novelist who lived around the same time. By marginalising Ziadeh’s voice, she added, the male-dominated cultural scene of the time undermined, wittingly or not, an Arab woman’s contribution to the evolution of modernity.
Such recurring elimination of the role of women in the making of Arab Muslim culture is in itself a reason to try to reconstruct the history of Arab culture as a whole, through revisiting archival material, according to Hoda Al-Sadda, professor of English literature. Al-Sadda refers to the exemplary work done on this front by Rawiya Sadek and Iman Mersal in reconstructing the life and battles of Doria Chafik and Enayat El-Zayyat. While both Chafik and El-Zayyad ended up ending their own lives following political and other disappointments, Al-Sadda argues that the works of Sadek and Mersal move beyond – or rather before – the tragic endings to shed sufficient light on their battles, won or lost.
Much more work is required to do justice to the untold stories and marginalised voices of many impressive women whose contribution to Arab culture remains underrated. In her introduction to the book, Omaima Abou Bakr, professor of comparative literature, argues that very little has been done to provide a deep and critical feminist take on the history of Arab culture. Much more work, Abou Bakr added, is still required to move beyond the traditional gender roles and power balance that has produced so many unfair and misleading stereotypes.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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