Despite her more popular image as a meek and retiring housewife, Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, emerges in recent scholarship as a figure of authority – a woman capable of elucidating the tenets of Islam, delivering a fatwa, and acting as a source of sunna. This paper continues the trend of what one scholar calls a “resignification of Fatimah’s role in the Shi‘i narrative” by examining how classical Shi‘i hadith compilers made use of Fatima’s khutba, a sermon she is reported to have delivered not long after her father’s death. After the Caliph Abu Bakr denied Fatima property she believed she had inherited from the Prophet, Shi‘i sources say, she aired her grievances at her father’s mosque, warning her listeners against those who wished to usurp the caliphate and her rights. She also discussed the major edicts of Islam and exhorted Muslims to follow the correct path. In their treatises on legal matters, prominent Shi‘i hadith compilers Ibn Babawayh (d. 1191) and al-Majlisi (d. 1699) treated Fatima’s khutba as a source of law and Fatima herself as a model for behavior, thus recognizing for the daughter of the Prophet a status similar to that of the imams. This paper explores the origins of this stance and its significance as a means of shedding light on how classical Shi‘i sources construct authority. Given that Fatima’s status is inextricably linked to her relationship to her father, for example, I argue that these hadith compilers acknowledge and uphold the concept of bilateral descent – the notion that a daughter may carry on her father’s legacy, transmit his bloodline, and inherit his property – to a greater degree than do their Sunni counterparts. Here, just like a son, a daughter can inherit both a father’s property and his authority. Further, I maintain that such a stance exerted a positive impact on the status of women in Shi‘i societies versus Sunni ones, at least on a theoretical basis.

The idea of deducing legal rulings in Islamic law, or ijtihād, as well as the qualifications of the person who practices ijtihād, known as the mujtahid, has been a complex issue among Muslim ‘ulamā’ for centuries. Many Muslim ‘ulamā’ and Western scholars have maintained that the gate of ijtihād was closed after the formation of the Islamic schools of law (madhāhib). The title of mujtahid was therefore impossible to attain. Moroccan intellectual Al-Khamlīshī maintains that the strenuous conditions put forth by some of the Sunni jurists to qualify an individual to become a mujtahid actually contributed to the demise of ijtihād. Al-Khamlīshī singles out the famous Sunni jurist Muhammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfī‘ī for his work al-Risāla, in which he outlines several conditions that must be met for an individual to qualify as a mujtahid. These qualifications, according to al-Khamlīshī, were proven to be unachievable and stood as myriad obstacles in creating new generations to reform the old Islamic fiqh. This essay shows that, despite the extremely strenuous set of qualifications set in place for an individual to become a mujtahid, through the writings of al-Khamlīshī, Moroccan women penetrated men’s domain in Islamic family law, breaking the long-standing monopoly men held therein. Most importantly, for the first time Moroccan women were publicly practicing ijtihād—a legal process that was once not only considered the realm of men exclusively, but was also seen as impossible to attain by anyone after the establishment of the Sunni Islamic schools of law in the tenth century.

Did women living in the harems of the Safavid shahs had an opportunity for any kind of education or did they waste their lives behind the walls of a gilded prison? The following presentation, based on contemporary sources, will reveal some interesting aspects of this hidden world. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Primary Persian sources, as well as numerous records by European travelers to Iran in that period, indicate that many women in the harem did not waste their lives. Some studied the Qur’an, fiq, and other religious texts; others read literature and poetry; some wrote poems and learned calligraphy; while others studied dancing, singing and playing musical instruments. Women learned to sew and make slippers and a number of them were proficient in herbal medicine and acted as medics. Sources also indicate that some of the women rode horses, accompanied the shahs on their hunt and carried weapons. In addition, the presentation will enumerate a number of women in the harem who wielded great political power. The paper will identify the women by name and refer to the period of their residence in the harem (i.e, the reign of Shah Isma`il, Shah Tahmasp; Shah `Abbas, etc.).

In the Maliki Islamic legal theory that became dominant in Morocco under the Marinid dynasty (1244-1465), women had few options for choosing their husbands, with fathers able to exercise a large amount of control over their daughters’ marriage choices. However, legal sources from this time show that in practice, woman had multiple ways of avoiding undesirable marriages. Using published and manuscript sources from Morocco in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the fatwas (legal responses) of some of the most prominent scholars of the time, this study examines the cases of the most extreme method that women used to convince their reluctant families to accept their choice of a particular husband: running away with the man they wanted to marry. The end result in every case examined was a legally sanctioned marriage between the runaway bride and her chosen husband, almost always contracted with familial support, despite the social and legal transgressions that may have taken place on the path to achieving this goal. While marriages of this nature were not officially recognized by society or the Islamic legal system, I argue that in practice, families and jurists dealt with the reality of these unions when faced with the necessity. In this way, marriages based on mutual choice, and guidance about how society and the law could address them, forced their way into medieval Moroccan jurisprudence and Islamic legal discourse. This in essence altered the legal landscape to reflect the space that women carved out for themselves through their actions. The handling of these cases also demonstrates the ability of Islamic law to adapt to the needs and experiences of women and society. The current research highlights the importance of considering the implementation of law in the Islamic west, a place of rich scholarly and legal tradition, which has been comparatively understudied in relation to the central Islamic lands and the Ottoman Empire.

Royal women have been court poets’ objects of praise in the Persian literary tradition for centuries. In the Timurid and Safavid periods women of political importance composed poetry, patronized the fine arts, and commissioned historical chronicles to project their power. This study will briefly explore how Parī Khān Khānum— the celibate Safavid princess who virtually ruled Iran during the last years of her father Shah Ṭaḥmāsb’s reign, and played a key role in the rise to power of her brother Ismā’īl Mīrzā—left a strong impression on Safavid historical chroniclers such as Afūshtah Naṭanzī. In his Naqāvat al-Āsār Zikr al-Akhyār dar Tārīkh-i Ṣafaviyah, Naṭanzī surveyed Parī Khān Khānum’s extensive involvement in the affairs of state. In this case, this study will analyze the relationship between her role in historical chronicles and her correspondences with the court poet Muḥtasham Kāshānī, whom she deemed the most eloquent poet of the age. It is interesting to see whether her celibate status enables him to cast her as sacred, erotic, gender-ambiguous, and a religious leader? In his qasā’id, Kāshānī dramatically describes his lady patron in sensual language and also compares her to holy women of Islam such as Fāṭimah the daughter of Prophet Muḥammad and Mary the mother of Jesus. He also plays with gender by casting her simultaneously as a male king and Bilqīs the Queen of Sheba, emphasizing her leadership qualities. Similarly, in 1569, Shīrāzī Navīdī finished his book, Takmīlāt al-Akhbār, dedicating it to Parī Khān Khānum who was the “princess of the world and its inhabitants” and “the Fāṭimah of the time.” This comparison of Iranian princesses to holy women would eventually be found in later Qajar-era praise poetry. Kāshānī versified the princess’ divinity in a time of Shāh Ṭahmāsb’s increasing puritanism and the public’s ghulāt sensibilities, highlighting the strong relation of poetry to the rhetoric of political authority. With this rich interaction between performance, patronage, and desire, it can be surmised that the depiction of Parī Khān Khānum as a celibate symbol of eros is not empty hyperbole but an abstraction of royalty aiming to capture the imagination of Shiite audiences.