Few Persian women have entire Dīvāns attributed to them, and in this study I place Zīb al-Nisā Makhfī (d.1702) in the conversation about critical changes in poetic trends, authorship and literary reception during the Safavid-Mughal period. Who is Makhfī the poet, and what does she represent in this phase of literary development and culture? Do people view her as part of the conversation on Persian poetry or is involvement owed more to her status as a patron? How is her poetry conceived of as part of the international Persian literary sphere? How does she view herself in light of these questions? I translate some of her mystico-erotic Persian ghazals from the Dīvān as well as some Safavid, Mughal and Qajar biographical anecdotes the poet into English, using this material as a starting point to examine unresolved issues related to the poet’s life and work. I survey sources on Makhfī and rethink assumptions about the poetess and especially her impact on the Persian ghazal tradition. Her ghazal and rubā’ī poems are deep, erotic, and heartbreaking, and her poetry has often been compared to those of Hāfiz. Makhfī deftly uses two pseudonyms, or takhalluṣ, which is not unusual but not common in the ghazal genre. In some instances, Makhfī adopts the male voice, shifting gender roles and playing with literary devices. The strong ironic tone of her lines is a good example of her style, and communicates what it means to be a woman during her time. I contrast the dominant poetic voice with a more gendered voice in early modern Persian poetry, and suggest a new framework for conceiving the poetic voice singing of erotic love and melancholia. By looking at Makhfī’s poetic corpus alongside other influential poets in her circle, such as Nāsir ‘Alī and Bīdil, I interrogate the existing historiography of sabk-i hindi and bazgasht. I particularly address the issue of how to relate a poetic persona to a real human person, and I hope to engage with it on the level of methodology: Makhfī's invocation of the feminine in Persian, and her life as a celibate poet, princess, and prisoner.

After the ideas of Islam were introduced to the Arab society by Muhammad, a complex system of values emerged, combining the spirit of manliness (murūwah) and kinship solidarity (ʿaṣabiyyah) which reigned among the Arabs from times immemorial, with a new religious consciousness (dīn). Scholars who have been examining the ethical system which appeared in the 7th century Arabia (Farès, Lecomte, Rezvan, Bravmann) found that, generally, Islam did not oppose pre-Islamic moral values, but rather approved and even reinforced them. A significant point mostly overlooked in this discussion is that when poetry is concerned, a certain conflict between pre-Islamic morality and the norms of Islam was inevitable. The goal of the paper is to argue this thesis examining the problem of slander as one of the most salient points of tension between Arab poets and religious ethics in the first centuries of Islam. Placing the question into the ethical paradigm of murūwah, ʿaṣabiyyah and dīn, I reconstruct the historical and exegetical discussion to trace the origins of the problem and to gain new insights into the social conditions of the state founded by Muhammad. For this, I use the diwāns of 7-8th century poets' (Aʿšā, Ḥuṭayʾa, Ḥassān ibn Ṯābit, Jarīr, Aḫṭal and some others), their biographies provided by Ibn Qutayba, Iṣfahānī and Balāḏurī, historical and literary works by Jāḥiẓ, Ibn Ḫallikān, Ibn Rašīq and Ḥuṣrī, and the collections of hadīṯ reports by Buḫārī, Ibn Kaṯīr, Hayṯamī and Aṣbahānī. The mentioned method and data allow me to come to the following conclusions. After the advent of Islam, poets' behavior was exposed to the criticism of a religious establishment who sought to maintain a certain social order protecting the young Ummah from moral degradation and inner instability. Accordingly, the ethics of a good poet was defined by his abidance by the norms of Islam in interacting with all the members of the Ummah. At the same time, poets have maintained the pre-Islamic ways of expression developed for ideological tribal wars in which any means were applied to make verses effective, and only one's commitment to his tribe was defining the ethics of actions. In these circumstances, a conflict was inevitable, because in the 7th century, composing satires became a well-paid profession outside the tribal world and many outstanding poets left their tribes in search of earning opportunities.

This paper builds on Remke Kruk’s recent scholarship (The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature, 2014). In her study of the popular epic from the pre-modern period, Kruk discusses characters such as Dhat al-Himma, the Woman of Resolve, who confront men in battle and defeat them. This paper contributes to Kruk’s scholarship by identifying similar heroines in stories from 1001 Nights. As a result, a more complex and less stereotypical image of women in early Arabic literature begins to emerge. The main part of this paper discusses portrayals of women in two stories from 1001 Nights, “The Debate between Tawaddud the Slave Girl and the Scholars” and “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad.” In the first, a slave girl of Harun al-Rashid astonishes the court by debating learned men in Qur’an, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, and philosophy. She defeats them all, much in the way that Dhat al-Himma disposes of her enemies on the battlefield, even dethroning champions of chess and backgammon in the process. In the second, specifically in the framed dervish’s tale at the story’s center (like many other classical Arabic works, “The Porter” is arranged according to ring composition), we find the striking example of a princess engaged in mortal combat with a jinni to save a threatened prince. Both fighters go through multiple transformations into various animals and elements, before the courageous princess resorts to fire, killing her adversary therewith. She then returns to human form. Thus these interior stories from the collection contribute to the overall feminist message of 1001 Nights, which features, as is known, the courageous and inventive Shahrazad as its main heroine. In sum, not only does this paper analyze two remarkable stories of 1001 Nights structurally and thematically, but it also places them in a broader context alongside the popular epic. In consequence, we begin to see a more rounded picture of women in classical Arabic literature. Courtly classical Arabic poetry and prose largely celebrates traditional male virtues, such as courage and generosity, and typically addresses women, or describes them, as love objects for the men. Yet in popular literature, as we see, the women may take on very active roles, even overcoming or replacing the men in their fields of dominance. As a whole, classical Arabic literature, including its popular forms, may be seen to feature a variety of traditional and nontraditional representations of women.

In this talk, I will engage with various genres of medieval writing about ancient Egypt and suggest that Islamic authors did not have a comprehensive framework to analyze the past. Instead, their writing strategies and conclusions were conditioned by their individual concerns and the genre in which they wrote. Medieval scholars had a fascination with the ancient past, not just of Egypt, but of Persia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Greece, and Yemen as well. However, their reasons for recording these histories and what they chose to include in their works varied for each region. For instance, Greek history was intellectual above all else. Greek sciences and philosophy influenced Islamic learning in a myriad of ways, and thus it was this intellectual linkage that scholars wished to emphasize. Understanding why medieval scholars focused on certain aspects of ancient Egypt has been puzzling for many modern scholars, and it seems as if medieval scholars were also not unified about what their audiences should learn from this history. I will examine “wonder” literature and tales of supernatural events, an attempt to translate the hieroglyphs, and various myths that emerged or were transplanted onto the Egyptian past. These stories appear in chronicles, treatises, and other compendia that emerged from the 10th-14th centuries. The accounts to be analyzed include those of al-Idrisi, al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik, al-Suyuti, ibn Wahshiyya, and others. Modern scholars have tended to look at such texts in order to determine whether or not medieval people had a connection to Pharaonic Egypt, arguing for either a complete break with the past or for some regional nostalgia or even proto-nationalistic sentiment. I contend that medieval authors saw a need to explain the past, because the past was so visibly written on Egypt’s landscape, and that they did this through established genres and tropes. Focusing on the different genres in which scholars wrote and their strategies to rationalize the past, we can appreciate the diversity of medieval perceptions of ancient Egypt.