Women in the Medieval Islamic World [Paperback]

Women often appear invisible in what is widely perceived as the male-oriented society of Islam. Women in the Medieval Islamic World seeks to redress the balance with a series of original essays on women in the pre-modern phase of Islamic history. The reader will encounter here a colourful portrait gallery of rulers, politicians, poets and patrons, as well as some larger than life fictitious females from the pages of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature. No less authentic are the accounts of quiet or troubled lives of ordinary women preserved in the court records of Mamluk Egypt and Ottoman Turkey, reminders that historical research can resuscitate the lives of subaltern as well as elite women from the past. For people who believe that Muslim women, especially medieval Muslim women, have no history, this book demonstrates the ways in which research by twenty international scholars - sometimes working in their own distinct fields and sometimes in overlapping areas - can bring into focus the role and contribution of women in the development of Islamic history. There will no longer be an excuse for their exclusion.Introduction: Becoming Visible: Medieval Islamic Women in Historiography and History; Gavin R.G.Hambly Three Queens, Two Wives, and a Goddess: The Roles and Images of Women in Sasanian Iran; J.Rose Women in Pre-Islamic Central Asia: The Khatun of Bukhara; R.N.Frye Zaynab Bint `Ali and the Place of the Women of the Households of the First Imams in Shi'ite Devotional Literature; D.Pinault The Bold and the Beautiful: Women and `Fitna' in the 'Sirat Dhatal-Himma'; R.Kruk Sayyida Hurra: The Isma'ili Sulayhid Queen of Yemen; F. Daftary Women's Lamentations as Protest in the Shahnama; O.M.Davidson Heroines and Others in the Heroic Age of the Turks; G.Lewis Female Piety and Patronage in the Medieval Hajj; M.Tolmacheva Sultan Radiyya Bint Iltutmish; P.Jackson Timurid Women: A Cultural Perspective; P.P.Soucek Conjugal Rights Versus Class Prerogatives: A Divorce Case ilƒ4