Fatima.Mernessi_The-Forgotten-Queens-of-Islam-EN

The Little Queens of Sheba 143
to them, felt the need to give a good-conduct report of the queen:
'Balqis was a woman of irreproachable conduct; she remained
chaste. And as she was not the slightest bit interested in men, she
remained a virgin until she met Solomon and married him.' 10
Did she really marry Solomon? There is nothing in the Koranic
text to lead us to such a conclusion. Nevertheless, the theologians
and historians took it upon themselves to decide. Muhammad al-
Qannuji promised hell to anyone who dared to think that Solomon
married Balqis: 'Ibn al-Mundhir stated that Solomon later married
Balqis .... This is an extremely reprehensible statement.' 11 For
him Balqis and Solomon were two different entities. And since a
woman at the height of power does not at all conform to the profile
of a marriageable young woman of our day, Balqis poses a problem
and has always posed a problem for historians. Some of them
resorted to the irrational in their attempts to explain this strange
woman. Mas'udi (died in 346/tenth century) sowed doubts about
her origin by revealing that she had a human father and a mother
who came from the jinns. With a throne and a whole people at her
feet, Balqis could not be completely human:
The birth of this queen is surrounded by supernatural circumstances
that have been reported by the transmitters. They recount that her
father was out hunting, found himself in the presence of two serpents,
one black and the other white; that he killed the black one and then
saw appear before him two jinns, of whom one was old and the other
young; that the old [jinn] gave his daughter in marriage to the king
with certain conditions; and that the fruit of that union was Balqis.
Mas'udi was a historian of unparalleled intelligence, and any Muslim
of even the most modest intelligence knows that in order to be
convincing one must be logical. Nevertheless, in the matter of
Balqis, Mas'udi, usually so sure of himself, had twinges of conscience.
He felt obliged to explain this story of the jinn: 'As for us,
we only credit facts of this type if they conform to beliefs that
religious law compels us to accept.' 12 In this case, religious law
compelled nothing at all. The Koran did not consider it interesting
or necessary to tell us about either the father or the mother of
Balqis. It was Mas'udi's personal problem; he could not bear to see
a woman depicted on a throne, even in the Koran, without feeling
the need to attack her and put her humanity in doubt.
Despite everything, Balqis has held her own in the face of the
historians' attempts to reduce or humiliate her. She continues to