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

150 The Arab Queens
challenge to established power, it should be a priori more egalitarian
toward women. This question brings us back to our original point:
did the queens of Yemen have the right to the khutba issued in their
name because they were Shi'ites or because they were Yemenis? Is
their exceptional case explained by religion (Shi'ism) or ethnicity,
that is, by cultural specificity, by local tradition, especially the
importance of women in the myths and legends of South Arabia?
After the death of al-Mukarram, 'Arwa discovered to her cost
the attitude of the Shi'ite hierarchy. For Muslims the death of a
head of state is a moment of rupture when the only thing that is
certain is anxiety about the unforeseen. And it was the tradition of
the Prophet that made this inevitable. By refusing to designate a
successor from his own family despite pressure from it, the Prophet
Muhammad gave a very strong signal that the will of God was
against the Arabs' aristocratic tradition of power, which had been
the rule during the jahiliyya. 40
By his refusal to designate his successor, the Prophet expressed
the essential point of the egalitarian principle of Islam. Since the
seventh century this fundamental act has obliged every politician
who aspires to the leadership of a community of Muslims to explain
to the faithful the origin of his power and to justify his legitimacy.
The death of a leader, whatever his title - caliph invested with a
divine mission, or sultan drawing his power from a fiercely materialistic
army - obliges his successor to settle the problem of legitimacy
in one way or another by answering one simple question: where
does his power come from? Who authorizes him to govern? It is
absolutely inconceivable for a person to govern without justifying
himself, since power in Islam is characterized by the fact that the
world here below is inseparable from the Beyond, the material
inseparable from the spiritual. 'Arwa publicly exercised material
power during the lifetime of her husband, who had delegated it to
her, but al-Mukarram remained the holder of spiritual power, the
inheritor of the Isma'ili da'wa in Yemen, and as such he got his
legitimacy from the eighth Fatimid caliph of Egypt, who was called
al-Mustansir.
Far from being a minor sovereign, al-Mustansir asserted his power
in the world as a dangerous caliph who had under his command a
network of terrorists put at his service by Hasan al-Sabbah, the
master of the order ofal-hashashin, the Assassins. With al-Mustansir
the Isma'ilis reached their apogee, since it was during his reign that
the Shi'ite armies invaded Baghdad and had the khutba given in his
name in the al-Mansur mosque, the seat and symbol of Abbasid