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

152 The Arab Queens
money to rise against the first Abbasid, al-Safah, the father of al-
Mansur and the founder of the Abbasid dynasty. But upon the
death of al-Safah and the accession of his son al-Mansur, al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya succumbed to temptation. Following the classic model
of Shi'ite challenge, al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, who in the beginning hid
his pretensions to power, one day publicly declared himself the sole
legitimate caliph. His partisans drove al-Mansur's governor out of
the city. Then began an exchange of letters between the Abbasid
caliph and his challenger that is a goldmine for those interested in
the logic of legitimating power in the two major divisions of Islam,
even though al-Nafs al-Zakiyya ended up beheaded like all his
predecessors. 45
Anybody who talks about legitimacy necessarily talks about birth,
and anybody who talks about birth talks about maternity. One of
the key axes of the debate between the Sunni caliph and his Shi'ite
challenger was the clarification of their position regarding the role
of women in the transmission of power: whether a woman can
transmit political power. The debate now introduced into an essentially
monotheistic political scene the otherwise carefully veiled
phantom of maternity. Maternity is totally ignored in its physical
aspect by the shar'ia, which recognizes only paternal law: children
born of a Muslim marriage necessarily belong to the father. This
principle is so fundamental that the status of an illegitimate child
(that is, a child who has only its mother) is practically non-existent,
making it impossible for Muslim parents to adopt a child legally.
Adoption, which risks reproducing a fiction of paternity, is rejected
by the shar'ia. Today this presents insoluble problems to the qadis,
since in most Muslim countries all adoptions of children are more
or less illegal. 46
Returning to the epistolary joust, let me point out that al-Mansur's
mother was a non-Arab/arya, a Berber slave named Sallama. Some
say that Sallama was from the Nafzawa tribe; others maintain that
she was of the Sanhaja. 47 The first insult that the Shi'ite pretender
addressed to the Abbasid caliph was that he, al-Nafs al-Zakiyya,
was a pure Arab on both paternal and maternal sides, while the
Abbasid caliph could not say as much. According to al-Nafs al-
Zakiyya, al-Mansur's descent was doubly stained, first because Sallama
had ajam (non-Arab) blood in her veins, and secondly because
she was an umm walad, a slave who is bought and sold in a suq. 4S
He, al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, had on his side only women from a chain
of illustrious aristocrats that led straight back to Khadija, the first
wife of the Prophet, Khadija 'the pure, the one who was the first