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

158 The Arab Queens
it. If the Sunni palace in Baghdad needs to disavow women as
transmitters of legitimacy, the religious authorities will find no
difficulty in making the holy book say what they need it to say. The
only difference is that the Fatimid caliph's interests caused him to
take two contradictory positions concerning women and their place
on the political scene. He said yes to their pre-eminence in an
esoteric debate about the transmission of power, Fatima being
claimed as an ancestor through whom legitimacy and political power
were passed. But he said no to the presence of women as partners
on the political scene, and 'Arwa was disavowed and declared
incapable of governing a Shi'ite state.
The history of the Fatimids constitutes a unique field of investigation
for those interested in women and politics. Other, extraordinary
circumstances thrust a Fatimid princess into occupying the
caliph's place and fulfilling his imperial duties for four long months.
She was Sitt al-Mulk, who took power in 411/1020 after the mysterious
disappearance of her brother, the imam al-Hakim Ibn 'Arnri
Allah, who one fine morning declared to his people in a delirium
that he was God in person and that they should worship him as
such.
The story of Sitt al-Mulk is as fascinating as it is exemplary. It is
the story of a woman forced by circumstances to take on the
unimaginable: to assume the place of a caliph in order to save
millions of the faithful from the madness of the imam. This was
not, as in the case of 'Arwa, just a matter of exercising mulk, purely
earthly power, but of occupying the empty place of a caliph become
unfit to carry out his responsibilities. Sitt al-Mulk took the place of
an infallible imam whom madness had transformed into a hallucinating
killer whose acts no longer had any logic or legitimacy in the
eyes of the faithful. The case of Sitt al-Mulk is without doubt an
extreme case, in which the female presence, on principle relegated
to the harem, invaded the caliphal throne. In order to protect itself,
the system completely denied the existence of Sitt al-Mulk; the
khutba was never said in her name in the mosques. After four
months of direct rule she herself, a woman of great capability, on
whom the historians readily bestowed the adjective hazima, sought
to set up a screen, to hide herself.