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

170 The Arab Queens
of women pleaded their case to al-Hakim, explaining that 'not all
women have a man to take care of them, and they take care of
themselves.' 46 Then al-Hakim, in response to their complaints, had
a brilliant idea that the historians repeat with a seriousness not
lacking in irony:
He ordered the merchants to bring to women everything sold in the
suq and the streets so that women could make their purchases. He
gave precise instructions to the vendors. They should equip themselves
with an instrument similar to a soup ladle with a very long
handle. With this instrument they were supposed to push the merchandise
in to the woman hiding behind the door, and she could ask
the price if she wanted to buy it. In this way the vendor could avoid
seeing his client. 47
Contrary to what one might suppose, the majority of Muslim men
did not appreciate this kind of absurdity, and Ibn al-Athir concludes
that 'people were very put off by this sort of measure.' Many women
who tried to resist 'were killed, one group being put to death by
drowning. Al-Hakim got rid of many old women.' 48
Who were the women who preferred death to being locked up?
Aristocrats and wives of notables proud of their privileges, or poor
women who had to go about the streets in order to earn their
living? Who were these Egyptian women who braved the unjust
prohibitions of a caliph 1,960 years ago and decided to transgress
his orders, to walk in the streets that he had declared belonged to
men alone? Were they educated women or illiterates? Were they
peasants driven to Cairo by drought, or the coddled daughters and
wives of the bourgeoisie? Were they mothers of families or barren
women, women with all the advantages or marginal creatures whom
no one cared about? These are the questions that young women at
Cairo's universities will one day choose as dissertation topics. And
on that day we shall see unfold before our eyes a history of the
people of Cairo very different from the one that the misogynistic
tradition wants us to believe in - a history of a fractious, combative
people whose rage against injustice has no sex. We will see a rage
that inflames women with the same fierceness that it does men and
sends them side by side, probably hand in hand, into the streets
where sometimes death and sometimes freedom await them. The
historians emphasize one fact that explains the dynamics of the
Cairo of that day: the men were deeply affected by the prohibitions
that fell on their wives, and the humiliation they felt was in no way
different from that of their wives, daughters, or lovers. In those