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

10 Queens and Courtesans
muezzin will announce that the sun has reached its zenith. And
order dictates that women must be in their place and the caliph in
his.
No woman who has held power has borne the title of caliph or
imam. For that reason are we to say that there have never been
women heads of state in Islam? Is the title alone a sufficient criterion
of exclusion? If one regards having the title of caliph as the criterion
for governing, one is going to eliminate the majority of heads of
state, because few bore that title. Caliph is an extremely precious
title reserved to a tiny minority, because of its religious and messianic
dimension. Even today, just as in the past, many Muslim
heads of state would like to bear this title, but only the exceptional
few have the right to it. The king of Morocco is one of those; he
is amir al-mu'minin (Commander of the faithful) and caliph, the
representative of God on earth, his dynasty being traceable back to
the Prophet.
In order to understand what a caliph is, it is necessary to understand
the contrary - a sultan or king. And what better master could
we find than Ibn Khaldun, that gifted intellectual of the fourteenth
century (732/1332-808/1406), who filled political offices in various
parts of the Muslim world from Andalusia to Egypt and retired
from public life at the age of 40 in Oranie, a few miles from Tiaret
in Algeria, to reflect on violence and the reasons for despotism?
He knew whereof he spoke: he came close to death on several
occasions during his political career in the service of princes. According
to him, all the woes of the Muslim world and the political
violence that held sway in it came from the fact that the caliphate,
the divine mission specific to Islam, had been perverted into mulk,
archaic despotism, which knew no limits and was answerable to no
law, only to the passions of the prince:
Mulk . . . implies domination and coercion, which come from a spirit
of rapine and animality. Most of the time the orders given by the
leader are unjust and injurious to the material interests of those
under his rule, because he imposes burdens on them that they cannot
bear, in order to gratify his aims and desires. 1
The caliphate is the opposite of mulk in that it represents an
authority that obeys divine law, the shari'a, which is imposed on
the leader himself and makes his own passions illegitimate. And
therein, Ibn Khaldun explains to us, lies the greatness of Islam as
a political system. The caliph is tied by divine law, his desires and