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

How Does One Say 'Queen' in Islam? 13
the arena of power indicates a breakdown in the system: lowerranking,
normally excluded elements are in charge. And it is difficult
to imagine anyone more excluded from political competition than
women.
The caliphate turned out to be a dream difficult to realize after
the Prophet's death. It was a mythical vision of a happy community
ideally directed by a caliph who was made wise by divine law - a
law that reduced him to a humble captive of God's project, which
was to make the Muslims happy and powerful among nations. This
mythical caliph has no personal narcissistic concern with power. He
is the servant of the community's needs first. Strange as it may
seem, the caliph - one cannot say it too often - has no legislative
power and as a result can make no legal reforms, because it is God
himself who is al-Musharri' (the Lawgiver), the creator of the
shari'a. 1 The law was revealed once and for all. That is why women's
calls today for reform of family law, which derives entirely from
the shari'a, for the forbidding of polygyny and the repudiation of
wives, and for equal rights of inheritance have provoked an outcry.
While according to the Lisan al-'Arab, the word caliph exists only
in the masculine form and cannot be used in the feminine, sultan
and malik on the contrary exist in both forms. The distribution of
political power between the sexes seems to be evident in Arabic
grammar. In any case, although no woman ever became a caliph
(as far as I know), there have been many who managed to be
sultana and malika (queen). 8
One of the most famous was Sultana Radiyya, who took power
in Delhi in the year 634 of the Hejira (AD 1236). 9 This is not far
from Punjab, which is the fief of Nawaz Sharif, later prime minister
of Pakistan, who was one of Benazir Bhutto's major adversaries
during the 1988 election, when he unsuccessfully tried to defeat
her by mobilizing fundamentalist votes. Radiyya took power in
somewhat the same conditions as did Benazir Bhutto, by demanding
justice before the people for a crime committed by the reigning
sultan, her brother Rukn al-Din. In Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan
traveller, we have a distinguished historian who can inform us about
Sultana Radiyya's ascent to power. He travelled in her country in
the fourteenth century, just a hundred years after her reign, which
apparently made such an impression on the minds of the Muslims
that they recounted it to their visitors. Ibn Battuta departed from
Tangier on a tour of the world. He left Mecca in September 1332
to see Bilad al-Sind, which is none other than the native land of
our Benazir. His description of the country and its rulers is part of