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

218 Notes
various volumes of certain sources like the Wafayat by Ibn Khallikan
and Kamil by Ibn al-Athir, is that of Zarkali in his A'lam, vol. 7, p.
304. The other excellent summary is that of the Encyclopedia of Islam.
65 How many of the admirers, like me, of the singers Farid al-Atrash
and his sister Asmahane know that they were Druze? They came from
a noted Druze family in al-Qarya, the Syrian part of the Druze
mountains. Farid was born in 1910, learned to play the lute from his
mother, and departed with Asmahane for Cairo at the time of the
Syrian revolt against the French in 1925. They continued their musical
training in Cairo. Asmahane was mysteriously killed when her automobile,
travelling between Cairo and Suez in 1944, plunged into the
water. In 1960, when I had finished secondary school and left Fez for
the Mohammad V University in Rabat, we all obviously listened to
Elvis Presley and dreamed about Marilyn Monroe. But it was the
languorous manner of Asmahane, when she murmured 'Qahwa, asqini
ahwa' (Coffee, pour me a coffee), that I religiously tried to duplicate
in my apprenticeship in charm and seduction. Rumour had it that
Asmahane had been a spy during World War II and that was why she
had been killed. Some said that she was working for the Arabs, some
said for the English. The rumour that I hated was that she was in fact
connected to the Nazis, that to further the Arab cause against the
English she worked with the Germans. The men in her life? All the
princes and kings in the Middle East vied for her favour, and also
obviously workers and football players. What more could one dream
of? In any case, it was her air of mystery that released the dream that
was my ideal of femininity during the troubled years of adolescence;
and Farid, who lamented his loneliness in all the corners of the medina,
was my ideal of masculinity, real masculinity, who exuded gentleness
from every pore. Our obsession with Asmahane was so intense that
we almost bumped off the student from Marrakesh who told us that
she had died long before independence. We refused to believe it, just
as the followers of Hamza had refused to believe the death of al-
Hakim. As for me, when I got ready to undertake an operation of
seduction, whether romantic or professional, whether on a date or at
a conference, it was the languorous manner of Asmahane that I tried
to emulate. That is part of the reason that I always begin my lectures
in a soft little voice that is directed to the heart. After her death,
Farid al-Altrash had a meteoric career, becoming the famous singer
and actor that we know so well. He did the music for more than 500
films. He died in 1974. And some of us, like me, turn lamentably
romantic when his voice pours out of a transistor radio in all its
sweetness. Allah yarhamul
66 Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, vol. 8, p. 128; Hanbali, Shazarat, vol. 3, p. 194;
Encyclopedia of Islam, article on 'Al-Hakim'.
67 Quoted by M. Canard in his article on al-Hakim in the Encyclopedia