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

16 Queens and Courtesans
ancestry to Fatima, his daughter, and to 'Ali, his son-in-law and
cousin. Hurr also has to do with the idea of resistance, since one
says of a bride that she has spent the night hurra if she was not
deflowered on her wedding night, since her husband could not
penetrate her. 16 This idea of resisting, of concentrated energy contained
in hurr, is evident in the word harrara, which means 'to
write'. When you decide to write a text, what you are in fact doing
is 'liberating words' (tahrir al-kitaba). You are arranging alphabet
letters in a specific order that makes sense and liberates meanings. 17
Al-muharrir (the liberator) is one of the many words for a writer.
One of the duties of the hurr, the aristocrat, is to think globally, to
plan for others, to think for the group. A duty and a privilege, it
is the mark of honour of the elite. But what is surprising is that we
never find the title of hurr used for men. We never encounter it
given to a temporal or spiritual head of state, like the words sultan
or malik. We often find it used for women as a synonym for malika
or sultana, and in regions of the Muslim empire as different as
Spain, North Africa, and Yemen. Al-hurra is the title of two Yemeni
queens of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Asma and 'Arwa,
whom we will meet further on. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, several Andalusian queens, who played important roles
on both sides of the Mediterranean (Spain and North Africa) bore
this title. Women seem to emerge on the political scene at the
time of great catastrophes. The fall of Granada in 1492, when
the Christians ejected the Muslims from Spain, was one of those
occasions.
The most famous of these women was 'A'isha al-Hurra, known
to the Spaniards by the name Sultana Madre de Boabdil, Boabdil
being the distorted name of her son, the last Arab ruler of Spain
Muhammad Abu 'Abdallah. She won the admiration of her enemies
at the time of the Muslim debacle. 18 According to 'Abdallah Inan,
an expert on the fall of Granada, despite the silence of Arab
sources, which barely mention her name, 'A'isha al-Hurra played a
prominent role in Muslim history. 19 Only Inan's analysis of the
Spanish documents revealed that she was a remarkable leader who
took heroic action at a tragic moment; he calls her one of the 'most
noble and fascinating [personages] of our history'. 20 Her life, which
Inan calls 'a page of heroism', is little known, if not entirely
unknown, and is barely studied even by experts. Inan tries to retrace
several episodes of it. According to him, it was 'A'isha al-Hurra
who decided to transfer power from her ageing husband, 'Ali Abu
al-Hasan, who had taken power in 866/1461, to her son by him,