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

20 Queens and Courtesans
caliph of the dynasty. She had her reasons. The outrageous behaviour
of the caliph, towards women whom he had forbidden to leave
their homes, and dogs which he had decided to exterminate, had
gone too far. He awoke one morning and announced that he was
God and that the population of Cairo, with Sitt al-Mulk in the lead,
had to worship him. 31
'Sitf seems to have been a title borne by women of exceptional
talent. A'lam by Zarkali (the 'Who's Who' of famous Arab men
and women) cites several of them who were known as experts in
theology. 32 Sitt al-Qudat (chief of qadis!), a musnida (expert in
Hadith or traditions relating to the Prophet) who lived in the
fourteenth century, taught in Damascus and wrote treatises onfiqh,
religious knowledge. (A qadi is a religious authority and judge.)
Sitt al-'Arab and Sitt al-'Ajam were also famous experts infiqh in
the fourteenth century.
We cannot close the list of titles given to women who have
exercised political power in Muslim history without mentioning the
cases - rare, it is true - of those who took power either as military
leaders or as religious leaders. One of the fairly unusual titles in an
Islam that carefully distinguishes between spiritual and secular (or
more precisely military) power was that given to a Yemeni queen
who was a religious leader, the daughter of Imam al-Zayd al-Nasir
li Din Allah, and who took San'a by force of arms in her capacity
as the Zaydi chieftain in the middle of the fifteenth century. The
title she bore was Sharif a Fatima. 33 And there was Ghaliyya al-
Wahhabiyya, a Hanbali from Tarba near Ta'if, who led a military
resistance movement in Saudi Arabia to defend Mecca against
foreign takeover at the beginning of the eighteenth century. She
was given the title of amira, amir being the title of the leader of
armies. The amir in chief (generalissimo) of the army is called
amir al-umara. This dignity was originally confined to the military
command.' 34 Her boldness and strategic ability led her enemies on
the battlefield to credit her with the magic gift of making the
Wahhabi forces invisible. Historians noted her appearance at the
head of the bedouin army as a memorable event: 'Never had the
resistance of the Arab tribes from the vicinity of Mecca been so
strong as was that of the Arabs of Tarba .... They had at their
head a woman who bore the name of Ghaliyya.' 35
However, in the majority of cases the women who entered the
political arena, like most of the men, were neither military chieftains
nor peerless religious leaders. Even if they sometimes had to lead
military operations, that was not their preferred field of action. As