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

52 Queens and Courtesans
caliph is supposed to show great restraint and moderation at the
death of a woman very dear to him, and above all to avoid showing
his grief in public. Harun al-Rashid violated all the rites of the
caliphate and of burial. And, great man that he was, filled with
self-confidence, he saw his prestige only grow from it. Tabari reports
the testimony of a man who was present at the burial of Khayzuran
in the year 173: 'I saw al-Rashid that day .... Barefoot, he
accompanied the casket through the mud to the cemetery of
Quraysh. Upon arriving, he washed his feet . . . and intoned the
funeral prayer. Then he went down into the tomb to pay final
homage to his mother before leaving the cemetery.' 1 Right up to
her death Khayzuran defied the empire and its traditions.
The name Khayzuran means 'bamboo', the plant that symbolizes
both beauty and suppleness. Her life has fascinated both the members
of the elite, who adopted her styles of coiffure and adornment,
and the common people, who could only admire her in the tales
from the Arabian Nights, that popular fiction that rightly depicts
her life as the ultimate dream of a woman's life, in which seduction,
fortune, and power are intimately linked and sensually entangled.
She made political decisions that were so important that it can be
said without exaggeration that she put her mark on one of the most
momentous epochs of the Abbasid dynasty and the history of Islam.
There is almost no information about her physical appearance, says
Nabia Abbott, who devotes half of her book Two Queens of Baghdad
to her. 2 Today bamboo, because of its slender suppleness
and deceptive fragility, is still considered to suggest some of the
inexpressible mystery of the female body. In the medinas of the
traditional cities of Morocco, as young girls walk by, one of the
murmured compliments one hears, still reflecting the charm of the
past, is: 'Allah la qtib al-khayzurarf (Allah! What a stem of
bamboo!). But Khayzuran infused bamboo with a magical dimension
it lacked before her. As in fairy-tales, she had a very difficult early
life before she rose to dizzying heights.
She was born free in an area of Yemen called Jurash. All the
historians except Ibn Hazm agree on this fact. 3 He is probably
wrong, and this detail is important. Yemeni women are known for
never agreeing to leave men in sole charge of politics. Was it
because the memory of the queen of Sheba remained vivid despite
Islamicization? According to the overwhelming majority of sources,
Khayzuran arrived at the palace in Baghdad as a slave. As the
shari'a specifies, no Muslim may ever be reduced to slavery by
another Muslim, yet no classic historian ever took the trouble to