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

84 Sovereignty in Islam
This shocking event, in which the performance of a woman as
imam in a mosque is linked to a caliph who is the incarnation of
disorder and evil, is repeated throughout historical literature. Every
time al-Walid is mentioned, Nawar is there at his side and leading
the stunned faithful. In the thirteenth century Abi al-Hasan al-
Maliki described the scene again, mentioning Nawar among 'the
famous women of the era of the apogee of Islam'. 43 Nawar is always
present. In the twentieth century she is included in 'Umar Kahhala's
Who's Who-type of book of 'celebrities among women in the Occident
and the Orient'. And he obviously had no more information
about her than the scene in the mosque. 44 It is needless to add that
al-Walid ushered in the end of his dynasty. He himself was swept
out of office in year 126 (744) after only a year and two months in
power. That year three caliphs succeeded each other, and things
went from bad to worse until the seizure of power by the Abbasids
a few years later in 750.
The appearance of a woman at the mihrab, made even more grotesque
and apocalyptic by the fact that it was a jarya dressed as a
caliph, sounded the death knell of the first Muslim dynasty. But it
also shows the omissions and the artificial couplings in the collective
memory and confirms that the Friday service as a criterion of
sovereignty for women is more than significant. By amplifying outrageous
and scandalous scenes, resistance has accumulated throughout
the centuries depicting women as alien to the mosque and totally
contrary to its nature. But it would be a mutilation of Islam and its
historical dynamic to reduce it to such resistance and ignore the
counter-resistance. In the present case it would be to reduce it to
its misogynistic tendencies. It is not merely because the masters tell
the poor, the slaves, or women that they are inferior that they
believe it and conform to it. To understand the dynamic of a given
civilization, it is necessary to try to understand both the desires of
the masters (their laws, ideas, etc.) and the resistance of their
supposedly weak, defenceless subjects. We have to free Islam from
cliches, go beyond the idealized pretty pictures of the groups in
power, scrutinize the counter-resistance, study the marginal cases
and exceptions. This is especially necessary for understanding the
'history' of women in Islam, a 'history' doomed, like that of peasants
and the poor, never to be reflected in the official discourse. It is
time to begin to rewrite the history of the Muslims, to go beyond
the Islam of the imam-caliph-president, of the palace and its 'ulama;
to move beyond the Islam of the masters, and doing that means
going into the swampy, dark areas of the marginal and the excep-