sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

OBITUARIES INTO LIFE HISTORIES: WOMEN IN MAMLUK DAMASCUS
Mahmood IBRAHIM *
Obituaries of some women in Mamluk Damascus could be turned into life‐histories by providing a
deep social and cultural context through an investigation of names, institution, practices, and other
information included in the obituary notices. The juxtaposition of real life situation and idealist
construction of gender roles should make it easier to better assess the position of Muslim women.
Obituaries, wafiyyat, became a popular genre in medieval Arabic literature. For the most part, these
were records of the religious scholars, the Ulema, of the various Islamic law schools and high
government officials among other notable. There are exceptions when the obituaries of women are
included. It is even rarer to include the obituaries of ordinary women. 1 Altogether, however, they
constitute a cumulative record that could provide an alternative view of women in Islamic history.
Current views on the position, status, and role of Muslim women, in the present and in the past,
are very controversial. The “West” constructed a largely negative view of Muslim women
representing them as veiled, secluded, voiceless and marginalized in a society dominated by men. 2
Such images were constructs grafted upon the Muslim woman overtime. In her analysis of the image
of Muslim women in western literature, Muhja Kahf finds that a negative shift took place from the
seventeenth century onward, when “the veil and the seraglio or the harem enter into Western
representation of the Muslim woman.” 3 In addition, Muhja Kahf observes that the very traits
assigned to the Muslim woman were those of the now‐castigated aristocratic woman in a changing
European society. 4
Gavin Hambly offers another explanation for the negative representation of Muslim women in
European literature. Europeans, who travelled in the Middle East from the sixteenth century onward,
having had no real contact with local women, developed a thread in their writing that “combined the
hidden and therefore exotic attractions of the denizens of the harem with an assumed licentiousness
resulting from their master’s neglect.” 5
European literature of the 19 th century, often written by colonial administrators themselves,
served as a justification for European colonial domination. Lord Cromer, governor of Egypt from
1883‐1907, exemplifies such administrators who held such a poor opinion of Islam and of Muslim
women in particular. 6
Modern Islamists base their vision of women on the exegetical and juridical treatises written
centuries ago exclusively by a body of male scholars known as the Ulema. Therefore, they too cast
an unfavorable view of the role of women in the new Islamic society despite casting such a role
within a liberationist framework. 7 Nonetheless, secular feminists and liberal Muslims regard the
Islamist positions on women as regressive with a significant loss of rights and bitterly resent the
perceived loss of freedom that they believe are legitimately their rights under Islam. 8
That the Orientalists and the Islamists coalesce when it comes to holding women in an inferior
position is not surprising given their similar methodological assumptions that, among other things,
confuse the origins of practices and attitudes that are currently associated with Islam, or considered
peculiarly Islamic, such as veiling, seclusion, and the institution of the harem. Muslim chroniclers
depicted the pre‐Islamic period as that of jahiliyyah, a period of ignorance; an uncivilized, uncouth,
and ungodly culture that Islam, with divine authority and a well‐ordered society replaced. In other
words, it was not Meccan society in particular or Arabian society in general that caused the change; it
was divine intervention that brought Islam and transformed society. Orientalists, on the other hand,
took the concept of jahiliyyah as proof that Arabian society was so underdeveloped that it could not
*
California State Polytechnic University - California, USA