Chosen among Women

Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi`ite Islam

Mary F. Thurlkill

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780268042318
• eBook ISBN: 9780268093822
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Chosen among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi`ite Islam combines historical analysis with the tools of gender studies and religious studies to compare the roles of the Virgin Mary in medieval Christianity with those of Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad, in Shi`ite Islam. The book explores the proliferation of Marian imagery in Late Antiquity through the Church fathers and popular hagiography. It examines how Merovingian authors assimilated powerful queens and abbesses to a Marian prototype to articulate their political significance and, at the same time, censure holy women's public charisma. Mary Thurlkill focuses as well on the importance of Fatima in the evolution of Shi`ite identity throughout the Middle East. She examines how scholars such as Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi advertised Fatima as a symbol of the Shi`ite holy family and its glorified status in paradise, while simultaneously binding her as a mother to the domestic sphere and patriarchal authority.

This important comparative look at feminine ideals in both Shi`ite Islam and medieval Christianity is of relevance and value in the modern world, and it will be welcomed by scholars and students of Islam, comparative religion, medieval Christianity, and gender studies.

Notes

Introduction

1. al-Majlisī, v. 43.3, p. 24.

2. Important sources on the Franks are Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Janet L. Nelson, The Frankish World, 750–900 (Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1996); and, of course, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill’s leading works, including Barbarian West, A.D. 400–1000 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), and The Long-Haired Kings (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962).

3. Ralph W. Mathisen provides an important look at Arian Germanic churches and hierarchy in “Barbarian Bishops and the Churches ‘in barbaricis gentibus’ during Late Antiquity,” Speculum 72.3 (1997): 664–97.

4. GM 8, 10.

5. Throughout the eighth and ninth centuries, these identities were still evolving. Sectarian divisions centered particularly on supporters of `Ali and his descendants versus the supporters of the caliphs. For clarity, I shall distinguish the groups as Shi`ite and Sunni Muslims which, of course, conveys a doctrinal distinction that took centuries to fully solidify.

6. For `Arwa, see Farhad Daftary’s “Sayyida Hurra: The Ismā`īlī Ṣulayḥid Queen of Yemen,” in Women in the Medieval Islamic World, ed. Gavin R. G. Hambly (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 117–30; and Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam, trans. M. J. Lakeland (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); also see Kishwar Rizvi’s “Gendered Patronage: Women and Benevolence during the Early Safavid Empire,” in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 123–53.

7. Rivzi, “Gendered Patronage,” 126.

8. Averil Cameron provides an important discussion of paradoxical imagery in Christian discourse in Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of a Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). She examines the Virgin Mary in chap. 5, 155–88.

9. Theologians formally recognized Mary as God’s “container” only after extended debates. Mary received the appellation Theotokos, or God-bearer, at the highly controversial Council of Ephesus in 431 CE.

10. For secondary sources on early female virgins (including their imitation of Mary), see Virginia Burrus, “Word and Flesh: The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in Christian Antiquity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10 (1994): 27–51; Averil Cameron, “Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity,” in History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History, ed. Averil Cameron (London: Duckworth, 1988), 181–205; Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mary Foskett, A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

11. See the arguments of Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

12. According to some classical authors, Muhammad paralleled shayātīn and wives, including Eve’s temptation of Adam. M. J. Kister quotes al-Munāwī, al-Suyūṭī, and al-Daylāmī in “Legends in tafsīr and hadīth Literature: The Creation of Adam and Related Stories,” in Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, ed. Andrew Rippin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 93.

13. See Annemarie Schimmel’s introduction to feminine imagery in Sufi literature, My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam, trans. Susan H. Ray (New York: Continuum, 1997), 20.

14. There are a number of secondary sources devoted to Shi`ite cosmology and the Imams in particular. Two basic works are Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of `Ashūrā in Twelver Shi`ism (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); and Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early Shi`ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam, trans. David Streight (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994).

15. See Giselle de Nie’s “Consciousness Fecund through God: From Male Fighter to Spiritual Bride-Mother in Late Antique Female Sanctity,” in Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (New York: Garland, 1995).

16. Vernon K. Robbins explains the rhetorical nature of certain images in historical, social, cultural, and political works. He defines these as “patterns of intertexture,” or the ways in which texts stand in relation to other texts and interpretations. See The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric, Society, and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1996).

17. al-Majlisī, v. 43.2, p. 18.

18. For important methodological discussions of material culture, gender, and theology, see Robin Margaret Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (New York: Routledge, 2000); Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Female Monastic Houses (London: Routledge, 1994); Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, eds., Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

19. See recent discussions of poststructuralist theory and the implications for early Christian studies in Coon’s Sacred Fictions, introd.; Mary Ann Tolbert, “Social, Sociological, and Anthropological Methods,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Gillian Cloke, This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Ages, 350–450 (London: Routledge, 1995); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); and, of course, Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on gender performance, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

20. For a review of feminist hermeneutics in the 1970s, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), chap. 1, “Toward a Feminist Critical Hermeneutics.”

21. See, for example, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Schüssler Fiorenza articulates a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that questions male authors’ misogynistic imagery and a “hermeneutics of remembrance” to reconstruct the “reality” of the early church; see In Memory of Her.

22. Many authors have reviewed the historical circumstances of women in Islam to argue for contemporary political change and to revive a pristine Qur’anic gender ideal free from patriarchal interference. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Asma Barlas, “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

23. Most authors either contest Fatima’s historical authenticity (see the articles in EI¹ and EI²) or consider her an exemplary model in contemporary political debates. See, for example, `Ali Shari`ati, Shari`ati on Shari`ati and the Muslim Woman (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1996); Fatima Mernissi, Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1996). As a notable exception, Denise Spellberg considers in passing Fatima’s role in historical rhetoric in her Politics, Gender and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of `A’isha bint Abu Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

24. See the important works by Mary Clanton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

25. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, I.29. See Alan Thacker’s article regarding Rome’s influence on English piety, “In Search of Saints: The English Church and the Cult of Roman Apostles and Martyrs in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries,” in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, ed. Julia Smith (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 247–77.

26. See Peter O’Dwyer, Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1988). O’Dwyer examines the “Old Irish Life of S. Brigid” as well as “Adamnān’s Law Code” in discussing Marian imagery in the early seventh century.

Chapter One. Holy Women in Context

1. Denise Spellberg uses this approach in her Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past. She carefully distinguishes the difference between `A’isha’s “life” and “legacy” within the Sunni community.

2. Another controversial element (besides the Christological debate) was Mary’s own lack of sin. Popular piety throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages equated the Virgin Mary with the Song of Song’s woman “without spot” (4.7). It follows that should Mary provide the flesh for the God-Man, it must indeed be “sinless.” Yet theologians debated the point (i.e., how could redemption occur before the Crucifixion?), and the Immaculate Conception only became dogma in 1854. Another question remains, however: if Mary was indeed “without stain,” did she inherit the physical marks of Eve’s sin, i.e., menstruation? The Protevangelium of James had promoted the notion that Mary could “pollute” the temple; and, according to medieval conceptions of anatomy and physiology, menstrual blood transformed into milk, thus allowing Mary to lactate (a popular image in the late Middle Ages). Theology retained the incongruity that Mary remained free from sin, yet bore some of the burdens of the flesh (just as Christ did). See Charles T. Wood’s “The Doctors’ Dilemma: Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought,” Speculum 56.4 (1981): 710–27.

3. For Cyril’s refutations, see Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, PG, v. 77.

4. See Gillian Clark’s discussion in Early Church as Patrons: Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 6.

5. There is a significant debate about ethnic designations in the early Middle Ages. As Lawrence Nees points out, many historians argue that ethnic distinctions between the “barbarians” and the Gallo-Romans only supports the Roman propaganda that distinguished their “pure” culture from the barbaric ones. See his introduction in Speculum 72.4 (1997): 959–69. Yet other historians contend that ethnic distinctions are useful; see James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimetz, eds, Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). Gerd Althoff considers ethnic distinctions important as well; he suggests that Roman senatorial families largely inherited church authority (in the cities) while Frankish aristocratic families assumed more local control in rural areas; see Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

6. See E. Weig, “Volkstum und Volksbewusstsein in Frankenreich des 7. Jahrhunderts,” Caratteri del Secolo VII in Occidente (Spoleto: Settimane di Studio del Centro italiano di studi sull) Alto Medioevo 5 (1958): 587–648; and Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 180–81.

7. Political overtones remained because the Visigoths and some other tribes were still Arian, which set them apart theologically from the Franks. Yet it is important to note that these differences were expressed as theological instead of only political.

8. Historians have argued that the level of “literacy” in the Merovingian period has been underestimated. See, for example, Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 21–42; M. van Uytfanghe, “L’Hagiographie et son publique à l’époque mérovingienne,” Studia Patristica 16 (1985): 5...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preliminary Notes
• Introduction
• One Holy Women in Context
• Two Holy Women in Holy Texts
• Three Virgins and Wombs
• Four Mothers and Families
• Five Sacred Art and Architecture: Holy Women in Built Form
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Genealogies
• Glossary of Arabic Terms
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index