The Warrior Women of Islam

Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature

Remke Kruk

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848859265
• eBook ISBN: 9780857736499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Colloquial Arabic storytelling is most commonly associated with The Thousandvand One Nights. But few people are aware of a much larger corpus of narrative texts known as popular epic. These heroic romantic tales, originating in the Middle Ages, form vast cycles of adventure stories whose most remarkable feature is their portrayal of powerful and memorable women. Wildly appreciated by medieval audiences, and spread by professional storytellers throughout the cities of the Muslim world, these fictions were printed and reprinted over the centuries and comprise a vital part of Arab culture. Yet virtually none are available in translation, and so remain almost unknown to a non-Arab public. Remke Kruk at last makes these neglected romances available to a Western audience. She recounts the story of Princess Dhat al-Himma, brave and undefeated leader of the Muslim army in its wars against the Byzantines; of Ghamra, brought up as a boy to become a fearless leader of men; and of cool-headed Qannasa, raiding from her mountain fortress to capture and seduce her enemies before putting them pitilessly to the sword.
The Warrior Women of Islam puts a bold new complexion on gender roles and the wider perception of women in the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

Arabic Popular Epic:
An Introductory Note

In the minds of most people, Arabic popular storytelling is equivalent to the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. This is not surprising, for since it first became known in Europe early in the eighteenth century through Galland’s translation,¹ the tales from The Thousand and One Nights became so popular in the West that they eclipsed most of the rest of the Arabic narrative tradition.

Even now, few people realize that, in the vast sea of Arabic storytelling, the tales of The Thousand and One Nights occupy only a minor place. Other collections of tales exist, and large numbers of stories circulate in the oral tradition of the Arab world. There is also another vast corpus of popular narrative texts that was popular among Arab audiences from medieval times up to the twentieth century. This is the genre known as popular epic, sīra shaʿbīya. It is also referred to by various other names: heroic romance, popular romance, saga or chivalric tales.² The genre consists of usually lengthy heroic tales centred around a specific hero, often based on a historic character, and his companions. The exploits of these heroes are the subject of huge cycles of adventure stories, amounting to thousands of pages. They are composed in prose or in rhymed prose, sometimes a mixture of both, and often include poems as well. One of the most famous, the Sīra Hilālīya, which tells about the adventures of the tribe of Hilāl, is mostly in verse form.

The Arabic word for this type of literature is sīra, ‘geste’. Malhama, epic, is another term that is used. We might call them heroic tales, chivalric romances or even adventure stories. These long tales formed the stock-in-trade of professional storytellers, who recounted them in daily instalments to an enthralled audience. This tradition went on until the twentieth century, and still exists locally. It should be kept in mind that the tradition of telling these long epic tales stands apart from the more casual telling of various kinds of short stories, which may happen in any place or context, including the family circle.³

The epics were handed down in oral as well as in written form. Storytellers, often specialists in the performance of a specific epic, recited the tales in public spaces, and, along with these oral performances, manuscripts of the texts circulated widely. Owners of manuscripts, often storytellers themselves, but also booksellers, divided up the text into small volumes, which they rented out to readers.⁴ From the nineteenth century on, cheap printed editions became available, and the texts have been regularly reprinted up to the present day.

These narratives usually present legendary versions of historical events, and famous historical figures play leading roles in them. Fantastic elements play a major part in some of them, less so in others. A number of stock characters appear in all of them, varying in appearance and character. The periods, geographical regions and social backgrounds in which the tales are set differ widely. The Sīrat Banī Hilāl, still performed in Egypt, is a legendary account of the westward emigration and adventures of the Arabian tribe of the Banū Hilāl.

Sīrat ʿAntar, about the legendary pre-Islamic Bedouin hero ʿAntar ibn Shaddād, is set in the context of rivalries between Bedouin tribes, and this is also a major element in Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma, which describes the adventures of Princess Dhāt al-Himma and her warriors in their continuing struggle with the Byzantines. Sīrat al-malik al-Zāhir Baybars is a legendary account of the exploits of the Mameluke sultan Baybars, who lived in the thirteenth century.

Sīrat al-malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is full of tales of wonder about the adventures of the legendary Yemenite king Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan, while Qissat al-amīr Hamza al-Bahlawān tells the story of the pre-Islamic Arabian prince Hamza and his conflict with the Persians. The latter tale is of Persian origin, and it is very widespread in the Islamic world. Widely varying versions exist in Urdu, Malay, Turkish and Arabic.⁵ Also of Persian origin is Qissat Fīrūzshāh ibn al-malik Dārāb, about the adventures of the Persian prince Fīrūzshāh.

Less well-known works in this genre are the Sīrat al-Iskandar (about the adventures of Alexander the Great)⁶ and the Sīrat al-Hākim bi-amr Allāh (about the Fatimid caliph of that name; not yet available in print).⁷ The list is not complete, and continues to be expanded by new finds. While the epics mentioned here are all extremely lengthy, four to six thousand pages or even more, there also exist relatively short ones, such as the story of Princess al-ʿAnqā, ‘The Phoenix’ (still unedited), and various others.⁸

No proper definition of the genre has as yet been given, and, consequently, opinions differ as to the works to be included in the corpus. The story about the picaresque rogue ʿAlī Zaybaq demonstrates the scholarly dilemma: it is not a heroic tale at all, but since most of the works in this genre contain a certain amount of picaresque elements in the form of the ʿayyār, the trickster character who plays a prominent role in many epics, this has led scholars to include ʿAlī Zaybaq in the corpus. Another problem is that there is a certain amount of overlap with the stories about the legendary exploits of the Arabs in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, and the equally legendary accounts of the first Islamic raids and conquests (maghāzī and futūh literature). The story of the hero ʿAbdallāh ibn Jaʿfar and the conquest of North Africa, popular in the Arabic as well as the Berber tradition of the Maghrib, is a good example.⁹

Development of the genre

We do not know exactly how old these popular epics are, at least not in the form in which they have come down to us. Clearly, the fact that many feature a specific historical figure offers us a terminus post quem for the epic in which this person appears, but that is about all. We know that tales about the hero ʿAntar and about Princess Dhāt al-Himma, her son ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and their companion Battāl were already circulating in the tenth century, but we do not yet know exactly when and why these tales were converted into the long epic narratives that we know as sīra shaʿbīya, popular epic. The influence of the Persian narrative tradition is likely, but the exact connection has not yet been sufficiently researched.

The first actual evidence of long semi-historical tales circulating in Arabic dates from the twelfth century. Samaw’al al-Maghribī (d. 1174) mentions in an autobiographical note that in his youth he was very fond of reading ‘the great compilations of tales such as that about the tales of ʿAntar and about the tales of Dalhama and al-Battāl’, until he came to realize that these tales were mostly written by booksellers, and then he started to look for real historical tales, such as the works of Miskawayh and Tabarī.¹⁰ We also know about a physician who lived in the middle of the twelfth century, who was nicknamed ‘al-ʿAntarī’ because he earned money by copying the tales of ʿAntar.¹¹ Precisely what form these tales were in and how long they had been in existence we do not know. They may not have been exactly like the sīras as we know them. All we can say is that the references to the Crusades included in the sīras of ʿAntar and of Dhāt al-Himma as we currently know them demonstrate that they cannot be older than the twelfth century, although they very likely contain material that is older. Similar problems exist concerning the Sīrat Banī Hilāl, which occupies a position of its own because, much more than the others, it has been passed on by oral tradition and is always performed in dialect Arabic.

The other sīras are of a slightly later date, but even there our knowledge is restricted by the fact that no manuscripts of these texts older than the fifteenth century have come down to us.¹² These MSS originated from the milieu of the professional storytellers who composed or reworked the sīras and passed them on through a mixed oral and written tradition. In doing so, they made use of the narrative material that formed the stock-in-trade of their profession. Storytellers, reading from written texts or performing orally without the help of books, adapted their material to the taste of their public. Successful plots and motifs were used again and again and crop up in different sīras, sometimes virtually unchanged. The diversity of the MSS of each particular sīra shows that the written versions of the sīras were part of a living process in which the interaction of written and oral tradition was a basic element.

Narrative aspects

A few remarks must suffice here about the narrative aspects of the epics. For a more elaborate treatment the reader is referred to Malcolm Lyons, who deals extensively with these matters in the first volume of his The Arabian Epic (1995).

Although each sīra has its own specific subject matter and approach, as a whole they have much in common. The adventures in which their heroes become involved partly take place in well-known geographical settings, but also often take them to mysterious faraway countries where they may meet strange beings and monstrous enemies. Actual geographical distances are hardly taken into account, and time has laws of its own in this type of literature. Thus, the passing of time hardly affects the heroes’ physical appearance, and when they are grandparents they are just as redoubtable in battle as in the prime of their youth.

The stories are often extremely complicated, because they involve a vast number of characters who, in the course of events, each go their separate ways until their paths cross again. So the narrator has to jump from one plot line to another in order to catch up with what is happening on the wider scene, exactly as is done in modern television series involving a number of characters whose lives are interrelated. A further complication, especially for the non-Arab reader, is that many characters bear the same first names, and one quickly becomes confused reading about all these ʿAmrs, ʿUmars and ʿAbdallāhs, not to mention the staggering number of Maryams and Fātimas that appear on the scene.

Just as in a television series, the story can be expanded continuously by linking a new episode to the previous episode. If, for instance, the lovers in a modern television soap are finally united, this could bring the series to a conclusion. Instead, however, a former lover turns up in the next instalment. Mistrust and discord between the couple arise, and everything starts all over again. The equivalent in Arabic popular epic is the cloud of dust that appears at the horizon after an adventure has been brought to a good end. The cloud announces the arrival of a group of warriors, enemies or friends, and a new series of adventures is set in motion. A narrative device repeatedly used in modern soaps also frequently occurs in the epics: a character who is presumed dead suddenly reappears, sometimes with a much altered appearance, for instance as a result of magical tricks involved in his disappearance.

Protagonists

A vast number of protagonists appear in these epics. Many of them are fictional versions of historical figures, which offer us an interesting view of the way in which these persons were perceived on the popular level. Among the protagonists are a number of stock characters, adapted to the needs of each particular narrative. One, of course, is the hero, whose status and career is described according to the usual framework of heroic literature all over the world. The circumstances of his birth and early youth are unusual; he often acquires an extraordinary sword and an exceptionally powerful steed at the start of his career; he has to set out on a quest to win his beloved or to gain recognition. A remarkable aspect of the Arabic epic is that a number of the heroes are people of low social status, handicapped in their career by their birth and physical appearance. Many of them are black, and some even start out as slaves. Some of the heroes are female, in some cases black women.

Early in his life the hero usually acquires a faithful companion and helper, who, in Arabic popular epic, is generally a sort of trickster figure, the ‘man of wiles’.¹³ The Arabic term is ʿayyār. The ʿayyār possesses characteristics that enable him to cross all kinds of boundaries, natural, social and practical. He speaks a number of languages, is a master of disguise and, in some cases, has supernatural powers. As a typical trickster, he is a creature of marginality, not bound by convention. He can subvert the existing natural or social order by do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• A Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• A Note on the Illustrations
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Arabic Popular Epic: An Introductory Note
• 2. Warrior Women in the Arabic Tradition
• 3. Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma 1: Princess Dhāt al-Himma and Her Many Battles
• 4. Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma 2: Prince ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and His Warrior Wives
• 5. Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma 3: The History of Ghamra the Daughter of ʿUtārid
• 6. Warrior Women in Sīrat ʿAntara 1: Ghamra the Daughter of Fāʾiz
• 7. Warrior Women in Sīrat ʿAntara 2: Hayfā’, Zarqāʾ and ʿUnaytira
• 8. Prince Hamza al-Bahlawān: In Praise of Traditional Womanhood
• 9. Sīrat Baybars 1: Lionesses
• 10. Sīrat Baybars 2: Warrior Queens
• 11. King Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan, the Soft-Hearted 1: Qamarīya
• 12. King Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan 2: Tāma
• 13. King Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan 3: Munyat al-Nufūs
• 14. Final Observations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates