Sex and the Medieval Muslim Woman

Umberto Eco quipped that in every instance when critics accused him of anachronism in The Name of the Rose, he was quoting 14th-century texts. I get it. As a retired scholar of early medieval mystic Islam now writing historical mysteries set in 10th-century Baghdad, I, too, face ironic claims of anachronism in my Sufi Mysteries Quartet.

Most concerns arise over the women portrayed in my novels, especially Saliha, a free-spirited, sexy woman unwilling to let men control her. In our present era in which many assume that Muslim women desperately need saving, Saliha comes as a surprise. But as a specialist on women in this period, I can assure my readers that she is not a figment of my contemporary imagination.

I turned to writing mysteries after leaving the academy. I may have been done with academia, but I was not done doing history. The murder at the heart of each book arises from a historical question, and each red herring is a point of discussion on that question. The detailed personal story arcs, the sociopolitical settings, and even lushly described walks across Baghdad are parts of a larger argument I am making about the time and place. In short, I am grinding axes all over these books. I am saying straight-out what I could only hem and haw about in scholarly papers. And much of what I wanted to say was frank talk about the lives of early Muslim women.

All my characters are constructed on figures from the past. Using research in social history, I flesh out hints of women’s lives that come to us through mediated and often meager primary sources, and I bring them to life in my novels. For instance, a woman who starved herself for God is described as having once been “a fattened camel ready for sacrifice.” A woman denying men her body to sacrifice it for God got me thinking about women with the upper hand on male desire: not just ascetics but also those women who reveled in their alluring flesh, married or unmarried, noblewomen or washerwomen.

I remembered Aisha bint Talha, the niece of one of the Prophet’s wives, who became the basis for Saliha’s character. Shocking stories of her behavior and beauty were widely shared. She refused to segregate herself from men and readily took part in their conversations. Aisha was fun loving, wild tempered, and hot blooded. She refused to cover her face, declaring that the world should know her superiority. This noblewoman was nothing but trouble for her husbands, and they thought she was worth it. In those early reports, she reads like a woman out of a noir movie. I could see Robert Mitchum leaning in to light her cigarette.

And so Aisha bint Talha became Saliha, written as an impoverished woman who escaped to Baghdad from a brutal marriage. A woman done with men except in the bedroom. Men want to protect her, and her refusal to marry spurs a story arc exploring medieval Muslim masculinities spanning three books. Saliha is her own woman, a loyal friend to amateur detective Zaytuna and a lover to Tein, a detective with the Grave Crimes Section. She works hard, has ambition, and is good in a scrap when a case demands it.

Saliha spurns Tein’s pleas to marry, instead insisting on meeting him for trysts in the hidden doorways of ruined alleys. Women who worked in markets or fields or in the homes of the wealthy had few restrictions on their movements. A widow and a washerwoman like Saliha had opportunities to meet and flirt with men and even find a spot for a clandestine meeting. Unbelievable to some of my readers, yet these meetings happened. Sources such as marketplace inspector’s manuals and the observations of poets, scholars, and intellectuals like the famed al-Jahiz confirm these brief liaisons and even longer encounters in brothels known as “daytime marriage houses.”

But how realistic is Saliha’s insistence on sexual consent? Because married and enslaved women had no social or legal expectation of consent, a few (male) historians argue they could not have considered forced sex a violation. Yet medieval male transmitters passed on reports of free mystic women refusing to marry for this very reason. One account in al-Sulami’s biographies of early mystic women describes a free, married woman speaking about forced sex in desperate terms as a violation of her right to intimacy with God. Saadia Yacoob’s work on al-Sarakhsi shows that the 5th/11th century jurist was concerned with lack of consent in sexual relations. Another jurist’s account reveals that an enslaved woman brought her owner to court on charges of sexual brutality. My second novel in the series, The Jealous, addresses these very matters.

The historical axe I’m grinding with Saliha’s character is not to prove there were sexy, independent sidekicks back in the day. Maybe there were, but that is not my point. I am telling the story of a woman who refused to be controlled by men, with all the attendant risks, and, through her character, opening a door to the lives of urban medieval women of her class.

It is a maxim of historical fiction that the author must not “do history,” as it takes away from the story itself, but I have pinned my hopes on Eco’s example. It is possible to educate pleasurably through narrative. I think I succeeded. Well, at least, my novels are taught in university classrooms. Not the same as being an internationally renowned scholar and best-selling author, but it feels pretty darn good. And concerns about anachronisms? They educate too. Surprising readers with medieval Muslim women who demand a say over their bodies may open the reader up to new paths of thought about the Muslim past and the present.

This essay was originally published in the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History. I have added the observation about Yacoob’s work on al-Sarakhsi in this version.

Image: A Young Lady Reclining After a Bath
Leaf from the Read Persian Album
Herat (Afghanistan), 1590s
By Muhammad Mu’min
MS M.386.5. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911
A topless woman reclines. The image is framed by rectangles of close decorative vegetal and gold leaf as well as lines of Persian poetry. Follow the link to the Morgan Library to know more.