‘I am, by God, fit for high positions’ On the political role of women in al-Andalus

Abstract

Narrating and explaining the fairly emancipated women in al-Andalus has been fraught with ambiguity for the approximately one century of scholarship on the subject. There has been much stereotyping depending upon the investigator's particular perspective. This paper clarifies the roles of Andalusian women in political relations from the Muslim Conquest in 711 through the fall of Granada in 1492. The interpretations used in historiography pit a traditionalist trend, in which continuity from the pre Islamic past is stressed, against the anti-continuist trend, in which an Oriental culture of the Muslims added the distinctive features of Iberian character today. In order to evaluate the two historiographic approaches, the contributions of seven prominent women are presented and evaluated for their social contexts during the eight centuries of al-Andalus. Comparisons are then made to prominent women in other political contexts within the Arab world in order to evaluate the strength of the two competing historiographic perspectives.