Wessam Elmeligi, The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia. Focus on Global Gender and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, xiv, 154 p.

Abstract

The critical questions concerning the present anthology pertain not to whether pre-modern women wrote poetry and other texts, but what they composed and how their creations have survived until today. Western medievalists have struggled with those issues already for a long time, but now, with the help of Wessam Elmeligi, we are suddenly blessed with the discovery of a large number of poems created by Arab women first from the pre-Islamic age, that means, roughly prior to 611 C.E., then from the transitional period, from the early Islamic period, the Umayyad period, the Abbasid period, from the Islamic Andalusian world, and finally by Fatimid and Mamluk poets.