Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity

Abstract

The book under review, which is divided into five chapters, an introduction,and a conclusion, investigates how gender, sexuality, and concepts of womanhoodwere deployed to express cultural differences in order to formulateand articulate the Abbasid identity and legitimize the new dynasty’s authority.El Cheikh argues that Abbasid-era texts used gendered metaphors and conceptsof sexual difference to describe those groups they perceived as a threat.The “Introduction” opens with an overview of the book’s scope and isfollowed by the story of the “harlots of Hadramaut” rejoicing after theProphet’s death, how Abu Bakr dealt with it, and why this event was consideredsignificant. These women’s public celebration was contrasted withMuslim prescriptions for women as regards obedience, piety, and domesticity.The purpose here was to juxtapose the era of jāhilīyah, with its idolatry,tribal feuds, sexual immorality, burial of live infant girls, and theabsence of food taboos and rules of purity, to the mainstream Islamic culturalconstruction of the emerging community struggling to define itself.El Cheikh argues that the Abbasid textual tradition was unsympathetic towardthe Umayyads and thus represented them as corrupt and godless inorder to justify Abbasid rule, which would lead to a new society characterizedby “the cohesive powers of a common language, currency and a unifyingreligio-political center” (p. 5) ...