Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam

Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima

Alyssa Gabbay

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838602338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima, Alyssa Gabbay examines episodes in pre-modern Islamic history in which individuals or societies recognized descent from both men and women. Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, features prominently in this study, for her example constituted a striking precedent for acknowledging bilateral descent in both Sunni and Shi'i societies, with all of its ramifications for female inheritance, succession and identity. Covering a broad geographical and chronological swath, Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam presents alternative perspectives to patriarchal narratives, and breaks new ground in its focus upon how people conceived of family structures and bloodlines. In so doing, it builds upon a tradition of studies seeking to dispel monolithic understandings of Islam and Gender.

Part One

Mothers

1

Umms and wombs

How and (maybe) why Shi‘is reckoned descent through Fatima

The so-called ‘mother’ is not a parent of the child, only the nurse of the newly-begotten embryo. The parent is he who mounts; the female keeps the offspring safe, like a stranger on behalf of a stranger.

(Aeschylus, Oresteia)¹

I am the tree, and Fatima is its branch. ‘Ali fertilizes it, and Hasan and Husayn are its fruits.

(The Prophet Muhammad)²

My mother, myself?

Are mothers related to their children? The question may seem odd today, given that science has told us for decades that females as well as males transmit their genes to their offspring. But in the not-too-distant past, in both Islamic and non-Islamic societies, scholars and laypeople often downplayed or even ignored female contributions to generation.³ Instead, women served as ‘incubators’; they supplied the ‘material substance for the child’ while men supplied the seed containing the child’s essence.⁴ This perspective both stemmed from a concept of women as inferior and helped reinforce it. If unable to transmit her bloodline and her characteristics, a woman was of less import to her natal family; she likewise possessed less autonomy and creative power, and, naturally, enjoyed less claim to her children. In Marjane Satrapi’s brilliant graphic novel Persepolis 2, a character, observing that custody in cases of divorce in Iran is often awarded to men, complains, ‘I heard a religious man justify this law by saying that man was the grain and woman, the earth in which the grain grew, therefore the child naturally belonged to his father!’⁵

Yet some medieval Muslim scholars – both Sunni and Shi‘i – envisioned a greater role for women in transmitting their own bloodlines. Women as well as men contributed something essential and enduring to the making of a child. This chapter examines the diversity of medieval views on generation and lineage (nasab), demonstrating how Shi‘i (and some Sunni) depictions of Fatima fit into the less widely acknowledged ‘duo-genetic’ view that acknowledges contributions from both male and female. It also explores possible origins for these concepts, including pre-Islamic regional influences and Qur’anic depictions of the Virgin Mary, whose son Jesus belongs to her lineage. Finally, it analyses how passing on one’s bloodline in many of these cases signifies agency, for it attests to a sense of identity and stature for these women, even within a patriarchal structure. Recognition of the ability to transmit one’s bloodline has marked significance for the status of women today. It has implications for laws dealing with a wide range of matters, from nationality to custody of children to inheritance.

Medieval views on generation

Theories of generation play a key role in determining the status of women in any given culture. By determining and describing how life is generated, scholars tell us how humans and other beings are related to ‘each other, the non-human world, and the cosmos’.⁶ As in so many other areas, medieval (Sunni) Muslim thinkers who expressed themselves on these matters by no means came to a consensus about them. Rather, drawing from Greek sources (who themselves disagreed on important matters) and their own research, they developed a plethora of views about how generation takes place.⁷ This diversity of opinion gave rise to a certain flexibility regarding the status of women, and in particular mothers, in Islamic societies – a flexibility that (like mothers themselves) often does not receive its appropriate due.

As in so many matters, Greek thought – chiefly as espoused by Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle – formed the foundation for theories of generation developed by Muslim scholars.⁸ These earlier men differed drastically on the roles played by males and females in generation, with Hippocrates and Galen maintaining that both sexes possess a semen-like substance that plays an equal role in the forming of an embryo, and Aristotle rejecting that notion.⁹ According to Aristotle, the role of the female is far less consequential and has little to do with creating the identity of a child: lacking semen, she provides ‘only the passive material which the male semen, as carrier of the soul, fashions into the new individual’.¹⁰

To elaborate, taking into consideration the fact that children could resemble either their mothers or their fathers, Hippocrates ‘argued that both male and female must contribute similar reproductive material to the foetus’ – that is, semen, a substance that ‘comes from all parts of the body of each parent, and goes to all parts of the body of the child’.¹¹ Similarly, Galen, who wrote at a time after which the ovaries had been discovered, believed that both men and women possessed semen and that the ‘female semen, just like the male semen, contributes both to the matter and to the form of the foetus’.¹² Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that ‘semen was a residue of nutriment in its final form – that is, blood’.¹³ Males possess sufficient body heat to transform the blood into semen. In women, who lack the sufficient heat, it remains blood. Thus, men contribute semen to the making of a child, and women contribute menstrual blood.¹⁴ But the contributions are not equal: the male contributes the soul and the form of the child whereas the female contributes only the material. As contemporary scholar B. F. Musallam observes, the ‘male semen fashions the female menses into a new individual very much as a carpenter fashions wood into a bed, or a builder bricks into a house’.¹⁵ Ideally, the male principle sho uld ‘master the matter’ and the child will ‘be a male and will look like his father’.¹⁶ Cases in which such mastery does not occur – in which, for example, a male resembles his mother – represent a deplorable ineffectiveness of the semen.¹⁷

Concomitant with Aristotle’s understanding of how generation works is the concept of women as inferior and defective. Because woman is ‘merely a receptacle’ who cannot generate a soul for her child during procreation, Aristotle regarded the state of being female as a deformity, even as he acknowledged it as a necessary evil.¹⁸ Her inferiority destines her to serve man, ‘he who provides the essence of life.’¹⁹

Muslim thinkers followed Aristotelian thought to varying degrees. Abū al-Walīd Muhammad ibn Rushd (d. 1198) ‘held fast to the letter of Aristotle’ with regard to conception.²⁰ Abū ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), known in the West as Avicenna, incorporated the notion of female semen rather than menstrual blood into his ideas of conception (given the discovery of the ovaries, he was obliged to accept this argument), but otherwise his ideas about male and female contributions bore a striking resemblance to those of Aristotle: he argued that the female semen contributed to the ‘matter’ of the foetus, but not the principle of movement, or the soul, which was the male’s (superior) contribution.²¹ In fact, we can decisively speak of Ibn Sīnā’s views on this matter as Aristotelian, for the scholar gave to female semen ‘exactly the same role that Aristotle had assigned to the menstrual blood’.²²

Some scholars argue that the majority of Muslims have always adhered to some form of this essentially ‘monogenetic’ view and continue to adhere to it today.²³ The contemporary anthropologist M. E. Combs-Schilling, for example, claims that Islam is an extremely patrilineal system, in which

essential being and essential affiliation pass down through the patriline – that is, from great-grandfather to grandfather to father to son. Enduring biological essence is seen to transfer from father to progeny and creates an inalienable tie, written in the life-blood itself (in much of the Muslim world, patrilineal ties are known as ‘blood ties’). … Daughters as well as sons receive their basic definition from their fathers, but only sons are capable of passing it on to future generations. Females are dead ends for their patrilines – important, but ephemeral additions. ²⁴

Likewise, drawing on her fieldwork conducted in an Anatolian village between 1979 and 1982, anthropologist Carol Delaney writes evocatively about the villagers’ conceptualization of procreation as an event in which the man contributed the seed, and the woman, the soil in which the seed grew – an understanding that drew on the Qur’an for support: ‘Women are given to you as fields, go therein and sow your seed (2:233).’²⁵ The contributions, though both important, were by no means seen as equal. The man’s role is the ‘primary, essential, and creative’ one; he gives the ‘seed which encapsulates the potential child’.²⁶ As a villager from another study stated, ‘If you plant wheat, you get wheat. If you plant barley, you get barley. It is the seed which determines the kind of plant which will grow.’²⁷ The woman, on the other hand, merely ‘provides the nurturant context for the foetus’ – a context to which she brings little individuality:

The nurture that women provide – blood in the womb and milk at the breast – can be supplied by any woman. This nourishment swells the being of the seed-child and while it affects the growth and development of the child, it does not affect its essential identity; that comes from the father. Women’s nurturant capacity is valued, but it must also be remarked that the substance they provide ultimately derives from men since men are thought to engender both males and females. The substance women contribute pertains only to this world – it is temporal and perishable and does not carry the eternal identity of a person. The child originates with the father, from his seed.²⁸

In this sense, the woman is identified with earth, soil and land – a concept that found expression in comparisons of marriage and sex with men’s purchase of land and sovereignty over it.²⁹ Even if a woman does contribute a ‘seed’ to the making of a child, it is usually considered to be a ‘distillate of menstrual blood (matter), not generative, formative and creative material’.³⁰ This monogenetic theory of procreation had far-reaching ramifications for gender roles in the Turkish village.³¹ Men are ‘imagined to have a creative power within them, which gives them a core of identity, self-motivation or autonomy. Women lack the power to create and therefore to project themselves.’³² Similarly, because of man’s role as the ‘author/creator’ of his child, ‘children belong to their father; they are his seed. In case of divorce, the children stay with him; in the case of death, they stay with his relatives. If his ex-wife or widow remarries, the children remain behind.’³³

Indeed, to a rather large extent, these ideas populated pre-modern Muslim (and non-Muslim) societies; and continue to find expression today.³⁴ In a treatise on a sura from the Qur’an, Abū al-Khayr Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allah (d. ca. 1318), the famous Persian historian and vizier, cited a centuries-old Arabic poem that denied a daughter’s ability to transmit her lineage. Rather, it attributed all children to their fathers: ‘Our sons are the sons of our sons,/[but] the sons of our daughters are the sons of distant men.’³⁵ Muslim scholars today promote similar ideas via popular means such as websites. In an entry called ‘The Protection of the Lineage’, a website explaining the precepts of Islam speaks of a child as inherently belonging to his or her father, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Transliteration, periodization and dates
• Introduction: Redrawing family trees
• Part One Mothers
• Part Two Heiresses
• Part Three Successors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright