Gender and Genre in the Tabaqāt

To what extent does Fawwāz's biographical practice rewrite the classical genre that her title recuperates even as her preface ignores this genre's attention to women's lives? Some scholars argue that the medieval dictionaries' diversification in subject matter, treatment, and purpose over time did not mean a radical shift in focus. In M. J. L. Young's words, “Even when biography became a distinct genre in Arabic literature it never completely lost the characteristics linking it with the science of Hadith.”^[47] Hafsi argues that biographical practice underwent “spectacular transformations”;^[48] yet construction and content reveal continuity. Biographical dictionaries continued to immortalize a spiritual-political elite.^[49] Genealogies of kinship and knowledge transmission figured prominently, as did anything that might contribute to evaluating a subject's probity and intellect. The focus remained on the socially visible, intersubjective contours of experience, the subject constituted as a social and spiritual link within a set of hierarchies.

These pre-nineteenth-century dictionaries do not portray a world of gendered absolutes or opposites. They construct elite women as seekers and transmitters of knowledge, vocal participants in public life, and actors in the economy. “The ideal female image projected by al-Sakhāwīī;,” comments Lutfi, “comes through as the pious, modest, knowledgeable and generous woman. As a wife she is portrayed as patient, peaceful and frugal. Our biographer admires and respects women who seek learning and contribute to its propagation.”^[50]

Some attributives that described subjects were specific to women, but more were not. Yet concern with moral exemplarity, writers' affiliations, and the import of hierarchies of closeness to the prophet Muhammad^[51] interact with a perspective in line with the male-dominant structures of medieval Islamic societies. As in other medieval Arabic genres, in biographical dictionaries the domain of elite men's experience is the norm, the filter through which women's voices and acts appear.^[52] And while it can be argued that a cumulatively shaped portrait emerges out of the orally transmitted and written sources that biographers amassed, ultimately the compiler/writer controlled the construction of the life history. Denise Spellberg's analysis of shifting portrayals of the prophet's most famous wives, ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr and Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid, and his daughter Fātima reveals that “compilers” made shifts in diction significant to these portraits' symbolic power in competing political discourses.^[53] Compilers made choices about who and what to include, even if an accumulation of citations tempers the authority of a dominant narrative voice. When a compiler chronicles his contemporaries, it is harder to deny this authority.

While it would be inaccurate to claim that these premodern life histories construct a “private-public” dichotomy along gendered lines, privileging the “outer events” of an individual's adult life^[54] may have implications for presenting the gendered subject. As the textual layers of the biography give voice to a public world—a social framework of experience and action wherein male agency and visibility are the norm—women's lives emerge constructed in the terms of their mediated relationships to that world. This is evident in the choice of life events to narrate and the focalizations from which they are narrated. Sociolinguistic convention (grammatical patterns that positioned women as objects of action) and the subject's definition according to a patrilineal genealogy enhanced this perspective.^[55] The woman “subject” thus appears at least partly as object, anomaly, or absence. Many entries on women in these compendia are in fact entirely stories about men. The woman's presence as biographical subject seems a pretext. As a character within the text she is tangential, essentially an onlooker in an exchange or transaction between men, whether discursive, financial, or military. Or, her significance (the reason she is a biographical subject) hinges on relationships of kinship or marriage to a prominent man.^[56]

That Fawwāz focuses centrally rather than tangentially on “excellent” women, declaring this a worthy aim in itself, distinguishes her work from the biographical genre that evolved to ascertain the contributions of individuals to the codification and maintenance of Islamic normative practice. Her breadth of inclusion from the Arabic/Islamic world expands the notion of excellence from—most narrowly—the ambit of the prophet Muhammad's wives, forebears and descendants, and contemporaries within Meccan and Medinan society or—for a later period—from members of a Muslim elite.^[57] Rather, she includes de facto (rather than genealogically ascertained) members of that elite who were subjects of other kinds of collections, the adab works, which were not necessarily concerned with exemplarity. Thus, of the 312 subjects Fawwāz draws from the Arab/Islamic world, 33 are jawārī. These were highly trained musicians, singers, often poets, and sometimes concubines, purchased by members of the elite. They were part of the elite world socially but not in their ethnic and religious origins or their individual social status, although they could attain that status through marriage or childbearing.^[58]

That Scattered Pearls focuses only on women creates a cumulative portrait quite different from that of the traditional dictionaries. Rather than appearing as a small minority of a politically and intellectually active elite, women emerge as a multitude, albeit still an elite one.^[59] That it expands the arena to include women of the ancient Mediterranean, Europe, North America, and Muslim India shifts the cultural focus, implicitly authorizes new visions of community and comparison for Arab women readers, and offers that readership new role-modeling possibilities. By my count, of Fawwāz's 453 subjects, 73 were clearly European or American Christians plus one medieval European Jew. Another 68 were of the ancient world (pre-Islamic Egyptian Christians, Byzantines, pre-Christian Greeks and Romans, ancient Jews, ancient Egyptians including Ptolemaic rulers, preIslamic Persians, other ancient Easterners). One was a royal woman of non-Islamic Asia, another the daughter of a court minister in Sicily. Within the ambit of Islam, Fawwāz, from a Shī‘‘ī family, does not give particular pride of place to women revered by Shī‘īs as important to their own sense of historical identity. Nor does she give a negative portrait of ‘‘A’ءisha bt. Abīī; Bakr as premodern Shī‘ī biographers often did.^[60]

Thus, departing from the practice of featuring only Arab/Islamic subjects,^[61] Fawwāz constructs a circuit of possibility, emulation, and example-by-warning for women unrestricted by ethnicity, religious belonging, or a subject's relationship to an imperial center (an issue of debate locally as Fawwāz wrote her volume). If we cannot equate writing a biographical dictionary with the formation of a collective gendered identity, we can see how Fawwāz's reach might offer that possibility as her lives echoed through women's journals. As Hartmut Fähndrich observes of premodern dictionaries, “Each individual is placed in a double context . . . his own life as presented in his biography and . . . lives of all other individuals in the biographical dictionary.”^[62]

Yet Fawwāz also signals her own sense of belonging, her own cultural situation, in the proportions of identities she incorporates—a balance quite different from the mix in the women's magazines (even those edited by Egyptian Muslims, even those identified with an Islamist political outlook). The West as dominant political and economic power is outnumbered by the waves of Muslim, Arab, and Mediterranean (including Byzantine) women she features. If the term ruūm could slip from anciently naming the Byzantines to labeling western Europeans in their majority religious identity of Christians, still, the West in the sense of the powerful states of Fawwāz's time and as implied in her contemporaries' use of the term al-gharb was margin rather than center of her collection. Perhaps this also adumbrates its historical moment. A decade or two later, al-gharb was becoming more troublesome as a locus of desired imitation and of threat.

Finally, that with some exceptions Fawwāz focuses on women known for their deeds and legacies rather than primarily for their relationships to men places emphasis on women's agency, although relationships to men may have been (and are constructed as) significant to the female subject's ability to act. As was true of female subjects in earlier dictionaries, many of Fawwāz's “mistresses of seclusion” were prominent first because of men to whom they were attached. But Fawwāz emphasizes their own actions. Suzanne Necker's (1739–94) husband “took her as a helper and adviser and loved her; she deserved his love and esteem because she had made it her goal in life to please him.” Yet, Fawwāz asserts, as Joseph Necker became an eminent banker, he “depended on her in meeting his visitors and guests . . . and entrusted to his wife management of his household and his money. She would loosen and bind and sell and buy.” This image fits nicely into the emphasis on learned domesticity that we will find in the “Famous Women” biographies of the women's press, yet it is not the whole picture for Fawwāz. As minister of France, Necker “reformed financial affairs and concerned himself with reforming the prisons and hospitals. Primary credit goes to his wife, for she used to oversee the prisons herself, investigate conditions in them, and devise appropriate reforms. She founded a māristān in Paris that is still named after her.” Anna Manzolini (1706–74) learned the art of anatomical modeling from her husband but in her own right became famous as an artist and professor of anatomy.^[63] Women's own independent acts also shape Fawwāz's portraits of rulers or spouses of rulers. In both roles Fawwāz portrays women almost invariably, and approvingly, as active politicians. Fayrūz Khawinda (fl. eighth century A.H./fourteenth century C.E.), “daughter of Sultān ‘‘Alā’ء al-Dīn, ruler of Delhi in the country of the Hind,” was not only “solitaire of the age in beauty and splendor, intellect and cleverness—she of refinement and eloquence, of astuteness and elegance.” Her brother “submitted the reins of rule to her, such that with her judiciousness of opinion she put the kingdom into a state better than it had been in her father's time. Her brother [the sultan] took no decision without [getting] her opinion.”^[64] One of the most common epithets in Fawwāz's biographies of “royals” is masmuūat al-kalima, “one whose word is heard [and followed].”^[65] This contrasts strongly with the rare portrait of a ruling woman in al-Sakhāwīī;'s al-Daw’ء al-lāmi‘‘, which elicits from the biographer discomfort and disapproval.^[66] Yet Fawwāz's approbation is not without precedent here, if with Hilary Kilpatrick we scrutinize other premodern books about women. One Andalusian scholar's adab work represents Bilqīs of ancient Yemen as an able ruler: “The choice of Bilqīī;s as one of the exemplary figures in the framework of his book indicates al-Ma‘‘āfirīī;'s willingness to admit a woman who exercised power into his scheme of ideas.”^[67]

Fawwāz portrays women as strong and vocal, and as choosy marriage partners, and she includes subjects the women's magazines (and latetwentieth-century collections) would pass over, such as Euphrosine (b. 413 C.E.), a Christian saint born in Alexandria who refused to marry.^[68] Also unlike later biographers, Fawwāz occasionally places women in the space of grammatical subject rather than object when the verb is “to marry” or “to divorce.” “Every time she married a man and then saw a fault in him she satirized him in verse. The Bedouins came to fear her tongue.”^[69] Maintaining the concept of exemplarity, Fawwāz may be displacing its meaning and context. But we must not exaggerate her singularity. In turning to adab literature for material rather than relying strictly on the tabaqāt tradition, she would have found appropriate figures from Arab/Islamic history to populate her collection. As Kilpatrick remarks, some medieval works portray women who are worldly, wise, witty, and occasionally just a bit wild. Anything but retiring, they are “independent personalities [who] . . . possess insight, courage and culture”; they “behave irreproachably” but also “move around freely.”^[70]

This shift in focus, possibly toward the material of adab collections, can be seen as propelled by a modernist outlook. It coincides with Fawwāz's agenda as articulated in her essays: to propose boldly a cautious opening up of gendered social roles, more specifically to show the social and economic benefits of freeing women from restraints on their ability to achieve emotional, intellectual, and financial independence. She seems never to miss a chance to describe a woman earning her bread. After her father died, leaving her penniless, Necker “taught and lived from the wages of teaching.” Manzolini supported her family when her husband could not or would not.^[71] Maria Morgan, Sophie Blanchard, Rachel, Almaz: women's labor for a living is put in terms of necessity rather than choice, but these life histories support Fawwāz's call elsewhere that girls be trained to earn a living. She herself had to do so after her brother died.