In the surviving historical record, medieval Arabic female poets are few compared with the number of known male Arabic-language poets. Within Arabic literature, there has been "an almost total eclipse of women's poetic expression in the literary record as maintained in Arabic culture from the pre-Islamic era through the nineteenth century".[1] However, there is evidence that, compared with the medieval poetry of Europe, women's poetry in the medieval Islamic world was "unparalleled" in "visibility and impact".[2] Accordingly, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars have emphasised that women's contribution to Arabic literature requires greater scholarly attention.[3][4][5]

Attestation

The work of medieval Arabic-language women poets has not been preserved as extensively as that of men, but a substantial corpus nonetheless survives; the earliest extensive anthology is the late ninth-century CE Balāghāt al-nisāʾ by Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr (d. 280/893).[6] Abd al-Amīr Muhannā named over four hundred female poets in his anthology.[7] That much literature by women was once collected in writing but has since been lost is suggested particularly by the fact that al-Suyuti's 15th-century Nuzhat al-julasāʼ fī ashʻār al-nisāʼ mentions a large (six-volume or longer) anthology called Akhbar al-Nisa' al-Shau‘a'ir containing "ancient" women’s poetry, assembled by one Ibn al-Tarrah (d. 720/1320). However, a range of medieval anthologies do contain women's poetry, including collections by Al-Jahiz, Abu Tammam, Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, and Ibn Bassam, alongside historians quoting women's poetry such as Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Yaqut al-Hamawi, and Ibn 'Asakir.[8]

Medieval women's poetry in Arabic tends to be in two genres: the rithā’ (elegy) and ghazal (love-song), alongside a smaller body of Sufi poems and short pieces in the low-status rajaz metre.[9] One significant corpus comprises poems by qiyan, women who were slaves highly trained in the arts of entertainment,[10] often educated in the cities of Basra, Ta’if, and Medina.[11] Women's poetry is particularly well attested from Al-Andalus.[12]

According to Samer M. Ali,

In retrospect we can discern four overlapping persona types for poetesses in the Middle Ages: the grieving mother/sister/daughter (al-Khansāʾ, al-Khirniq bint Badr, and al-Fāriʿah bint Shaddād), the warrior-diplomat (al-Hujayjah), the princess (al-Ḥurqah, ʿUlayyah bint al-Mahdī, and Walladah bint al-Mustakfī), and the courtesan-ascetic (ʿArīb, Shāriyah, and Rābiʿah al-ʿAdawīyah). Rābiʿah’s biography in particular projects a paradoxical persona that embodies the complementary opposites of sexuality and saintliness.[13]

While most Arabic-speaking medieval woman poets were Muslim, of the three probable medieval female Jewish poets whose work has survived, two composed in Arabic: Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil and the sixth-century Sarah of Yemen (the remaining, Hebrew language poet being the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat).[14][15]

Known female poets

The following list of known women poets is based on (but not limited to) Abdullah al-Udhari's Classical Poems by Arab Women.[16] It is not complete.

Jahilayya (4000 BCE–622 CE)

Muhammad Period (622–661 CE)

Umayyad Period (661–750 CE)

Abbasid Period (750–1258 CE)

Andalus Period (711–1492 CE)

Anthologies and studies

Anthologies

  • Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1999), ISBN 9780863560477 [includes facing Arabic texts and English translations]
  • Dīwān de las poetisas de al-Andalus, ed. by Teresa Garulo (Madrid 1986)
  • Poesía femenina hispanoárabe, ed. and trans. by María Jesús Rubiera Mata (Madrid 1990)
  • Nisāʾ min al-Andalus, ed. by Aḥmad Khalīl Jumʻah (Damascus: al-Yamāmah lil-Ṭibāʻah wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʻ, 2001) [نسـاء من الأندلس, أحمد خليل جمعة].
  • Rubiera Máta, María Jesús, Poesía feminina hispanoárabe (Madrid: Castalia, 1989)
  • We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, ed. by Selma Dabbagh (London: Saqi Books, 2021), ISBN 9780863563973
  • Ibn al-Sāʿī, Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad, ed. and trans. by Shawkat M. Toorawa, Library of Arabic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2017), ISBN 9781479866793, Arabic text

Studies

  • Hammond, Marlé, Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women's Poetry in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ISBN 9780197264720
  • Myrne, Pernilla, Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, The Early and Medieval Islamic World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020) ISBN 9781838605018

References

  1. ↑ Clarissa Burt, 'Arts: Poets and Poetry: Arab States', in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, ed. by Suad Joseph (Leiden: Brill, 2003-2007), V: 77-80 (p. 77).
  2. ↑ Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54 (at p. 653).
  3. ↑ Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1999), p. 13.
  4. ↑ Tahera Qutbuddin, 'Women Poets', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), II 867, Archived 2014-02-07 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ↑ Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54 (at p. 652). https://www.academia.edu/5023780.
  6. ↑ Rkia Elaroui Cornell, 'Rabiʾa from Narrative to Myth: The Tropics of Identity of a Muslim Woman Saint' (Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 7, 32.
  7. ↑ Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54 (at p. 653). https://www.academia.edu/5023780.
  8. ↑ Tahera Qutbuddin, 'Women Poets', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), II 867, http://nelc.uchicago.edu/sites/nelc.uchicago.edu/files/2006%20Women%20Poets%20(Med.%20Islamic.%20Civ.%20Enc.).pdf Archived 2014-02-07 at the Wayback Machine.
  9. ↑ Tahera Qutbuddin, 'Women Poets', in Medieval Islamic Civilisation: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Josef W. Meri, 2 vols (New York: Routledge, 2006), II 865, http://nelc.uchicago.edu/sites/nelc.uchicago.edu/files/2006%20Women%20Poets%20(Med.%20Islamic.%20Civ.%20Enc.).pdf Archived 2014-02-07 at the Wayback Machine.
  10. ↑ Kristina Richardson, 'Singing Slave Girls (qiyan) of the ‘Abbasid Court in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries', in Children in Slavery Through the Ages, ed. by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 105-18.
  11. ↑ Gordon, Matthew S., 'Introduction: Producing Songs and Sons', in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1-8 (pp. 5-6); doi:10.1093/oso/9780190622183.003.0001.
  12. ↑ O. Ishaq Tijani and Imed Nsiri, 'Gender and Poetry in Muslim Spain: Mapping the Sexual-Textual Politics of Al-Andalus', Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies, 1.4 (October 2017), 52-67 (p. 55). doi:10.24093/awejtls/vol1no4.4.
  13. ↑ Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women, ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54 (at p. 653). https://www.academia.edu/5023780.
  14. ↑ Peter Cole (ed. and trans.), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 364.
  15. ↑ Emily Taitz, Sondra Henry, and Cheryl Tallan, 'Sarah of Yemen', in The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. to 1900 C.E. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003), pp. 57-59.
  16. ↑ Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1999) ISBN 086356-047-4.
  17. ↑ Mahd is included in Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. by Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1999), pp. 26-27. She is unlikely to have existed: Roger Allen, review of: Approaches to Classical Arabic Poetry - Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry, M. C. Lyons, Gibb Literary Studies, 2 (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999) and Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, Abdullah Al-Udhar (London: Saqi Books, 1999), Review of Middle East Studies, 35 (2001), 201-3 (at p. 202). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026318400043352. Rather she is a chronicle character who is portrayed uttering a muzdawaj warning the people of ʿĀd of their impending destruction by Allah, in accordance with the prophecies of the prophet Hud.
  18. ↑ "Al-Khansāʾ | Arab poet". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2020-08-30.
  19. ↑ Hayyali, Layla Muhammad Nizam, al-. Mu’jam diwan ash’ar al-nisa fi sadr al-islam. Beirut: Maktabat Lubnan Nashirun, 1999, p 41.
  20. ↑ Dwight F. Reynolds, 'The Qiyan of al-Andalus', in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 100-21 (pp. 105-7); doi:10.1093/oso/9780190622183.003.0006.
  21. ↑ Dwight F. Reynolds, 'The Qiyan of al-Andalus', in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 100-21 (p. 101); doi:10.1093/oso/9780190622183.003.0006.
  22. ↑ Dwight F. Reynolds, 'The Qiyan of al-Andalus', in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 100-21 (pp. 116-17); doi:10.1093/oso/9780190622183.003.0006.
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