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 womanhood were deployed to express cultural differences in order to formulate and articulate the Abbasid identity and legitimize the new dynasty’s authority. El Cheikh argues that Abbasid-era texts used gendered metaphors and concepts of sexual difference to describe those groups they perceived as a threat. The “Introduction” opens with an overview of the book’s scope and is followed by the story of the “harlots of Hadramaut” rejoicing after the Prophet’s death, how Abu Bakr dealt with it, and why this event was considered significant. These women’s public celebration was contrasted with Muslim 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 the absence of food taboos and rules of purity, to the mainstream Islamic cultural construction of the emerging community struggling to define itself. El Cheikh argues that the Abbasid textual tradition was unsympathetic toward the Umayyads and thus represented them as corrupt and godless in order to justify Abbasid rule, which would lead to a new society characterized by “the cohesive powers of a common language, currency and a unifying religio-political center” (p. 5) ...