Nadia Maria El-Cheikh. Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity

In this slim volume of 121 prose pages, Nadia Maria El-Cheikh argues that “gender-related and sexual imaginings play an important function in self-construction projects, and this is especially true in Islamic history” (3). No argument there, especially at a time when for some scholars in the medieval field the category of “gender” remains anathema. Nor is there much doubt in the extant scholarly literature that “the late Umayyad and Abbasid periods ushered in conditions that debased the position and the conception of women” (6).This devolution has been aptly defined by previous generations of scholars, including, most notably, Nabia Abbott and Leila Ahmed. Thus, less persuasive is the book’s overall assertion that where gender and the construction of female Muslim identity are concerned, “the early Islamic period . . . has predominantly been left untouched” (8). Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity provides no definitive vision of identity under the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). Instead, it focuses on the emergence of a Muslim and Sunni sectarian view that “required an array of opposites” (11). These represent interesting choices and include those living during the jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic past), deemed by Muslims ex post facto as an era of ignorance of the true religion and barbaric human behavior (chap. 1); the Qaramita, a ninth- and early-tenth-century Shiʿi splinter group, defined by the Abbasid regime’s scholars as heretical military threats within the empire (chap. 3); and the bordering Byzantine Christian enemy empire (chap. 4).

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Caliphate · Empire · Identity (music) · Islam · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Religious studies