The primary aim of this research project was to fill a vacuum in the field of studies on women belonging to and living under medieval Islamic dynasties by comprehensively covering women under the Fatimids. After all, this was and still remains the only Islamic dynasty to be named after a woman. Moreover, to this dynasty were linked those women who, on account of the power they commanded, were to become among the most famous female personalities of the medieval Islamic world: Sitt al-Mulk, the Sulayhid queens of the Yemen and the mother of the imam-caliph al-Mustansir. The recurring lament by contemporary scholars of the limited availability of primary material for the study of women in the medieval Islamic world in general did not deter us from pursuing our plan. We soon realised that information, far from being minimal, was in fact plentiful to those looking for it, interspersed, as it is, within historical, doctrinal, literary and other narratives. After several years of research, we hope we have achieved our primary aim: to throw some light on the erstwhile silent and shadowy figures of women under the Fatimids and give them a presence in the history of women in medieval and pre-modern dynasties.

On the sunny day of 23 January 1958 a large crowd gathered in a colourful assembly in the National Stadium of Karachi. To the sound of music played by the tuxedoed musicians of the Prince Aly Khan Orchestra, women in gleaming and flowing attire, men wearing elaborate headgear and playful children awaited in trepidation on the stands. At last a controlled commotion in the middle of the pitch signalled the beginning of the extraordinary ceremony that the joyful crowd had come to witness. High dignitaries in their fineries carrying the Holy Qur'an, the ceremonial sword of justice and other insignia flanked and followed a handsome young man as he made his way towards the centre of the pitch where a pulpit had been built for the occasion.

Walking by the young man's left side was a statuesque woman, with her head uncovered, wearing a stunning white sari, which further enhanced her mature beauty. The young man climbed alone to the top of the pulpit and, with great composure, reached its centre. A high dignitary presented him with the copy of the Holy Qur'an, thus marking the formal beginning of the ceremony. As the Holy Book was handed over, all those present lowered their heads and covered their faces at once: the women concealed their gaze under the most ornate veils, the men shadowed their faces with garlands made of flowers and coloured paper.

Studying Women and the Fatimids: the Sources, the Methods and the State of Studies

The Fatimid period is one of the best-documented in medieval Islamic history. A considerable number of medieval non-Isma'ili literary works, as well as documentary, epigraphic, artistic and archaeological sources, shed light on most aspects relating to the history of the Fatimid dynasty and of the societies in those areas under Fatimid rule or influence. Complementing this body of sources are the few historical works written by Isma'ili authors and the historical references contained in the extensive Isma'ili doctrinal literature. Isma'ili and non-Isma'ili primary sources represent the core material on which the contents of this book are based. Most of these sources have been discussed, explained and classified by Paul E. Walker in his Exploring an Islamic Empire: Fatimid History and its Sources (2001) and, more broadly, by F. Daftary, Ismaili Literature: A Bibliography of Sources and Studies (2004). In the present book the data drawn from a vast selection of primary sources are approached and interpreted through the methods of textual, socio-historical and contextual analyses.

As is the case with the overwhelming majority of medieval sources, none of the primary literature used here was written by women and, as a whole, none of the male writers dealt with women as their primary concern. Mediated, as they are, through the male voices, the references to women found in these sources may be said to a large extent to be more revealing about men's perceptions of women than the women themselves.

The Da'wa: A Historical Overview

In mid-eighth-century Baghdad, the Sunni 'Abbasid caliphs had just undertaken the spiritual and secular leadership of the Muslim community when religious-political activists in Iraq and beyond began to challenge their right to rule. The 'Abbasids rose to prominence by exploiting the sentiments of those who upheld the rights of the Prophet Muhammad's descendants to guide the Muslim community, only to ignore these ideals once in power and proceed to curb all dissenting groups. However, one of these groups – the Shi'is – defied the ‘Abbasids’ right to rule, with militant and spiritual action inspired by a conception of a divinely designed authority that led them to recognise Muhammad's descendants – via his cousin and son-in-law 'Ali – as their spiritual and secular leaders or imams. Shi'is credit Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 148/765), acknowledged as the fifth imam to descend from 'Ali, with having formulated a full-blown doctrine of imamate; a doctrine that was to be at the heart of all Shi'i teachings to come.

The Shi'i linking of the principle of authority to genealogy inevitably caused Shi'i activists to split into groups, each aiming at affirming its own particular vision of spiritual and secular rule by defending the rights of its chosen candidate to the imamate. Among them, a group from Kufa, in southern Iraq, distiguished itself in supporting the imamate of Isma'il, who was Ja'far al- Sadiq's son, thus directly challenging the claims of their Shi'i rivals who backed Isma'il's brother, Musa al-Kazim.

Evolutionary psychology, a recently constituted but already broadly extended programme in the study of human behaviour, is notable for, among other things, the unusually pre-emptive character of its claims. According to its major proponents, ‘reverse engineering’, the method that defines and distinguishes evolutionary psychology, permits identification of the underlying, innate mental mechanisms that govern all human behaviour, from incest-avoidance and female-adolescent anorexia to past-tense formation and a taste for Victorian novels. In supplying these identifications, it is said, evolutionary psychologists provide genuinely scientific explanations for human behaviours and cultural practices that, up to now, have been improperly or inadequately explained by other social scientists and, at best, merely ‘interpreted’ in the humanities. It is claimed, moreover, that, in thus furnishing the missing link between the natural and the human sciences, evolutionary psychology has effected a crucial turning point in intellectual history, inaugurating a conceptual integration of all fields of genuine knowledge under the mantle of a single, comprehensive scientific discipline or, in effect, a super natural science. As I indicate below, there is good reason to be sceptical of these somewhat grandiose claims.

A bit of preliminary map-sketching will be useful. Contrary to depictions by evolutionary psychologists, the most significant controversies over the claims and accomplishments of the programme are not between enlightened Darwinists and dogmatic theologians or between sober, up-to-date cognitive scientists and either ideology-driven humanists or social scientists clinging to archaic ideas.

It is widely accepted that Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) are Woolf's first experimental novels, building on radical short stories such as ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and on the theories of fiction developed in ‘Modern Novels’. Woolf abandons the rigid chapter structure she criticised in ‘Modern Novels’, adopting in both a more flexible form built on sketches or ‘moments’ of varying length. She eschews a documentary approach to character in Jacob's Room by making the eponymous character an enigma, and in Mrs Dalloway by concentrating on the mental experience of her protagonists, the latter being especially radical for embracing the psychotic consciousness of Septimus Warren Smith. Woolf also wrote both novels with an awareness of the work of her contemporaries, particularly T. S. Eliot, whom she had met in 1919, and James Joyce, whose Ulysses she had read in draft form in 1918 and grudgingly admired.

However, as this chapter will demonstrate, alongside her innovations Woolf maintained a respect for the literary past and remained concerned about tradition and canonicity. The tension is evident within ‘Modern Novels’ itself, for Woolf notes that her ‘quarrel … is not with the classics’ (E, III. 31), levelling her criticism against the popular writers of the time: the previous half-generation of novelists represented by H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy; and although she hails Joyce as the leading figure in a new trend, she none the less compares him unfavourably with Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Laurence Sterne and William Thackeray (E, III. 33–4).

Woolf considered The Waves to be the novel which came closest to capturing her own ideas and establishing her own style. When exploring her earliest ideas for the work, she noted a desire to write a book which was ‘made solely & with integrity of one's thoughts’ (D, III. 102), and after finishing it, she noted, ‘I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning – if The Waves is my first work in my own style!’ (D, IV. 53). Although these statements may appear to be declarations of originality or expressions of a Bloomian desire to overcome the anxiety of influence, the reverse is true. Woolf's comments on her style are couched in provisional, exploratory terms (‘I think …’; ‘if The Waves is …’), suggesting a writerly identity which was in process rather than achieved. The novel itself is profoundly polyphonic, for its prose enfolds many earlier texts in a variety of subtle ways: quotations are absorbed very deeply into the fabric of the novel, with very few being offset or placed in quotation marks; there is much paraphrasing of famous texts; and well-known literary moments (like the mysterious laughter in Jane Eyre (W, 207)) are replayed as part of the characters' experiences. In other words, in expressing her thoughts or ‘the shapes [her] brain holds’ (not ‘produces’), Woolf inevitably expressed the works which formed an important part of her mental landscape, for reading was integral to her intellectual life.

Virginia Woolf has long been celebrated as an innovative novelist and a radical thinker who broke with the aesthetics of earlier generations and challenged their values; some critics have even suggested that she anticipated ideas and approaches which emerged long after her time. However, it is less widely acknowledged that Woolf also looked backwards; that she was immersed in the literary past and her intellectual heritage as a reader and critic; and that this had an impact on her fiction. Although Beth Carole Rosenberg has drawn attention to Woolf's dialogue with other writers in her essays and fiction, and Sally Greene's edited collection, Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, has demonstrated that the strength of Woolf's interest in the Renaissance can be seen in both her scholarship and her fiction, many scholars are none the less reluctant to see the presence of the literary past in the novels. So, for example, although Elena Gualtieri and Juliet Dusinberre have drawn attention to Woolf's intimacy with the literary past in her essays, both resist applying these insights to her novels: Gualtieri makes a distinction between the essay, which ‘remained for her attached to the paternal figure and therefore became the arena where the relationship between tradition and modernity was explored’, and the novel, which ‘represented the possibility of experimenting with new forms and shapes’; and Dusinberre argues that Woolf ‘used the past for a purpose, as an empowering model for herself as woman writer, and particularly as a writer not of fiction but of criticism and literary history’.

It has been said that knowledge, or the problem of knowledge, is the scandal of philosophy. The scandal is philosophy's apparent inability to show how, when and why we can be sure that we know something or, indeed, that we know anything. Philosopher Michael Williams writes: ‘Is it possible to obtain knowledge at all? This problem is pressing because there are powerful arguments, some very ancient, for the conclusion that it is not … Scepticism is the skeleton in Western rationalism's closet’. While it is not clear that the scandal matters to anyone but philosophers, philosophers point out that it should matter to everyone, at least given a certain conception of knowledge. For, they explain, unless we can ground our claims to knowledge as such, which is to say, distinguish it from mere opinion, superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, ideology, illusion or delusion, then the actions we take on the basis of presumed knowledge – boarding an airplane, swallowing a pill, finding someone guilty of a crime – will be irrational and unjustifiable.

That is all quite serious-sounding but so also are the rattlings of the skeleton: that is, the sceptic's contention that we cannot be sure that we know anything – at least not if we think of knowledge as something like having a correct mental representation of reality, and not if we think of reality as something like things-as-they-are-in-themselves, independent of our perceptions, ideas or descriptions.

Woolf wrote these words in her diary entry for 28 November 1928, almost two years after To the Lighthouse was completed. She records that, retrospectively, she regarded the novel as a turning-point in her relationship with both her parents: by writing this heavily autobiographical novel and by translating her parents into the fictional characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, Woolf readjusted her relationship with her past. It is tempting to use this diary entry, as Fogel does, to read To the Lighthouse as a process by which Woolf overcame parental influences and took control of her own writing. However, the latter part of the passage suggests a different dynamic, for it articulates a process of loss and recovery: although Leslie Stephen's death had left Woolf free to write, her sense of freedom was compromised by an ‘unhealthy obsession’, a form of longing for him. The process of writing To the Lighthouse helped Woolf address this loss by enabling her to know her father (though not her mother) in a new way: as a writer.

Orlando is often taken on Woolf's own estimation as ‘an escapade’ (D, III. 131) and viewed as a lighthearted comic piece. However, when read in the context of Woolf's engagement with the literary past, it can be seen to serve the serious purpose of critiquing the assumptions of patriarchal literary history and developing feminist perspectives to replace them. Although Woolf's use of parody in Orlando is undoubtedly comic, it is also layered and strategic. On the one hand, her parody of academic conceptions is satirical: she mocks conventional approaches to literary history (as well as biography and history) by mimicking them in the voice of the narrator and the mock scholarly apparatus of preface, footnotes and index, all of which are shown to be inadequate frameworks for addressing the complex subject-matter of a character who lives for 350 years and changes sexes part-way through. She also attacks the literary-critical establishment through the heavily satirised figure of Nick Greene who sets himself up as an arbiter of taste, but is merely a self-publicist seeking financial gain (as a Renaissance and Restoration hack) and society's esteem (as a Victorian knighted professor). On the other hand, Woolf's parodies of English literary styles and her allusions to a wide range of texts and authors from the Renaissance to the present are more subtle and complex.

The title of this chapter points to two sets of interrelated difficulties. Those in the first set arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals. The second set reflects the intellectually and ideologically crisscrossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fields as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on kin and kinds – that is, relations and classifications – and then turn to the increasingly complex play of claims and counter-claims regarding the so-called species barrier.

The problem of our kinship to other animals mirrors that of our relation to other problematic beings: for example, the unborn, the mentally disabled, the drunk or the terminally comatose – beings, that is, who are recognisably our own kind but not yet, not quite, not just now, or no longer what we readily think of as what we ourselves are. In all these cases, there are difficulties handling both sameness and difference, difficulties framing the claims – either conceptual or ethical – of kinship, and, for formal philosophy, difficulties above all acknowledging just these difficulties.

Of course we are animals, it is said; or, to quote philosopher of ethics, Bernard Williams, ‘The claim that we are animals is straightforwardly true,’ the straightforwardness of the truth here deriving, it appears, from the current scheme of biological classification.

We can now see that Woolf's novels were informed deeply by her sometimes vexed, sometimes positive conversations with past writers. As the analyses of her creative processes in the preceding chapters reveal, her reading and writing practices were closely interfused: quite simply, she needed to read in order to write, and almost invariably she preferred to read past writers. Sometimes she needed to read for intellectual stimulation: it is significant that she began to draft The Voyage Out after six years of intensive reading, but even in the 1930s, reading poetry helped release her from creative deadlock whilst formulating The Waves. Woolf also used past writings to help her make sense of the world and its problems – not least war and patriarchy – and as a consequence these works informed the thematic content of her novels.

Reading earlier literature also helped Woolf explore her own preoccupations and sensibilities, such as when she read Sterne in 1926 while considering the future of the novel in general and of her own writing in particular, or when she saw in Coleridge's agonies her own sense of being overwhelmed by experience. These empathetic readings in turn helped her articulate traumatic experiences of her own, such as when she used the classical image of birds singing in Greek in describing her breakdown of 1904, or when she drew on Romantic models to help develop her ‘moments of being’. Reading was so central to Woolf's understanding of the world that re-reading texts also became a form of self-discovery, a revisiting of self and past. This is most evident in The Waves, where in an intense reflexive exploration of her own process, she revisited works which had inspired her: for example, while writing the second typescript she re-read and quoted from Dante who had stimulated her earliest sketches for the novel.