Finding the Faqīhāt: women’s legal scholarship and biography in premodern Morocco

ABSTRACT

This article examines women’s lives, scholarship, and memory in premodern Morocco through the life of Umm Hani al-ʿAbdusi (d. 1456). Biographical sources describe Umm Hani as a faqīha (legal scholar), placing her in an elite category of women who engaged with Islamic law at the level of legal interpretation. Tracing Umm Hani’s inclusion in biographical works over 500 years, this study demonstrates the respected space she occupied in these collections, as well as how her memorialisation evolved in the late twentieth century, reflecting the increased interest in women’s historical participation in Moroccan society. Rather than discounting the traces preserved in the sources as evidence of women’s lack of participation, this study argues that we should take these glimpses as hints at what might have been, what women’s lives and learning could have looked like outside of the biographical mentions recorded by men and institutional structures dominated by male scholars. Moreover, Umm Hani’s preservation in the sources stakes out a precedent for women’s interpretive authority in Islamic law in the premodern Islamic world.

KEYWORDS:

• Morocco
• faqīha
• biography
• women
• Marinid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Particularly in the case of Morocco, there is interest in traditions of women’s sainthood and other activities related to Sufism, documented in hagiographies, a type of biographical literature (El Hour 2020; Ouguir 2020).

2 The biographers are also not using the term to refer to a woman educated in the Qurʾan as is sometimes used in Modern Morocco, which would have led ‘faqīha’ to refer to a great number of their biographical subjects.

3 Exceptions are a twentieth century study of Zarruq’s life and work by Ali Fahmi Khushaim that lists Umm Hani among Zarruq’s teachers, although Khushaim does not include Zarruq’s grandmother, Umm al-Banin, in that list (Khushaim 1976, 12–13), and a twentieth century biography of Rahma bint al-Janan lists her son, Ibn Ghazi, as one of her students (Ibn Zaydan 2008, 3:83).

4 Abu ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sulami (1999) also devoted a volume to Sufi women, and Ibn al-Sa‘i (2017) reserved a collection for concubines of Abbasid caliphs, most having achieved some degree of education.

5 Roded’s analysis, however, excluded biographical dictionaries devoted to jurists (among other groups) as she assumed that women would not be well-represented.

6 Fierro identified a total of 32 biographies representing 20 distinct women due to repetition across the biographies.

7 Translations from Arabic and Spanish are my own.

8 It is possible that Ahmad Ibn Ghazi, a fellow Maknasi, could have come into contact with the ʿAbdusi family. One of his biographers does make this connection, but it is presumably inaccurate as Ibn Ghazi himself refers to ʿAbdullah al-ʿAbdusi as ‘the teacher of our teachers’ (Ibn Ghazi 1964, 32), since ʿAbdullah was a teacher of the generation of scholars that educated Ibn Ghazi, including Ibn Ghazi’s teacher and ʿAbdullah al-ʿAbdusi’s student, Abu ʿAbdullah Muhammad bin Qasim al-Qawri (d. 1468) (Qarafi 2003, 96; al-Kattani 2006, 385).

9 Three fifteenth century collections have an entry for ʿAbdullah but not Umm Hani: Ahmad al-Wansharisi’s Wafayat (2009, 93); Muhammad al-Sakhawi’s Al-Dawʾ al-Lamiʿ (1992, 5:67); and Abu al-Fadl ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Suyuti’s Aʿyan (1927, 122), Badr al-Din al-Qarafi’s Tawshih al-Dibaj (2003, 95–96; 108; 260). Two biographical dictionaries from the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century also include ʿAbdullah (and some other family members) but exclude Umm Hani: Ibn al-Qadi’s (d. 1616) Durrat al-Hijal (1970, 3:53; 3:381–382); Ibn al-Qadi’s Jadhwat al-Iqtibas (1973, 2:425; 1:346–347) (Jadhwat al-Iqtibas is not confined to scholars and does list many entries for women, although they are mostly women distinguished by their royal connections, not their scholarship); Ibn al-Qadi’s Laqt al-Faraʾid (Ibn al-Qadi 1976, 251; 216; 246). A late nineteenth-century biographical dictionary, Muhammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Kattani’s (d. 1926) Salwat al-Anfas, mentions Umm Hani in her brother ʿAbdullah’s entry (2006, 3:385).

10 Umm Hani’s short entry is repeated twice, and is essentially the same as al-Tinbakti’s version of Umm Hani’s biography, although interestingly it does not connect Umm Hani to her brother ʿAbdullah or other family members.

11 A number of twentieth-century works do not follow the pattern of increased inclusion of women, listing ʿAbdullah but not Umm Hani: Ibn Zaydan’s Ithaf ʿAlam al-Nass (Ibn Zaydan 2008, 4:567–569) (although six women do have standalone entries); Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli’s al-‘Alam (2002, 4:127). Muhammad Makhluf’s Shajarat al-Nur al-Zakiyya (Makhluf 1970, 1:255).

12 The sources are not in agreement on ʿAbdullah al-ʿAbdusi’s date of death, but most place it in 848 or 849AH (1444-1446CE).

13 A twenty-first century work makes the opposite assumption about the location of the scholarly activities of the Marinid faqīhāt: the editor of ʿAbdullah al-ʿAbdusi’s fatwa collection lists Umm Hani, Fatima, and Umm al-Banin as students of ʿAbdullah, and states that they studied with ʿAbdullah in his home, not at the Qarawiyyin Mosque, although Zarruq does not specify that the learning took place at the mosque or at ʿAbdullah’s house (al-ʿAbdusi 2015, 17–18).

14 Al-Tazi cites Gannun’s Nubugh for this passage, as well as a chapter about the history of the Qarawiyyin and prominent scholars associated with it, although neither of these sources refer to Umm Hani as muftiyya (Gannun 1975, 1:202; Ibn al-Hosni 1960, 170).

15 In his lecture about famous women in Moroccan history given to the Egyptian Women’s Party in the first half of the twentieth century, al-Fassi, a prominent Moroccan nationalist, states that Moroccan scholar al-Hasan al-Yusi (d. 1691) discussed a female ʿAbdusi (al-Fassi does not specify which one) ‘who was considered among the greatest female scholars with regards to judicial decisions in his time’ (al-Fassi 1956, 61). I was unable to locate a reference to either of the ʿAbdusi sisters in the available works of al-Yusi. In one text, al-Risaʾil, al-Yusi does mention ʿAbdullah al-ʿAbdusi in order to quote one of his judicial opinions (al-Yusi 1981, 2:579). This raises the question of the origin of al-Fassi’s information about the ʿAbdusi sisters (either Umm Hani or Fatima), which recognised one of them as knowledgeable in a highly specialised field of Islamic law.

16 Asma Afsaruddin (2002) similarly finds that Muslim biographers of the medieval period highlight or reduce certain elements of the biographies of the women closest to the Prophet Muhammad (Ṣaḥabiyyāt) to bring them into conformity with more limited contemporary views on gender roles.

17 The first reference in English to Umm Hani is a loose translation of the passage on learned women from al-Tazi’s history of the Qarawiyyin (Bewley 1999, 16).

18 Which is certainly not to suggest that this is a necessary element for women today who wish to engage with Islamic legal sources and interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Institute for Maghrib Studies [grant number TALIM 2012-13]; Fulbright Association [grant number IIE 2012-13]; Social Science Research Council [grant number IDRF 2013].