This accessible volume presents and contextualizes a collection of stories in order to inform scholars and the public about depictions of warrior women in Arabic popular epic. Remke Kruk is one of the foremost pioneers in sira scholarship. Her interest in sira stories began in the 1980s, with her first article on warrior women appearing in 1993. She overcame several prejudices that have shaped Arabic studies historically: a focus on written texts to the exclusion of oral texts, a focus on elite members of society to the exclusion of popular genres, and a focus on male characters and personages, to the exclusion of the female. Publication of sira scholarship has risen markedly in the past two decades. Scholarly disciplines have never been so well positioned for sira studies.
The genre of sira (translated as geste, epic or romance) refers to a number of story cycles that retell the adventures of one or more heroes, and thus reimagine certain periods of history in Arabic culture. In the introduction to The Thirsty Sword (1996), Peter Heath identifies nearly a dozen historical periods and their accompanying epics, starting from early Persian history in Sirat Firuz Shah, and ending with Mamluk history in Sirat Baybars. Remke Kruk's monograph is limited to passages pertaining to warrior women in five story cycles, the historical events of which stretch roughly from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries: 1) Sirat ʿAntar set in pre-Islamic North Arabia; 2) Sirat Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan in pre-Islamic South Arabia; 3) Sirat Hamza in early Islamic Arabia; 4) Sirat al-amira Dhat al-Himma in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates; and 5) Sirat Baybars in the Fatimid and Mamluk periods. The sira genre bears on most aspects of Arabic studies, including literary and social history, gender studies and linguistics.
This monograph draws together Kruk's earlier writings with an eye to a broader audience. It includes images never before published together, providing a unique source for the visual culture of the epics discussed. It also addresses an ignorance of Arabic sources among non-Arabists, as attested by earlier studies of warrior women that include no mention of women in medieval Arabic epics (for example, Antonia Fraser's The Warrior Queens). Kruk's work points out the need not only to dig up historical evidence (as demonstrated in Warrior Women by Jeannine Davis-Kimball), but also to recognize the importance of mythology and folklore in cultural studies.
Chapter 1 introduces the genre of sira, or Arabic popular epic. Chapter 2 discusses the character type of warrior women, including two excerpts from Sirat ʿAntar. This chapter helpfully discusses how warrior women in Arabic epics connect to, or compare with, heroic women in contemporary anglophone popular culture, the Amazons, and historical women leaders. Chapters 3–13 focus on paraphrasing tales from five of the most popular Arabic epics.
Chapter 3 introduces Sirat al-amira Dhat al-Himma, the longest extant Arabic epic and the only one named for a woman, in terms of its live performance in Morocco that Remke Kruk observed and documented in a 1999 article co-written with Claudia Ott. It discusses the epic's eponymous warrior woman (“Princess” Dhat al-Himma) and her comrades, summarizing some of the early episodes in the epics. Chapter 4 tells of Dhat al-Himma's role as parent, and her relationship with her son ʿAbd al-Wahhab and his four wives, and how these characters develop the larger narrative. Kruk observes a pattern, with each new wife acting more independently than the last, although she does not analyse this pattern. Chapter 5 retells the tale of Ghamra, a heroic warrior woman character in the same epic. Ghamra's story may interest those familiar with the medieval French romance Silence, since both tell of a girl raised as a boy, and her exploits as a knight.
Chapters 6 and 7 move to warrior women in Sirat ʿAntara, retelling their stories without analysis, although Kruk does point out how this particular epic ends with the hero's daughter. She suggests that this strategy allows the audience to retain respect for the hero, even after he no longer dominates events in the narrative, since a young male hero would compete with the older hero, while “[a] daughter does not challenge her father's image, but enhances it” (p. 146). Chapter 8 discusses how the heroic tale of Qissat Hamza takes a distinctive approach to warrior women, valorizing a patriarchal ideal of female submission. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss warrior women in Sirat Baybars, most of whom appear in the narrative only to recede into the background. Chapter 10 focuses on the exception, a foreign queen who retains her authority and independence. Chapters 11, 12 and 13 examine the female characters of Sirat Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan. Kruk is most interested in sharing these characters' stories, and in measuring their degrees of independence and authority within the narrative context.
In chapter 14 Kruk analyses the tales briefly, recommending further research on gender in Arabic literature. She astutely explains how the presence of women in epics connects to gender issues in their societies of origin: “the martial women do not represent the female angle in a male discourse, but embody the perceptions, anxieties and desires of men” (p. 225). Such anxieties include: the social stigma of having only daughters, anxieties and risks of marriage and sexuality, and the fascination with the (sometimes sexual) appeal of domination and dominant women. This analysis complements and applies to many other literary contexts, including female characters in popular Arabic poetry or in Classical Arabic literature, not to mention female characters in many non-Arabic sources.
The only weakness in this book is the brevity of analysis, but this is also its strength, offering accessibility to a broad audience. The book contains an extensive bibliography. This highly informative book represents the culmination of more than twenty years of research, providing a great contribution to sira scholarship, gender studies, Arabic studies, literary studies and cultural studies.
