The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman
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The Arab-Byzantine frontier, like most pre-modern frontiers, consisted of a wide zone rather than a specific boundary line. . . . This frontier, like others, has been described as a place of mixing and fusion, a region where the residents on both sides had more in common with one another than with the people of their own hinterlands and capitals.16
Narratives such as Sirat Dhat al-Himma (not to mention a host of other popular stories of eastern Mediterranean border regions) originate in a historical context consisting of a variety of interactions, including but not limited to violence. The many audiences of this epic throughout history may have identified with the tensions of border life because they were under attack by invading forces (such as the Crusaders) or foreign powers (such as colonial authorities), or were faced with unfamiliar ideas or different outlooks (whether within or between communities). Border dynamics represent the widespread presence of differences within a society, and frontier narratives represent a canvas for exploring the ways in which people and social groups interact when they find themselves in borderlands, faced with differences within their own community and/or society.
The characters in Sirat Dhat al-Himma frequently embody multiple identities, converting from one religion to another, and often reverting to their former religious identity. They may also masquerade as co-religionists, while serving rulers of the other side of the border. Such radical manipulation of social categories reveals the playfulness and skill of sira storytellers and the timeless appeal of exploring social tensions. In a premodern context, stories about changing identities highlight the porous nature of borders and point to the complexity of interactions among individuals, communities, and ideas of diverse cultural origins.
At the same time, this intercommunal diversity and its tensions reflect the tensions of social identities closer to home. As far as we know, Sirat Dhat al-Himma was composed and retold by male storytellers; its imaginary world and characters reflect the patriarchy and hegemonies of the medieval Arab region at the same time as they appear to upend them. Nevertheless, the female identity of Princess Fatima and other characters is significant, whether hidden or disguised or overridden by other marks of social power. Similarly, the Black identity of characters such as ʿAbdelwahhab or ʿAntar (of another epic) marks them and affects their social status.17
Sirat Dhat al-Himma highlights women warriors more than any other extant Arabic work.18 The scholar Remke Kruk explains that “the martial women do not represent the female angle in a male discourse, but embody the perceptions, anxieties and desires of men.”19 Such anxieties include marriage and sexuality, the social stigma of having only daughters, and the fascination with the appeal of domination and of dominant women.
Skin color represents another form of difference within society that this epic takes on. Princess Fatima’s sole child, ʿAbdelwahhab, is Black, although she and the child’s father are not. ʿAbdelwahhab’s coloring makes him stand out, marking him in relation to his parents and his society, and it does cause potentially fatal conflict in the story, but the distinction also works to his advantage, heightening his appearance of strength and his uniqueness. It certainly does not weaken him or exclude him from the family of legendary heroes. As Kruk and Ott point out in their study of the performance of this epic in Marrakesh in 1997, the epic is known in everyday conversation in Morocco as “al-Wahhabiyya,” the “Wahhabi” epic or story cycle. ʿAbdelwahhab gradually joins his mother and their allies as an equal, taking over missions and general leadership, at least for the duration of an episode. He never eclipses his mother entirely, just as she does not eclipse the great heroes of her ancestry, because that would undermine central elements of this heroic genre. He earns a place of equal honor within the family of heroes, with his Blackness being one of the striking features that defines his character. His Blackness also shapes his interactions with different portions of the army, with him commanding and having deeper relationships with people of color than his mother does. The racial and colorist division depicted here was also typical of historical armies generally.20
Gender also intersects with social status in this epic.21 The storyteller transports the audience to an imaginary historical world of great danger, in which social status is often at stake. Tribes regularly conduct raids on each other, with the loser forfeiting livestock, possessions, family members, and even their freedom. The tribal system demands a life for a life, with the family of anyone wronged seeking retribution because their honor depends on it. Feuds between tribes can last generations, and weakness proves deadly. Fortunes can change swiftly, with a patron and a client switching positions overnight. It is this society that shapes young Fatima, and in which she succeeds in earning a position of fame, fortune, and formidable reputation. Like many epic heroes, she is raised in seclusion from her people—she grows up with a secret identity, and an unknown ancestry. Captured as a prisoner of war in a raid by an enemy tribe, she is stigmatized from childhood by orphanhood and servanthood. When she is captured by the Bani Tayy tribe, she abhors the ease with which her caregiver Suʿda agrees to serve her new masters and refuses to comply, saying, “I’m no slave-girl” (“Ma ana jariyya wa-la khadima”). This scene of her infuriated assertion of her dignity is also the first time the text mentions a facial covering. Fatima wears a burqaʿ that covers her face according to the fashion of noblewomen on both sides of the Arab-Byzantine border, claiming that she serves no one but the Creator.22 Her self-assertion confronts her low social status as she develops from a child to a warrior.
In the section “The Story of Nura,” the eponymous warrior woman has a romantic and/or sexual preference for women, up until the time she meets Al-Battal. Nura is not the only one in the epic with this orientation; others include Maymuna and Queen Zananir. From the perspective of the narrator, these preferences among women are a source of fitna, or disorder. Nura, and Princess Fatima prior to her marriage, represent a threat to society on several levels. Just as various men seek to press Fatima into marriage, so social pressures in the epic and among its early audiences aim to tame the threat that Nura represents to mainstream values.23
The epic of Princess Fatima testifies to the tensions and ambiguities inherent in social hierarchies, particularly gender, to the vicissitudes of human life, and to the artistic and creative beauty of Arabic literature, both oral and written. It occupies a literary borderland that permits the mixing of popular and elite genres and motifs in order to engage a variety of audiences across generations. Geographically, it likely reached audiences speaking Arabic, Greek, and other languages, and it continues to cross political boundaries to this day. From a baby whose gender dashed her father’s hopes for political authority, and who seemed to him a dangerous burden, to a young prisoner of war, and finally to a warrior and commander, Fatima Dhat al-Himma and her heroic sira contribute a frequently neglected face to the gallery of Arabic—and world—literature.
MELANIE MAGIDOW
NOTES
1. Throughout this book, I have generally retained the Arabic terms amir and amira, the masculine and feminine forms, respectively, of “leader.” These terms originate in a tribal system and connote authority; other possible translations include “chieftain,” “tribeswoman,” and “noblewoman.”
2. Composition of the epic began at an unspecified date, but possibly between 1100 and 1143, in northern Syria. See Claudia Ott, Metamorphosen des Epos: Sirat al-Mugahidin (Sirat al-Amira Dat al-Himma) zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Leiden, The Netherlands: Universiteit Leiden, 2003). She specifies post-Mirdasid northern Syria. The Mirdasid dynasty reigned from Aleppo from 1024 to 1080. They were descended from the Bani Kilab tribe and shifted their loyalties back and forth between the Byzantines and the Arab Fatimids who ruled from Cairo. For more on the earliest manuscripts and print editions, see Melanie Magidow, “Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Subsidia Series no. 9, Medieval Texts in Translatio
n 6 (2019).
3. Rum: The term denotes the Romans, referring to the Greek Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire.
4. Bani Kilab (descended from the Kilab bin Rabiʿa bin ʿAmir people) was a tribe of the ʿAmir bin Saʿsaʿa group in Western Central Arabia, at least as early as the sixth century. The tribe maintained peaceful relations with some neighboring tribes, despite inter-tribal tensions, while feuds persisted between Kilab and their allies and other tribes that bordered their region. The tribe advanced north-northwest, some settling in northern Syria and others on the far side of the Euphrates. See “Kilāb b. Rabīʿa” and “ʿĀmir b. S.aʿs.aʿa” in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brill Online Reference Works (1:101 and 9:441, respectively).
5. The original sira, which dates from the seventh century, is Al-Sira al-nabawiyya and is an account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. For more on the term and its history, see Magidow, “Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma.” Singular sira becomes sirat in a compound title such as Sirat al-amira Dhat al-Himma. The plural in Arabic is siyar, but here I have used the plural siras for the purpose of accessibility for anglophone readers. I have used the same logic for the plural of amir (leader), making it amirs in English instead of the Arabic plural, umaraʾ.
6. My translation. Maʿadd ibn ʿAdnan is a mythic forefather in Arab genealogies. As for the authors or narrators named, scholar Edward William Lane declared, “None of them are at present known” (in nineteenth-century Cairo). Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: Alexander Gardner, 1895): 422. To this day, not a single one of the ten men listed in this genealogy has been verified in biographical literature. The only narrator mentioned throughout the text of this epic is Najd ibn Hisham, and he is qualified as muʾallif, sahib, musannif (compiler, etc.). Even that attribution serves more to authenticate the text than to indicate its authorship. Claudia Ott hypothesizes, “The fact that [Najd ibn Hisham] descends from the Bani Kilab, just like the heroes of the Epic, is a probable reason for his ascribed authorship” (Ott, Metamorphosen des Epos, 42–45). I would like to thank Ulrich Marzolph for his personal communication regarding authorship of this epic.
7. This epic may open in Yemen due to “Yemen’s preeminent role in ancient Arabian civilization and folklore.” Franz Rosenthal, “Muslim Social Values and Literary Criticism: Reflections of the H.adīth of Umm Zarʿ,” Oriens 34 (1994): 31–56.
8. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 1:73.
9. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 1:62.
10. ʿAlī ibn Musā al-Maqānibī, Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma wa-waladihā ʿAbd al-Wahhāb . . . (Beirut: Al-Maktaba al-Shaʿbiyya, 1980), 1:504.
11. Maqānibī, Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma . . . , 1:556.
12. See Seeger A. Bonebakker, “Some Medieval Views on Fantastic Stories,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 10 (1992): 21–43. For attitudes toward popular literature, see Reynolds, “Popular Prose in the Post-Classical Period,” 252–54.
13. In the context of performances that last hours on end, references to the Prophet Muhammad or to God help reintegrate the audience since they require appropriate responses. See Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes, 184.
14. Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes, 163.
15. Wen-Chin Ouyang, “Romancing the Epic: ʿUmar al-Nuʿman as Narrative of Empowerment,” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 3, no. 1 (2000): 11.
16. Michael Bonner, ed., Arab-Byzantine Relations in Early Islamic Times, vol. 8 of The Formation of the Classical Islamic World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004): xxv, xxvii.
17. For more about Blackness, see Schine, “Conceiving the Pre-Modern Black-Arab Hero: On the Gendered Production of Racial Difference in Sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah.” For more about social drawbacks and heroes, see Heath, The Thirsty Sword, 70–72.
18. For more about women in Arabic epics, see Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 1:109–18, and Kruk, The Warrior Women of Islam. Kruk, emeritus professor of Arabic language and culture, has written a series of articles on “warrior women” in Sirat Dhat al-Himma and other Arabic epics. She reads Sirat Dhat al-Himma as a collection of “warrior woman” stories, composed within and around the model of its eponymous heroine, and states that warrior women “are present in all the heroic cycles.” Kruk, “Back to the Boudoir,” 135. Also see Amanda Hannoosh Steinberg, “Wives, Witches, and Warriors: Women in Arabic Popular Epic,” (PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018).
19. Kruk, The Warrior Women of Islam, 225.
20. Thanks to Rachel Schine for contributing this insight.
21. It is important to note that in addition to class and gender, race or skin color also intersects in this and other epics. Rachel Schine analyzes the accusations Dhat al-Himma faces when she gives birth to a baby with dark skin in her 2019 article, “Nourishing the Noble.” I include here the point that Schine made in personal communication from August 21, 2019: “This is likely due to a conflation that arises in the common semiotic slippage between black people and slaves in Arabic popular literature. . . . On the historical development of the identification of blacks with slavery in theology, literature, and public discourse, see: David M. Goldenberg, Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham (Boston: De Gruyter, 2017).” Thus, race functions as a subcategory of “servanthood” in my conception of identity markers in the epic of Dhat al-Himma. For a discussion of how the term race applies to premodern contexts, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
22. Maqānibī, Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma . . . , 1:506.
23. Regarding homosexuality between men, it appears in this epic only in cases of outright domination (in one instance, a male warrior sexually assaults a male warrior of the opposing side, and the latter dies of mortification). For readers interested in learning more about the range of sexualities in premodern Arabic literature and culture, see Aysha Hidayatullah, “Islamic Conceptions of Sexuality,” in Sexuality and the World’s Religions, ed. David W. Machacek and Melissa M. Wilcox (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003): 256–92. For more on female homosexuality, see Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (New York: Routledge, 2009).
A Note on the Translation
This abridgment consists of nearly a dozen carefully selected episodes out of a total of some 455 episodes in the unabridged version, which in Arabic spans seven volumes and more than six thousand pages.1 (The unabridged version is divided into seventy parts. In the case of one storyteller in Marrakesh, the oral performance, at one hour per day, took a year and three months to complete.)2 In 1909, a man named ʿAli al-Maqanibi issued the definitive printed edition in Cairo. That edition was reprinted in 1980 in Beirut by the now-defunct publishing house Al-Maktaba Al-Shaʿbiyya. Scholars rely on this edition, whether the Cairo or the Beirut printing. This translation is based on the Beirut printing of the original Maqanibi edition.3 The first three episodes introduce Fatima’s ancestors: her great-great-grandfather Al-Harith, in the first episode; her great-grandfather Jundaba, in the second episode; and her grandfather Sahsah, in the third episode, whose romance with Layla is notably similar to the classic love story of Layla and Majnun in many Islamic cultures.
Princess Fatima comes on the scene in the fourth episode, born to Mazlum, son of Sahsah. Her mother names her Fatima and cares for her, but Fatima is separated from her family when a rival tribe raids her encampment. She grows up in the rival tribe and must fight to protect herself, becoming Dhat al-Himma, the most formidable warrior of her time, before being reunited with her family. The next three episodes recount her disastrous marriage, her first forays into the borderlands with Byzantium, and her dramatic transition into motherhood.
The episode titled “Switching Sides” shows the dynamic of the borderlands, with plenty of daring and doub
le-crossing. In “Like Mother, Like Son,” Princess Fatima’s son, ʿAbdelwahhab, comes of age, following in her heroic footsteps. “The Story of Nura” provides a brilliant example of the stock scene of warriors coming across a secluded castle or cloister, where they find one or more beautiful and formidable women; Nura stands out as another strong woman warrior in this epic, this time from the Byzantine side. In “A Final Adventure,” Princess Fatima and her companions face a deadly trap, and the epic concludes with some measure of resolution in the Arab-Byzantine conflict.
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This is the most extensive rendition of the epic into English to date. However, it is an abridgment and also not a literal translation.4 It is not intended as an assist to parsing the Arabic.5
This translation is also not “neutral,” if indeed any translation could be. Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, said, “I, like all translators, make choices, and those choices are informed by my experiences as a human being as well as a scholar.”6 I made three main choices. The first was about the narrative voice: I took my cues from the long line of storytellers who have transmitted this epic over the ages by becoming the teller of this story. I did not add my own stories to the text, but I delivered it in my style, sensitive to the patriarchal and dominant strains in the omniscient narrator that would lose contemporary readers. The second choice was to gently downplay some of the religious phraseology, by removing a few culturally specific references that distract from the plot and characters. My rationale for this choice is simple: this is not a religious or dogmatic text, and I have thus tailored it to a broad audience reading in English in a contemporary, pluralistic context. The third choice was to remove gratuitous descriptions of violence. Again, within a live performance context, a storyteller can gauge the audience and choose to present more or fewer gory details. There are times when I opt, for example, for fewer words to describe decapitation; keeping some details off the page allows readers to use their imaginations.