The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature.

• Author: Hammond, Marle
• Position: Book review

The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature. By Remke Kruk. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Pp. xxv + 272. 62 [pounds sterling] (cloth); 15.99 [pounds sterling] (paper).

Studying folkloric narrative poses many challenges. First and foremost among them is the absence of an identifiable originating author whose historical persona may situate a story as the product of a certain individual who wished to convey particular meanings reflecting his or her estimations of the values and aesthetic structures of a particular age, whether the milieu in which the story is set is contemporary to the author or, indeed, worlds away. When we read an authored piece of literature as symptomatic of a cultural ethos, as somehow representative of the attitudes of the society that produced it, we have to tread very carefully through matters relating to authorial intent: What points is the author trying to make about society and how are the author's themes and devices rooted in those intentions? On the other hand, when we read an author-less story, "symptomatic" interpretations would seem to be necessarily reductive, since the story takes its shape dynamically through an accumulation of tellings and retellings across chronological and geographical boundaries. Beyond the question of authorship, there is the poetic, symbolic, and narrative structure of oral literature with its thematic and linguistic peculiarities discussed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord and situated in an Arabic-language context by scholars such as Michael Zwettler and James Monroe. It is an immensely fascinating subject that, in the case of Arabic folkloric literature, remains relatively untapped despite the numerous valuable contributions by scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern studies in recent decades, such as Malcolm Lyons, Pierre Cachia, Bridget Connelly, Dwight Reynolds, and Susan Slyomovics, to name a few.

Remke Kruk's The Warrior Women of Islam approaches Arabic popular epics via their portrayals of those female protagonists who challenge the authority of men not only through their wit and wisdom but also through their physical prowess on the battlefield. Over the course of fourteen chapters, Rruk discusses the treatment of these "warrior women" in five epics in particular, namely, the tales of Dhat al-Himma, 'Antara, Prince Hamza al-Bahlawan, Baybars, and King Sayf ibn Dh! Yazan. Much of the book in fact consists of relatively detailed synopses of the...