[In the following review, Fay compliments Mernissi's perspective in The Forgotten Queens of Islam, but considers the book marred by numerous historical inaccuracies.]

Fatima Mernissi's The Forgotten Queens of Islam is a flawed but provocative and, at times, insightful study of the nature of power in Islamic history and contemporary Islamic society. Ostensibly, Mernissi is conducting a historical investigation into the question of whether women were ever heads of state. However, she uses her subject matter to assert that political Islam or Islam as the practice of power is fundamentally anti-democratic. Thus, her book is both a historical inquiry and a powerful critique of the state in contemporary Islamic societies.

This is not the first time that Mernissi, a sociologist, has turned to history for her subject matter or to answer a question that has contemporary relevance. She did so in the book that first brought her to the attention of the West, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, and in Women in Islam: A Historical and Theological Inquiry. In the latter book, Mernissi turned to history in order to refute the remark of her grocer who quoted a hadith as evidence that women were not fit to govern. In her latest work, she was reacting to the election of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and the remark made by the leader of the opposition who called her election blasphemy and remarked that an Islamic state was never governed by a woman. The work under review is Mernissi's attempt to answer that remark.

As she did in Women in Islam, Mernissi returns to the sources to conduct her investigation—published volumes of hadith in the first case, and, in the second, chronicles and histories by al-Maqrizi, Ibn Hanbal, al-Mas'udi, and Ibn al-Athir, among others; Ibn Khaldun's al-Muqaddima, for its disquisition on the nature of power and the rise and fall of dynasties; and Ibn Battuta's Rihla. Although Mernissi uses a methodology and sources appropriate for a historical study, her lack of training as a historian is evident in her mishandling of historical events and chronology, her ahistoricism, and her superficial reading of the relevant secondary literature on her topic and on women's history in general.

Mernissi begins her inquiry by making the distinction between the office of caliph or imam and the wielding of actual power. Thus, Mernissi can assert that even though women have never borne the title of caliph, they have indeed administered states and have even been recognized as heads of states. Mernissi sees essentially three categories of female rulers: those who shared power with a husband or son; those who assumed power because of the absence (through death, for example) or disability of men; and those who were sovereign in their own right. For Mernissi, the test of sovereignty for both men and women was whether the khutba was read in the name of the one claiming to rule and whether coins were inscribed in his or her name. Some of the female rulers were Shajar al-Durr, who was directly linked to the founding of the Mamluk Empire in Egypt; Khayzuran, wife of the third Abbasid caliph, al-Mahdi, and mother of two caliphs, her sons al-Hadi and Harun al-Rashid; and Sitt al-Mulk, daughter of the Fatimid Caliph al-'Aziz and sister of his successor, al-Hakim. Among the less well known were Asma and Arwa of 11th-century and early-12th-century Yemen. According to Mernissi, female rulers were called sultāna, malaka, sitt, and al-hurra.

One of the problems with the book is the number of errors Mernissi makes when relating historical events and presenting a chronology. Her account of the Mongol conquest is particularly garbled; she states at one point that after the Mongol defeat by the Mamluks at Ayn Jalut, the caliphate of Baghdad was dependent on the Il-Khan dynasty created by Hulagu. In fact, the Mongols assassinated the last caliph during their conquest of 1258, and the Egyptian Mamluks took a successor to Cairo to legitimize their own rule. Mernissi makes this claim while stating in a later chapter that the caliphate was fatally wounded in the 10th century by the founding of the Fatimid counter-caliphate in Cairo. These are just two examples of the errors of fact that Mernissi makes in the book. Her lack of consistency makes information in one chapter contradict what has been presented in an earlier one. There are several instances in the book also of Mernissi's ahistoricism. When discussing the Fatimid caliphate and the Isma'ili Shi'is, Mernissi informs her readers that one of the Isma'ili sects became famous when its leader, the Aga Khan, married the American movie star Rita Hayworth. She also notes in a lengthy footnote that her understanding of the Druze was enhanced by learning that the singers Farid al-Atrash and his sister, Asmahane, were Druze.

On another level is the issue of interpretation and analysis, specifically Mernissi's understanding of the household and her argument that in the pre-modern period there were clear and rigid distinctions between public and private space. Mernissi argues that women were prevented from ruling in their own right because of the distinction between public space, which was forbidden to women, and the private space of the household or harem, which was women's territory. Other historians have argued more persuasively that both public and private affairs were conducted in the ruler's household, thus blurring the distinction between the two. This is precisely what gave women the opportunity to enhance their influence and even to rule, especially since in the household of the king or caliph power was achieved and allocated based on kinship or proximity to the ruler.

If one were to categorize Mernissi's book, it would be as women's history. Yet she has written about reference to the historiography of the field and or to its categories of analysis, its methodology, or its theoretical frameworks. This is no doubt why the book as a work of women's history seems somewhat dated.

Mernissi is at her most interesting when linking the past to the current state of politics in the Islamic world. She takes Ibn Khaldun's distinction between caliphate and mulk to argue that while the caliph represents an authority that obeys divine law, a king recognizes no superior law and has purely earthly concerns. In modern Islamic states, apparently irreconcilable contradiction exists between the religious and the secular in the declaration of Islam as the state religion within political systems that are ostensibly parliamentary democracies. The contradiction arises because the rights of the individual, which are the foundation of any democracy, are often incompatible with the tenets of the faith. As Mernissi has written, “A citizen and a believer do not behave the same way in space, for the good and simple reason that Heaven and earth are governed by different laws.” Thus, the exercise of free speech by a citizen in the parliamentary realm could be blasphemy by a believer in the religious realm. She is also saying that the modern caliphal state is maintained to legitimize and perpetuate authoritarian regimes by stifling free speech and political action by its citizens. By her assertion that the contemporary Islamic state exists at two fundamentally contradictory stages, Mernissi links women and the people ('āmma). Both are considered fitna (disorder) to the authoritarian regimes now in power because both threaten the regimes's hold on power. Mernissi conceptualizes the issue in terms of space, arguing that both the 'āmma and women are disturbing as soon as they appear where they are not expected, and no one expects them where decisions are made.

Mernissi's study is flawed in several respects, some of which have been discussed. Instructors who choose to use this book in the classroom will have to be sure to correct the errors of fact. For women's history, Mernissi's book does not advance our theoretical understanding of the position of women very much, although it does add to our store of knowledge about women's lives in the understudied period between the establishment of the Umayyad empire to the rise of the Ottomans, a not inconsiderable achievement. It should be particularly enlightening to students whose images of Muslim women have been formed by American popular culture, with its emphasis on the veil and the harem, which are equated with women's subjugation and oppression.

In spite of its shortcomings, this book, like others of Mernissi's, is provocative, insightful, full of interesting information, and very readable. For all those reasons, the book is recommended—with reservations.