[In the following review, Porter commends Mernissi's passionate and forceful arguments in The Forgotten Queens of Islam and Islam and Democracy, but finds flaws, notably errors of omission and overemphasis, in both books.]

Forgotten Queens of Islam is inspired, partly, by the condemnation by Muslim clerics of Benazir Bhutto's election in Pakistan on the grounds that she is a woman. It also seeks to take issue with the surprisingly ignorant statement by the historian Bernard Lewis that “there are no queens in Islam, and the word queen where it occurs, is only used of foreign rulers”. Fatima Mernissi—a prominent Moroccan sociologist—brings to our attention an array of women throughout Islamic history who ruled in a number of ways. Only a small proportion were fully legitimate monarchs (with their names mentioned in the khutba or Friday sermon and on the coinage); others had real enough power but were not officially acknowledged. There was a third category whose power lay in their ability to manipulate their men. The last were evidently the slave women, of which the harems were full. Mernissi has dug amusing and scurrilous anecdotes about rulers such as the tenth-century Buyid prince Adud al-Dawlah, who had his slave girl thrown down a well because her sensuality distracted him from serious matters.

The core of the argument is that history has been rewritten: such is the continued horror of the notion of women rulers in the Islamic world that reputable historians, both Western and Arab, have undermined the importance of these women, cast slurs on their characters, or ignored them altogether. Mernissi's is a very readable broad sweep of history. There are problems, however, with her approach. Arguments inevitably become simplified, errors of fact have crept in, and spellings have sometimes suffered in the translation. While her theme is on the whole convincing, the conspiracy theory can be taken too far. The Queen of Sheba is given a prominent place because of her mention in the Koran, and Mernissi finds “scholars … in the process of piling up proof that she never existed”. The fact is that scholars of South Arabia, who have no axe to grind, have found no reference to her in the South Arabian texts. Again in the context of Yemen, she sees the lack of knowledge about the early medieval Sulayhid queens as part of the “abysmal gaps in memory” which she ascribes to male prejudice. But the history and culture of the Yemen in general are little known; how many have heard of the Yu'firids, the Rasulids, or the Tahirids—all dynasties ruled by men?

Mernissi's message is directed not only at historians but at contemporary Arab women. In an amusing account of the excesses of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who had dogs killed, prohibited the Egyptians' favourite food, mulukhiyyah, and stopped women going out for years by banning the manufacture of women's shoes, Mernissi breaks off to talk of the courageous women who defied the ban. This is a cry to their modern counterparts, in a country where the Islamists are now eroding the rights that women have fought to achieve.

There is, however, an unconscious paradox in the rehabilitation of these “forgotten queens”. This is brought out unwittingly in another newly translated work, Islam and Democracy. Mernissi continues to emphasize the good qualities of her queens (Arab historians tend to eulogize their dead rulers). However, it is evident that they acted as ruthless politicians when necessary. Yet she lambasts the despotism of rulers throughout Islamic history, and blames them for the present state of the Muslim world, “rolled towards a precipice of mediocrity where it now vegetates”. This is an angry book. It begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expectations it aroused in the Arab world about the possibilities of democracy in the Middle East. The remainder of the book is a sustained lament for the fact that this potential has not been realized. She ascribes the failure to a variety of causes, veering between the personal and the general. She has recourse to the device of interlocutors, one of whom is her aunt Aziza, who complains “why does no-one explain this dimuqratiyyah? Is it a country, a she-devil (ifrita) or an animal or an island?” In her attempt to seek out “democrats” in Islamic history, Mernissi focuses on the dissenters, the heretics and the unorthodox. Equally, she hunts through Islamic traditions to find justification for democratic practice. In neither quest is she wholly successful. However, the passion behind her writing will sweep up and carry along any sympathetic reader.