Guest Essay by Will Chamberlain: The Little-known Lives of Umm ‘Ali and Mah-i Malik
As a social enterprise focused on supporting women makers through our craft networks, we are endlessly curious to learn about women past and present who are reshaping narratives in their respective fields.
We invited Will Chamberlain, an independent researcher working in Afghanistan, to illuminate the stories of two forgotten female figures of Afghan history: Umm ‘Ali and Mah-i Malik. Though their contributions to religious scholarship and architectural patronage, documented in medieval Arabic and Persian texts, are undeniable, both of their lives and legacies are often overlooked.
Women’s collective achievements are often obscured and their historical significance can be diminished over time as their stories are modified to fit dominant, patriarchal narratives. Even so, their lives remain a testament to how women exert agency and contribute to the cultural, political, and spiritual fabric of the societies in which they live.
View of a village street with a woman in long robe and head-dress walking along near Minaret of Daulatabad in Balkh, Afghanistan. Taken by American photographer Josephine Powell during her travels in Afghanistan between 1958 and 1972. (Archnet)
When you think of Afghanistan in the medieval period, what is the image that comes to mind? The Silk Roads, the Buddhas of Bamyan, fortresses, soaring mountains? Looking at that same image again, who is it that you picture, where are they from, what languages do they speak, what is it that they base their beliefs on? For many, interrogating this image likely brings to the fore an image of a society which may be ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse but, unlikely one in which women appear in a major way. The following discussion seeks to add more colour to this image, exploring the lives and legacy of two women heavily involved in the very fabric of their times; in scholarship, architectural patronage and in moulding the legacy of both themselves and those around them.
In the north of Afghanistan, west of the modern city of Mazar-i Sharif, lies the city of Balkh, the historic centre of Bactria, a region which extended across the northern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range. Known in pre-Islamic times as Bactra, the city is mentioned in the Zoroastrian Avesta, a collection of sacred texts, the oldest of which are thought to date back to the start of the first millennium B.C.E, and in the account of the Achaemenid ruler Darius’ (r. 522-486 B.C.E.) campaigns, inscribed on the great rock walls at Bisotun in western Iran. The city was also home to the great Buddhist shrine of Nawbahar, literally translated as ‘new spring,’ but likely a corruption of the Sanskrit nava-vihara, or ‘new monastery.’ The Arab conquests between the mid-seventh and early eighth centuries C.E., which sought to incorporate Balkh and the surrounding region into the Umayyad (ca. 661-750 C.E.) and later Abbasid (ca. 750-1258 C.E.) caliphate were slow, with successive armies and governors dispatched to the region to establish control over the restive north-eastern frontier. [i] It was into this world that Umm ‘Ali (fl. c. 850), the first of the women discussed here, emerged.
A descendant of an Abbasid governor of Balkh, Umm ‘Ali appears as a colourful character whose theological and scholarly credentials saw her depicted in both Arabic and Persian sources as a role-model for her contemporaries and those who followed her, men and women alike. Though she appears in sources as a character bolted on to descriptions of her husband, the qadi (‘judge’) Ahmad Khidrawayh (d. 854-5), one of Balkh’s foremost scholars, the status which she carved out in the scholarly community and the city of Balkh leaps out at us from the texts. Indeed, in a line attributed to Abu Yazid, one of the great Islamic scholars of the time, on whom more will follow, it was said that:
“Whoever wants to study Sufism must do so with the degree of effort which Umm ‘Ali, the wife of Ahmad Khidrawayh, had shown.’[ii]
Born into a wealthy and influential family in ninth century Balkh, Umm ‘Ali received and sought an extensive education in Islamic theology and law. This included work on tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis), ‘ilm (lit. ‘knowledge,’ of which there are several branches, relating to information, natural laws and conjecture) and hadith (the sayings ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad). As part of this education, she participated in hajj (‘pilgrimage)’, to Mecca, staying there for seven years as she continued her studies. This sort of education and experience of travel was not unusual for women of a certain status in this period, with several sources on the time, most notably the biographical dictionaries, attesting to a number of women who received similar educations. It is also worth emphasising that whilst on her travels, Umm ‘Ali was, for a time, unaccompanied by her husband, as the Fada’il-i Balkh (lit. ‘The Merits of Balkh’, c. 1214/1278) records that he had passed away by the time of her return to the city.
The central bay of the Noh Gunbad mosque in Balkh. Built during the first half of the ninth century, it is roughly contemporary with the life of Umm 'Ali. Taken by Josephine Powell during her travels in Afghanistan between 1958 and 1972. (Archnet)
Writing on the presentation of medieval Muslim women in biographical and documentary sources, Julia Bray notes that whilst women appeared in textual material, they ‘tended to be seen as objects, rather than as agents, of social development.’ Umm ‘Ali, as presented in the work of Arezou Azad, exists as an exception to this, her agency shining through in many of the early sources related to both her and her husband.[iii] Umm Ali’s agency is perhaps most evident in one of the key stories which we receive from the sources; that of the events which led to her marriage to Ahmad Khidrawayh. al-Hujwiri (d. ca.1072-7), the complier of a Persian-language treatise on Sufism, wrote of Umm ‘Ali that, despite originally intending to remain unmarried, she had a change of heart, asking for the hand of Ahmad Khidrawayh:
‘[Umm ‘Ali] sent someone [with a message] to Ahmad: “Ask my father for my hand.” He did not respond. She sent someone [again with a message]: “Oh Ahmad, I did not think you a man who would not follow the path of truth. Be a guide of the road; do not put obstacles on it.” Ahmad sent someone [with a message] to ask her father for her hand.’[iv]
Here, Umm ‘Ali, after failing to elicit a marriage proposal from Ahmad on the first attempt, appeals to his spiritual conscience. Umm ‘Ali’s ability to mobilise her spirituality and her knowledge are also reflected in the praise she receives in the textual sources. In the Fada’il-i Balkh, for example, she is praised for her maqam and waqt, both key dimensions of Sufi spiritualism concerned with one’s own understanding of one’s spiritual state and experience. Abu Nu’aym (fl. 1031), another chronicler, similarly described Umm ‘Ali in terms of her futuwwa, a term conventionally used to describe young men and, in Sufi terminology, to refer to ‘reckless self-regard’ or ‘chivalry.’ The use of this term to refer to Umm ‘Ali may have been intended, Azad argues, to obliquely explain her scholarly prowess by making her ‘male,’ through the employment of an adjective traditionally ascribed to men. Umm ‘Ali’s learning and spiritualism also led her to Abu Yazid, also known as Bayazid, one of the foremost Islamic scholars of the period. al-Hujwiri, describes this encounter as follows:
‘When she came to Bayazid, she removed her veil from her face and spoke with him boldly. Ahmad was surprised by this, and jealousy seized his heart. He said: ”Oh Fatima, why this boldness with Bayazid?” She said: “As much as you are my natural partner, he is my spiritual partner. Through you I reach love, and through him I reach God. This is because he does not need my company, while you need me.”’[v]
Here again, Umm ‘Ali’s individualism shines through, with her pursuit of knowledge superseding the bounds of her own marital relationship and eliciting jealousy on the part of her husband. This relationship with the scholar was not to last, however:
‘One day, the great mystic commented on her hands and the henna painted on them. The utterance of such observations on a part of her body was a step too far for her, and Umm ‘Ali declared that it had rendered their companionship unlawful (haram).’[vi]
Through time, however, this ‘miracle-worker’ and ‘accomplished master of the Sufi path,’ would be slowly ‘pacified by historiography.’ By the fifteenth century, her story was moulded to fit the tropes which had, at that point, come to be associated with educated Muslim women. She would be portrayed as a model of piety and charity but, ultimately, second-fiddle to her husband, rather than the active partner in their dynamic who can be seen in the earlier sources.[vii]
Detail from one of the pillars of Noh Gunbad mosque in Balkh. Built during the first half of the ninth century, it is roughly contemporary with the life of Umm 'Ali. Taken by Josephine Powell during her travels in Afghanistan between 1958 and 1972. (Archnet)
Moving south from Balkh into the central highlands of Afghanistan, one reaches the province of Ghor. Unlike Balkh, which sat at a cross-road linking routes to the south, to those heading west into Iran, north into Transoxania, and east towards China, Ghor was known in the tenth century as the dar al-kufr, ‘the land of the unbelievers,’ cut off from the surrounding areas by its inhospitable terrain. Ghor was a source of slaves, iron and fighting dogs, but little else.[viii] In the early twelfth century, however, the Ghuri dynasty, ruling over a loose network of nomadic-pastoralists who inhabited the valleys of the area, burst out of the mountains, sacking the great city of Ghazni and, over the course of the next century, established their rule over a territory which extended from eastern Iran onto the Indo-Gangetic plains.
The principal source for the history of the Ghuris is Minhaj al-Din Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri, written in the mid-thirteenth century in the courts of the Delhi Sultans. Juzjani’s narrative, whilst focused on the Ghuri sultans and their successors, refers repeatedly to the many women who populated the social milieu about which he was writing. Though the Tabaqat recounts the role of women as daughters, siblings, wives, mothers, concubines and slaves, presented relative to their male counterparts rather than figures in their own right, Juzjani also writes of queens and princesses, reciters of the Qur’an, hajjis (‘pilgrims’), and a woman who became a famous physician in the province of Nimruz. One of the most prominent figures amongst this latter group is the Ghuri princess Mah-i Malik, ‘the moon of the lord,’ the eldest daughter of the Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Ghuri (r. 1163-1203) and an early patron of Juzjani himself.
In Juzjani’s account, it is recorded that Mah-i Malik was initially engaged to a Saljuk warlord based in Nishapur, in modern Iran but that this engagement was broken off, possibly after the Ghuris themselves captured the city and its ruler. Following this, she was engaged once more and married to Malik Ala al-Din, a cousin of her father, accompanying him on hajj to Mecca and where they funded the construction a Sufi khanaqah(gathering place) in the city, as well as a series of mosques and madrasahs in Ghur on their return.
Though many of Juzjani’s references to Mah-i Malik portray her relative to male figures, particularly the suitors arranged by her family as they tried to establish their influence in the region, her role in Ghuri society shines through in the text. Juzjani writes:
‘That princess has brought up this loyal subject in her own chamber of favour and harem of chastity. Until adulthood, [I] was in the service of her house, and relatives and ancestors of this loyal subject were in the service of her family, the family of her father. The legacies of her kind favours are very much [in the life] of this wretch [Juzjani]. May God reward her.’[ix]
The madrasah and mausoleum complex of Shah-i Mashhad on the banks of the Murghab river in north-west Afghanistan. (Archnet)
Mah-i Malik functions here as a patron of Juzjani, housing him within her court and supporting his career. Elsewhere, he describes how his mother, and the princess Mah-i Malik were foster-sisters, ‘ham shir va ham maktab,’ of one milk and one school, again emphasising his closeness and proximity to her court. The praise of Mah-i Malik continues with Juzjani highlighting her piety, the depth of her theological knowledge and presenting her as ‘Khadijah [the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad] of the age.’ Mah-i Malik also appears as the source for Juzjani’s own knowledge on the origins, history and genealogy of the Ghuris themselves presumably recounted to him as he was raised in her haram (royal apartments) in the Ghuri summer capital, Firuzkuh, now most famous as the location of the Minaret of Jam.
One of these stories, included in the Tabaqat, outlines how the emergence of the Ghuri sultanate itself was based on a love-affair between two royal cousins who fled their families in Nihawand (likely the city in Persianate Iraq) in order to marry one another. In this couple, it is the daughter of Amir Suri who is the active partner, instigating their flight which resulted in the foundation of the kingdom of Mandish, the region which would, by the Islamic period, become known as Ghur. Cited as she is as a transmitter of these stories on the genealogy and history of the Ghuris, Mah-i Malik is, therefore, a central pillar on whom our modern understanding of the self-representation of the dynasty rests.
Beyond the literature, Mah-i Malik’s legacy is also seen in the built environment of Ghur. Shah-i Mashhad, a madrasah and mausoleum complex built sometime between 1165 and 1176 on the banks of the Murghab river roughly 140km north-east of Herat, is thought to have been one of the sites commissioned by the Princess. The iwan, or portal, of the madrasah reflects this patronage, including praise of Mah-i Malik which would have been visible to all those who passed into the courtyard beyond. The two brickwork inscriptions, laid out in Kufic script read:
Right pillar: ‘In the name of God, the clement and merciful. [She] instructed construction of this blessed madrasah, the great and knowledgeable lady [or queen].’ Left pillar:‘[May God bless] her, extend her dominion and double her power; dated in the month of Ramadan of the year 571 [March-April 1176].’[x]
These inscriptions stand as testament to the role and influence of Mah-i Malik, offering, along with the tantalising textual references, a glimpse into the history of this remote region of Afghanistan in the period. For a time veiled in the past and ‘pacified by historiography,’ the lives of both Mah-i Malik and Umm ‘Ali offer a way into understanding the roles which could be and, indeed, were occupied by women in medieval Afghanistan. Involved in scholarship, patronage of construction and the arts they actively shaped their own times and the legacy that they left behind.
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For those wishing to read more about the women and the stories described and alluded to above, I would highly recommend the insightful work of Arezou Azad, including her work on ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam’ cited below and that of Jawan Shir Rasikh, particularly his PhD thesis on ‘Early Islamic Ghur, 10th-12th century C.E.: Rereading the Tabaqat-i Nasiri’ (2019), as well as that of. For a more general discussion of the country, Barfield’s ‘Afghanistan’ (2010) is also an invaluable starting point. To get a sense of the geography, landscape and appeal of Afghanistan, the Penguin Classics edition of the Baburnamah, ‘Journal of the Emperor Babur’ (2007), particularly the section on Kabul, is also worth a read.
References:
[i] This description of early Balkh is included to give a sense of the city and region in which Umm ‘Ali lived but is only a brief sketch of one of the most fascinating cities of Afghanistan. For more information on Balkh and indeed the broader context the open-access Encyclopaedia Iranica is a fantastic resource.
[ii] From Jami’s Nafahat al-uns, cited and translated in Arezou Azad, ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam: The Quiet Legacy,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 56 (2013), p. 80.
[iii] Julia Bray, ‘Men, Women and Slaves in Abbasid Society,’ in Gender in the Early Medieval World, ed. Brubaker and Smith (2004), p. 130; Azad, ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam,’ pp. 53-88.
[iv] This translation of al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub is from Azad, ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam,’ p. 68.
[v] This translation of al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub is from Azad, ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam,’ pp. 75-6.
[vi] Azad’s rendering of al-Hujwiri’s narrative of the events. Azad, ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam,’ p. 76.
[vii] This presentation is seen in Jami’s Nafahat al-uns and is translated in Azad’s ‘Female Mystics in Medieval Islam,’ p. 80. The phrase ‘pacified by historiography’ is also from Azad’s conclusion, p. 82.
[viii] These descriptions can be found in the work of al-Istakhri, a tenth century geographer writing in Arabic and in the Hudud al-Alam, ‘The Regions of the World,’ a contemporary Persian-language geography.
[ix] Juzjani’s Tabaqat, translated in Jawan Shir Rasikh’s PhD thesis: ‘Early Islamic Ghur, 10th-12th century C.E.: Rereading the Tabaqat-i Nasiri’ (2019).
[x] This translation of the epigraphy is from Blair, ‘The Madrasa at Zuzan: Islamic architecture in eastern Iran on the eve of the Mongol Invasions,’ Muqarnas, 3 (1985), p. 81. It is worth noting that the identification of Mah-i Malik as the patron of the complex is somewhat disputed with some suggesting that it was in-fact Taj-al Harir Jawahir-Malik, wife of Ghiyas al-Din and sister of Sayf al-Din, the man in whose memory the mausoleum was constructed, who was the patron. Whilst this suggestion of alternative patronage may somewhat diminish the tangible legacy of Mah-i Malik, it does speak to the broader significance of women of the royal court in the Ghuri context.
