Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva. Calligraphy is by Soraya Syed. The logo graphics are produced by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com). Writer Tom Verde thanks Carlos Abellanossa, Betsy Raymond Stevenson, Rachel Sprouse, Leila Abouzeid and Sarah Al-Hamad for their assistance. He dedicates the six-episode Malika series to the late pioneer of Islamic women’s history Fatima Mernissi.
A devoted wife and mother, she was also a politician, a businesswoman, a fashion designer and trendsetter, a developer and garden planner, a philanthropist devoted to women, a battlefield commander and even a tiger-hunting sharpshooter.
The empire she ruled with her husband, Jahangir, stretched at its height across much of India and southern Afghanistan. It had been founded in the first half of the 16th century by Turco-Mongols (hence “Mughal”) who claimed descent from Genghis Khan and Amir Timur through its founder, Babur. From then until the mid-19th century, the Mughal state was renowned for its organization, learning, tolerance, culture and prosperity.
The future Nur Jahan—the name is her later, royal title—was born Mihrunissa (Sun Among Women) in 1577 in Kandahar in what is now Afghanistan, the fourth child to her mother, Asmat Begam, and her father, Mirza Ghiyas-ud-din Muhammad. Aristocrats of Persian descent, they found favor in the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Taking the Turkic title beg (pr. bay), Mirza Ghiyas received also the honorific Itimad-ud-Daula (Pillar of the State) while young Mihrunissa received a royal education where she excelled in art, music, literature and dance.
At 17, according to Heinrich Blochmann, an 18th-century translator of Akbar’s official chronicle Akbar Nama, she was wed to another transplanted courtier who had previously served in Persia, Ali Quli Beg Istajlu, upon whom Akbar’s son Shah Salim conferred the title Sher Afkan (Lion Slayer) because of his courage in battle. The union produced Mihrunissa’s only child, her daughter, Ladli Begam. When Salim ascended to the throne in 1605, he adopted the imperial name Nur-ud-din Muhammad Jahangir Badshah Ghazi, or, more concisely, Jahangir (World Conqueror). Two years later, Mihrunissa’s husband was killed in an altercation with the governor of Bengal and his officers.
Royal diarist Mu’tamid Khan, in his Iqbal Nama, recalled that some four years after the Lion Slayer’s death, during the spring new year celebrations of 1611, Mihrunissa “caught the King’s far-seeing eye, and so captivated him that he included her amongst the intimates of his select harem.” They were married less than two months later, on May 25. She was just shy of 35; he was 41. Among the last of many wives, Mihrunissa became Jahangir’s favorite and chief consort.
“Day by day her influence and dignity increased,” Khan observed. Distinguished from other ladies of the court, she enjoyed lofty titles including Nur Mahal (Light of the Palace), Nur Jahan Begam (Lady Light of the World) and Padshah Begam (Imperial Lady), until Nur Jahan (Light of the World) became her ultimate title.
Part of her growing power came from the custom of appointing family members to high court positions: Her father became chief minister; her mother became chief matron of the harem; her brother Asaf Khan became head of the royal household and his daughter Arjumand (Nur Jahan’s niece) married Jahangir’s son Shah Khurram. Her influence was such that Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert took note of where real power rested. “[Jahangir] is King in name only, while [Nur Jahan] and her brother Asaf Khan hold the kingdom firmly in their hands,” Pelsaert remarked. “If anyone with a request to make at Court obtains an audience or is allowed to speak, the King hears him indeed, but will give no definite answer of Yes or No, referring him promptly to Asaf Khan, who in the same way will dispose of no important matter without communicating with his sister, the Queen.”
Another of Jahangir’s diarists, Muhammad Hadi, surmised that nothing “was wanting to make her an absolute monarch,” but the symbolic “reading of the khutba [Friday sermon] in her name.” Not only did she conduct administrative business with the public, but nobles came to “receive her commands. Coins were struck in her name, and the royal seal … bore her signature.”
A character sketch by Venetian Niccolao Manucci, in his history of the Mughal court, qualified Nur Jahan as “a woman of great judgment, and of verity, worthy to be a queen.”
In part, her power was compensatory. The emperor was a self-confessed alcoholic and opium addict. Hadi reported that Jahangir “used to say that Nur Jahan Begam has been selected and is wise enough to conduct the matters of State” while all he desired was “a bottle of wine and piece of meat to keep himself merry.”
As Jahangir’s health declined, he continued to praise Nur Jahan’s “skill and experience” as “greater than those of the physicians,” and he poignantly credited her “affection and sympathy” for diminishing “the number of my cups [and keeping] me from things that did not suit me.”
It is in this context that historians most remember Nur Jahan. She juggled the care of her chronically ill husband with the demands of the empire, and she did so famously. “It is impossible to describe the beauty and wisdom of the Queen. In any matter that was presented to her, if a difficulty arose, she immediately solved it,” wrote Khan.
The range of her accomplishments bears out their praise. In commerce, she turned land grants (jagirs) given to her by Jahangir into profit centers. She collected shrewdly calculated duties on imports, Pelsaert noted, “of innumerable kinds of grain, butter, and other provisions.” She owned her own ships that sailed to and from Arabia, Persia and Africa, trading spices, ginger and dyes for perfumes, ceramics, ivory, amber and pearls. She managed rivalries by playing the English off the Dutch and the Portuguese off them both, granting trade concessions (primarily for indigo and embroidered cloth) for sizeable fees.
She used wealth and influence to support painters, poets and musicians. Especially keen was her interest in designs for building that impacted Mughal architecture: Her fondness for the domestic art of embroidery, for example, is reflected in ornamental reliefs in the tomb of her father in Agra.
Her refined tastes were also evident in the “very expensive buildings” she erected “in all directions—sarais, or halting-places for travelers and merchants, and pleasure-gardens and palaces such as no one has ever made before,” Pelsaert wrote. She designed, among others, the famed Achabal Gardens in Kashmir state, with its lavish array of fruit trees, fountains and a man-made waterfall illuminated at night from behind by “innumerable lamps,” wrote the gobsmacked French physician Francois Bernier, who traveled almost a century later.
Yet Nur Jahan could also be as thrifty as a village housewife. On one occasion recounted by 18th-century Delhi historian Khafi Khan, Jahangir, upon questioning the expense of finely embroidered caparisons for the royal elephants, was pleased to learn that Nur Jahan spent “practically nothing on them,” having them instead made by palace tailors from used mail bags.
When it came to her own couture, she pioneered what would be regarded today as a line of designer clothing. She set fashion trends at court with her designs of silver-threaded brocades (badla) and lace (kinari), light-weight, floral-patterned cotton and muslin textiles (panch-toliya and dudami) for veils and gowns, and her own signature scent made from rose oil, Atri Jahangiri. For cost-conscious brides (and grooms), she is also credited with creating the (now traditional) nurmahali, an inexpensive set of wedding clothes. More than a gesture, her concern for the poor—especially poverty-stricken young women—was genuine. “She was an asylum for all sufferers,” Hadi recorded. “She must have apportioned about 500 girls in her lifetime, and thousands were grateful for her generosity.”
Yet when the need arose, she swapped flowery gowns for battle gear. Ambushed by rebel forces on her way to Kabul with Jahangir in 1626, Nur Jahan directed the imperial army’s defense from atop a war elephant. When a female servant beside her was shot with an arrow in her arm, the queen “herself pulled it out, staining her garments with blood,” Hadi reported.
Nur Jahan was praised also by her husband for her skill with a hunting gun from the teetering perch of an elephant litter. In his memoirs, he recorded how she shot four tigers with six bullets, acknowledging that “an elephant is not at ease when it smells a tiger and is continually in movement, and to hit with a gun from a litter (imari) is a very difficult matter.”
An unnamed poet present during the hunt was moved to compose the following verse:
That rebellion of 1626 stemmed from earlier unrest stirred up by Shah Khurram, who envied Nur Jahan’s influence over his father. When Jahangir died in 1627, a war of succession followed. Nur Jahan attempted to enthrone Shahryar, the youngest of Jahangir’s sons, who had married Nur Jahan’s daughter, Ladli Begam. But Shahryar was slain, and Shah Khurram ascended the throne as Shah Jahan. The “Light of the World” did not interfere further, and she lived for 19 more years in quiet retirement in Lahore with her widowed daughter.
Putting aside finery, she is said to have worn simple white clothing and abstained from parties and social functions. Her life drew to a close on December 17, 1645, at the age of 68. She is buried in Lahore, in a mausoleum of her own design, upon which this epitaph to her grace and modesty is etched:
Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva. Calligraphy is by Soraya Syed. The logo graphics are produced by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).
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The reign of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I ("the Magnificent"), from 1520 to 1566, was the empire's golden age. Equally impressive was the century and a half that followed, the Kadinlar Saltanati, or the "Sultanate of Women." During this era, a succession of politically savvy royal women directed much of the government's affairs, often as regents for underage male sultans. First among them was a woman who came to the palace as a slave and eventually played a role in foreign and domestic affairs and served as an intimate political advisor to the sultan.
Europeans knew her as Roxolana, meaning "a girl from Roxolania," the medieval Latin name for Ukraine. Her Ottoman name was Haseki Hürrem Sultan, from haseki (favored wife or royal consort) and hürrem, meaning "joyful" or "laughing one." According to legend, she was born Anastasia (or Aleksandra) Lisowska, around 1505 in western Ukraine. Abducted by Crimean slavers at age 15, she arrived in Constantinople (today's Istanbul) where she was supposedly purchased by Ibrahim Pasha as a gift for his boyhood friend and soon-to-be-sultan Suleiman.
Others say Roxolana was assigned first to the royal laundry, where her skills as an embroiderer were matched only by her musicianship. As the story goes, Suleiman was passing by the laundry when he overheard her singing and playing Ukranian songs. Stumblingly conversant in Slavic, the sultan "stopped to talk with her in her outlandish speech," and was immediately smitten, as his 1951 biographer Harold Lamb recounted.
While smacking of fairly tale, the story suggests it was Roxolana's wit and intelligence that made her stand out. Indeed, Venetian ambassador Pietro Bragadin described Roxolana as "young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite."
Once Suleiman officially noticed Roxolana (laying a handkerchief across her shoulder was the court custom), she became the third most powerful woman in the palace after Suleiman's mother, Hafsa, the valide sultan, or "queen mother," and his qadin sultan, or first lady, Mahidevran, mother of Suleiman's eldest son, Mustafa.
Clashes with mahidevran were swift in coming. By 1526 the Venetian ambassadors-meticulous observers of court politics and intrigues-had noted that Suleiman favored Roxolana. Envoy Bernardo Navagero wrote that Mahidevran confronted her, shouting, "Traitor, sold meat [i.e., "bought in the bazaar"]. You want to compete with me?" as she clawed Roxolana with her nails. Later summoned, Roxolana sent word to Suleiman that she was not presentable. Baffled, he demanded to see her. She "related to him what had happened ... showing her face, which still bore the scratches." Mahidevran confessed, adding brassily that "she had done less to [Roxolana] than she deserved." This "inflamed the sultan even more," and "all his love was given to the other"—Roxolana.
She started by defying the harem's century-old "one mother-one son" policy, preventing a royal consort from bearing more than one heir. Between 1521 and 1531, she had a son, Mehmed; a daughter, Mihrimah; and then four more sons: Abdullah, Selim, Bayezid and Cihangir. In 1541 she defied another royal tradition by remaining in Constantinople rather than accompanying Mehmed to his first administrative post in the provinces. (Normally, only upon the sultan's death would the mother of the eldest male heir be permitted to return to the capital, where she would then assume the role of valide sultan.) She shattered another, far greater tradition by becoming the sultan's wife.
"This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans," remarked one Genoese ambassador in an undated letter. "The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave-woman from Russia, called Roxolana [sic], and there has been great feasting."
The wedding, in 1533 or 1534, was Suleiman's most public declaration that he was "deeply devoted" to Roxolana, wrote historian Leslie Pierce. As the Venetian Navagero observed: "There has never been a woman in the Ottoman palace who had more power than she."
The royal couple's correspondence highlights their passion.
Nevertheless, Roxolana eliminated potential rivals by persuading Suleiman to marry off the prettiest of the young women in the harem. She also (happily, no doubt) waved goodbye to Mahidevran in 1533, when the qadin followed Mustafa to his first official, provincial appointment. A year later, Hafsa died, leaving Roxolana mistress of the harem, at least pro tempore, as Mahidevran remained rightfully next in line to become valide sultan.
But another rival remained: Ibrahim, now grand vizier. Though one of Suleiman’s closest confidants, Ibrahim developed his own aspirations to the throne. After a decade or so of honors, wealth and ever-increasing authority, Ibrahim grew arrogant and “was much hated,” ambassador Bragadin wrote. Ibrahim ran his own military campaigns and even referred to himself as “sultan” in negotiations. His fall was swift: On March 15, 1536, servants found him with his throat cut.
While Suleiman ordered the execution, Roxolana was rumored as its architect. To historians, this remains “a matter of conjecture,” wrote Galina Yermolenko, author of Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture, and yet Roxolana “might have exploited the rumors against Ibrahim and influenced Suleiman’s decision.” As early as 1526, Pierce noted, Roxolana informed Suleiman of tensions with Ibrahim and lost little time securing the newly vacant post for Rustem, husband of her daughter, Mihrimah.
In 1541 a fire in the Old Palace inched her closer to the pinnacle of power. Located in the center of the city, the Old Palace was the official residence for both the sultan and the harem. The newer Topkapı Palace, on a promontory over-looking the Bosporus, served as seat of the court. After the fire, Roxolana convinced Suleiman to relocate the harem to Topkapı. The move permitted her to be at Suleiman’s side constantly, where she could advise him more closely on political matters. Writing to him while he was away, she informed him of plagues infesting the city and warned him of potential unrest. She also corresponded with the king of Poland regarding the suppression of the Crimean slave trade—a subject of doubtless personal interest.
Highest among Roxolana’s priorities, however, was the welfare of her sons. The Ottoman law of imperial succession mandated fratricide to prevent princely inheritance squabbles. If Mustafa succeeded Suleiman, her four surviving sons were doomed. (Abdullah had died as a child.)
Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva. Calligraphy is by Soraya Syed. The logo graphics are produced by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).
Little is known about her origins, including her given name and her year of birth in the early 13th century. The name she was known by, “Shajarat al-Durr” (“Tree of Pearls”), is said to have been inspired by her fondness for the jewel of the sea. Legends say she came from royal Arab stock, but historians agree she was most likely born in present-day Armenia to a family of nomadic Kipchak Turks, known to Western medieval chroniclers as “the blonde ones” and among whom women often held high status. “I have witnessed in this country a remarkable thing, namely the respect in which women are held by them,” recalled 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta.
Around the time of Shajarat al-Durr’s birth, Mongols were sweeping west across Asia, absorbing some Kipchak tribes and settlements while displacing and dispersing others. Some were taken captive and sold to other peoples—including the ruling Ayyubids of Egypt. Shajarat al-Durr’s first husband, Sultan Al-Malik al-Salih, in fact, was the first to bring large numbers of Kipchaks to Cairo. The men became military servants, known as Mamluks, while Shajarat al-Durr, like other women, entered the harem.
In his history of the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, Cairo-born Al-Makrisi, a biographer, historian and poet of the 14th and 15th centuries, wrote that the sultan “loved her so desperately that he carried her with him to his wars, and never quitted her.” In 1239, she bore a son, Khalil, and in 1240, Shajarat al-Durr and the sultan were married. This freed the bride of servitude, but their son died in infancy, and she bore none further.
Al-Salih, however, already had a son in southeastern Turkey, the troublesome Turan Shah, a child by his first wife. As a result, al-Salih relied greatly on his wife, whose Kipchak roots aided the Ayyubid sultan in mobilizing Mamluk troops to task—first in maintaining his immediate domain, Egypt, and then in extending dominion into Syria. It was this, “her ability to counsel her husband on matters of the state, including military campaigns,” that has garnered Shajarat al-Durr the most attention from biographers today, says historian Mona Russell of East Carolina University and author of Creating the New Egyptian Woman (2004). Writing not long after Shajarat al-Durr’s own lifetime, one Syrian chronicler called her “the most cunning woman of her age.”
Her acumen became widely apparent in the spring of 1249. Sultan al-Salih, campaigning in Syria, learned that the armies of the Seventh Crusade, led by Louis ix of France, were sailing for Egypt, aiming to land 1,800 ships and 50,000 men in the Nile Delta city of Damietta. Shajarat al-Durr, acting as regent in Cairo, dispatched al-Salih’s top commander, Fakhr al-Din, to Damietta while she led the Mamluks in garrisoning Cairo.
Then came more bad news: The sultan had been wounded in battle. He was on his way back to Egypt by stretcher.
Louis landed at Damietta on June 6, 1249. Overwhelmed, the outnumbered Muslim troops abandoned the city, reported the 13th-century historian Ibn Wasil. They regrouped on the east bank of the Nile, about 100 kilometers northeast of Cairo, at al-Mansoura. There, the ailing al-Salih arrived, and he was joined at his bedside by Shajarat al-Durr. By late August, al-Salih’s health began to deteriorate with each passing day. Ibn Wasil described the situation as “a disaster without precedent … there was great grief and amazement, and despair fell upon the whole of Egypt.”
In November, Sultan Al-Malik al-Salih passed away. Bereaved yet determined to ensure the continuity of her husband’s dynasty and avoid revealing weakness to the Crusaders, Shajarat al-Durr recalled Turan Shah from Turkey and, until his arrival, arranged to conceal the sultan’s death.
She summoned Fakhr al-Din and al-Salih’s head eunuch, Jamal al-Din, who was in charge of the Mamluks, “to inform them of the death of the sultan, and to request their assistance in supporting the weight of government at such a critical period,” wrote Al-Makrisi.
Their deception required an elaborate conspiracy. All orders from the sultan were in fact signed by Jamal al-Din, who forged his master’s signature. (Other sources say Shajarat al-Durr had al-Salih sign batches of blank documents before he died.) A doctor was also let in on the secret, and he was seen visiting the sultan’s chamber daily.
Meals were brought to the door and tasted while singers and musicians performed outside the chambers. Meanwhile, Shajarat al-Durr arranged for a boat, and disguised in black robes, she accompanied her husband's body under cover of night up the Nile to Roda Island south of Cairo, where the Mamluk troops were stationed. There, she hid the corpse and issued orders—also forged—for construction to begin on al-Salih’s mausoleum.
In this way, for nearly three months, Shajarat al-Durr secretly directed the sultanate. Although Fakhr al-Din fell in battle, his forces began to repulse the Crusaders, and Turan Shah arrived in time for the defeat and capture of Louis.
Yet as successor to his father, Turan Shah quickly began making missteps.
“He had no confidence but in a certain number of favourites, whom he had brought with him from [Syria],” Al-Makrisi recorded, and this sidelined the Mamluks.
He demanded that Shajarat al-Durr hand over both his father’s treasure and her own jewels and trademark pearls. “The sultana, in alarm, implored the protection of the Mamluks,” reported Al-Makrisi. They were only too glad to come to her aid, considering “the services she had done the state in very difficult times” and the fact that Turan Shah was “a prince universally detested,” and Turan Shah was slain on May 2, 1250.
The Mamluks decided that “the functions of Sultan and ruler [of Egypt] should be assumed by Shajarat al-Durr,” Ibn Wasil recorded, adding that “decrees were to be issued at her command and ... [from] that time she became titular head of the whole state; a royal stamp was issued in her name with the formula ‘mother of Khalil,’ and the khutba [Friday sermon] was pronounced in her name as Sultana of Cairo and all Egypt.”
Although—to recall Ibn Battuta’s observations—the Mamluks were not unaccustomed to female potentates, she was entirely up to the job, “endowed … with great intelligence” and capacity for “the affairs of the kingdom,” noted Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli, a modern biographer and poet from Syria.
One of her first acts as sultana was to conclude a treaty with the Crusaders that returned Damietta and ransomed Louis ix. These terms she negotiated with her French counterpart, Queen Margaret of Provence. Thus the Seventh Crusade ended with the diplomacy of two queens—one Muslim and one Christian.
Not all supported her. The most stinging objection came from Baghdad, where Caliph al-Musta’sim is said to have declared: “We’ve heard that you are governed by a woman now. If you’ve run out of men in Egypt, let us know so we can send you a man to rule over you.” Wary of the far reach of Abbasid influence, the sultana and her council knew they needed to capitulate if they were to ultimately endure.
As Sultan of Delhi over the next quarter century, Shams-ud-din Iltutmish proved extraordinarily able. Backed by the umara chihalgani (forty amirs), the elite corps of Turkic nobles, he extended the Sultanate’s realm from the Khyber Pass, along today’s Afghanistan-Pakistan border, east to the Bay of Bengal, on the opposite side of the subcontinent. He won a reputation for courage, wisdom and generosity while staving off not only usurpers but also the armies of no less a threat than Genghis Khan. The strength of his sultanate allowed for endowments to religious and scholarly institutions, the standardization of a currency and support for poets and philosophers. Near what was to be the end of his reign, in 1229, he received a title and robes of honor from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.
A century later, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta noted Iltutmish was remembered for being “just, pious and of excellent character.” As an example, Ibn Battuta recorded Iltutmish’s decree that the seeking of justice be open to anyone who sought it, signaled by wearing a red-colored robe: “When [Iltutmish] held a public audience or rode out [from the royal court] and saw someone wearing a coloured robe he looked into his petition and rendered him his due from his oppressor.”
In short, upon his death in 1236, he had paved the way for his son Rukn-ud-din Firuz to inherit a stable, prosperous and highly cultured monarchy, if it hadn’t been for one thing: Firuz’s “inclinations were wholly towards buffoonery,” according to contemporary chronicler Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Firuz’s younger brother Bahram proved equally disappointing.
Aware of both his sons’ shortcomings, Iltutmish had a controversial backup plan in place: He designated the office of sultan to his eldest and most self-disciplined child: Radiyya, his daughter. The 16th-century Persian historian Firishta described her as imbued “of every good quality which usually adorns the ablest princes.” During her father’s reign, Firishta continued, “[she] employed herself frequently in the affairs of government; a disposition which he rather encouraged in her than otherwise, so that during the campaign in which he was engaged in the siege of Gualiar [modern Gwalior, a rival city south of Delhi], he appointed her regent during his absence.”
When the umara chihalgani questioned his appointment, Firishta recorded Iltutmish’s attempt to reason with them: “[My] sons give themselves up to wine and every other excess and none of them possesses the capability of managing the affairs of the country.” He added that Radiyya “was better than twenty such sons.”
None of this stopped Firuz from shoving his step-sister aside and seizing the throne for himself upon his father’s death in 1236. Or, more precisely, he had his mother, Shah Terken, do it for him. The harem’s chief concubine, Shah Terken was, according to Firishta,“a monster of cruelty.” Even before Iltutmish’s death, she had taken advantage of the umara chihalgani’s misgivings about Radiyya as a female ruler and bribed them to support Firuz.
After Iltutmish died, she set her sights quickly and directly on 31-year-old Radiyya. She arranged for a deep pit to be dug along the path where the princess frequently went horseback riding. However, the plot was discovered, and Radiyya was spared.
“The minds of the people revolted at these scenes,” wrote Firishta, and they began to rally around Radiyya. The amirs imprisoned Terken, and although they acted to advance Radiyya to the throne, Firuz retaliated militarily. This brought on the stirring gesture for which Radiyya is most remembered: Recalling her father Iltutmish’s decree, on the eve of the battle, Radiyya appeared wearing not royal attire, but the red-colored robe of one who seeks a redress of grievance. She appealed directly to the people and the army, and thus defeated Firuz, who was captured and put to death—in all likelihood together with his mother—in November 1236.
Under Radiyya, “all things returned to their usual rules and customs,” Juzjani reported. “Sultan Radiyya was a great monarch,” he observed, employing the masculine form of her title. “She was wise, just and generous, a benefactor to her kingdom, a dispenser of justice, the protector of her subjects, and the leader of her armies … endowed with all the qualities befitting a king,” he recorded.
Still, the chronicler felt compelled to editorialize: “[B]ut she was not born of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men, all these virtues were worthless.”
This, in fact, was what the power-hungry umara chihalgani was hoping for: a “worthless,” subservient woman they could manipulate from behind the scenes. But Radiyya, it seems, was neither so easily fooled nor foiled. Appearing unveiled in public during the traditional royal procession, she used her first official act as sultan to set the tone for her reign as one of self-assertion and even defiance.
“She ruled as an absolute monarch [and] mounted a horse like a man, armed with bow and quiver, and without veiling her face,” Ibn Battuta reported. Other historic accounts say she cut her hair short and, wearing men’s robes, sat among the people in the marketplace to listen to their grievances and render judgments.
Not only did she rule astutely, but also, as historian Peter Jackson noted, she was the only sultan of her time whom Juzjani described as a military commander. Like her father, she took diplomatic steps to keep the Mongols in check, but she also put down insurgencies: She crushed a rebellion by one of the old guard who objected to her on the grounds of her sex, and she campaigned against other rival incursions. Surviving coins minted in her name were imprinted with “commander of the faithful” and “most mighty sultan.”
While all this may have irked the umara chihalgani, its members didn’t feel compelled to do much about it until Radiyya started threatening their job security by appointing an Ethiopian slave, Jamal ud-din Yaqut, to the post of Lord of the Stables (Amir-i akhur, or amir of horses, i.e., Sultan’s equerry). The job commanded great prestige because it put him in daily, ear-whispering distance of the sultan. Peppering the court with spies, the nobles began digging for dirt. Lacking anything concrete, they fell back on one of the oldest political tricks in the smear-campaign handbook.
“A very great degree of familiarity was observed to exist between [Yaqut] and the Queen,” wrote Firishta. Whether or not Radiyya shared more than just a master-subject relationship with Yaqut will never be truly known. What ultimately mattered, according to Jackson, “was that Radiyya sought to develop a power-base of her own and neglected the Turkish slave elite which she and Firuz had inherited from their father. Her dependence on Yaqut and his promotion to the rank of intendant of the imperial stables must be seen in this context.”
To extinguish the threat, the amirs began openly to challenge the sultan. But Radiyya was beloved by the citizens, especially in Delhi, and the amirs knew that overthrowing her on her home turf would prove difficult. In the spring of 1240, they convinced one of their fellow amirs, the provincial governor of Bhatinda, Malik (King) Altunapa, to conjure up a rebellion in the Punjab as bait to lure Radiyya away from Delhi.
While she was away, the umara chihalgani had Yaqut murdered, and then they dusted off her hapless half-brother Bahram and set him on the throne.
Worse yet for Radiyya, the Bhatinda campaign proved a rout. She was captured, and Altunapa imprisoned her. Then, in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist of fate, she and Altunapa, whether from love or ambition or both, married, and he pledged to reinstate her as sultan.
The newlyweds marched upon Delhi, hoping for triumph, but their army was no match for the forces the amirs rallied around Bahram. Deserted by their troops after a humiliating retreat, Radiyya and Altunapa, according to Juzjani, were captured and executed by Hindus near the Punjab city of Kaithal on December 25, 1240. She was 35 years old.
Ibn Battuta, however, recorded a more embellished account of her death: Defeated, Radiyya stumbled into a farmer’s field, hungry and exhausted, begging for food. The farmer gave her a crust of bread, and she fell asleep beneath a tree. Catching sight of jewels glinting in the embroidery of her garments, the farmer killed her and buried her, and “taking some of her garments, he went to the market to sell them.” The plan backfired when local authorities suspected the farmer of theft, beat a confession out of him and recovered Radiyya’s body. (To this day, the actual location of Radiyya’s grave remains uncertain: Delhi, Kaithal and Tonk, in Rajasthan state, all claim the honor.)
Not unexpectedly, Radiyya’s half-brother Bahram was deposed for incompetence after two years on the throne. The sultanate itself endured two more centuries until it fell to the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur.
Of all the sultans of Delhi, Radiyya is perhaps the best remembered in popular culture, even eight centuries later. The subject of poems, plays, novels, Bollywood films of highly varying quality and, last year, an epic mini-series on Indian television, she continues to capture the social imagination of India and the world.
Art direction for the “Malika” series is by Ana Carreño Leyva; calligraphy is by Soraya Syed; and the logo graphics are by Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).
The story of Khayzuran is one of rags to riches, captivity to sovereignty. Born in the southwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula around the middle of the eighth century, a bit more than 100 years after the death of Prophet Muhammad, she was kidnapped by slave traders while still a child. Sometime between 758 and 765, she was sold in Makkah to none other than the founder of Baghdad, Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, who gave her to his son and successor, al-Mahdi.
She bore al-Mahdi a daughter and two sons, both of whom became caliphs—one the renowned Harun al-Rashid. By the time of her death in 789, her annual income had reached 160 million dirhams, which was roughly half of the entire state revenue, according to the 10th-century historian al-Masudi. Her personal wealth made her “undoubtedly, next to [her son Caliph Harun al-Rashid], the richest person in the Moslem world of her day,” observes historian Nabia Abbott, whose Two Queens of Baghdad: Mother and Wife of Harun al-Rashid is a seminal work in Middle Eastern women’s studies.
Khayzuran’s path to political power, like that of many women in the long era predating today’s nation-states, was via the royal haram, or women’s quarters. A favorite of al-Mahdi, she enjoyed a level of trust that rivaled, and may have exceeded, that of Rita, al-Mahdi’s first wife and cousin whose origins could not have differed more from Khayuran’s: Rita was a royal, the daughter of Abu Abbas Abdullah, founder of the Abbasid empire.
A brief statement in al-Tabari’s monumental, ninth-century History of the Prophets and Kings shows al-Mahdi’s regard for his first lady of the haram: “In this year [775] al-Mahdi manumitted his slave girl … al-Khayzuran and married her.” At a time when caliphs were expected to marry fellow members of the aristocracy, elevating Khayzuran to queen was “a bold break with convention,” modern historian Hugh Kennedy has observed.
And not unsurprisingly, the medieval Arab chronicles indicate that this led to court intrigue: The high-born ladies of the Abbasid court sneered at Khayzuran’s presence, yet she is said to have deflected their snobbery with cordial grace. Though history provides no evidence of direct tension between Rita and Khayzuran, the fact that the latter’s sons—Musa al-Hadi and Harun al-Rashid—were named as heirs to the caliphate while the former’s were never even considered indicates Rita’s “tacit recognition of the futility of challenging” Khayzuran, Abbot speculates.
Described as “slender and graceful as a reed,” according to Abbott (khayzuran is Arabic for “reed”), she hardly relied on beauty alone for her success. She was intelligent, freely quoted poetry and studied the Qur’an, hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) and law at the feet of leading scholars.
She is also said to have enjoyed practical jokes and shared al-Mahdi’s sense of humor, such as privately mocking Caliph al-Mansur’s flashes of temper. Yet when it came to governing, she was all business: “At the opening of [her first son al-Hadi’s] caliphate, al-Khayzuran used to exercise her authority over him in all his affairs without consulting him at all ... assuming sole control over matters of ordaining and forbidding, just as she had done previously with his father,” al-Tabari remarks on al-Hadi’s accession upon al-Mahdi’s death in 785.
The new caliph chafed at his mother’s dominance. Perhaps it was because al-Hadi didn’t live up to Khayzuran’s expectations, or perhaps he resented her long-standing preference for his younger brother, Harun al-Rashid. The discord did not last long: Al-Hadi died the following year. (Rumors circulated that Khayzuran had him poisoned, but there is no authoritative account.) Harun al-Rashid became caliph of an empire from Morocco to Persia and ushered in the zenith of the Abbasid era. When his mother died in 789, the caliph displayed the depths of his grief and devotion by helping to shoulder her bier, barefoot, through the mud.
The histories do not detail Khayzuran’s political achievements, but coins were struck in her name, palaces were named for her, and the cemetery in which subsequent Abbasid rulers were laid to rest also carried her name, all testifying not only to status but also to a civic largesse. Notably, she passed on this sense of civic duty to Amat al-Aziz, known to history by the unflattering if sonorous name Zubayda.
Zubayda was both Khayzuran’s niece and, after Zubayda’s marriage to Harun al-Rashid, her daughter-in-law. It was her grandfather, al-Mansur, who no doubt intended affection in nicknaming her Zubayda (which means “Little Butter Ball”) “on account of her plumpness” as a child, according to 13th-century biographer Ibn Khalikhan.
As an adult, the chronicler goes on to say, her “charity was ample, her conduct virtuous.” He adds that in her chambers, a hundred slave girls tasked with memorizing the Qur’an recited one-tenth of it daily, “so that her palace resounded with a continual humming like that of bees.”
Born into the lap of the extreme luxury of the Abbasid Empire at its zenith, Zubayda quickly developed extravagant tastes. According to al-Zubayr’s 11th-century Book of Gifts and Rarities—a sort of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” of its day—the cost of her wedding, “the likes of which had never ... been seen in [Islamic] times,” ran to 50 million dinars. (For comparison, the annual cost of living for an average family in Baghdad was about 240 dinars.) The event featured a waistcoat encrusted with rubies and pearls “whose value could not be assessed” for the bride; guests received gifts of gold dinars in silver bowls and silver dinars in golden bowls.
A trendsetter of high style, Zubayda was “the first to introduce the fashion for slippers embroidered with precious stones and for candles made of ambergris—fashions which spread to the public,” according to al-Masudi. On state occasions, it was said, she “could scarcely walk under the weight of her jewelry and dresses,” and she had to be propped up by servants.
Yet she spent no less lavishly on public works, to her enduring renown. She made at least five pilgrimages to Makkah, as it was on her fifth, in 805, that she was distressed to see that drought had devastated the populace and reduced the sacred well of Zamzam to a mere trickle. She ordered that the well be deepened, and she spent nearly 2 million dinars improving the water supply of Makkah and the surrounding province.
This included the construction of an aqueduct from the spring of Hunayn, 95 kilometers to the east, as well as the famed “Spring of Zubayda” on the plain of Arafat, one of the ritual locations on the Hajj. When her engineers cautioned her about the expense, never mind the technical difficulties, she replied that she was determined to carry out the work “were every stroke of a pickax to cost a dinar,” according to Ibn Khalikhan.
Beyond Makkah, she financed one of the greatest public-works projects of the era: construction of a 1,500-kilometer darb (road) from Kufa, south of Baghdad, all the way to Makkah, complete with water stations at regular intervals and hilltop fire beacons to guide travelers at night. Her contemporary historian al-Azraqi declares that “people of Makkah and the pilgrims owe their very life to [Zubayda] next to God,” and pilgrim cries of “God bless Zubayda” echoed for generations along the route that is still called Darb Zubayda. (It fell into disuse when pilgrims opted for rail, auto and air travel over camel caravans.)
In a personally painful decision, in 813 Zubayda put the interests of the state ahead of her own flesh and blood by ultimately endorsing her stepson al-Ma’mun’s accession to caliph when her own son, Caliph al-Amin, became intolerably corrupt. Her instincts were on the mark, and the cultured al-Ma’mun proved to be a just and erudite ruler who founded Baghdad’s famed think tank, bayt al-hikma (house of wisdom), which became a center for the translation into Arabic of Greek, Roman and other classical texts that not only informed the Abbasid intellectual milieu, but also later became foundations of the European Renaissance.
Zubayda died in 831, yet her reputation as a woman of influence lived on in both history and literature. Her husband, Harun al-Rashid, became the protagonist caliph in the European collection of alf layla wa layla (1001 Nights), and it was Zubayda who became the real-life basis for the very fictional Scheherazade.
Art direction for the “Malika” series: Ana Carreño Leyva; calligraphy: Soraya Syed; logo graphics: Mukhtar Sanders (www.inspiraldesign.com).