This volume in the now well-established series of the New York University Press, the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), addresses a subject which fascinates the non-Muslim common reader, woman or man: “Women in Islam”. But its characters are far from the languorous Orientalist images of Delacroix and his like. The thirteenth-century compiler Ibn al-Sāʿī’s focus is on women of great culture and refinement who are capable of holding their own against the renowned poets of their age, or else who are founders of institutions of learning and dispensers of charity.

Julia Bray's introduction offers a thoughtful presentation of the writer, his times (the last years of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate and its collapse with the Mongol invasion) and his motives for compiling this book; she concludes that he was a fervent supporter of the ruling dynasty, to which he devoted a good part of his (now lost) literary output. Discussing the book's contents, she observes the gradual change from the earlier sections, depicting beautiful and witty slave-girls, caliphs' possessions, who are poets and singers, to the later ones, in which the consorts are virtuous, models of piety, and public benefactors. She characterizes it as “an essay in cultural memory”, conceived during the reign of the last ʿAbbāsid caliph and with no suggestion of the disaster to come. One could argue, however, that the theme of death, present from the very beginning of the book and recurring regularly (cf. Hilary Kilpatrick, “Some late ʿAbbāsid and Mamlūk books about women. A literary historical approach”, Arabica XLII, 1995, 64–9, especially 65–6) is an indirect pointer to the fall of the dynasty.

Shawkat Toorawa explains the principles of his edition, which is based on the single surviving manuscript and draws on insights from an earlier publication of it. Given the state of the manuscript and the existence of a competent earlier edition, preparing the Arabic text will have been relatively simple. The challenge was to provide an English version which was accurate, readable, and which conveyed the elegant and witty flavour of the original. Speaking for the team of translators, Toorawa explains the choices made to render the English version accessible and enjoyable for a non-specialist public. He traces the history of the translation, the original draft of which was made before the inception of LAL in 2009 but was later ditched. His description of the stages the translation went through before it was finally published, and of the collaboration on which it was based, deserves to be read and pondered by anyone planning to render a Classical Arabic text accessible to the general public.

The translators have made intelligent decisions. They retain the Arabic names of the consorts, but when these are slaves, the names are translated in the titles of their sections. The isnāds (chains of authorities) which introduce the individual pieces of information, with their lists of unfamiliar and, for the average reader, meaningless names are rendered less forbidding by being put in the present tense and translated in various ways. And like the characters mentioned in the items of information, the authorities are given concise identifications in the glossary of names. The prose sections read fluently and idiomatically; endnotes explain allusions and occasional unexpected translation choices. The poetry, generally the greatest challenge for a translator, is more uneven. Arabic poetry has rhyme and metre, and the team has apparently paid most attention to the problem of rhyme, trying to make the verses rhyme where the context requires it, or sometimes resorting to half-rhyme or assonance. The renderings in many sections demonstrate their skill in finding appropriate solutions. But they have perhaps been less concerned with rhythm, and occasionally not repeating a word where the sense is clear would have made the rendering more fluent.

Ibn al-Sāʿī’s text, with its brief sections, illustrates a common approach to the portrayal of personalities in medieval Arabic belles-lettres. Salient moments in the subject's life are the focus of attention, and it is left to the reader to imagine what led up to them and what were their consequences. After a separation lasting 40 years, Malik Shāh's concubine Khātūn found and was reunited with her mother; Sitt al-Nisā’ the daughter of Ṭūlūn, who had been famous for her extravagance and generosity, was recognized as she begged in a market in Baghdad, but she refused any help except a good meal; al-Hādī’s concubine Ghādir, who had taken a vow not to marry his brother Hārūn al-Rashīd if he died, did marry the new caliph but died after dreaming that her former master was cursing her. In a different literary tradition, reports such as these could be at the core of a longer work of fiction; here the reader is left to ponder them – and do with them what s/he will.

All those associated with introducing, editing and translating this text, representative of much of medieval Arabic belles-lettres, are to be congratulated on making it accessible to the scholarly and more general public. It deserves to be perused in particular by all those curious about “Women in Islam”.