Crossing the topics of religious studies, gender, and hagiography, Thurlkill juxtaposes the images of Mary and Fatima as they were constructed by late antique and medieval thinkers for various theological and political purposes. In addition to hagiography and the writings of the church fathers, Thurlkill discusses how Merovingian authors used the sacralized legend of the Virgin Mary to emphasize conservative gender ideals even as they functioned to make sense of queens and powerful abbesses. Likewise, she shows how medieval twelver Shi'ite authors employed Fatima (the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, wife to his cousin ‘Ali, and mother to Hasan and Hussain, the second and third imams from whom the line of both “twelver” and Isma'ili Shi'ite imams proceed through the progeny of Hussain) to reinforce the domestic role of Shi'ite women within a patriarchal system while simultaneously bolstering the sanctity of the family of the prophet. In emphasizing how religious thinkers used Mary and Fatima as “symbols to think with” (68), Thurlkill provides a helpful commentary on how feminine images became cultural capital within their respective spheres of religious expression.
The value of a comparative work such as Thurlkill's, which relies on a theoretical rather than strictly historical basis for its comparison, lies in its ability to create seemingly strange bedfellows. It forces the reader to blur the all-too-defined line in scholarship between Christian studies and Islamic studies, between late antique history and medieval history. It uses the scholarly category of gender studies to examine, side by side, the sacralization of women's bodies across religious traditions and serves as a reminder of the human dimension of religious expression that comes before academic definitions of religions.
However, the danger in a purely theoretical comparison or in a comparison that deals with two separate geographical and temporal traditions exists in the appearance of coincidence and superficiality. Thankfully, Thurlkill's study is neither coincidental nor superficial (quite the opposite). Nevertheless, as a historical comparison, her study comes off as a bit weak because it sidesteps the very place and time where the Christian traditions of late antiquity and developing Shi'ite traditions coincided: Iraq in the early Islamic era. When the Muslim armies invaded Mesopotamia, they encountered thriving Jewish, “pagan,” Christian, and Zoroastrian communities. Specifically, the newly created Islamic tent cities of Kufa and Basra, where the Muslim armies of the East settled and eventually transformed into centers of radical protest against the Umayyads, lay astride the remnants of the Christian Arab kingdom of al-Hira. Likewise, northern Mesopotamian cities like Edessa and Mosul boasted thriving Eastern Christian communities (the Assyrian Christians) as well as a highly sophisticated hagiographical tradition (one that rivals its Western counterpart in sheer volume alone). Contrary to popular conceptions, Muslims did not live separate lives from their non-Muslim counterparts: an Assyrian Christian bishop resided in Basra, and Christian Arab tribes participated in some of the conquests. Moreover, it was in Iraq where the first organized expressions of what would later become Shi'ism proper can be found. Is it not appropriate, then, to consider early Islamic Mesopotamia as the melting pot wherein notions and stories of sacred women would have mixed? Is Iraq not, then, the keystone that connects late antique Christianity with medieval Shi'ism? Because such historical context is missing from Thurlkill's analysis, her comparison of late antique Merovingian treatments of Mary with medieval Shi'ite discussions of Fatima lacks the historical glue that would have finally cemented her argument into place.
Thurlkill's bibliography is impressive, especially when one considers the amount of material required to address her topic. All the same, there remain some holes. For example, she does not engage Abdulaziz Sachedina's study Islamic Messianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), which would have provided a means to reflect on another religious phenomenon that is shared by both Christians and Shi'ite Muslims, and to do so in the context of the early Shi'ite groups that emerge in Kufa. Likewise, she neglects to engage Michael Morony's Iraq After the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). As I maintain above, Mesopotamia is where historical interaction between Christians and early Shi'ites occurred primarily and most profoundly. Morony documents the religious groups of early Islamic Iraq, an exercise that could provide a window into the historical comparisons that Thurlkill's book lacks. Another model for how religious ideas percolate from one tradition into the next is Elizabeth Fowden's The Barbarian Plain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), also missing from the bibliography, which deals with the late antique hagiography of St. Sergius and includes a chapter on St. Sergius's image in the early Islamic period.
Thurlkill's study is to be welcomed as a bridge connecting gender studies, Christian studies, and Islamic studies, and as an indicator of directions for future research. It is hoped that scholars like Thurlkill will continue to transcend the self-imposed boundaries of their disciplines, if only because their subjects, in this case Muslims and Christians, acted in relation to the narratives of sacred women in profoundly similar ways.
