Poetry is the Arabs’ mine of knowledge and the book of their wisdom, the archives of their news, the repository of their days, the erected wall that protects their feats, the trench that keeps their glories, the impartial witness on the day of judgement, the decisive justification during disputes.Footnote 1
In ‘Uyun al-Akhbar, Ibn Qutayba (c. 828–89) consciously draws attention to the role of Arabic poetry as a repository of knowledge of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic era and as a rich archival source of the past. What Ibn Qutayba had to say of Arabic poetry is true of the premodern and Ottoman fragments of Arabic poetry in the Cairo Genizah, which are a “mine of knowledge” of medieval Cairene Jewish society, and an archival source of its history and daily life in Egypt and in the larger Arab and Mediterranean setting.
The archival and documentary nature of medieval Arabic poetry is a helpful source when examining the history of Arab women and their lives, including the Jewish community of medieval Cairo.Footnote 2 The Cairo Genizah collection, fragments dating roughly from the 13th to the 19th century and kept by the Jewish community in the Ben Ezra synagogue, contains a substantial amount of Arabic love poetry that can be treated as archival and documentary material. This article examines a number of Arabic love poems in the Genizah, for the first time arguing that these poems, especially petitionary love poems that contain dialogues demonstrate not only the agency and voice of Jewish women of this period but also the possibility of direct female composition. Studied together, the fragments highlight some daily aspects of the culture that produced such poetry, gender relations at the time, and the interaction that took place between Egyptian and Islamic society and Jewish society. The challenges inherent to questions of female voice, agency, and authorship are crucial to this study. Specifically, how can we describe or understand the female voice in likely male writing? And how do love exchanges and dialogues help us understand the social context of gender relations in these communities?
It is impossible to ascertain whether the poems are based on real or fictive experiences, but some may well be based on real experiences and hold a semblance of truth. One of the poems to be examined, for example, is an elegy sung by a mother to her daughter, and quite often elegies are based on real experiences.Footnote 3 It is also possible that exchanges between lovers and their beloved are based on the poet/lover’s amorous encounters, even if the poetic dialogue is largely a figment of the imagination.Footnote 4 My treatment of the poems is, therefore, semifictive.
For this study I will use the critical lens of social anthropology to treat these poems as an expression of society. It is a lens that allows texts to tell us about the culture that produced them, dominant social relations, and values.Footnote 5 This approach highlights the archival and documentary aspects inherent in texts. Because these texts, in this case poems, are part of a lived experience, it is helpful to embed them first in the social fabric of female Jewish culture in medieval Cairo, as well as the larger Islamic culture. This is because “the cultural and social context of Genizah papers is Arab-Islamic civilization” and, I would add, Egyptian civilization as well.Footnote 6 It is equally useful to examine the way in which the Genizah poems differ from mainstream Hebrew love poetry; the women in the poems under study here are not represented as passive, but rather as active and vocal.
Except for one elegy by a mother for her deceased daughter, which holds the substantial possibility of being composed by a woman, the love poems to be discussed here are likely composed by men. As we shall see, they clearly open space for the female voice to act, react, and interact with the male lover. But how much education did Jewish women have that facilitated literary or nonliterary compositions like the elegy? What opportunity was there to have their voice embedded in love exchanges that reveal a degree of agency and personhood?
Female literacy is challenging to define in the Middle Ages in general. Borrowing Franz Bäuml’s term, many European medieval women could be regarded as “quasi-literate,” with possible knowledge of some Latin, while maintaining “a high degree of facility in the vernacular.”Footnote 7 Likewise, as we shall see, medieval Jewish women in the Mediterranean world could be considered quasi-literate, with knowledge of the Torah and the vernacular, and in some cases possessing levels of intellectual knowledge of and familiarity with classical Arabic literary works as well.
The question of female literacy is one that Shelomo Dov Goitein discusses in his seminal work on the Cairo Genizah. Despite his remark that the apparent lack of literary pieces written by women in the Genizah corpus is attributable to women’s lack of sufficient educational practices and skills, there is evidence of educated women and education in the Genizah.Footnote 8 One letter to Maimonides, for example, was from his sister Miriam.Footnote 9 Women also authored or dictated appeals to authorities, petitions, and wills.Footnote 10 More pertinent to our discussion is women’s encouragement of other women in the family to attain education, as in the case of a dying woman urging her sister to give her a daughter an education, or in the case of the blind female schoolteacher mentioned in a responsum of Maimonides.Footnote 11 Notably, in a letter of consolation a man named Barakat wrote to his sister Rayyisa, who was apparently educated enough for him to advise her to study Ecclesiastes and Proverbs for solace as well as the classic Arabic work al-Faraj ba‘d al-Shidda (Relief after Distress).Footnote 12 These examples represent literate women and give insight into their words and worlds.
One cannot ignore the question of female authorship or the ambiguities and complexities that surround it in the Middle Ages. Challenging as it is, it is still possible to speak of medieval women authors, “but not under modern definitions of the author.”Footnote 13 The assumption holds true because “authorship held a variety of meanings in the Middle Ages,” in different institutional and cultural contexts.Footnote 14 Women had their name on some works, wrote some anonymously or collaboratively, dictated others like the petitions and letters mentioned in the Genizah context, and facilitated the writing of works through their patronage of male authors.Footnote 15
In Genizah studies, letters and petitions “written” by women and usually dictated to a scribe are treated as “sources for women’s concerns” embodying “their words.”Footnote 16 Even when an uneducated woman dictated a letter, “her words underwent only minor text processing … the document [was] close to natural speech,” and still largely underscored her voice, character, an amount of education, and certainly a degree of agency and personhood.Footnote 17 When looking at the possibility of utterances by women in love poetry and elegies, I adopt the same stance as Genizah scholars who view women as “the writers of the petitions, even though they probably did not physically write them.”Footnote 18 It is the closest we can get to female poetic voices in the Cairo Genizah until further discoveries are made.
In the Islamic and Mediterranean world that surrounded the Cairo Genizah, women had more education in general than their European counterparts.Footnote 19 Medieval female authorship in this part of the world still held ambiguities and challenges, but perhaps was more pronounced with examples of poetic output by the likes of al-Khansa (c. 575–634), Wallada’s letters to Ibn Zaidoun (11th century), and Nazhun (12th century), among others.Footnote 20 Female authorship and poetic skills are recorded in Abu Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs).Footnote 21 In his book, al-Isfahani lists the lives and deeds of twenty-seven women performers whom men competed with, only to lose when faced with these women’s erudition and poetic talent.Footnote 22 In fiction, women had a voice with the tales of Scheherazade in the 1001 Nights, tales that included stories of real female performers and poetesses in the caliphal court.Footnote 23 As well, Arabic literature includes sīras (biographies) of female warriors and figures in Arab culture.Footnote 24 The Genizah preserved excerpts from the famous 1001 Nights and fragments of sīras in which women speak and play major roles.Footnote 25 Such examples contradict the stereotypical notion of female invisibility in Islamic cultures, especially when placed next to the contributions of the wives and mothers of caliphs across different spheres of politics, education, and the maintenance of pilgrimage routes.Footnote 26
Notably, the immediate and more concentrated context of the Genizah was the Egyptian society that the Genizah was part of. The number of women’s letters written in Arabic that have been preserved signal “a long epistolary tradition in Egypt” and focus on business matters.Footnote 27 But the female epistolary tradition goes even further back, to ancient Egypt.Footnote 28 Indeed, women’s petitions from Ptolemaic, Roman, and Late Antiquity Egypt make claims based on women’s helplessness in ways similar to the Genizah petitions.Footnote 29 The Egyptian, Islamic, and Jewish history of women’s literacy and agency allows us to consider further their voices in poetry, which may well be derived from real life exchanges and experiences, and the possibility of female authorship.
The differences noted in female agency in the Cairo Genizah Arabic poetry fragments underline a departure from mainstream Hebrew love poetry. Typical of love poetry in general, most love poems in Hebrew literature fall into two categories: descriptive love poems and petitionary love poems.Footnote 30 In the first, the poet describes the physical traits of the often-distant beloved, whereas in the second the poet seeks the beloved’s attention and implores her to requite his affection.Footnote 31 The categories inevitably overlap. The Genizah love poetry contains examples from each category. In Hebrew love poetry, however, the beloved is represented as a type rather than an individual.Footnote 32 Also, petitionary love poems in the Hebrew tradition concern the relationship and the lover’s feelings rather than the beloved and her “inner life.”Footnote 33 As we shall see, this is radically different from the Genizah fragments, in which at times the individuality of the beloved is emphasized, and her inner thoughts and life are given expression. The beloved has room to engage in dialogues or even initiate a conversation in Arabic poetry in the Genizah, unlike Hebrew poetry, which provides fewer instances of dialogues and agency.Footnote 34
The significance of exploring examples of female voice in the Genizah in which the women seem to speak directly underscores the representation of women as active players or speakers in poetry. More broadly, it is worth exploring the female voices in the Arabic poetry of the Cairo Genizah with the aim of contextualizing them within the literary network of Jewish female poetic voices across the Mediterranean. The geographic network included few but renowned women: Sarah of Yemen (6th century), composer of poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia whose tribe witnessed the rise of Islam; the anonymous wife of Dunash ibn Labrat (Andalusian; 10th century); and the anonymous wife of Qasmuna bint Isma‘il (Andalusian; 10th–11th centuries).Footnote 35 These poetesses and their output may be further proof of the possible female literary skills and agency we encounter in the Genizah fragments. The exploration of the female voices in these fragments expands the poetic map that stretches from Arabia in the east to Andalusia in the west, with the possibility of making literary and thematic connections across the writings of these female Jewish poetesses and women in the Cairo Genizah.
Comparing the fragments to be discussed with the corpus of medieval and early modern Arabic poetry shows that the poems are not copied from earlier Arabic sources and appear to be original to the Cairo Genizah. This leaves us with two possibilities: first, that they were composed by the Cairene Jewish community; second that they are copies of lost Arabic works. We cannot always confirm the exact provenance of the fragments but need to work around this and other challenges, ranging from anonymous authorship to largely unverified dates. It is worth noting that, more often than not, the poems are in the Egyptian colloquial dialect, and some were probably orally performed and transmitted. Oral recitation remained crucial to cultural transmission and identity-making even after poetry was committed to writing.Footnote 36
I turn now to four fragments, considering women’s representations in love poems that mainly comprise extended dialogues. The women in these love poems range from seductress and possible victim to a deceased jealous woman speaking from the afterlife.
“Advise My Lover Not to Take Another Wife”
The first poem is a fragment in two leaves with holes in places, stained, rubbed, and faded. It probably dates to the 12th or 13th century.Footnote 37 Of all the fragments I explore here, this is the only one written in Arabic script. The rest of the consulted fragments are in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script). The fragment under question is a touching, anonymous elegy of a mother mourning the recent death of her daughter and is very likely to have been composed by a woman.Footnote 38 It remarkably features the deceased daughter’s voice as well, in a rich, extended dialogue with her mother. Given the female voices and perspective, deeply felt sentiments, and word choice, the poem challenges us to rethink the generally held assumption that “neither the literary nor the documentary Genizah seems to contain a single piece of writing, religious or other, attributable with certainty to a woman.”Footnote 39
In about fifteen lines in the medieval Egyptian Arabic dialect, mother and daughter exchange sentiments of loss and lament; their voices merge together and become inseparable at times. The style and language recall the zajal, a traditional form of folk poetry, often sung in colloquial Arabic, that is said to have started in Muslim Spain then spread throughout the Middle East. Ibn Quzman of al-Andalus (1078–1160) is credited with being the earliest zajal poet in writing.Footnote 40 The main features of the zajal include its oral aspect, improvisation, musical accompaniment, and performance.Footnote 41 The singer performing the zajal usually sang of love, daily life, nostalgia, and religion. Both style and language suggest that this poem belongs to the genre and that it might have been orally performed.
The only voices in the poem are female voices: the mother laments her loss; the daughter complains of the painful liver disease that caused her demise. More important, the deceased daughter gives instructions for her funerary rites, which range from gathering people for the condolence ceremony to playing the cymbals and cemetery visits. Anthropologically, the text sheds light on cultural values and gender and social relations in society.Footnote 42 This includes the funerary rituals and social relations among the Jewish community described in this poem of personal affliction.
The poem provides insight into gender relations in the context of the daughter’s love object, that is, her khalīl (lover).Footnote
43 She fears that her lover will replace her and take another woman. Whether out of love or jealousy, or both, early in the poem the deceased woman requests that her mother advise her lover on this matter, just after the mother’s opening words about loss.Footnote
44
Beat the cymbals by God and gather the people. And advise my lover
.4 دقي لي الصاجات بالله واجمعي الأهالي واصي خليلى
Not to take another [woman] instead of me for by God, he will not find my equal among all creatures
.5 أصلا لا ياخد بدالي في جمع الخلايق والله ما يجد بدالي
[I am] pleasant, beautiful … like the the full moon of the night.
.6 طريفه مليحه … كبدر الالي
She extols her own beauty and charms, as if she were still alive. Throughout the poem, the daughter maintains the voice of the living rather than the dead, as she negotiates the in-between space. Accordingly, she warns of kiṣaṣ (retaliation) in the event of the lover substituting her with another, and emphasizes that she accepts no ta‘addud (multiplicity) if he takes another woman.Footnote 45 The manner of retaliation is not made clear, but the warning reflects a sense of subjectivity. She exerts power through her threat even though she no longer inhabits the realm of the living.
The daughter’s wish to be remembered by the lover rather than forgotten and substituted recalls the wife of Dunash ibn Labrat (11th century), who left us a poem on the occasion of her husband’s forced departure from Spain, possibly in the aftermath of falling out with Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the leader of Spanish Jewry.Footnote 46 The wife of Dunash ibn Labrat stands out as “the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew language” and “the only one for centuries to come.”Footnote 47 The wife wonders if the departed husband will remember her and their son. The poem reads:
Will her love remember his graceful doe, her only son in her arms as he parted?
On her left hand he placed a ring from his right, on his wrist she placed her bracelet.Footnote 48
Although the wife of Dunash bin Labart does not mention her graceful looks like the deceased daughter in the elegy, she does mention their son and the exchange of material objects and gifts as symbols of love.Footnote 49 The women in the two fragments play on the physical and material with the hope of keeping their husband or lover attached to them in life and death. Their words and attitude give insight into gender relations and dynamics of the time and portray a sense of agency.
The attribution to Dunash bin Labrat’s wife was confirmed based on Ezra Fleischer’s discovery of a second copy of the poem with a heading indicating her authorship, later cautiously further confirmed by Goitein as an example of “perfection in composition and style not expected at that early period.”Footnote 50 In the Genizah elegy’s case, unfortunately, we do not have a heading bearing female evidence of authorship, but the intricate feelings, language, and voice of both mother and daughter and the linguistic interplay substantiate the claim for a female author and open space for the possibility of feminine writing, or “écriture feminine,” in Genizah literary works.Footnote 51 The elegy partakes of Goitein’s notion of the “perfection in composition and style” that characterizes the wife of Dunash ibn Labrat’s poem, if not exceeding it.
“Do Not Speak to Me”
From a dialogue between two women I now turn to the more common use of dialogue between man and woman in petitionary love poetry. The Genizah fragments preserve some poetic exchanges between lovers in which women are allowed space to speak and engage in wordplay.Footnote 52 This is in keeping with the use of dialogue in Arabic love poems in general, especially in the Umayyad period, as in the famous love poems of Buthaina and Jamil.Footnote 53 The preserved poetic exchanges reflect notions of female voice and agency, which are similarly found and developed in these fragments.
The petitionary love poem examined here shows a woman rejecting her lover with wordplay and wit. The fragment dates to the 12th or 13th centuries and comprises two leaves (bifolium) with 16 lines each, written in Judeo-Arabic. It is possibly a zajal, and again the poet is unidentified.Footnote 54 The poem is about a man who chases a young woman. She rejects his love in a playful manner, claiming that her mother is marrying her off soon. Her tone and manner are seductive.
The dialogue starts in a domestic setting, the lover finding the young woman standing at the top of the stairs. He addresses her as she descends and expresses his love.Footnote
55
and I said O lady
وقلت يا ست
.3 אזרק וקלת יא סת
Who taught me through her love how to love passionately.
من علمتني في هواها اعشق
.4מן עלמתני פי הואהא אעשק
Her immediate response to his admiration is to urge him to stop talking to her because she will marry soon.Footnote
56
By your youth, do not speak to me
شبابك لا تكلمني
.9שבאבך לא תכלמני
I am a maiden and my mother will
انا بنيا وامي راحا
.10אנא בניא ואמי ראחא
Marry me off. What would she do with the man?
تجوزني وايش تعمل بالرجل
.11תגוזני ואיש תעמל באלרגׄל
Although Jewish women “had a strong say in matters of marriage” as apparent in several letters, here the woman in the poem gives the impression that her marriage is arranged by her mother.Footnote 57 Whether this is true or is simply a strategy to make herself unattainable, and therefore more desirable, female voice and agency are apparent in both the woman’s words and the mother’s overshadowing presence. As in the elegy discussed above, this fragment highlights a mother-daughter relationship, in this case with the mother making marriage arrangements rather than acting as a go-between between deceased daughter and living husband or lover.
In the following line, the woman’s language is firmer. She asks him to close the door of his apartment and stay away from her.Footnote
58
close the door after you [a bit]?
غلق عليك الباب حيبت؟
.12 ?גלק עליךּ אלבאב מע חיבת
By asking him to close the door, she prevents him from maintaining further communication and inhibits his emotions. The woman uses the spatial boundaries of the building to demarcate gender boundaries. She draws the line between them physically and emotionally.
Through the lens of social anthropology, the medieval social, domestic, and spatial setting stands out in this fragment and gives a glimpse of the architectural landscape of everyday life. This is a multistoried building with stairs, and the man and woman are possibly neighbors. In addition to private and commercial correspondence, legal documents, and accounts that occasionally contain “illustrative references to the structural and social aspects of housing in the Geniza period,” as Goitein notes, poetry too gives insight into the architectural scene as a backdrop to relationships and life in medieval Egypt.Footnote 59 The presence of staircases as a way of “communication between the floors” mentioned in the Genizah documents is confirmed in the fragment that starts with stairs as a space for communication between man and woman.Footnote 60
Travelers’ accounts of medieval Cairo between the 10th and 13th centuries corroborate the Cairo Genizah documents when it comes to the multistoried architecture of al-Fustat. Both al-Istakhri and Ibn Hawqal in the 10th century refer to buildings between five and eight stories in their geographical treatises.Footnote 61 In Safarnama, Nasir Khusraw (11th century) tell us that he rented a place in a four-storied house when he was in al-Fustat. He describes houses with fourteen stories and seven stories, and says that some had roof gardens.Footnote 62 ʿAbd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162–1231) describes residences as spacious and states that people “live for the most part in the upper storeys.”Footnote 63 These were the types of buildings that the Jews rented and lived in, according to the legal documents Goitein consulted.Footnote 64 Travel accounts confirm the sense of community and neighbor relations that the poem underlines, here between man and woman.
The poem has several missing and illegible lines that do not allow us to see clearly all occasions during which the woman speaks. But at the end, after the young man’s amorous advances, she clearly reprimands him.Footnote
65
O lord what do I have to do with you by the life of …
يا سيد مالي ومالك بحيات …
.14יא סיד מאלי ומאלך בחיאת…
Until the end, the lover’s feelings are unrequited. The description of the woman’s beauty throughout is limited to her moonlike face, black eyes, and plump white wrist.Footnote 66 No other sensual or explicit descriptions are employed. The material objects mentioned toward the end, again with unclear context because of missing parts in the fragment, are a book, apples, and gold.Footnote 67 The role of women and women’s voices, however, unfolds and further expands in the following fragment, which holds a longer dialogue.
“They Say a Liar Is Followed to the Door Front”
The third fragment is two leaves and badly damaged. Written in Judeo-Arabic, it has seven to eight lines on each folio and is part of a long poem in colloquial Arabic, in which a man invites a woman to his house.Footnote 68 He lures her through promises of good company and other enticements after they reach his place. As the woman follows him to the house, an extended dialogue made up of a series of questions and answers takes place. The story is an archetypal one of a man seducing a seemingly innocent woman to his house, where she falls prey to his seduction, which she ultimately regrets.
Unlike the previous fragment in which the young woman at the stairs rejects the amorous advances of the neighbor and asks him not to talk to her, the young woman here is easily, and perhaps willingly, seduced. Also, unlike the previous fragment, the voice of the woman stands out; in fact, the poem is divided equally between the woman’s questions and man’s responses.
In this context, it is the woman who opens the poem by asking about the promised songs in what becomes a series of ongoing questions.Footnote 69 Her next question is about the whereabouts of the birds; he answers that they flew away to their dens. The image of the birds may be symbolic of the man’s dishonest pursuits, and signify that she should have flown away like the birds.Footnote 70 At this point, the lover interrupts her questions and urges her to follow him to his place with the promise of wondrous company.Footnote 71
Using a proverb from Egyptian folklore that remains current, the woman gives the man the benefit of the doubt the same way one does with a liar until he proves to be one indeed.Footnote
72
She said walk ahead of me. Let me follow your words to the end
قالت فسر قدامي نتبع حديثك لأخرو
.5קאלת פֿסֵר קדאמי נתבע חדית֒ך לאכֿרו
They say a liar is followed to the door front.
[فهم يقولو الكذاب يتبع لباب الدا[ر
.6פֿהם יקולו אלכאדֿב יתבע לבאב [ר]אלדא
The proverb “a liar is followed to the door front” is a perfect example of the entextualization described by a social anthropologist when examining how a text is “lifted” out of discourse and “re-embedded in a new context” in a way that encourages “thinking about texts cross-culturally.”Footnote 73 The proverb is repurposed from its wider everyday Egyptian culture and embedded into the more specific literary Genizah culture, in a Judeo-Arabic poem. This is an example of the cultural borrowing and cross-cultural relations between Egyptian and Jewish cultures in medieval Cairo.
The Egyptian proverb that finds its way into this fragment from the Cairo Genizah for preservation (along with other proverbs) is an interesting cultural marker.Footnote 74 It is unclear whether the woman is fully aware or totally oblivious of the lover’s intentions. If aware, then she is part of the chase game and is in full command of her actions. If not, then she is victim of the lover’s seduction, and the agency in her questions and dominating voice throughout the poem is not genuine.
The woman resumes asking questions upon finding out that the house is deserted. Only then does the man reveal his true intentions by asking her to remove her clothes. But first she displays sorrow and regret.Footnote
75
She bit her fingers in grief and regret.
[عضـ]ـت علا اصبعها واتحسرت واتندمت
.4[עצֿ]ת עלא אצבעהא ואתחסרת ואתנדמת
She then asks where the assumed other guests are, and he assures her that her face/presence is all the company he seeks.Footnote 76 She follows her question with one about the apples which he likens to her cheeks and to her breasts. The incomplete poem ends with more questions about nuts and pistachios that we cannot properly decipher.Footnote 77 Here, too, there is a domestic setting and promises of material luxuries and objects that range from pleasant company to sumptuous food.
On the lover’s end, the language is sexual and explicit. The woman’s language is naive and takes on a devotional and pious tone at the end, when she finds out she has been deceived and reprimands him for swearing unjustly.Footnote
78
She said … in the afterlife
قالت … فل الاخره
.1קאלת … פל אכֿרה
There is a place for believers to be crammed with the righteous.
فيها مقام كول مومن يحشر مع الابرار
.2פֿיהא מקאם כול מומן יחשר מע אל אבראר
The use of devotional expressions is unexpected and surprising, especially given the explicitly sexual language that follows. The poet might have wanted to represent the woman as innocent by having her adopt such a tone. Perhaps the words are meant as a final failed attempt on her behalf to dissuade the man from dishonoring her. The word abrār (righteous) along with the verb yuḥshar (to be crammed) reverberate across the Qurʾan in countless verses and provide another example of entextualization, in which Qurʾanic and everyday Arabic vocabulary find new context in the Genizah.
In the next and final fragment, there is a remarkable reversal. The devotional tone we see here is picked up by the lover and tinged by asceticism. The woman is hardly seduced by his amorous advances. Far from being a victim of love like her counterpart here described, she is in full command of her emotions and decides to reject the lover at the end because he does not merit her love.
“You Said You Have No Luck to Be With Me. Why Are Your Clothes Torn?”
The previous fragment belongs with the one I turn to now and is probably penned by the same poet.Footnote 79 Similarly, it consists of two leaves with eleven to twelve lines each and is torn and stained. Written in Judeo-Arabic by an anonymous poet, the poem is structurally like the previous one in that there is a long dialogue between two lovers, with the woman asking questions and the man answering. But, as we shall see, the representation of the woman and her personality and language are strikingly different from the naïve, seduced woman above. Her personality shines through as she ultimately rejects the lover, after engaging in witty wordplay with him. The lover uses language and self-description that echoes ascetics and Sufis.
Except for one line at the beginning in which the woman asks about the intentions of the lover regarding some wisdom that he utters, the entire recto of the first folio is about the man’s invitation to his house in the neighborhood. The road he chooses to his place is an easy one, devoid of obstacles so as not to exhaust her.Footnote
80 The woman’s voice is prominent in folio 2, where there is an equal interplay of questions and answers throughout between her and the lover. Her questions include finding out where the matājir (stores) are, to which the lover answers that she is the store for him who buys.Footnote
81 She then asks about dhahab (gold), which he says is gone.Footnote
82 Next, she asks about his qaṣr (palace). The word qaṣr is a pun that can mean either palace or shortening prayers in Islam when needed, such as when one travels. The lover picks up the pun and answers in a religious context.Footnote
83
I replied that this happens in my prayers during long journeys.
فقولت داك في صلاتي في اطول الاسفار
.8פֿקולת דאך פֿי צלאתי פֿי אטול אל אספֿאר
Shortening and combining prayers are a mercy from our God.
والقصر والجمع فيها رحمه (من الله ربنه (ربنا)
.9ואל קצר ואל גֿמע פֿיהא רחמה מן אללה רבנה
He eases things for us when we have excuses.
خفف علينا ازا ما كانت بنا الاعدار
.10 כֿפֿפֿ עלינא אזא מא כאנת בנא אל אעדאר
Unless this fragment is copied from an Arabic original no longer extant, the use of a direct Islamic reference here points to the integration and entextualization of Islamic culture in the Genizah literary works.
The demanding beloved continues asking about several items, such as the lover’s abode, camphor, pleasant oud, food, halva, and wine.Footnote 84 Notably, all the objects the woman mentions throughout the poem are expensive and luxurious items, unlike the innocent things (songs and birds) the seduced woman in the previous fragment asks about. This is certainly a more demanding woman, who shows signs of belonging to a higher social status.
The woman’s luxurious demand for rich objects stands in contrast with the lover’s obvious poverty. In response to her question about food, he alludes to his destitute condition as he has no qinṭar (a lot of money) to buy cooked food from the market.Footnote 85 In fact, the lover does not own any of the luxurious items she asks about, and in his replies the palace becomes the shortened prayers, camphor becomes her breath, halva (a dessert) becomes her beauty, and wine becomes her saliva, and so on. At this point in the exchange, the lover exhausts his options and admits to her his love, and he says he is now afraid that she thinks he is a liar.Footnote 86 The lover as a liar is a common trait in both this poem as well as the previous one. The difference is that in the last example the woman uses the proverb to indicate his lying, whereas here the lover describes himself as a liar, sensing that the woman is smart and far from gullible.
The woman’s ultimate decision, reflecting her strong personality, is that the man stands no chance to win her heart, especially with his torn clothes. The question about his shabby appearance replaces questions about material objects. She finds how he is dressed puzzling, given his friendship with her brother who is obviously affluent, and his status as supposedly the son of righteous people.Footnote
87
You said you have no luck to be with me. Why are your clothes torn
قلت فما لك حظ في ومال تيابك بالرقع
.5קלת פֿמא לך חט? (חטׄ) פֿי ומאל תיאבך באל רקע
if you are my brother’s friend and the son of the righteous?
وانت صاحب اخانا وابن التقا الاخيار
.6ואנת צאחב אכאנה ואבן אל תקא אל אכֿיאר
The lover’s response regarding his appearance picks up the pious tone he employed earlier in the poem and takes it in a Sufi-like direction. Like ascetics, he gives up his material comfort to the poor and adopts poverty himself.Footnote
88
I replied every Friday I invest the first poor person who comes by
فقولت في كول جمعه اول فقير جن اصرفو
.7פֿקולת פֿי כול גֿמעה אול פֿקיר גן אצרפֿו
With the clothes of happiness and righteousness
اكسيه تياب السعاده وجملو ابرار
.8אכסיה תיאב אלסעאדה וגֿמלו אבראר
Then I wear his [the poor man’s] clothes and walk bare footed to the door of my house
والبس تيابه وامشي حافي الا باب منزلي
.9 ואלבס תיאבו ואמשי חאפֿי אלא באב מנזלי
Thanking God for the blessings that He bestows upon the thankful.
شكرا لنعمت الله ينعم علا الـ شكار
.10שכרא לנעמת אללה ינעם עלא אל שכאר
He even exchanges his clothes and place with a poor person who comes his way. Although not exactly the same, the clothes exchange of the poor lover recalls the Sufi tradition of investiture, when the master invests the student with a kharka (piece of cloth). Whether the lover will give up his love for the demanding beloved and adopt the path of ascetics or seek her attention again remains unknown. Equally unclear is the way the reader should interpret the lover’s reply. Should the ascetic answer to the woman’s criticism of his appearance and lack of material luxuries be taken in earnest, or should it be taken as a playful answer? The lover’s tone and reply may be one of mockery and criticism leveled at the woman’s attachment to worldly luxuries and material comfort. This too remains hard to tell.
Conclusion: Female Visibility in the Arabic Poetry of the Cairo Genizah, and in Reality
Women’s visibility in these poems is clearly dependent on the power of their words and voice. A study of the female voice reveals women’s personality, authority, wordplay, emotions, and their gender relations. Overall, the fragments highlight the culture that produced them, some aspects of the social reality of the day, and the dialogic relation between Egyptian and Islamic cultures on the one hand and Cairene Jewish culture on the other. The instances of entextualization across the Genizah are endless and underscore the mosaic culture of the time.
Although the poems certainly hold a documentary value in the way they corroborate what we know to date of the medieval life of the Jewish community in Egypt, they also invite us to rethink this reality and consider the possibility of female authorship. The apparent lack of literary pieces written by women in the Genizah corpus is attributable to women’s lack of sufficient educational practices and skills.Footnote 89 Although this may hold true to an extent, we can read the poems through an anthropological lens to glean the underpinnings of society and gain a better understanding of its social dynamics. Female agency is at the heart of gender relations in the Genizah love poems, which show a whole range of female self-expression, witty dialogues, and wordplay.
In the second half of the 12th century and especially from the 13th century onward, women are freely mentioned by name and greeted in the Genizah documents. Statements about women’s earnings start appearing in marriage contracts.Footnote 90 The visibility of women, especially common women, in various kinds of documents in the Cairo Genizah echoes the realities of everyday life. Such social transformation may have been a direct outcome of the declining economic conditions, leading to the mention of women of lower classes in the Genizah and in Arabic literary works, such as the 1001 Nights. Footnote 91
If economic conditions rendered women visible in everyday life in Cairo and made them equally visible in legal documents and letters in the Genizah as well as in 1001 Nights, these conditions may have made them visible in literary poems too. Not all the poems portray women of lower classes, but certainly (except for the last fragment that features the demanding beloved) the first three feature women of more modest social status. In all cases, regardless of questions of class, these women have in common their voice, reverberating across the centuries. I hope that this article is the beginning of further studies on the female voice in Arabic poetry of the Cairo Genizah, which might offer different readings and challenge our perceptions of this era and the women living in these communities.
Acknowledgments
This article is part of the Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah project, led by Mohamed Ahmed at Trinity College Dublin. The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement 851411). The original discovery and transliteration from Hebrew/Arabic script of this fragment into Arabic script was done by Mohamed Ahmed; I would like to sincerely thank him for his continuous support and feedback on this article. His significant contribution facilitated research on the fragments. I also would like to thank Ben Outhwaite, head of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge Library, for his insight and for his generous help in dating the fragments, and Maria Dobozy at the University of Utah for her ample support and mentorship throughout my academic journey. Special thanks to Hoda Yousef and the reviewers for their valuable input during the editorial and review process.
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