Protection granted by women: between law and literature

Abstract

Grants of protection in pre‑Islamic Arabia were often connected to expressions of status and power. This paper evaluates the gendered aspects of protection to explore how Arabic literature viewed grants of protection by women. The issue was recorded in various guises: jurists debated the issue on a theoretical level, historians included relevant stories in the Prophet’s biography, and literature preserves other episodes from pre‑ and early‑Islamic‑era Arabia. While jurists generally permitted women to grant protection, literary works took an opposite track, and employed the trope of women’s acts of protecting to denigrate male characters. A cross‑genre analysis of women protectors reveals intriguing aspects about the status of women and the nature of fact and fiction in Arabic literature about the Arabian past.