Women in Islamic Philosophy? Sitt al-ʿAjam and the Interpretation of Akbarian Thought

Although scholarship in Islamic Studies has highlighted the contributions of women as religious scholars engaged in the transmission of ḥadīth and in jurisprudence, or as ascetics in the mystical traditions of Sufism, their roles in and contributions to the history of Islamic philosophy remain unexplored. My preliminary study of the historical record indicates that women made significant contributions to central philosophical debates of Islamic philosophy. One example is Sitt al-ʿAjam bint al-Nafīs, a thirteenth century scholar of Baghdad, who wrote several books, two of which are extant. My paper has two aims: introduce Sitt al-ʿAjam through what she wrote and the philosophical world she inhabited, and provide a sketch of some of the preliminary steps , methodological considerations and challenges of working on women in the history of Islamic philosophy. 

Sitt al-ʿAjam’s Sharḥ al-Mashāhid is a commentary in Arabic on the seminal work of Ibn ʿArabi (d.1240), Mashāhid al-asrār al-qudsiyya. Sitt al-ʿAjam also authored another work, Kashf al-kunūz. This latter work has yet to be studied or edited. She is also known to have authored a third work, Kitāb al-Khatm, which has yet to be found. In addition to being an important text in the reception history of Ibn ʿArabi, her work is also important for a central aim in modern scholarship: understanding the ways in which philosophers of the Islamic world engaged with various traditions of Greek thought and Islamic mysticismthe Greek philosophical tradition. In the Commentary, she discusses Aristotelian and other Greek philosophical arguments, as well as seminal philosophical debates from the Islamic context, such as the origin or eternality of the cosmos. She engages problems in metaphysics and natural philosophy and brings philosophical mysticism into conversation with a variety of Greek thinkers, including Thales, Hermes, and Aristotle. Sitt al-ʿAjam’s work has received little scholarly attention.

This is no exception. No woman philosopher figures into any of the classic anthologies and companions on Islamic or Arabic philosophy, nor, as far as I can tell, does a single woman philosopher play a part in the plot lines of Islamic intellectual history, as explored in modern studies. This ought, in the least, strike us as puzzling, and in itself warrants a revisiting of the canon sources to include the works of women philosophers and weave their contributions into the broader history of Islamic philosophy. 

Scholars have found that our standard history of philosophy stands to be corrected, in terms of breadth and inclusion. The recovery work of feminist historians of western philosophy from the last three decades has identified nearly two hundred women philosophers with approximately a thousand works that were unknown, lost or intentionally excluded from the philosophical canon. Some of these works and figures led entire schools and movements, with reputations that attracted students from around the world. Mary Ellen Waithe’s four-volume A History of Women Philosophers (1987-1995) pioneered this recovery work, yielding a swathe of women philosophers from antiquity to the twentieth century that have yet to receive any or adequate scholarly attention. Analysis of these sources has already yielded important revisions. One example is the previously untranslated fragment by Aesara of Lucania that is very similar to what is accepted to be Plato’s original theory of the tripartite soul. An example from the early modern context is sixteenth century Spanish nun Teresa of Avila’s evil deceiver strategy of her Interior Castle as the likely source of Descartes’ infamous evil deceiver argument of Meditation 1, which he is credited with inventing, along with being the founding father of modern philosophy. Despite these advances made by feminist philosophers in the Western context, the contributions of non-Western women philosophers, especially in the Islamic context, have yet to be given scholarly attention.much, in some cases any, scholarly attention.

Fortunately, recovery work is not unfamiliar to the student of Islamic philosophy. Recently, scholars of Islamic intellectual history have uncovered an enormous corpus of unexamined manuscripts from the post-classical period of Islamic thought (roughly 1100-1900). The sources fall under the broad label of the “rational sciences”; are authored by Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and pagan thinkers; and span modern day Spain to West and North Africa to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. In Robert Wisnovsky’s groundbreaking article, it was found that over 90 percent of some 800 new sources have yet to be examined or even edited. Long held orientalist narratives of the decline of Islamic thought in this post-classical period have been firmly overturned. However, as we begin to forge new narratives and fill in these gaps, we risk creating a glaring new one.

I take this re-reading of the canon to be a much-needed corrective and significant for a few reasons. The first set of reasons concern historical accuracy: we cannot be confident in our current canon if exclusions are made on the basis of gender (even if inadvertent — the historian of Islamic philosophy is confronted with formidable challenges in locating works authored by women, in deciding what counts as a philosophical work or question, and so on). It is too early to tell how significant these works are to the philosophical debates of their period, or their influence in the later reception history. But I argue that we must, in the least, put women thinkers on the map for consideration of future scholarship. The second set of reasons concern philosophy’s self-image as male. The percentage of women in professional philosophy today is amongst the lowest in the academy. While women are often overrepresented in the humanities, they account for only a quarter of faculty in philosophy departments of the US, and women of color fare even worse. Women cannot see themselves in a discipline where the caricature of the old man with a beard reigns supreme, and where women are often entirely absent in coursework and syllabi. Of course, scholars have shown that the image is more complicated - that a love of wisdom is neither unique to Western traditions nor to one gender over another. However, philosophy as a discipline has been slow to expand beyond the mainstream Anglo-European canon of male authors. The paper considers some of the methodological challenges and questions that arise in the retrieval project of women’s philosophical works in the Islamic context, raising larger questions on what constitutes a canon and what counts as philosophy.