Shahla Haeri analyzes how Muslim women have played significant roles as political leaders in both historical and contemporary contexts. The chapter highlights how this occurs despite selective use of a hadith to deny women political authority. Haeri presents a detailed reading of the Queen of Sheba in the Qur’an, arguing that Islam legitimizes women’s exercise of the highest levels of political authority.

With Chapter 5, we move to the modern world and the transition to constitutional democracy. Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to be democratically elected to the office of prime minister in a Muslim-majority state. The Jamaat-e-Islami Party brought a suit against her based on the hadith that allegedly warns against women’s political leadership. The Lahore High Court threw out the suit for what it was: a politically motivated attack with little support from the public or grounding in religion. The daughter of a feudal dynasty from Sindh, Benazir was thrust onto Pakistan’s political landscape by the draw of destiny and has left an indelible mark on Pakistani political culture and history. Benazir Bhutto was elected prime minister twice and was poised to win a third term when she was assassinated. Ten years after her death, her lifelong mission to foster democracy in Pakistan has almost become ingrained in the fabric of Pakistan’s political structure, despite the powerful countercurrents of religious extremism and military interference. Her election upended Pakistani patriarchal power and hierarchies of privilege, age, and gender. The only way to stop her was to eliminate her, not through the ballot box but through violence.

The Quranic revelations concerning the sovereignty of the Queen of Sheba and her encounter with King Solomon are juxtaposed with the latter’s fanciful reconstructions by medieval Muslim biographers. This chapter argues that God’s concern is not with the queen’s marital status, nor with arranging a marriage for the fabulous pair. The queen’s gender is immaterial to her leadership and governance; her faith is at the center of the Quranic revelations. But in its medieval reconstructions, gender politics takes center stage. The queen’s brilliant diplomacy and successful peace-making initiatives to avert certain war were not utmost in the minds of the patriarchal exegetes, but rather the control of this “haughty” – read autonomous – woman’s body, and the restriction of her mobility and sexuality through marriage. I focus on what the story tells us about women and political authority, about the queen’s leadership and charisma, her wisdom and genuine concern for her people’s lives, in her sustained diplomatic efforts to negotiate peace with a much stronger and uncompromising adversary. Her leadership is an example of desirable leadership, regardless of gender, that values negotiation over domination, peace over war and destruction.

The Unforgettable Queens of Islam is a book about Muslim women rulers, women who have contested rules of dynastic succession in medieval Yemen and India and stood for election in modern Pakistan and Indonesia. How did they achieve such feats? How could young Muslim women come to occupy the exalted office of the sultan in Delhi in medieval India, or be democratically elected prime minister in modern Pakistan? Did they contravene religious laws and moral orders to become rulers in their societies? What sociopolitical structures, cultural mechanisms, and personal qualities enabled them to realize their objectives? History provides us with many cases of powerful women – Muslim and non-Muslim – who influenced men of power (or men in general) to change the course of their relations, dynastic successions, and sociopolitical events.

A member of the Isma’ili Sulayhid dynasty (eleventh–twelfth century) in Yemen, Sayyida Hurra Queen Arwa was a unique Muslim woman leader: she held both political and spiritual authority simultaneously. She governed Yemen first as a queen consort in collaboration with her husband, then as regent of her son, and finally as a sovereign in her own right until her death in 1138. She balanced her allegiance to the Fatimid Isma’ili imam-caliphs in Cairo with a degree of administrative independence and autonomy in Yemen. She demonstrated self-confidence and acted decisively to preserve her throne, whether against her state’s enemies or insubordinate family members. Faced with the momentous prospect of a contested succession to the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, she established the position of the supreme missionary, which safeguarded the continuity of the Tayyibi Isma?ili community. She managed to keep the powerful and competitive Yemeni tribal leaders in check, while delivering justice and stability to her people. Not only was the alleged Prophetic hadith not invoked in opposition to her leadership, the imam-caliph al-Mustansir elevated the queen as a religious leader, a hujja. Did Yemen suffer under her sovereignty? Evidently not! She was “immensely popular” and people called her “their Mistress.”

This chapter focuses on the military/political leadership of the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘A’isha, and her involvement in the Battle of the Camel. ‘A’isha’s actual presence on the battlefield leading the army caused neither unanimous dissent nor anxiety among her generals or the rank and file, though her military leadership was contested in the aftermath of her defeat. Though her religious authority is almost universally acknowledged, her political authority is contested and the subject of much hand-wringing and controversial commentary, invariably leading to the invocation of the alleged Prophetic hadith, “Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” Conveniently ignoring the Queen of Sheba’s sovereignty, the male political/religious elite has historically upheld this hadith as a “sacred” principle against women’s political authority. In view of the actual leadership of some charismatic Muslim women in medieval or modern times, the question is how to interpret the incongruity between the Quranic revelations and the prophetic tradition regarding women’s political authority – one supporting, and the other opposing. I argue that it is dynastic power, the dynamics of the father-daughter relationship, and her own charisma that enables a woman to wear the crown.

Looking back at the lives and legacies of the remarkable women rulers I have highlighted in the preceding pages, it seems to me that my fascination with them and my desire to tell their stories, connecting the historical dots between medieval and modern times, may have had deeper roots in my own thoughts and memory, a sensibility cultivated in the soil of my childhood and upbringing.

I grew up in a highly educated and intellectual family, surrounded by capable, socially active, and professionally accomplished women. My paternal grandmother, wife of an ayatollah and mother of six sons and four daughters, was foremost among them. She was the undisputed queen of her huge household and enjoyed the unwavering affection of my grandfather.

This chapter highlights the life and leadership of Megawati Sukarnoputri, who became the first modern Muslim woman head of the state. The eldest daughter of Sukarno, Indonesia’s national hero, Megawati emerged as a leader at a time when Indonesian society was in the grips of social and political crises. Her swift rise to power unsettled powerful men, who belittled her as only a “housewife,” and perceived her political campaigning as disruptive and subversive. Fearing rapid loss of his legitimacy, the dictator Suharto made political alliances with hardline Islamist parties to prevent Megawati’s presidential campaign. But he failed spectacularly to stop her or to dampen her public support. I discuss the intense political rivalry over the presidency following Suharto’s fall, and the appeal to the Prophetic hadith to disqualify Megawati. It became clear that it was not genuine religious conviction that sought to block a woman’s political advancement, but the intense anxiety of the male political elite whose political dominance was in jeopardy. She was neither a “stupid housewife” nor did her leadership doom Indonesia. She turned out to be a canny politician: calm and unpretentious, the likes of whom Indonesia had not seen before.