Finding #girldads where you may not expect them

Though the ravaging of our world by the coronavirus now makes it seem a distant memory, just a few months ago we were mourning the deaths of Kobe and Gianna Bryant in a helicopter crash, and freshly appreciating Kobe Bryant’s self-professed status as a “Girl Dad” – someone delighted to be a father to four girls and who saw Gianna as more than capable of carrying on his basketball legacy. She’s “a monster. She’s a beast,” he was reported as proudly telling an interviewer, declaring that he saw much of himself in her. #Girldad quickly began to trend on Twitter and elsewhere, with many fathers also professing themselves thrilled to have daughters and noting that they, like Kobe, saw them as fit to follow in their footsteps. Many of these fathers also coached their daughters, just as Kobe did. Alongside the cliché image of a man tossing a ball to his son in the backyard, those of Kobe playing basketball with Gianna became indelibly etched upon our minds.

As someone who had just completed a book on gender and succession in medieval Islamic societies, all of this had a familiar ring.  Part of my research involved looking at Muslim #girldads -- men who saw their daughters as capable successors and who groomed them to carry on their professions, whether as scholars, rulers, or Sufis. What we have been treating as a relatively new phenomenon is actually as old as the hills, and those hills can be found in unexpected places.

Like in what is now Saudi Arabia. It may surprise those who think of the religion as inherently oppressive toward women, but Islam has a fairly robust tradition of #girldads, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad himself in seventh-century Mecca and Medina. Not only did the Prophet instruct his followers to treat their daughters well, promising Paradise to those who took good care of their daughters and did not prefer their sons to them, he modeled that behavior himself. According to hadith, or traditions, the Prophet had four daughters who grew into adulthood. No sons survived. He was closest to his youngest daughter, Fatima, who, according to accounts, spoke like him, sat like him, used language like him, and whom he treated with great respect and love. According to one hadith, he called her a “part of me” and said “Whatever hurts her hurts me, and whatever makes her happy, makes me happy” – indicating a clear sense of identification between the two. In fact, one version of that report suggests that the Prophet Muhammad saw Fatima as his deputy. A man named Abu Lubaba had tied himself up in penitence for betraying the Prophet. Though Fatima offered to untie him, he had sworn to allow only the Prophet to release him. The Prophet then pronounced, “Fatima is a part of me,” and Abu Lubaba permitted her to untie him.

Based at least partly on such pronouncements, many Shi‘ites believe that Fatima received some of the Prophet’s gnostic knowledge, and was able to speak and act and even guide the community in his stead. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a twentieth-century Iraqi ayatollah, saw Fatima as a revolutionary who embodied and implemented the values of her father after he was gone. So did the twentieth-century century Iranian sociologist, ‘Ali Shari‘ati, who even maintained that the essence of the revolution brought by Islam lay in the massive change it wrought in how females (and, particularly, daughters) were to be regarded, as exemplified by Fatima. In Fatima, Shari‘ati wrote, God purposely chose a daughter, not a son, to inherit her family’s glory and to continue the ancient prophetic chain begun by Adam. God thus delivered a clear message: treat women and girls with respect.

Muhammad was far from the only Muslim father to look upon his daughter as intrinsically capable of modeling his legacy. Fathers who cultivated their daughters’ talents populate the depth and breadth of medieval Islamic history, many of them scholars. As Muhammad Akram Nadwi has noted, the twelfth-century hadith scholar and jurist Sa‘d al-Khayr, father to many daughters, “was most particular about their attending hadith classes, travelling with them extensively and repeatedly to different teachers. He also taught them himself.”[1] His efforts bore real fruit with his daughter Fatima bint Sa‘d al-Khayr, who became well known as a scholar in her own right. She began attending hadith classes at a very young age (either four or seven) and continued her studies into adulthood, mastering many important collections. Scholars traveled to Damascus and to Cairo, where she had settled with her husband, “expressly to study with her.”[2] She became quite wealthy and respected, as Nadwi has observed, and continued to teach until the end of her life.

Yet another Fatima made a name for herself as a scholar in the twelfth century, thanks at least partly to the efforts of her father. Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Samarqandi, a prominent jurist, educated his daughter in law and ensured that she “committed his compilations of traditions to memory.”[3] Fatima al-Samarqandi subsequently became prominent not only as a hadith scholar but as a jurist, for “[l]egal decisions were issued under both of their names.”[4] She also aided and corrected her husband, another prominent jurist, when he had difficulty in issuing legal decisions, as did still another (much earlier) Fatima, daughter of Yahya, who was known for debating her father on legal issues.[5] These three Fatimas’ fathers are but a few of the many examples of medieval Muslim men who trained their daughters in scholarly matters, whether that meant transmitting hadith, issuing fatwas, or calligraphing verses  from the Qur’an. 

Kings, sultans, and caliphs also acted as #girldads – a reality that sometimes led to women exercising authority in the political realm, or even ruling on their own for brief periods. The tenth-century Fatimid Imam-caliph al-‘Aziz, reportedly adored his daughter, Sitt al-Mulk, and “denied her nothing,” including exclusive use of one of two royal palaces in Cairo.[6] According to some accounts, he even made her a “party to power by asking her opinion and encouraging her to express it.”[7] When the caliph’s successor disappeared mysteriously, Sitt al-Mulk ruled the state for a month until another successor was appointed. Even after the new caliph’s accession, Sitt al-Mulk acted as the real ruler, for the nominal one was occupied with matters of pleasure. In a yet more significant #girldad move, thirteenth-century Indian ruler Shams al-Din Iltutmish reportedly passed over his sons to name his daughter, Radiyya, as his successor, claiming that she was the most worthy of sovereignty, and, unlike his sons, possessed the “capability of managing the affairs of the country.” Radiyya did rule the Delhi Sultanate for almost four years, winning praise for her skill. 

Likewise, the sixteenth-century Iranian ruler Shah Tahmasp took note of the exceptional abilities of his daughter, Pari Khan Khanum, and would seek her advice on “all decisions concerning matters ‘trivial or major, domestic or financial’” --  thus preparing her to be in a position to rule during a brief interregnum. Other #girldad rulers who appeared during the same approximate period include the Ottoman sultan Süleyman and the Mughal sultan Shah Jahan, both of whose daughters wielded considerable political authority, though they never actually ruled.

Muslim #girldads have proliferated in other arenas and time periods, too. In nineteenth-century Algeria, the Sufi saint Sidi Muhammad educated his daughter, Zaynab, on both matters of religion and administration of the prestigious Sufi lodge that he oversaw. After his death she engaged in a battle of succession with her cousin, ultimately winning out against tremendous odds. As the scholar Julia Clancy-Smith has observed, Zaynab’s close connection to her father helped solidify her claim to power: it was said that she “bore a striking physical resemblance to Sidi Muhammad: her carriage and mannerisms recalled those of the deceased saint. More important, many believed that she had inherited her father’s baraka [blessing power]; awe came to be mixed with reverence for her person.”[8]

#Girldads can be found in contemporary Muslim-majority countries as well. Most famously, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (d. 1979), prime minister of Pakistan from 1973 to 1977, began educating his daughters as well as his sons in political matters when they were still small, encouraging them to “feel part of the greater world.” The elder Bhutto was instrumental in his daughter, Benazir’s, decision to study at Harvard, where she obtained a degree in comparative politics in 1973; he desired her to play a part in Pakistan’s political life after his death. She led the country from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996, and was campaigning for re-election when she was assassinated in 2007.

It would be an overstatement, of course, to assert that Muslim fathers across time and geography have been universally interested in cultivating their daughters’ talents, or even regarded them in a wholly favorable light (just as one could not make the same claim of fathers belonging to other religious traditions). Preference for boys and worry about girls are entrenched sentiments in many societies. And affection or openness towards daughters, when it did appear, was often coupled with ambivalence. An eleventh-century jurist in northern Africa, while “encouraging fathers to give their daughters a general religious education, warned them against teaching girls how to write, fearing most their ability to write letters and compose poetry.”[9] Amir Khusraw, a medieval Indian poet who heaped praise upon his daughter, felt it necessary to preface his remarks by wishing that she had never been born.

It would be wrong, too, to confidently attribute the above examples of fathers’ cultivation of daughters to Islam itself as a religion (with the exception of the Prophet Muhammad). The societies in which they appeared were culturally and regionally diverse; who is to say that our #girldads were not influenced in their openness by a (non-Islamic) cultural factor rather than by some pro-daughter element of the religion? Similarly, one would have difficulty, I think, attributing Kobe’s egalitarian ideals about daughters to his Catholicism.

But what the examples of medieval Muslim #girldads can do is lend credence and encouragement to actions of present-day fathers by showing that others have ventured successfully into this territory. They can also dull the teeth of stereotypes of Muslim men as unjust toward women. While girl children were and are not always welcomed or treated well in Muslim-majority societies (just as they were and are not in non-Muslim societies – a reality that the recent clamor over #girldads makes clear), Islamic history has its fair share of dads who, like Kobe, wanted the best for their daughters, saw them as capable of being the best, and were willing to work to help them achieve it.

[1] Mohammad Akram Nadwi, Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam (Oxford: Interface Publications, 2014), 93.

[2] Nadwi, Al-Muhaddithat, 95.

[3] Ruth Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Sa‘d to Who’s Who (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 81.

[4] Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections, 81.

[5] Nadwi, Al-Muhaddithat, 144

[6] Paul E. Walker, “The Fatimid Caliph al-‘Aziz and His Daughter Sitt al-Mulk: A Case of Delayed but Eventual Succession to Rule by a Woman,” Journal of Persianate Studies 4, no. 1 (2011): 33. 

[7] Fatima Mernissi, Sultanés Oubliées: Femmes Chefs d’État en Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland as The Forgotten Queens of Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 160.

[8] Clancy Smith, “The Shaykh and His Daughter,” 130.

[9] Delia Cortese and Simonette Calderini, Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 125.