Today, Islamic Studies Twitter's talking about myths, history, & the gendered ways both get deployed, both #onhere & off. I have some thoughts, especially on the point of what kinds of accomplishments get celebrated. Get in losers; we're talking about Sayyida Nafisa. https://twitter.com/RachelSchine/status/1277637321915953153

Nafisa, as the designation “Sayyida” proclaims, is a descendant of the Prophet; she's also the daughter-in-law of Ja'far al-Sadiq. Her standard bio outlines emerged more than a century after her death in 824 & was embellished greatly as veneration of her grew in the 12th century.

I got interested in Sayyida Nafisa when I was researching my biography of Imam Shafi'i; I found accounts of his interactions with her in various sorts of pious, apologetic, & (semi-)scholarly discussions of her life. (She, though, never shows up in texts on him. Go figure.)

Ages ago, I gave a paper with a pretentiously long title, & multiple subtitles:

The Strange Case of the Jurist and the Saint, or, the Ongoing Construction of Female Religious Authority in the Muslim Biographical Tradition +

The subtitle gives it away: Being an account of how more than a millennium after their lives and deaths, the saintly Sayyida Nafisa came to have led the respected jurist Imam Shafi'i's funeral prayer +

(and the kicker): with special attention to the invention of facts and their circulation by scholars who should know better

Or, alternately, How tales grow in the telling to suit the times

Her bios report that owing to her impeccable lineage & personal reputation for renunciation & piety, she was considered a source of blessing as well as knowledge. People visited her, learned from her, and sought her prayers on their own behalf and on behalf of their loved ones.

The idea of pious intercession, that a saintly person’s prayers on one’s behalf could be efficacious, was widely shared among Muslims. When she died, stories say she was buried in a grave she had dug in her home in Cairo with her bare hands. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've failed to introduce the second protagonist in our little drama, the titular Jurist. He is, of course, the renowned scholar & legal theorist Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 820) who spent the last few years of his life in Egypt, where he met our Saintly Nafisa (or did he?)

Did Shafi'i & Nafisa really spend time together? Doing what? That's both likely unanswerable & largely irrelevant to the question of how accounts of their interactions create & sustain reputations of sanctity & (religious) authority.

In striking contrast to Nafisa's absence from Shāfiʿī's biographies, Shafi'i figures prominently in both premodern & modern accounts of Nafisa's life. Caroline Williams’ brief account (in Muqarnas, 1985) serves as a good summary:

Williams mentions three kinds of activities: miracles, scholarly exchange, & ritual performance. The way these are treated in different biographical accounts can help us think about contested notions of authority, especially female authority, in Muslim contexts.

What kinds of texts am I talking about? Mostly Not stand-alone biographies but compendia: medieval biographical dictionaries, lists of "Women Saints in World Religions,” hyperlinked online bios of worthy “Scholars,” or works that aggregate notable examples of “Women in Islam.”

What makes such comparisons meaningful despite key genre differences is that all treat each individual as part of a larger whole, meaningfully related by similarity or contrast to others also assembled therein. (I could riff on biographies for a while but I'll stop here.)

Anyway, let's talk first about the scholarly relationship. Shafi'i “collected” hadith from Nafisa. Ibn Khallikan, whose massive medieval biographical compendium is a standard source, says "It is related that" Shāfiʿī "went to visit her & learned some Traditions from her." (3:575)

In this pedagogical relationship, the “relater” of hadith, Nafisa, “taught” the seeker of hadith, Shafi'i--a position of some authority. Still, women’s presence as hadith transmitters, as Asma Sayeed has explored, didn't mean widespread scholarly parity. https://newbooksnetwork.com/asma-sayeed-women-and-the-transmission-of-religious-knowledge-in-islam-cambridge-up-2013/

Hadith-teaching figures in the bio of Nafisa the Pure included on http://sunnah.org ; she's the only woman who appears (via a pious excerpt from Imam Metwalli al-Sha'rawi) on the Scholars page (tho there's an entry for women hadith scholars) http://sunnah.org/wp/2008/07/18/nafisa-at-tahira/

Interestingly, though it's her bio not his, there's far more about Shafi'i's scholarly accomplishments than hers, which are glossed with "Imam Shafi`i also used to sit in Sayyida Nafisa’s association, learning hadith from her." He does, however, recognize her powerful prayers.

In Sha'rawi's account, even in the teaching relationship, Shafi'i gets all the active verbs (he learns; she doesn't teach); the biography emphasizes Nafisa's spiritual merits & the power of her prayers. Other texts, though, put the emphasis elsewhere.

Among Western scholars, Ruth Roded summarizes tersely for her (recently republished) collection of Women in Islamic Biographical Collections, which first appeared in 1993: "Nafīsa d. (daughter of) al-Hasan (died 208/824) taught traditions to the jurist Imam al-Shafi'i."

Roded was writing at a time, the last quarter of the twentieth century, when Muslim women’s scholarly achievements had come to hold greater weight & to serve important apologetic purposes.

Similarly emphasizing Nafisa's scholarly accomplishments: Aisha Lemu & Fatima Hareen’s 1978 Islamic Foundation publication Woman in Islam mentions that Shāfiʿī learned from Nafīsa. So did two contributors to May Yamani’s Feminism and Islam: Legal & Literary Perspectives (1995).

Syafiq Hasyim's Understanding women in Islam: an Indonesian perspective (2006) continues this emphasis on Nafisa's scholarly merits. He refers to her as a "female ulama," making no reference to ancestry or saintly virtues, let alone pious reputation or miraculous deeds.

These texts, from Roded & various Muslim scholars, say nothing about intercessory prayers or pious virtues or her participation in Shāfiʿī’s funeral, choosing instead to highlight Nafisa's religious knowledge.

Some include both. In his EI entry for Nafisa, Roger Strothman offers: "She had a reputation for learning & piety. Shāfiʿī frequently visited her to collect traditions; on his death, his body was brought to her house so that she might say the prayer for the dead over him

The EI, obviously, isn't geared toward constructing a useable feminist past but rather aims to explain & situate places, people, & intellectual trends deemed vital to Islamicate civilization. (On the EI, read Peri Bearman: https://isdistribution.com/BookDetail.aspx?aId=93550)

The EI entry on Nafisa draws from a range of premodern texts & its inclusion of prayer is a helpful reminder that this was, in premodern biographies, prayer (& prayer leadership, as I'll say more about shortly, is a crucial way of displaying sanctity & authority of various kinds.

Of course, the English term prayer obscures the difference between “du‘a” (supplication) & ritual prayer (salat). We've already seen refs to Shafi'i seeking Nafisa's intercessory du'a (Sha'rawi lingers on this). But what about the janaza funeral salat? Well, that's complicated.

Nafisa's bios consistently inform us that she prayed over Shafi'i, most suggesting that she did so from inside her home, or from the mosque space nearby, possibly following Shafi'i's student Buwayti. (Who's credited w/ leading funeral prayers is a whole other kettle of fish.)

Leaning into what goes unstated in some source texts, a few recent accounts, clearly speaking to new concerns over women’s ritual leadership of public and mixed-gender prayer, imply or outright declare that Nafisa led other mourners in Shafi'i's collective funeral prayer.

Ibn Khallikan, our medieval compiler: "When Shāfiʿī died, his corpse was brought into her house, and she there said over it the funeral prayer." Or Sha'rawi: "she prayed the funeral prayer ... over him from the women's section, following Imam al-Buwaiti who lead the prayer.”

We begin to see something quite different with Ahmed Souaiaia’s Contesting Justice (2006), a scholarly monograph. He begins with a lengthy recounting of the various ways in which various Muslim women contributed to Islamic civilization in the premodern era.

Souaiaia links Shāfiʿī’s ritual leadership with Nafīsa’s, writing that she “led Shāfiʿī’s funeral prayer when he died to honor him for leading her in Ramadan prayers.” The passage is unusual in stressing the leadership aspects of the Ramadan prayers & of the funeral prayer.

Souaiaia's emphasis on *leadership* of Ramadan prayers contrasts w/, e.g., how Margaret Smith's early 20th C bio of Rabia "& her fellow saints in Islam" mentions, using Ibn Khallikan, Nafisa's "great contemporary" Shafi'i used to pray Ramadan prayers "with her." Leadership? Meh.

For Souaiaia, it matters that Shafi'i leads, then Nafisa leads. Perhaps he has the controversy over @TheLadyImam's leadership of a mixed-gender public Friday prayer (2005) in mind. His note cites Egyptian scholar Jamal al-Banna on woman-led prayer.

His note points to Wiebke Walther’s sparingly documented Woman in Islam (which, tracking back, refers only to a woman at the time of the Prophet leading her household in prayer); from this, Souaiaia generalizes that women led mixed congregational prayer in early Islam.

Finally, Souaiaia also cites the medieval geographer al-Maqrizi's Khiṭat, used by scholars discussing Alid saints in Egypt, as in Williams’ summary above. Maqrizi, however, as far as I can tell, not taken by anyone pre-2000 as evidence of Nafīsa's ritual leadership.

Souaiaia was not the first to assert that Nafisa led Shafi'i's funeral prayer. Valerie Hoffman's entry on Nafīsa in Holy People of the World: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia (2004) asserts that "Al-Shafi'i became a close friend, and she led his funeral prayer, fully veiled."

In her earlier, longer contribution to Arvind Sharma's Women Saints in World Religions, Hoffman was considerably more circumspect about the relationship between the two, saying that Shafi'i "allegedly became her close friend, & she prayed (fully veiled) at his funeral."

We've got a remarkable shift from "she prayed ... at his funeral" (which btw the earlier essays says Buwayti led) to "she led his funeral prayer." (Curiously, that spicy “fully veiled” survives the rewrite, never mind that it appears in none of our early sources.) So what gives?

One might lament a (notable) lapse of standards for scholarly documentation. At the same time, it's useful to useful to explore how new preoccupations & conditions lead to strikingly different accounts, even when authors are ostensibly referencing the same textual sources.

Anyway, many tweets later, we arrive at back at my point: Nafisa's interactions w/ Shafi'i are told & retold by myriad writers to promote varied ideas about who's authoritative & what that means, including, in recent decades, about "women in Islam."

First, there's the recent invocation of Nafīsa as the patron saint of woman-led prayer. The 21st C narratives where Nafīsa leads Shafi'i's funeral prayer aim to prove the legitimacy, by means of precedent, of Muslim women's religious authority, understood as prayer leadership.

Premodern accounts don't equate religious authority/power w/ ritual leadership. They instead assert Nafīsa's spiritual merit & attest that Shāfiʿī recognized same, hence, his request that she pray over him & the carrying of his bier to her home en route to his burial place

Second, we must consider how Shafi'i functions in her biographies to attest to her spiritual & scholarly authority. In accounts where she exchanges hadith w/ him or teaches him hadith, the formal claim being made is of her equality with or superiority over him. And yet:

It bolsters her reputation when Nafisa's portrayed as teaching Shafi'i precisely because he's recognized as the pinnacle of scholarship. Shafi'i symbolizes powerfully orthodox religious knowledge. His authority underpins hers even as what the sources recount is her teaching him.

When it comes to intercessory prayer, or Shafi'i's request that she pray over his corpse, the point is that such a great scholar recognizes the efficacy of her prayers: the premodern & some modern texts are making a claim about Nafisa's spiritual power.

In contrast, recent accounts where Nafisa leads Shafi'i’s funeral prayer make a pitch for women's ritual leadership, again, implicitly enlisting Shafi'i as support for it. (Even if, in these contexts, the question of janaza leadership isn't so vital so much as public salat.)

Nafisa lived for four years after Shafi'i's death & was buried in her home not far from his tomb. A mausoleum was built on the site. Her shrine has prestige: the medieval historian Maqrizi lists it as one of “four places in Cairo where prayers are directly accepted into heaven.”

A final mystery, though. Too clever by half, I called that long-ago paper "The Jurist & the Saint." But Imam Shafi'i himself developed a posthumous reputation for sanctity. Pilgrims write him letters seeking intercession; worshipers visit his mausoleum.

Given how his work was carried forward by his Egyptian disciples, it's not at all surprising that Shafiʿi became a symbol of Sunni scholarly prowess in & far beyond the Ayyubid era. But the Master Judge whose intercession can be sought for domestic, academic, & health crises?

It's possible that understanding Shafi'i's emergence as a saintly figure in the centuries after his death can best – or perhaps only – be done in conjunction with investigating the life & myriad life stories of his pious teacher & intercessor, Sayyida Nafisa.

Wa Allahu alam.