Fathers and Daughters in Islamic History: A Typology

My paper draws upon my earlier work on colonial Algeria and North Africa as well as on very current research on women/gender in the medieval and modern periods, but located within a comparative/world history framework.  My initial foray into the questions surrounding father-daughter relationships was inspired by the succession battles unleashed in 1897 when Shaykh Muhammad, a revered Sufi and saint, designated his only daughter, Zaynab, as his spiritual heir and head of a religious center on the margins of the colonial state. Since I first thought about that particular father-daughter bond and its multiple meanings, I have been amassing a fund of examples, mainly, but not exclusively from North African history. For instance, the life of a Moroccan woman, Hakima, governor of the port of Tetouan and also a celebrated pirate in the early sixteenth century (her story has been salvaged by the Canadian historian, Osire Glacier) can not be understood without excavating the father-daughter connections and situating them within a local, regional, and trans-Mediterranean frame.  Thus, my paper explores the socio-historic contexts within which father-daughter ties were enmeshed across a generous swatch of time and space. It develops a typology to account for how and why apparently hegemonic gender ideologies accommodated Muslim women (or those from other religious communities within dominant Islamic societies and states) as spiritual heirs and/or political successors in specific historical periods.  It argues that approaching global history from this perspective invites us to rethink the highly gendered western/non-western, or Christian/Muslim, binaries.