114 DESTINY DISRUPTED
no one seemed surprised that a woman would take on this role. Women
were present at the iconic early battles as nurses and support staff and even
sometimes as fighters. In the battle of Yarmuk, the chronicles tell of the
widow Umm Hakim fighting Byzantine soldiers with a tentpole for a
sword.^2 Also, details about some of the battles come from women bards,
who observed the fighting and composed poems about it, essentially act-
ing as war correspondents.
Women must also have been present at crucial community meetings in
those early days, since the fact of their public arguments with Khalifa Omar
are recorded-and yet Omar appointed a woman to administer the market
in Medina.^3 Besides all this, women figure prominently among the scholars
of early Islam. In the first century after the Hijra, women such as Hafsa,
Umm al-Darda, Amra bin Abdul Rahman, and others rose to eminence as
authorities on hadith. Some were famous calligraphers. They and others
taught classes, took in students of both sexes, and gave public lectures.
Clearly, these women were not shut out of public life, public recog-
nition, and public consequence. The practice of relegating women to an
unseen private realm derived, it seems, from Byzantine and Sassanid prac-
tices. Among the upper classes of those societies, women were sequestered
as a mark of high status. Aristocratic Arab families adopted the same cus-
toms as a way of appropriating their predecessors' status. The average Mus-
lim woman probably saw her access to public life markedly reduced in the
fourth century AH (that is, after about 1000 CE) or at least that's what the
tone of scholars' remarks on gender roles imply. The radical separation of
gender roles into nonoverlapping spheres accompanied by the sequestra-
tion of women probably froze into place during the era of social break-
down that marked the latter days of the Abbasid khalifate. The same forces
that squeezed protoscience out of Islamic intellectual life, the same forces
that devalued reason as an instrument of ethical and social inquiry, acted
to constrict the position of women.
Ghazali devotes one-fourth of his oeuvre, The Revival of the Religious
Sciences, to a discourse on marriage, family life, and the proper etiquette
for the sexes. Here, he says that a woman "should remain in the inner sanc-
tum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter and exit
excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit
them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard her hus-