“Silence” and Historical Tradition in Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine

Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine (1991) has been widely read as a novel that condemns the silence of women in the early official history written by Muslim men. This type of reading is in line with the claim made by Djebar in the “Avant-propos,” introducing Loin de Médine, that accuses male Muslim historians (Ibn Hicham, Ibn Saad, and Tabari) of overshadowing the female presence in their works. In this article, I challenge this claim by returning to the original sources themselves and casting light on early Islamic historiography and its characteristics. Secondly, I demonstrate, through a comparison of two episodes reconstructed in the novel and their source, that this claim is historically invalid. My conclusion confirms that the image projected of the sources and of the historians in Loin de Médine meets the Western reader’s expectations while sharply contrasting with historical realities.