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Introduction Generating Normative Discourse God, as conceived by the men who guard Islam’s early traditions, fashions only perfected beings in the wombs of women. As noted by Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al‑Jāḥiẓ (d. 869 CE), a famous ninth‑century Arab author of prose, literature, and Muʿtazilite theol‑ ogy,1 each part of the body—hand, leg, eye, ear—is “designed to the highest standard of wise appropriateness,”2 which is “evidence of Divine wisdom, design, and execution.”3 Given this belief in God’s infinite wisdom and perfected design, humans are left to contemplate why many divine creations, brought forth from a mother’s womb, fall short of that ideal. For Jāḥiẓ, one without hearing is like “someone absent though present and dead though alive”;4 those who lose their memories “cease to be human beings and become beasts.”5 And, this is from a man who himself suffered from severely deficient eyes.6 As Jāḥiẓ’s own condition poignantly illustrates, the world humans experience is laden with anything but perfection, especial‑ ly with regard to birth and reproduction. As every woman knows, pregnancies are fraught with danger. Conception may or may not occur, conception may take place only to be followed by a miscar‑ riage or stillborn child. Both mother and child may die as a result of the traumatic experience of giving birth and/or being born. Mothers may undergo the successful delivery of a child only to find its limbs twisted in ways that do not conform to that divinely perfected, ideal human whom God designed, and men have come to expect. In other words, actual human experience and the ideal world that scholars such as Jāḥiẓ describe are disjointed—often wrenchingly so. Jāḥiẓ’s example, however, illustrates the contradictions that sur‑ face when natural, timeless biological functions, such as reproduc‑ tion and birth, become inextricably bound up with local and specific 1 2 Conceiving Identities theological and social systems of language, medicine, law, myth, and ritual to circumscribe what it means to be a mother. Such discussions about the formation of human life during the seventh to fourteenth centuries CE were crucial for the creation of a normative Muslim dis‑ course surrounding women’s biological, social, and religious roles as mother. To date, no study exists that considers how Muslim scholars of this period mapped the female reproductive body according to broader, cosmological schemes in order to define a woman’s maternal identity. By examining systematically the discourses and practices surround‑ ing maternity and how medieval Muslim theologians appropriated and channeled female reproductive power, this study fills a signifi‑ cant scholarly void concerning the historical construction of Muslim women’s identities. To meet this goal, this book has three aims: First, it brings to light relatively unknown medieval Muslim exegetical works, medical trea‑ tises, legal pronouncements, historical narratives, zoological texts, and folklore traditions that frame traditional understandings of motherhood and maternity. Second, it offers a foundational survey of the seminal discourses and practices concerned with women as procreative agents. This survey illustrates how medieval Muslim scholars prescribe visions of the pious “mother” and how their discursive strategies often conflict with the biological realities of the female reproductive body. Third, this study probes how ordinary women struggle to bridge the gap between their ideologically fashioned selves and their actual experience. By close consideration of rituals, gestures, laws, theories of procreation marginal to orthodox discourse, and folk medicine, this study reveals how medi‑ eval women embrace, multiply, but often question the maternal identities imagined for them by the tradition and thereby reinvent themselves as mothers and Muslims. Maternity provides an excellent example for a study of how a mother’s identity is formed because of the very liminal nature of con‑ ception, gestation, and birth. Maternity exaggerates the porous nature of women, whose boundaries are penetrated by others from within and without, in the form of sperm, child, and even God. As a result of these incursions, a woman’s identity is no longer fixed but severed and fluid.7 The boundaries of her own body shift continuously to accommodate from one to two or even three sentient beings; even more disturbing, there is no clear indication as to when precisely those alterations take place. Upon giving birth, the contours of a mother’s physique again erode as they are scrutinized, penetrated, and breached by physicians, midwives, family, society, and the child itself. For example, the blurring...

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