Queens and Prophets: How Arabian Noblewomen and Holy Men Shaped Paganism, Christianity and Islam

In this enlightening history, University of Houston professor El-Badawi (The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions) chronicles female power in Arabia before the dawn of Islam. Contradicting modern perceptions, El-Badawi argues that Arabian queens allied with prophets to shape the region’s religious and political culture, and that their legacies impacted the early Christian church, the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, and historical connections between the two traditions. Though their power would eventually be usurped—and legacies overshadowed—by male-dominated empires and religious sectarianism, El-Badawi shows how Queen Zenobia and her theologian Paul of Samosata shaped the theology of the earliest Arabian churches, explores how “warrior-queen” and “bishop-maker” Mavia became the “historical matriarch to an Arab ethos,” and suggests Khadijah, the prophet Mohammed’s first wife, was also the “mother of the faithful” and a quasi cofounder of a new Middle Eastern monotheistic tradition. Though the author sometimes jumps abruptly between empires and queendoms, El-Badawi presents a convincing case that mothers, queens, and goddesses played a far more important role in antique Arabia than they’ve been credited. It’s a welcome reassessment of female power in late antique Arabia. (Jan.)