Yes.
Rashna and
awais, thank you both for bringing up the info and references about Sakina, among all the others. There is some good stuff in this thread!
(...)
So it's really interesting to see all these alternative versions of one of the Shia's highly regarded characters, Sakina.
If there is truth to Mernissi's version, this has some serious potential. There's much to do, look up, research, write....
I just wanted to thank you both.
No problem
This sounds nice, for a Muslimah. But wasn't Sakina, daughter of hussain, grand daughter of Ali killed in the dungeons while the whole lot was imprisoned after the Karbala incident? That's what I heard growing up from every direction... it's a big thing among Shias who spend long amounts of time mourning her and the rest of Hussain's family every year (Ashura). Are we thinking of 2 different people?
I checked out the book "The veil and the male elite: a feminist interpretation of women's rights in Islam" by Fatima Mernissi from the university's library here, and the passage I copied and pasted from another site quoting it goes on to say:
You can imagine my surprise when I was accused of lying at a conference in Penang, Malaysia in 1984, where I presented Sukayna as a type of traditional Muslim woman for us to think about. My accuser, a Pakistani, editor of an Islamic journal in London, interrupted me, shouting to the audience: "Sukayna died at the age of six!" Trying to snatch the microphone away from me in a vindictive rage, he kept repeating: "She died at Karbala with her father! She died at Karbala!" Then smugly assuming the role of qadi, he demanded that I name the sources where I found my version of Sukayna's history. I furnished him a list on the spot - in Arabic obviously. He looked at it with disdain and told me it was very scanty. In fact, it contained the names of Ibn Qutayba, Ibn 'Abd Rabbih, Ibn 'Asakir, al-Zamakshari, Ibn Sa'd, Ibn al-Ma'ad, al-Isbahani, al-Dhahabi, Al-Safadi, Al-Washaa, al-Bukhari - in short, the great names of Muslim historiography. I learned later that this important editor, whose journal claims to contribute a better understanding of the Muslim world, neither speaks nor reads Arabic.
Sukayna died in Medina at the age of 68 (117 AH). Other sources have her dying at the age of 77 at Kufa. (...)
In any case, that verbal aggression that I was subjected to and that attempt to obliterate the memory of Sukayna by a modern Muslim man who only accepts his wife as veiled, crushed, and silent remains for me an incident that symbolizes the whole matter of the relationship of the Muslim man to time - of amnesia as memory, of the past as warping the possibilities of the present. (...)
What a strange memory, where even dead men and women do not escape attempts at assassination, if by chance they threated to raise the hijab that covers the mediocrity and servility that is presented to us as tradition. How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion? (...)
From the footnotes:
For biographical information on Sakayna, see the following, which, however, is far from being an exhaustive list: Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, vol. 8, p. 475; Isbahani, Aghani, vol. 3, pp. 36Iff; vol. 16, pp.138ff; vol. 17, pp.43ff; and vol. 19, pp.155ff; Ibn 'Asakir, Tarikh Madinat Dimashq (Damascus: n.p., 1982), pp. 155ff. (The authr died in the eleventh century.); Ibn Hasan al-Malaki, Hada'iq; Ibn Habib al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Muhabbar (Beirut: Al-Maktaba al-Tijariya, n.d.), pp. 439ff. (The author died in the year 245 AH, 9th Century CE.)
Topic: Favourite Character in Islamic Scriptures