Conclusion
Umm ʿAlī of Balkh presents a very different case of female religious authority from that of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya. The two had three things in common: their era - Rābiʿa preceded Umm ʿAlī by just one generation - their serious engagement with Muslim learning and mysticism as ʿulamāt, and their gender. Here is where the similarity ends. Each of these women had a particular path to scholarship, and each focussed on her own field of scholarship. While Rābiʿa came from the lowest stratum of society - she had been manumitted from slavery - Umm ʿAlī possessed exceptional wealth, not from her own labours but through inheritance from a family of the highest pedigree. Rābiʿa’s disciples came from all walks of life, while Umm ʿAlī’s social circle was centred on the provincial elite. Rābiʿa received many offers of marriage but rejected them all, choosing celibacy;98 Umm ʿAlī had to ask Aḥmad b. Khiḍrawayh more than once before he sought her hand in marriage. Rābiʿa famously refused help from her friends, as a mark of her extreme asceticism and otherworldliness,99 while Umm ʿAlī donated stipends to the poor. Rābiʿa developed and taught concepts in Islamic mysticism focussed on love and communion with God, while Umm ʿAlī studied and taught the Qurʾan. We do not hear of Rābiʿa learning from any particular master,100 while we read that Umm ʿAlī studied with her teacher Ṣāliḥ b. ʿAbdallāh, whose book of tafsīr she transmitted. Umm ʿAlī, like any good ʿālim, travelled to study for an extended period, while travel is not highlighted in the accounts of Rābiʿa.
In terms of the representations of these women, Rābiʿa tends to be accorded her own entries in the biographical dictionaries, while Umm ʿAlī is usually mentioned in relation to her husband. This seems to reflect a historiographical tradition rather than a real weighting of these two women’s contributions to Islamic scholarship and mysticism. The author of the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh was clearly impressed with the mahd-i ʿaliyya - the “[lady of ] high standing”—concluding that it was no wonder that Balkh’s shuyūkh were exceptional, considering how great their wives were.101 This male author, rather predictably, saw accomplished women as a prerequisite for male eminence. It is reminiscent of the phrase, “Behind every successful man stands a great woman.” Could it be that behind this successful woman stood a great man? Thus, al-Wāʾiz’̣s praise should not detract from the fact that the author still did not feel compelled to devote a separate biography to her.
However, the Shaykh al-Islām and other mediaeval authors of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries CE give us clues as to how a woman like Umm ʿAlī used strategies that enabled them to manoeuvre in the world of scholarship. These included reverse genderization (i.e., “being a man”) and engaging in nominal marriage. The stories of Umm ʿAlī that are repeated (with variations) in numerous sources during this period are the product of the historiographical tradition from which they spring. At some point between the mid-ninth and the early eleventh centuries, their stories became canonical in the biographical traditions and were introduced into the biographical sources and, in Umm ʿAlī’s case, into the local history of Balkh.
We find a subtle change in the later sources on Umm ʿAlī’s character: by the fifteenth century she loses those “manly” attributes that appear in the earlier sources. She becomes the virtuous woman who helps the poor and follows her husband in everything he believes - no divorce, no nominal marriage with Abū Yazīd. There is no more unveiling, no challenging or teaching her husband. Umm ʿAlī becomes pacified by historiography. Umm ʿAlī, like other women scholars in the later sources, are still represented as excelling in their scholarship and mystical experience, but social conventions eventually obliged the male authors who memorialized them to turn their legacy quiet, though not completely silent, for which we should be thankful.