Remke Kruk
Author of The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature
About the Author
Image credit: Prof. dr. Remke Kruk (Emeritus)
Works by Remke Kruk
Associated Works
The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love (1020) — Translator, some editions — 170 copies
The Animals' Lawsuit Against Humanity: An Illustrated 10th Century Iraqi Ecological Fable (1978) — Translator, some editions — 52 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kruk, Remke
- Birthdate
- 1942-11-08
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Netherlands
- Birthplace
- Apeldoorn, Netherlands
- Education
- Gemeentelijk Gymnasium, Apeldoorn, Netherlands
University of Leiden
Cairo University
University of Amsterdam - Occupations
- Arabic professor
translator
author - Organizations
- University of Leiden
University of Utrecht
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Leiden Institute for Area Studies - Short biography
- Remke Kruk werd geboren op 8 november 1942 te Apeldoorn, Nederland. Zij studeerde Arabisch en Perzisch aan de universiteit van Leiden en studeerde af in 1966. In 1978 verkreeg ze haar doctoraat aan de universiteit van Amsterdam. In de periode van 1967 tot 1969 had ze verschillende functies in de faculteit Arabisch aan de Universiteit van Leiden en van 1969 tot 1989 was ze assistent en later associé, professor Arabisch voor de universiteit Utrecht. Sinds 1990 is ze hoofd van de faculteit Arabische talen en culturen voor de universiteit van Leiden. In 2000 werd ze lid van de KNAW, Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie wetenschappen.
Ze gaf les in klassieke Arabische literatuur, Islamitische filosofie en wetenschap, klassieke literaire werken, en moderne Arabische religieuze teksten. Zij nam op 16 november 2007 afscheid als hoogleraar Arabische Taal en Cultuur aan de Universiteit van Leiden.
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- Popularity
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- Rating
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My The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature has this to say of the genre treated in this book: Even without taking account of the Thousand and One Nights, the Mamluk period was a golden age for popular fiction. In particular there was a vogue for lengthy poetic epics featuring Arab paladins who battled against Byzantines, Crusaders and Zoroastrians – not to mention sorcerers, dragons and seductresses. Such enthusiasm for pseudo-historical fiction aroused disapproval in pious circles. A 14th-century Syrian religious scholar advised copyists not to copy deceptive books ‘by which Allah does not offer any useful thing, such as Sirat Antar and other fabricated things’.
It echoes the famous injunction against Northern European epic, in an Anglo-Saxon monastery where popular fiction, if it were to survive, had to be copied out: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ The monks, chastened, suppressed their love of Ingeld epic, and thus, we are lucky to have Beowulf, single survivor of a greater tradition. One monk wrote out Beowulf, probably under his desk.
Ah, genre. Either a victim of pieties, or if not, of snobbishness. I am a devotee of medieval European chivalric romances and am conscious that class, in written arts, is not easily shaken off: these, the fantasy fiction of their day, were despised in more literary circles, and are still fighting for standing – scholarship on them had to struggle out of what we in Australia used to call the cultural cringe, and I see medievalists despise them still.
Their equivalents in the Arabic-writing world suffered a similar fate. The sira(t) (adventures, popular epic, romances – translation up to you) were very like those endless adventures of Lancelot or Orlando. They were cheaply printed, not preserved with care as were more ‘literary’ productions, which makes the textual study of them difficult today; they still can go unmentioned, this book complains, in surveys of Arabic literature, due to unavailability in other languages and lack of serious attention in their own.
Translator wanted, because I love them. An exception to their unavailability is The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan: An Arab Folk Epic, in, as you see, a much shortened version. These romances run to four or six thousand pages, and took a year for the storytellers to recount to their audience (another commonality with our fantasy fiction – which issues from this stuff, you know). The book before us is a great step forward in our English-language knowledge of these epics. There is also the more expensive The Arabian Epic: Heroic And Oral Storytelling in 3 vols, the 3rd vol being Texts, with extensive summary of the main epics. Remke Kruk’s book is also plot summary and description, nothing fancy like analysis, just getting the information to us about what is in these epics, what they are like.
It focuses, as you see by the title, on one characteristic of the knightly romance in its Arabic rendition: A remarkable aspect of the Arabic epic is that a number of the heroes are people of low social status, handicapped in their career by their birth and physical appearance. Many of them are black, and some even start out as slaves. Some of the heroes are female, in some cases black women.
Now, fighting women are a feature of knightly romance wherever you travel: Boiardo’s Italian, Spenser’s English, the Karakalpak Qirq Qiz (Forty Girls – who fight), the Byzantine Digenes Akrites, this last of which proves you have to put fighting women in even if you are driven to trash them. Whenever I see – and that’s frequently – reviews of contemporary fantasy or historical say, ‘here we go, have to have a butt-kicking woman these days, how anachronistic’, I itch to point out that women in arms and armour have been wildly popular from the get-go. After reading this book, I have the niggling suspicion that the Turkic epics may be outperformed in this area by their Arabic-language peers. But since neither are extensively translated into English, alas, I am unequipped to adjudicate in this challenge. They’ve certainly laid the gauntlet down. Dhat al-Himma, as the plot progresses, becomes more and more ‘bold’, rather like Xena the television series, which in its ripe episodes might be populated by a vast majority of women, from the weekly villain who wants to take over the world, to her army, to Xena and her army and her allies’ armies. I cite Xena because, of course, she’s genre fiction, in fact she’s very very similar to these romances, and having just devoured this book, I am in no mood to hide my box-set in the cupboard.
In these Arabic renditions, women marry and go on with their careers in arms just as before. Perhaps it’s a function of polygamy and plot; Abd al-Wahhab collects three warrior-women wives, one of whom remains centred in her independent castle, another of whom, after a lot of plot, goes bad and defects to the Byzantines. Dhat al-Himma, main hero of perhaps the second-most popular of the epics, dedicates herself to arms to the exclusion of love and (spoiler) dies of old age without a love affair in her six thousand pages. The above Abd al-Wahhab is her son, but by rape; she married only at orders of the caliph, wouldn’t consummate for months, and her husband drugged her (she is with difficulty restrained from killing him; in the end, the son does).
The sexual politics are only one aspect of these popular epics worth study. I think the book is titled to catch interest, slightly clumsily; inside, the author doesn’t use such words as ‘empowerment’, but describes the contents of the epics, with a brief discussion at the end: My aim in this book was, in the first place, to tell the stories and to emphasize how much popular epic has to offer. She observes that it is those epics with Bedouin settings which allow for women, whether Arab or foreign, to fight from childhood and to go on fighting after marriage; with the more ‘civilized’ settings (isn’t this familiar?), things become less free and easy: warrior women exist, but their position is contested.… (more)