‘Queens Of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers’
Tom Verde (Handout photo)
(EXCERPT) From Pakistan to Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan to Nigeria, from Senegal to Turkey, it is not unusual in modern times for women in Muslim-majority countries to be appointed and/or elected to high offices, including heads of state.
Nor has it ever been.
Stretching back nearly to the founding of Islam itself, women have held positions of political power in numerous Islamic nations and empires. Some ascended to office in their own right; others served as regents for incapacitated husbands or male successors then too young to rule.
Some proved insightful and able administrators, courageous military commanders, or both; others differed little from their equally flawed, power-hungry male counterparts, and sowed the seeds of their own downfalls.
The new book, “Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers,” — on sale starting July 22 — examines the lives of some of the most remarkable female leaders of Muslim dynasties, empires and caliphates, from Islam’s earliest centuries through the end of the seventeenth century.
Here is an excerpt:
The Most Powerful Woman in the Ottoman Empire Was From Ukraine
During the reign of the Ottoman Suleiman “the Magnificent” (1520 to 1566), one exceptionally capable and courageous young Ukrainian woman – so reflective of her modern descendants who steadfastly defend their homeland today – rose from poverty and slavery to a position of power and influence like no other Ottoman queen before her. In doing so, she redefined the role of the Sultan’s wife, ushering in the era of the Kadınlar Saltanatı, the “Sultanate of Women,” a succession of politically savvy queens and queen mothers who ably directed government affairs and public policy from the gilded confines of the royal harem for the next century and a half.
Europeans knew her as Roxelana, meaning “a girl from Roxolania,” the medieval Latin name for the Ukraine. Her Ottoman name was Haseki Hürrem Sultan, from haseki (favored wife or royal consort) and hürrem, meaning “joyful” or “laughing one.” According to legend, she was born around 1504 to a poor Orthodox priest from Rohatyn, a small town near Lviv, in the western Ukrainian region of Ruthenia. Then a part of Poland, the region was prime hunting ground for Crimean slave traders who supplied captives to the Ottomans.
Roxelana was probably around the age of twelve or thirteen at the time of her abduction, just old enough to fend for herself if she had to. This included keeping her virginity during the ordeal, otherwise Suleiman would never have made her his wife. That she resisted molestation and survived the hardships of her captivity speak to her courage, an enduring legacy — one is tempted to believe — of the people of Ruthenia. Modern Lviv and the residents of its surrounding countryside offered safe haven for refugees fleeing Russian aggression, bravely deterring invasion even as the region itself came under fire.
Once in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), she was purchased by Suleiman’s boyhood friend, Ibrahim Pasha, as a gift for the soon-to-be-sultan. A skilled seamstress and musician, she was assigned to the palace laundry where Suleiman supposedly overheard her singing and playing Ukrainian songs. The sultan was immediately smitten.
While smacking of fairytale, the story suggests it was Roxelana’s wit and intelligence that made her stand out. Indeed, contemporary Venetian ambassador to the Ottoman court, Pietro Bragadin, described Roxelana as “young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite.”
Once Suleiman officially noticed Roxelana (laying a handkerchief across her shoulder was the court custom), she became the third most powerful woman in the palace after Suleiman’s mother Hafsa, the valide sultan, or “queen mother” and his qadin sultan, or first concubine, Mahidevran, mother of Suleiman’s eldest son, Mustafa.
Clashes with Mahidevran were swift. By 1526, the Venetian ambassadors—meticulous observers of court politics and intrigues — noted that Suleiman favored Roxelana. Envoy Bernardo Navagero wrote that Mahidevran confronted her, shouting, “Traitor, sold meat [i.e., “bought in the bazaar”]. You want to compete with me?” as she clawed Roxelana with her nails. Soon summoned, Roxelana sent word to Suleiman that she was not presentable. Baffled, he demanded to see her. She “related to him what had happened ... showing her face, which still bore the scratches.” Mahidevran confessed, adding brassily that “she had done less to [Roxelana] than she deserved.” This “inflamed the sultan even more,” and “all his love was given to the other” — Roxelana.
The episode underscores Roxelana’s talent for navigating palace politics. Although not official qadin — a title that would remain with Mahidevran as mother of Mustafa — as Suleiman’s favorite it appeared that Roxelana was done playing by old rules.
She started by defying the harem’s century-old “one mother-one son” policy, which barred royal consorts from bearing more than one heir. Between 1521 and 1531, she had a son, Mehmed; a daughter, Mihrimah; and then four more sons: Abdullah, Selim, Bayezid and Cihangir. In 1541, she defied another royal tradition by remaining in Constantinople rather than accompanying Mehmed to his first administrative post in the provinces. (Normally, only upon the sultan’s death would the mother of the eldest male heir be permitted to return to the capital, where she would then assume the role of valide sultan.) She shattered another, far greater tradition by becoming the sultan’s wife.
“This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans,” remarked one Genoese ambassador in an undated letter. “The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave-woman from Russia, called Roxalana [sic], and there has been great feasting.”
The wedding, in 1533 or 1534, was Suleiman’s most public declaration that he was “deeply devoted” to Roxelana, wrote modern historian Leslie Pierce. As the Venetian Navagero observed: “There has never been a woman in the Ottoman palace who had more power than she.”
The royal couple’s correspondence highlights their passion.
“I wish for your success,” Roxelana wrote to Suleiman when he was off campaigning. “However my greatest wish is to be reunited with you. You are the only cure for my grieving, sorrowful heart.”
Suleiman was equally smitten. Under the alias Muhibbi (The Affectionate One), he replied: “[M]y bright moon ... my elixir of Paradise, my Eden/I am a flatterer near your door, I’ll sing your praises always/I, lover of the tormented heart, Muhibbi of the eyes full of tears, I am happy.”
Suleiman’s devotion was both sentimental and singular. He refused “to know any other women: something that had never been done by any of his predecessors,” wrote Domenico Trevisano, another Venetian envoy, in 1554.
Nevertheless, Roxelana eliminated potential rivals by persuading Suleiman to marry off the prettiest of the young women in the harem. She also (happily, no doubt) waved goodbye to Mahidevran in 1533, when the qadin followed Mustafa to his first official, provincial appointment. A year later, Hafsa died, leaving Roxelana mistress of the harem, at least pro tempore, as Mahidevran remained rightfully next in line to become valide sultan.
But another rival remained: Ibrahim, now grand vizier.
Though one of Suleiman’s closest confidants, Ibrahim developed his own aspirations to the throne. After a decade or so of honors, wealth and ever-increasing authority, Ibrahim grew arrogant, and “was much hated,” ambassador Bragadin wrote. Ibrahim ran his own military campaigns and even referred to himself as “sultan” in negotiations. His fall was swift and bloody: On March 15, 1536, servants found him with his throat cut.
While Suleiman ordered the execution, Roxelana was rumored to be its architect. To historians, this remains “a matter of conjecture,” wrote Galina Yermolenko, author of Roxelana in European Literature, History and Culture. Yet Roxelana “might have exploited the rumors against Ibrahim and influenced Suleiman’s decision.” As early as 1526, Pierce noted, Roxelana informed Suleiman of tensions with Ibrahim and lost little time securing the newly vacant post of vizier for Rustem, husband of her daughter, Mihrimah.
In 1541, a fire in the Old Palace inched her closer to the pinnacle of power. Located in the center of the city, the Old Palace was the official residence both for the sultan and the harem. The newer Topkapı Palace, on a promontory overlooking the Bosporus, served as seat of the court. After the fire, Roxelana convinced Suleiman to relocate the harem to Topkapı. The move permitted her to be at Suleiman’s side constantly, where she could advise him directly on political matters. Writing to him while he was away, she informed him of plague infesting the city and warned him of potential unrest. She also corresponded with the king of Poland, regarding the suppression of the Crimean slave trade—a subject of doubtless personal interest. Her efforts were enshrined in Ukrainian folklore (“Thus with the pasha’s key/She set the captives free,” went one song), and she remains a national heroine, especially in her hometown of Rohatyn where her statue towers above the central square.
Highest among Roxelana’s priorities, however, was the welfare of her sons. The Ottoman law of imperial succession mandated fratricide to prevent princely inheritance squabbles. If Mustafa succeeded Suleiman, her four surviving sons were doomed. (Abdullah had died as a child).
Mustafa was the “envy of all the princes,” as one Ottoman historian described him, beloved by the people and the army — a bit too beloved, it seemed. By 1553, rumors of Mustafa’s plans to usurp his father reached Suleiman’s ear, driven primarily (according to court gossip) by Rustem and Mihrimah who in turn may have been egged on by Roxelana. Suleiman reportedly watched from behind a curtain while Mustafa was strangled with a silken cord, as custom forbade the shedding of royal blood.
The dramatic downfalls of Roxelana’s rivals, the tectonic shifts in government policies she seemed to inspire, plus Suleiman’s unwavering devotion, all fueled inevitable jealousies, suspicions and rumors.
“[T]he entire court hate[s] her and her children likewise, but because the Grand Turk loves her very much, no one dares to speak,” wrote Venetian courtier Luigi Bassano, adding that Suleiman’s subjects attributed Roxelana’s power over him to magic, calling her ziadi (witch).
While more rational critics ruled out sorcery, many early modern historians nonetheless portrayed Roxelana as a ruthless schemer. More recent scholars say this may be unfair.
In the first place, wrote Godfrey Goodwin, author of The Private World of Ottoman Women, “most of what is known is gossip fed to Europeans who had never even stepped inside the [palace] and whose informants told them what they wanted to hear but not what they really knew, which was mostly nothing.” In Yermolenko’s opinion, Roxelana’s critics also “tend to overlook the fact that she had to fight for her own survival and the survival of her children in the very competitive world of the imperial harem. … [Roxelana] was thus unjustly and harshly judged by her contemporaries for surviving and doing so brilliantly.”
Despite her detractors, Roxelana held her head high and carried on with her royal duties. She established waqfs (charitable endowments) and endorsed grand-scale building projects. Her largesse included a mosque, two madrasas (Qur’anic schools), a soup kitchen, a hospital (still in use today as a women’s medical center) and an elementary school—all in Istanbul’s Avrat Pazari district, site of the women’s slave market where she herself had once been sold.
Here again Roxelana broke precedent. In the past, endowments of concubine mothers were limited to provincial cities, “while the sultan alone was responsible for the most splendid projects in the capital of Istanbul,” noted Pierce.
Roxelana died of an unknown disease on April 18, 1558. Even in death, she defied protocol: adjacent to the newly built Suleymaniye mosque, her tomb was erected beside the place reserved for her husband, making her “the first woman in Ottoman harem history to have been honored in that way,” wrote Yermolenko.
Suleiman lived eight more years. Roxelana’s second son Selim succeeded him, Mehmed having died as a young man.
Yet while he and subsequent male rulers often stumbled, Roxelana established an environment where women ably took their places. They included Selim’s wife Nurbanu as well as regents Kosem and Turhan, who ruled during the late 17th century.
Politically and ideologically, these and the other members of the “sultanate of women” were descendants of Roxelana, the laughing, loving, courageous and clever young woman from the Ukraine whose impact on the empire was lasting and irrefutable. Some historians have speculated that her independent spirit was a legacy of her homeland, where the Kievan Rus’ regarded women’s legal rights as equal to men’s. As Yermolenko has observed, her courage was inspired by the contemporary emergence of “a new type of a Ukrainian woman that came to the fore during the Cossack liberation movement (the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) — a Cossack woman who defended her home and land against foreign invaders along with Cossack men.”
To this day, despite her fame as an Ottoman queen, Roxelana is regarded as a national heroine in the Ukraine and a source of pride to its people -- a heritage Turkish officials have acknowledged. In 2019, at the request of the Ukrainian embassy in Istanbul, references to Roxelana’s Russian origins were removed from the visitor panel near her tomb at the Suleymaniye Mosque. With the Russian invasion of her homeland three years later, the simple, diplomatic gesture of letting people know just who this brave Ukrainian woman really was seems ever more poignant.
“Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers” can be purchased at Olive Branch Press, on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history. This article was adapted from his new book Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers which can be purchased online at https://interlinkbooks.com/product/queens-of-islam/ or your local independent bookstore, as well as Amazon. An earlier version of this article appeared in the author’s “Malika” series, written for AramcoWorld magazine in 2016.