The Five Women

We don't know her real name.

The woman who governed Tetouan for thirty years, who split the Mediterranean with Barbarossa, who forced the King of Morocco to come to her for the wedding — we know her only by her title: Sayyida al-Hurra. "The noble lady who is free and independent." She was the last woman in Islamic history to hold the title legitimately.

She is one of five. Five women, separated by centuries, connected by the fact that they shaped Morocco while history tried not to notice.

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The first was Dihya.

Seventh century. The Aures Mountains. The Arab armies had already taken Carthage, already scattered the Byzantines, already considered North Africa conquered. Then a Berber woman assembled an army.

At the Battle of Meskiana in 698, she destroyed the Umayyad forces so completely that the general Hassan ibn al-Nu'man fled east and didn't come back for five years. She ruled a free Berber state from the mountains to the oasis of Ghadames. The Arab chroniclers called her al-Kahina — the sorceress, the priestess — because they had no other framework for a woman who beat them in open combat.

She held them off for five years. When she finally fell, around 703, her sons joined the army that crossed the Strait and conquered Spain. The empire she delayed became the empire her children built.

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The second was Zineb al-Nafzawiya.

Eleventh century. A widow in Aghmat with a fortune and a condition: she would marry no man who did not intend to rule the entire country. Abu Bakr ibn Umar married her in 1068. Two years later he went south to fight in the Sahara and left his cousin Yusuf ibn Tashfin as deputy. On Abu Bakr's instructions, Zineb married Yusuf.

Then she made him an empire.

The sources call her "al-qa'ima bi mulkihi" — the one in charge of her husband's realm. They called her "The Magician" for her negotiations. When Abu Bakr came back expecting to resume power, it was Zineb who advised Yusuf on how to handle it: respectfully, generously, firmly. Abu Bakr went back to the desert. The Almoravid Empire — Senegal to Spain — belonged to Yusuf and Zineb.

Under her influence, princesses participated in state affairs. Women's education became normal. At least two women practiced medicine. When the dynasty fell in 1147, Princess Fannu fought in the defense of the capital. Zineb had set the precedent.

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The third was Fatima al-Fihri.

Ninth century. A woman from Qayrawan in Tunisia, inheritor of her father's merchant fortune, walked into the governor's office in Fes in 859 and announced she was going to build the largest mosque in North Africa. She spent every dirham. She fasted from the first day of Ramadan until it was finished.

The mosque became al-Qarawiyyin. The mosque became a university. Students came from across the Islamic world. Maimonides studied there. Al-Idrisi studied there and drew the most accurate world map of the medieval period. Pope Sylvester II — the man who introduced Arabic numerals to Europe — possibly studied there too.

UNESCO and Guinness recognize al-Qarawiyyin as the oldest continuously operating university in the world. Founded 859. The University of Bologna started in 1088. Oxford in 1096. Fatima had been running for 230 years by the time Oxford opened its doors.

Her diploma is still on display — carved onto a wooden board, behind glass, in the medina of Fes.

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The fourth was Sayyida al-Hurra.

Sixteenth century. Born in Granada around 1485 — the exact date, like her real name, is lost. Her family were Andalusian nobles, descendants of the Prophet through the Idrisid line. They fled to Morocco after 1492. Her father founded Chefchaouen. She married the governor of Tetouan at sixteen, helped him rebuild a city the Portuguese had left in rubble, and when he died in 1515, the people made her governor.

Then she became a pirate.

She split the Mediterranean with Hayreddin Barbarossa: he took the east, she took the west. Her fleet raided Spanish and Portuguese shipping for two decades. The Portuguese prayed for God to let them see her hanged from a ship's mast. The Spanish negotiated with her as an equal. She spoke Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese.

When the King of Morocco proposed marriage, she accepted — on the condition that he come to Tetouan. He did. The only time in Moroccan history a king married away from the capital. She kept governing. They lived in separate cities.

She ruled for thirty years. Her son-in-law overthrew her in 1542. She may have returned to Chefchaouen. Her ending, like her beginning, is undocumented.

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The fifth was Fatima Mernissi.

Twentieth century. Born in a Fes harem in 1940. The harem was not what the word implies to Western ears — it was an extended family household, but one where women could not leave without permission. She watched. She remembered. She turned the watching into scholarship.

PhD from Brandeis. Professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat. In 1987 she published "The Veil and the Male Elite," a historical investigation into the wives of the Prophet that was immediately banned in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Her argument: that Islam's founding texts did not require the subordination of women, and that the restrictions came later, imposed by men citing religion to justify power.

The book is still banned in several countries. It is taught in universities worldwide. She followed it with "The Forgotten Queens of Islam" — the book that rescued Sayyida al-Hurra from obscurity. Mernissi died in 2015, having spent a career proving that the women who shaped Islamic history had been written out of it.

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Five women. A warrior, a queen, a scholar, a pirate, a writer. Thirteen centuries between the first and the last. The men around them held the titles. The women shaped what the titles meant.