The “Presences of Women” from the Islamic World in Sixteenth- to Early Seventeenth-Century British Literature and Culture

Long considered to be the first book issued from the printing press of William Caxton, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (c. 1477) establishes the Arabic treatise Mukhtar al-hikam wa mahasin al-kalim [“The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings”], via successive Spanish, Latin, and French translations, at the foundation of English print culture. ¹ As Franz Rosenthal asserts in his detailed bibliographical study of Mukhtar al-hikam, these translations from the thirteenth century onwards of this eleventh-century “book of popular philosophy,” written by “the Syro-Egyptian historian, philosopher, and bibliophile, Abû l-Wafâ’ al-Mubashshir b. Fâtik” 400 years after the Hijrah, “were landmarks in the literary and intellectual history of the Western European nations.” The book had a similar impact on medieval Muslim literature and thought, where its classical Greek proof texts were supplemented by “sayings of Muslim sages and mystics not belonging to al-Mubashshir’s work.” ² As Leila Ahmed elaborates in Women and Gender in Islam, this shared legacy, based on “Aristotle’s theories,” inculcated misogynist dictums into “both Arab and European civilizations.” ³