Building Women

What do buildings tell us about the women who built them? For, despite political, religious and social structures meant to keep them from power, women throughout the early modern built big. Today, I’ll focus on women in the Islamic world, a squishy term that for my purposes refers to modern-day Arabia, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, Central Eurasia, and the Indian subcontinent, and I’ll look at the ways that buildings both commemorate and obscure individual agency.

We tend to think of architecture as a particularly public form of art patronage. And, after teaching undergraduates for years, I can say that our educational system tends to elide histories of gender and space before the modern era. What I mean is that my students (and perhaps many of my readers) tend to think that early modern women, especially Muslim women, had no access to public life. Instead, they were immured in their homes, hidden behind veils and devoid of any role in public life. This is patently false. Boundaries between “public” and “private” were much more porous in the Renaissance. While many Muslim homes of this period had a harem, it was hardly full of scantily clad concubines. Rather, the harem was (and remains) the place reserved for the family; visitors and even strangers could often access other areas of the house.

Access to architectural patronage was more a matter of class than gender. In both the Muslim and European arenas, architectural patrons were elite individuals with access to social, political and financial capital. Muslim women were active as builders of tombs, religious shrines and lodges, mosques and public works projects such as markets and baths. These women builders did not hold political power in their own right. Instead, female architectural patrons derived their social and political power from their male family members, usually fathers, brothers or husbands. But, Muslim women could own property and amass wealth. Unlike in much of Europe where Salic Law prohibited most forms of female inheritance, the Qur’an guaranteed women a share of family property.

Let’s look at the example of Tuman Aqa, one of the many wives of Timur, a Muslim ruler who conquered most of central Eurasia. Timur and Tuman Aqa were quite close: he built her a vast complex of gardens known as Bagh-i Bihisht, and she accompanied her husband several of his military campaigns. During her time as Timur’s wife, Tuman Aqa (also speleld Tuman Agha) paid for the construction of a mosque, a Sufi lodge, and the bazaar of hat sellers, all in Samarkand. After Timur’s death, Tuman Aqa eventually ruled the town of Kuhsan as a fiefdom in the name of her son, where she built another Sufi lodge, a madrasa, and an inn for the traveling traders responsible for most of the commerce in the region.

Many of these buildings exist only in ruins, but Tuman Aqa’s two mausolea still stand. Tuman Aqa’s mausoleum in Samarkand (above), which she built around 1404, consists of a commanding turquoise dome sitting on top of a drum decorated with geometric patterns and inscriptions created with glazed tiles. Inside, the dome is supported by luminous muqarnas that glisten in the pale light. Inscriptions at the mausoleum and its attached mosque laud Tuman Aqa’s dynastic connections and praise her merits. The building is located within a larger funerary precinct known as Shah-i-Zinda, which houses a shrine to Kusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad who lived in the 7th century CE. Thus, Tuman Aqa was able to place her own mausoleum near that of a revered early Muslim, ensuring that later generations would visit her tomb while on pilgrimage to Shah-i-Zinda.

Yet, this building and others like it bring me to a series of questions. How do buildings facilitate memory? And what memories do they construct of women? Perhaps most importantly for me, what is the relationship between memory and agency? Studies of women’s architectural patronage tend to focus on the fact of the buildings – their very existence and location – rather than visual and architectural elements, such as the placement of domes, the arrangement of the plan, the choice of ceramic tiles or the kind of brickwork used. This is because it is unclear what role patrons, whether male or female, played in the actual form and decoration of the building. To be fair, this is largely true in Europe as well. We know that a few female patrons, such as Isabella d’Este in Italy or Turhan Sultan in Turkey, actively participated in the planning and execution of their building projects. But, for the most part, it is unlikely that Muslim caliphs, shahs and princesses, or Christian kings, queens and dukes dictated the use of specific architectural elements. They wanted grand mosques and churches, magnificent palaces and impressive tombs. They left many of the details up to architects and advisers.

I don’t mean to say that Tuman Aqa had no agency. She was clearly a very powerful woman (though she still lacks a Wikipedia page). But I don’t think we can infer much about her personal tastes or style from this building, or even about individual self-representation. Tuman Aqa’s mausoleum celebrates her familial connections to her father, Amir Musa, and her husband, Timur. The rather generic inscriptions tell us nothing about her personality or her role at court. The style of the mausoleum is also steadfastly Timurid. The building therefore commemorates Tuman Aqa, not as an individual, but as a member of the Timurid dynasty. What I’m saying is that Tuman Aqa’s mausoleum is as much about establishing her family’s control of an important religious shrine as it is about her individual agency. Perhaps it is more accurate to refer to such buildings as examples of a patron using her (or his) personal agency to promote dynastic unity and continuity.

The academic year is upon us! I will only be blogging every other week during this time. So, check back on September 18th for a blog on Renaissance monsters and their gender-bending abilities!

Want to know more about the architectural patronage of Muslim women? Check out the online database Women Builders of the Islamic World. Note that, as of August 2019, there was no entry for Tuman Aqa. I also consulted the following resources for this blog: Roya Marefat, “Timurid Women: Patronage and Power.” Asian Art 6 (1993): 28-49; D. Fairchild Ruggles (ed.), Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (State University of New York Press, 2000). All images courtesy of ArchNet.