Mohamed Berrada's game of remembering and forgetting: expanding the horizons of contemporary Arabic literature

This article examines women's lives, scholarship, and memory in premodern Morocco through the life of Umm Hani al- Abdusi (d. 1456). Biographical sources describe Umm Hani as a faqiha (legal scholar), placing her in an elite category of women who engaged with Islamic law at the level of legal interpretation. Tracing Umm Hani's inclusion in biographical works over 500 years, this study demonstrates the respected space she occupied in these collections, as well as how her memorialisation evolved in the late twentieth century, reflecting the increased interest in women's historical participation in Moroccan society. Rather than discounting the traces preserved in the sources as evidence of women's lack of participation, this study argues that we should take these glimpses as hints at what might have been, what women's lives and learning could have looked like outside of the biographical mentions recorded by men and institutional structures dominated by male scholars. Moreover, Umm Hani's preservation in the sources stakes out a precedent for women's interpretive authority in Islamic law in the premodern Islamic world.