How will these resources help you?

While queenship studies have long been an exciting area of research, we tend to focus on European royal women, which gives us a skewed and incomplete perspective. Looking at the lives of queens and royal women in the medieval Islamic world not only gives us a better understanding of queenship, but also counters incorrect presumptions that Muslim royal women lacked agency and authority. The lives of women such as Arwa of Yemen, Shajar al-Durr of Egypt and Razia Sultan in India offer exciting case studies and comparisons to their European counterparts that can be woven into wider discussions of medieval history (including examinations of the Crusades) and of the nature of politics, gender and power in Islam.