Bakkara al-Hilaliyya

Bakkara al-Hilaliyya, as Kahhala describes her in A'lam al-Nisa', was one of the Arab women famed for courage, daring, eloquence, poetry, prose and oratory; she was a partisan of Ali ibn Abi Talib in the war of Siffin, giving rousing speeches that urged men into battle without fear. ¹

She came before Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan when she was old and frail, leaning on two servants with a staff in her hand, and greeted him as caliph; he returned her greeting kindly and bade her sit. ¹ With him were Marwan ibn al-Hakam, Amr ibn al-As and Sa'id, and each reminded him of verses of hers: lines urging a man to battle, lines denying that the son of Hind could hold the caliphate, and lines saying she had hoped to die before seeing preachers of the Umayyads on the pulpits. ²

When they fell silent she said his dogs had barked at her and set upon her, her staff had grown short, her wonder great and her sight dim; she had said what they quoted and would not deny it — let him do as he wished, for there was no good in life after Ali. Mu'awiya said that this would not lower her, told her to name her needs, met them, and sent her home. ^{2 3} In his notes Kahhala marks differences between Balaghat al-Nisa' and al-Iqd al-Farid — in the Iqd, for example, the second speaker is Marwan rather than Amr. ²

The stories of these 'women who came before Mu'awiya' are told in the adab literature; Kahhala takes them from Ibn Tayfur's Balaghat al-Nisa', al-Iqd al-Farid, Subh al-A'sha, Ibn Asakir's history and Nihayat al-Arab. They voice the positions their speakers took in the civil war, and the museum gives them as attributed reports, without a verdict. ³