Khadijah and Her Black-Eyed Sisters: The Image of Middle Eastern Women from the Era of the Birth of Islam in the Medieval Literature of the Byzantine-Slavic Circle

The monograph aims to show literary images of Arab and Persian women from the 4th–8th centuries in the Old Rus’ writings from the 11th–16th century. In the first three chapters, the reader will find a discussion of the image of women living in the Middle East in the pre-Muslim era: women who were part of the Sassanid Persian Empire, but, above all, members of various Arab tribes, which in the discussed period were at different stages of social and civilizational development. The fourth chapter is devoted to the first Muslim women, that is, the wives and daughters of the Prophet Muhammad, and the fifth, to Arab women from the era of the military expansion of the followers of Islam in the Mediterranean, where they came under the rule of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750).

The research material consists of texts written several centuries after the events described in them and in a culturally different area, that is, in the environment of the Slavs who, having adopted Christianity in the Eastern rite, came under the direct influence of the Byzantine civilization (Bulgarians, Serbs, and the Rus’). In the 9th century, they started translating into Old Church Slavic language works that had been written in Greek on the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire. This gave them the opportunity to get acquainted with various sources containing information about the peoples inhabiting the territory of the Middle East in the 4th–8th centuries, some of which were even translations or paraphrases of earlier Syrian, Arabic, Persian, or Coptic sources.