Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی
Authors
1
اPhD student in Islamic History, Lorestan University
2
Faculty of History, Lorestan University
10.48311/jhs.2026.104762.0
Abstract
The Jibāl region, located at the heart of medieval Iran and situated along the major commercial and intellectual arteries of the Islamic world, occupied a strategically significant position in the socio-political and cultural landscape of the Middle Period. Despite its central role in shaping the political, religious, and intellectual trajectories of the region, the agency of women in Jibāl has remained largely obscured within classical historiography and underexplored in modern scholarship. This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to examine the mechanisms through which women in Jibāl participated in the reproduction of power, negotiated constraints, and exercised cultural agency during the Buyid (4th–5th/10th–11th centuries) and Seljuk (5th–6th/11th–12th centuries) eras. Drawing upon primary historical sources and secondary research, this study applies key Bourdieusian concepts—including field, capital, habitus, and symbolic violence—to analyze systematically the diverse spaces in which women’s agency manifested. Through this framework, the article demonstrates how women navigated complex social structures characterized by patriarchy, hierarchical religious authority, and shifting political orders, while simultaneously shaping intellectual, spiritual, and political life in meaningful ways. The findings reveal that women in Jibāl were not passive recipients of structural constraints but strategic actors who employed various forms of capital to sustain influence, authority, and cultural presence. In the scientific-religious field, learned women—particularly muḥaddithāt and female scholars—mobilized cultural capital (religious knowledge, literacy, and scholarly pedigree) and social capital (scholarly networks and familial affiliations) to acquire symbolic capital, enabling them to teach, transmit Islamic knowledge, and train students. Their participation demonstrates that despite the gendered hierarchies of the era, women successfully carved out spaces of intellectual legitimacy and authority.
In the mystical-spiritual sphere, female Sufis utilized kinship ties, spiritual lineages, and localized networks to create semi-autonomous spaces for devotional practice and religious instruction. These women’s activities not only expanded the spiritual field but also contributed to the diffusion of Sufi ethics, ascetic values, and devotional practices throughout the region. Their agency underscores the importance of informal and non-institutionalized fields of religious life in enabling women to exercise cultural and symbolic influence. In the socio-political domain, women in elite households played pivotal roles in diplomacy, crisis management, charitable initiatives, and the consolidation of dynastic legitimacy. Through strategic marriage alliances, philanthropy, and the management of economic resources, these women transformed economic and symbolic capital into political leverage. Their interventions helped stabilize ruling dynasties and fostered networks of loyalty and patronage that were essential to governance in the politically fragmented milieu of the Buyid and Seljuk periods.
A core argument of this study is that the geographical particularities of Jibāl—mountainous terrain, dispersed settlements, and its location along transregional corridors—conditioned the habitus of its inhabitants, including women. This spatiality produced forms of resilience, self-reliance, and localism that shaped women’s everyday practices and modes of agency. Women became key actors in sustaining family structures, preserving cultural traditions, and managing local resources, responsibilities that endowed them with forms of capital often unacknowledged in written chronicles. The region’s unique socio-geographical configuration thus functioned as a form of embodied cultural capital that facilitated women’s participation in social reproduction. Islamic expansion into Jibāl further reorganized social fields, redefined legitimate forms of knowledge and authority, and reshaped gendered patterns of capital access. The transition from Zoroastrian Sasanian structures to Islamic political and religious orders produced new opportunities—including access to Islamic educational spaces, charitable endowments, and religious networks—while simultaneously reinforcing new modalities of symbolic violence, such as patriarchal interpretations of religious norms. Women responded to these changes through adaptive strategies, leveraging the new symbolic economy of Islam to reposition themselves within reconfigured fields of power. By analyzing these processes through Bourdieu’s relational sociology, this article illuminates the dialectic between structure and agency, demonstrating how women both internalized and contested dominant norms. Their strategies—ranging from knowledge production and religious participation to household management and political brokerage—illustrate the dynamic interplay between habitus, capital, and field. Women’s engagement, though often mediated by patriarchal oversight, reveals patterns of negotiation, adaptation, and subtle resistance that challenge androcentric narratives of medieval Islamic societies. The article thus makes three primary contributions. First, it offers the first comprehensive and region-specific analysis of women’s agency in Jibāl during the Buyid and Seljuk periods. Second, it applies Bourdieusian theory to pre-modern Iranian social history, providing a nuanced interpretive model that moves beyond descriptive historiography toward an analytical understanding of power relations, gendered habitus, and capital conversion. Third, it proposes an interdisciplinary, context-sensitive framework that integrates historical and sociological methods for reconstructing women’s roles in Islamic civilization. Overall, this study highlights the importance of re-examining medieval Iranian history through gender-aware and theoretically informed approaches. Understanding the social and cultural role of women in Jibāl not only enriches the historiography of Iran and the Islamic world but also contributes to broader debates on gender, power, and cultural reproduction in historical societies.
Keywords
Subjects
historical sociology