So when the doors of learning were flung wide open before her... and when, as the historians say, she turned to study and gave herself to it, most of them distinguished by keenness of intelligence and the power to acquire learning... medicine was among the sciences most beloved to them.

Zainab was not, of course, the only woman physician... there were many others... Baghdad, like Cordoba, was a stage for many of them.

Some of them specialized in treat-ing bodies, in their visible ailments and their hidden ones... There was the sister of al-Hafid Ibn Zuhr of Andalusia, and her daughter, and the two excelled in all the branches of medicine... and in the diseases of women in particular... so much so that al-Mansur ibn Abi Amir, heir of the Umayyad caliphate in Andalusia, would summon for his womenfolk and the general people of his house none but these two.

Woman had a primitive knowledge which was afterward polished — but how? How did she receive her lessons in medicine, philosophy, and the rest...? And where...?

He who searches the books of Arab

history finds between their lines what shows that the institutes of learning were abundant... and were of the highest order... a single insti-tute might hold 100,000 books.

And he finds that every institute had halls, and in each hall gathered a circle of people — among whom might be emirs, ministers, and scholars — listening to whoever delivered his lecture, then examin-ing and debating.

And he finds that the mosques, and especially the great congregational

mosque of Cordoba, were places where lessons were given exactly as happens in the universities today.

And that the women of Andalusia in that era would go out to the great mosque of Cordoba, or to other institutes of learning, and sit in the study circles, veiled and modest, drinking in knowledge.

Modest... And is there any decoration to adorn their breasts more precious than this one...?

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