Sarah of Yemen explained

Sarah of Yemen (Arabic: سارة, fl. 6th century CE) is noted as one of the small number of female composters of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry known from the sixth century CE. It is possible that she was Jewish,^[1] in which case she is one of only three attested female medieval Jewish poets (the others being the anonymous, tenth-century wife of Dunash ben Labrat and the probably twelfth-century Qasmuna).^[2]

The poem attributed to her survives in the tenth-century anthology named Kitab al-Aghani:

The eulogy implies that Sarah was a member of the Banu Qurayza, commenting on their defeat by Muslims around 627. Little more is known about Sarah, but she 'reputedly participated in a guerrilla action against Muhammad before a Muslim agent killed her.'

Notes and References

1. Emily Taitz, Sondra Henry, and Cheryl Tallan, 'Sarah of Yemen', in The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. to 1900 C.E. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003), p. 58.
2. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, ed. and trans. by Peter Cole (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 27, 364.