“At moonset  I was born  Dawn leaned over the universe  And night’s breast  In rage tore its tunic.”  ~Malika al-Assimi   —  The women are for expansion. Sinuous, flexuous, their gentle force pervades through the motley Silk Road, at moonrise, at moonset, captured in the archaic record of the times and sealed in the arc of the human story. A woman’s story.  The archaic Muslim woman. Muse of orientalist writing: the literary cannon across time and distance; folk tales and oral traditions; beguiling the senses of male poets; and perplexing the ethnocentric gaze. Yet what was the lesser explored reality of the Muslim woman of the Medeival period and the Middle Ages, the woman who was infinitely more than a captivating and well-documented beauty and object of desire? Who were the woman merchants of Abbasid Baghdad; the caravan investors of Damascus; the property-owning widows of Cairo; and the brains behind marriage alliances through which salient and pivotal trade networks would proliferate and flourish? The powerful women from grasslands of Central Asia to the oscillating deserts of …