Due to the way European monarchies were set up there would eventually be, through happenstance, a time when no male heirs existed. Either that or some complex political situation would create a queen when inheritance was in dispute.
In Europe we have Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, Queen Isabella, and Czarina Catherine.
What was different about Muslim monarchies that they never ended up with a female monarch?
I could be wrong and there was a Muslim female monarch in history. In that case tell me about her!
Okay, to be a bit blunt, /u/CptBuck is wrong. Well, he's probably right that there has been only one queen in the area we most popularly associate with Islam, that is, the Middle East and North Africa. But if we look just a few thousand kilometers east, we find quite a few proud - and often very successful - Muslim sultanahs. I am talking about Southeast Asia.
By far the most well-known example is the 'female century' in Aceh. Aceh was a major kingdom in North Sumatra which, in the early 17th century, had very nearly reunited the Strait of Melaka (this is the main maritime route between China and the rest of Eurasia and a key commercial artery). And Aceh, being the area the most exposed to the Indian Ocean in the entirety of Southeast Asia, was a center of Islamic scholarship to the point that it was called the 'verandah of Mecca.' Yet a kingdom so renowned for its piety was ruled only by sultanahs from 1641 to 1699.
In 1641, Iskandar Thani, sultan of Aceh, died unexpectedly at the age of 31 (probably poisoned by members of the mercantile oligarchy called the orang kaya). The sultan had left behind no male heir, and after a few days of chaos the orang kaya resolved to crown his widow, Taj al-Alam, as sultanah. Older interpretations of Acehnese history tended to argue that Taj al-Alam and her female successors were puppets of the orang kaya without any say of their own. Some 20th-century historians have even claimed that the sultanahs were responsible for Aceh's commercial decline because women were somehow incapable of gaining the respect of merchants. But recent analyses show that that Acehnese queens were fully capable of not only reigning, but ruling.
Consider, for instance, the 'jewels affair' early in Taj al-Alam's reign. Sultan Iskandar Thani had been an extravagant man and had ordered a wide array of very expensive gems, specifically cut according to Acehnese tastes (so they would be unsellable elsewhere), from the Dutch East India Company (VOC). When the VOC arrived with the gems, Iskandar Thani was dead and his thrifty wife initially refused to accept most of them. The VOC refused to relent, while many of the orang kaya in their turn refused to buy gems at extremely high prices when the new sultanah wasn't even interested in them.
The VOC had gone to war under the pretense of such minor issues. Here Taj al-Alam stepped in. She manipulated the perception of patriarchal society that women were 'inconsistent' in their wishes by delaying decision-making WRT the gems, allowing more time for the Acehnese elite to forge a consensus and to tire out the Dutch commissioner, convincing him to compromise. And during the two months of negotations between the VOC and the orang kaya, and between different orang kaya, the sultanah played a critical role. When discussions were growing too heated and potentially dangerous, the queen sent out her eunuchs to defuse the situation. And by meditating between the pro- and anti-Dutch (here, pro-gem purchase and anti-purchase) factions within the orang kaya class, the sultanah was able to convince all the orang kaya to accept her final arbitration that the gems would be bought at a lowered price.
Taj al-Alam was also quick to emphasize her Muslim piety and her relative disinterest towards temporal wealth. Malay histories recount that the sultanah gave gifts to "all the 'ulama and descendants of the prophet who came to [Aceh]," and that her authority and piety convinced many of her subjects to become pious believers in their own turn. Another Muslim visitor said with wonder that "a very gracious, perfect Muslim woman, generous with money, rules [the Acehnese.] She can read and knows science, beneficience, and agreement on the Quran."
Another of the orang kaya's worries about a female ruler was the suitor issue - when Taj al-Alam married, would not her husband be the most powerful man in Aceh? As it turned out, the sultanah never married. To keep her kingdom safe in turbulent decades, when the VOC slowly gained commercial hegemony in Indonesia and launched biting attacks against its competitors, she had in effect married her kingdom. It is not very surprising that she has been likened to an Acehnese Elizabeth.
Taj al-Alam, as sultanah, did not possess the sort of absolute power over her nobility that some of her male predecessors (such as Sultan Iskandar Muda, who forced his own generals to eat literal shit when they were defeated) had wielded. Yet she was able to use her political acumen and the stereotypes attached to female behavior to rule effectively, not out of authority and fear, but by creating an elite consensus under the queen's gentle guidance. And so the Dutch said of Aceh:
[The sultanah rules] a good-natured but awe-inspiring government.
Taj al-Alam was followed by three other sultanahs, of whom much less is known. But the very fact that the orang kaya preferred the 'unnatural' phenomenon of female rulers to male sultans suggests how successful Taj al-Alam's reign must have been perceived. As Aceh declined economically in the late 17th century opposition to queenship grew, and by 1699 a fatwa arrived from Mecca claiming that queens were un-Islamic. So ended the Acehnese queendom.
There are other examples, as I said. A succession of queens ruled the sultanate of Patani (now in southernmost Thailand) at the same time as Aceh, a phenomenon which so astonished a Chinese merchant that he falsely reported that only women could be sultans of Patani. Another Chinese was more bigoted and argued that since Patani practiced the bizarre custom of having female rulers, clearly it was "one of the most inferior countries among the countries of barbarians." Yet in the Malay history of Patani the queen is metaphorically associated with Islam, and a minister who challenges the queen is struck dead for the sin of treason. The Chinese observers who scorned Patani for following a mere woman may not have found many local supporters.
There were also queens among the Bugis of Islamic South Sulawesi, but they were rather different in function from those of Malay sultanates like Aceh or Patani. This has to do with the (at least nominally) elective nature of Bugis kingship and because having purer 'white blood' (white blood is the blood of the gods from whom all major royals were descended) mattered more than gender.
Sources.
[edit 2: as /u/PangeranDipanagara has pointed out, I'm way off base in regards to SE Asia. Please see their much more detailed post.]
~~ As far as I'm aware, there was precisely one Muslim Sultana in history the Mameluke Sultana Shajar ad-Durr [edit: as /u/capsulet pointed out there is another, Razia Sultana, Sultana of Delhi.] I'm not the most intimately familiar with the details of her rule, but she was basically a transitional figure between the end of Ayyubid rule and the start of direct Mameluke rule when she married Izz ad-Din Aybak.~~
What was different about Muslim monarchies that they never ended up with a female monarch?
Polygamy, concubinage, and male seniority succession. Your average male Muslim ruler in much of Islamic history could expect to have a whole lot more legitimate eligible children than would be possible in Europe. A norm towards seniority succession over primogeniture (though this was not universal or universally practiced) also made it less likely that you'd have the death of a child king, or the devolution of power onto the eldest female daughter of the monarch in the absence of a male heir, or succession crises over the religion of the monarch, which I think covers many if not most of the examples of European female queens.
