A broadly “constructionist” approach to the issue of homosexuality in Arab-Islamic history has recently been suggested by writers such as Arno Schmitt, Everett Rowson, and Thomas Bauer .
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They emphasize that the modern concept of homosexuality was absent from premodern Arab-Islamic culture, which, like classical Greek and Roman culture, tended to categorize and evaluate people according to whether they were active or passive in a sexual relation, and not according to the gender of their partners. This study offers some support for their claim, but argues that the distinction between active and passive was merely one of several distinctions that are not captured by the modern concept of homosexuality but are nevertheless crucial to understanding the attitudes underlying the texts that have come down to us. An exclusive emphasis on the distinction between active and passive will not allow us to understand the attitude of the majority of writers of the period who, like ʿAbdallah al-Shabrāwī, did not have a single attitude even toward “active” homosexuality, but held the distinction between, for example, passionate infatuation and lust, or between passionate kissing and anal intercourse, to be important.
The secondary literature on attitudes toward homosexuality in Arab-Islamic civilization consists overwhelmingly of brief discussions that try to encompass the entire geographic and historical span of this civilization. Even the few studies that focus on a text or a selection of thematically related texts usually try to supply a context in the form of general remarks about homosexuality in Arab-Islamic civilization. Such general discussions or remarks are based on a highly selective use of sources spanning many centuries and different geographic regions. All too often, sweeping claims are based on no more than a handful of sources, and sometimes even a single text.
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For instance, in a recent article which displays an admirable awareness of the need to avoid anachronism when discussing attitudes toward homosexuality in Arab-Islamic culture, J. T. Monroe nevertheless states that “Islamic jurisprudence” regards homosexual attraction to be “entirely normal and natural,” in sharp contrast to “Christianity,” which holds that such attraction is a “pathological character defect.”
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The claim is supported by a single statement by a twelfth-century Islamic scholar to the effect that a man who claims that he can gaze at a handsome beardless youth without feeling lust is lying. Some qualified version of Monroe’s claim may perhaps be defensible, but it is surely desirable to consider both the context of such a statement and a much larger number of texts before putting forward such a general claim.
The existing secondary literature also suffers from another kind of selectivity. It tends to focus on evidence from one or two particular genres, for instance poetry or juridical texts or medical works. There has as yet been no sustained effort to investigate the evidence from a whole range of genres and bring out their interrelations. This may be due to the fact that modern scholars tend to specialize in one particular field, such as Middle Eastern history or Arabic poetry or Islamic law or Sufism, and are understandably reluctant to venture beyond it. However, such an “interdisciplinary” approach is necessary. The textual evidence relevant to the study of attitudes toward homosexuality in Arab-Islamic history straddles such genres as biographical dictionaries, Islamic law, commentaries on the Qur’an, belles-lettres, Sufism, and medicine.
The source material that is relevant if one wishes to survey attitudes in Islamic, or even just Arab-Islamic, civilization from the seventh to the twentieth century is dauntingly large. A study that is less selective with regard to the amount and the genres of textual evidence it takes into account will also be a study that has a somewhat reduced geographic and temporal scope. In the present study I focus on the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the beginning of the encroachment of Western values and ideas upon the region. As I will briefly discuss in my conclusion, the encounter with European Victorian morality was to have profound effects on local attitudes toward what came to be called “sexual inversion” or “sexual perversion”
(shudhūdh jinsī) .
The present work should hopefully set the stage for a study of this profound change.
I should perhaps add that the imposed geographic and temporal limits do not imply any commitment on my part to the uniqueness of attitudes in that area and period. However, I also do not want to claim that each and every point I make will be valid for earlier periods of Arab-Islamic history. For instance, the love poetry of the period I study predominantly portrayed a chaste and unreciprocated love for a person whose gender is usually either indeterminate or male. This may or may not be true of earlier periods of Arabic history. Also, Islamic scholars of the period I study typically deemed composing love poetry of beardless youths religiously permissible. Again, this may or may not have been true of earlier periods. In general, it seems to me that the best approach to recovering the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in Arab-Islamic civilization is to conduct a series of more narrowly defined studies. Only then will the exact balance of continuity and change between various periods and regions become clear.
Overview of the Present Study
The present study is conceived as a work of cultural and intellectual history. The focus will not be on homosexual behavior in the past, but on how such behavior was perceived and represented. I should perhaps emphasize this point. In particular, I do not wish to suggest that the sexual behavior of individuals must conform in a straightforward way to the dominant sexual categories or concepts used in their society. For example, I shall be arguing that biographical and bawdy works from the period tend to distinguish conceptually between the active pederast and the effeminate pathic. This need not imply that individuals always acted in ways that fit neatly with this distinction. By the same token, it might be possible to establish that in the dominant discourse of the modern West, people tend to be classified according to the gender of their preferred sexual partners, and not according to their preferred role (insertive or receptive) in sexual intercourse. Even if this is the case, it does not follow that certain individuals do not act in ways that confound the dominant categorization—for example, pursuing both women and teenage boys, but never accepting to play the “receptive” role. On the other hand, it does not seem plausible to think of the distinction between representations and behavior as a rigid dichotomy, and to maintain that the former is completely unresponsive to the latter and the latter completely uninfluenced by the former. I therefore think that much of what I have to say about dominant perceptions will also reveal something about broad behavioral patterns.
The culture I shall be studying is the one shared by urban, literate Muslim men in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire between 1500 and 1800. The textual evidence that I consider was almost invariably written in urban centers such as Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Mecca, and Medina. By textual evidence I mean primarily Arabic literary sources such as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, belletristic works in verse and prose, and Islamic mystical and legal works. This will inevitably imply a bias toward the attitudes and values of the learned male elite, by whom and for whom such works were written. One obviously cannot assume that such values and attitudes can without further ado be thought to apply to other social groups. On the other hand, there would seem to be positive reasons for not supposing that the main cultural strands I shall discuss were narrowly confined to the elite. The cultural significance given to the distinction between active and passive partners was hardly an elite phenomenon. It is still apparent today amongst all social classes in the Middle East. The courting of boys by adult men also does not seem to have been an elite phenomenon. The literary sources suggest that men of non-elite status—bakers, tailors, street-sellers, and “rabble” attending the Saints Fairs of Egypt—could behave likewise. There is also no reason to believe that acceptance of the authority of Islamic law—even if one occasionally failed to live up to all the demands of this authority—was confined to the sociopolitical elite. The attitudes I discuss may have been more significantly correlated with gender than with social class. Unfortunately the literary sources of the period give almost no information on female attitudes to love and sex.
If the focus on the learned male elite seems somewhat narrow, speaking of the Arab-Islamic part of the Ottoman Empire between 1500 and 1800 could appear too broad. It might reasonably be asked whether it is legitimate to assume that there was no significant evolution and/or regional differences in attitudes within the geographic and temporal boundaries of this study. I believe not, and my approach will be essentially systematic rather than diachronic. I should emphasize that I have not started by assuming uniformity within the geographic and temporal scope of my study. The supposition that the culture of the literate classes in the period and area under consideration displayed an overall stability in time and uniformity from city to city is one that I believe is largely substantiated by the textual evidence. This does not preclude the existence of individual differences in outlook, but it is not possible to correlate such differences with period or region; they exist equally between two individuals of the same generation or city. In fact, the geographic and temporal continuity almost certainly extends beyond the limits of this study. I would expect that many of the points I make (though probably not all) are valid for Turkey and Persia between 1500 and 1800, as well as for the Arab-Islamic world in the Abbasid and Mamluk periods (750 - 1516).
The questions raised concerning the scope of the present study are certainly legitimate, especially given the above-mentioned tendency to make undifferentiated statements about attitudes in “Islam” or “Islamic civilization.” However, a justified suspicion of this approach can easily lead to an overemphasis on the differences between periods, regions, or social groups. Current discussions of attitudes toward homosexuality in Arab-Islamic history often present “religious scholars” and “Sufis” and “poets” and “the upper classes” as distinct groups with distinct and competing mentalities and values. However, this is a caricature of social reality.
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At least in the period under consideration, a substantial number of individuals were all of these things at once. A person might be an Islamic religious jurist, and as such committed to the principles of Islamic law. However, being an Islamic religious jurist would almost certainly be one of several social roles he assumed. The same individual would also think of himself as a “man,” as opposed to a woman or a child or an “effeminate” man. This social role carried with it certain demands on behavior that were independent of, and sometimes in tension with, the demands of Islamic law. Similarly, the same individual might also think of himself as a “refined” and “urbane” individual, in contrast to “rustic” and “coarse” common people, peasants, and nomads. This again involved certain expectations as to behavior, taste, and demeanor, expectations that had little or nothing to do with religion. In other words, a literate, urban male Muslim would be under the influence of distinct cultural strands. These cultural strands were independent of each other, and embodied values and assumptions that were potentially or actually in tension with each other. A study that ignores this fact will fail to do justice to this complex reality.
Rather than trying to recover attitudes that were supposedly characteristic of particular social groups, I will focus on distinct but coexisting strands in the culture of the urban elite.
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In particular, I will focus on three cultural strands that were relevant to perceptions and evaluations of what we might be inclined to call homosexual behavior or sentiments. In the first chapter of the study, I will present one cultural strand according to which the “active” or “insertive” role in sexual intercourse was uniquely appropriate to a man, and the “passive” or “receptive” role was uniquely appropriate to a woman. A man who willingly assumed the latter role was violating conventional gender roles, and was often stereotyped as effeminate and thought to suffer from an abnormal or pathological condition. However, a man who sought to have “active” or “insertive” intercourse with a beardless male youth was not violating gender roles, nor was he stereotyped in the same way. In the second chapter, I will present another cultural strand, one which valued passionate love and a general aesthetic sensibility toward human beauty in the form of women or beardless youths. Such a sensibility was thought to be the hallmark of urbane and refined people, and to lie at the root of evocative love poetry. In some Islamic mystical circles, such an aestheticist regard for beautiful women or handsome youths was given a metaphysical dimension, and held to be a means of personally experiencing the overwhelming beauty of God. In the third chapter, I discuss the cultural strand that receives expression in Islamic law, and the related disciplines of commentaries on the Qur’an and on the canonical sayings
(ḥadīth)
of the Prophet Muhammad. This strand perceived sexual relations between men as a transgression of Holy Law, though according to most schools of law only anal intercourse was deemed a cardinal sin. Anything that could be perceived to be the first step along the slippery slope to such transgressions, such as gazing at beardless youths or being alone with them, became deeply problematic. However, jurists were also committed to the principle that one ought not prohibit what God has made licit, or think ill of one’s fellow Muslims, and the efforts of especially zealous jurists to prohibit outright such “preliminaries” of sodomy met with resistance from other jurists. Most jurists did not deem that a man’s passionate love of a youth was in itself a sin, and permitted the composition of pederastic love poetry.