Read Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 Online

Authors: Khaled El-Rouayheb

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (6 page)

The passive male sodomite was seen as being in possession of a female sex drive, but without any of the constraints imposed on women in a patriarchal, gender-segregated society, and his image in bawdy-humorous works is similar to the image of promiscuous women
(al-qiḥāb)
.
49
The parallel is also revealed at the level of insults: a woman could be called “wide” (
wasīʿah
) and the passive sodomite a “slut”
(qaḥbah);
or at the level of folk-etiology: the sex drive of the nymphomaniac could also be explained by a worm-induced itch.
50
The existence of the
maʾbūn
or
mukhannath
challenged what was, in the premodern Middle East, one of the most sharp and consequential of boundaries: the distinction between genders. Lying outside the bounds of normality,
ubnah
was seen as a force that was powerful and uncontrollable (capable of overturning the familiar order of things) but also comparatively rare. When jurists of the Hanafi school sought to defend their ruling that sodomy was not a subvariety of fornication
(zina)—
and was therefore not subject to the same punishment—one of the arguments to which they resorted was that the incitement to fornication typically came from both parties, whereas the incitement to sodomy came from one party only.
51
The conceptual distinction between the active and passive sodomite, and the association of the latter—but not the former—with the transgression of gender roles, is hardly distinctive of the early Ottoman Arab East. The same could more or less be said of contemporary Arab, southern European, or Latin American culture, or, for that matter, the culture of classical Greece and Rome, Viking-age Scandinavia, or pre-Meiji Japan. One is clearly dealing with a conceptualization that is very widespread, both geographically and historically. Transgressions of culturally sanctioned gender roles tend to provoke particularly strong feelings of unease and condemnation, and this is especially so in the case of men who, in strongly patriarchal societies like those mentioned above, adopt behavior seen as proper only to women.
52
The contempt and ridicule aroused by the
maʾbūn
thus tended to be greater than the disapproval allotted to the
Lūṭī.
It was generally understood that one would rather be known as an active than a passive sodomite, as is clear from the following anecdote:
It was related that a certain man entered his home with a beardless boy ... when the beardless boy came [back] out he claimed that he had been the active party, so this was related to him [the man], so he said: “Trustworthiness is debased and sodomy is [therefore] forbidden except in the presence of two witnesses.”
53
 
It should be pointed out that it would be rash to assert on the basis of this passage, or the story of the rape of the Druze chieftain, or the defamatory poem of Ibrāhīm al-Ghazālī, that the active, “male” role in homosexual intercourse was regarded as being entirely free of opprobrium. Such an assertion has nevertheless been made, and an analogy is often drawn to what has been called the “double-standard” of traditional Mediterranean societies: outside of marriage (and historically also slavery) sexual relations are dishonoring for the female (the penetrated) but not for the male (the penetrator). As is to be expected, moral valuations are somewhat more complex than such a neat contrast suggests. First, the very distinction between male/penetrator and female/penetrated is much less relevant in one—hardly unimportant—context, namely the religious-juridical. It is in such contexts than one may encounter the otherwise atypical use of the word
Lūṭī
to designate the passive as well as the active sodomite.
54
Second, there is abundant evidence that to say or insinuate of a man that he was a fornicator or an active sodomite was perceived and intended as a derogatory remark. For example, in a defamatory poem, the Damascene scholar Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1577) said of his rival Muhammad al-Ījī (d. 1577):
and how many times has he not crept up on a beardless boy at night, and caused an opening in the upper part of the porch
[riwāq—
an allusion to the boy’s rear].
55
 
That this was not only the attitude of puritanical scholars is clear from the way the biographer Hasan al-Būrīrī (d. 1615) relates the following incident in his entry on the Damascene scholar Ismāʿīl al-Nābulusī (d. 1585):
He was falsely suspected of [an affair with] a boy ... and the religious scholars (ʿ
ulamāʾ
) supported him in this ugly affair but he encountered during that time extreme coldness from both elite and commoners, and this was because the boy went up to the hall of the governor ... with blood flowing down his legs, claiming that this was due to his being penetrated.
56
 
The different popular reactions to the reported act of Ismāʿīl al-Nābulusī in the late sixteenth century, and to the reported act of the Turcoman soldiers in the early eighteenth, is a testimony, not to changed sensibilities in the intervening period, but to the fundamentally context-dependent nature of the perception and evaluation of homosexual intercourse. In the first case, it is the alleged penetrator, a distinguished notable and scholar, who is highlighted and bears the brunt of public disapproval, whereas the identity and moral character of the penetrated boy is left out of consideration as being of secondary interest. In the second case, the reverse is true: the Emir occupies center stage, while the soldiers remain more or less anonymous. The social status of the people involved was thus one factor determining the interpretation and judgment of a particular case. In the oneiromantic handbook of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, dreaming that one is being anally penetrated by a social equal or inferior (a rival, a younger brother, a slave) usually has an inauspicious portent, while being penetrated by a social superior (the Sultan or one’s father) is a good omen.
57
It is as if the aggressive, polarizing significance of phallic penetration, and therefore the humiliation of being the passive partner, is toned down in a situation in which the penetrated is already clearly a social inferior, whereas it is emphasized when the status of the partners is roughly equal, or when the penetrated is socially superior to the penetrator. An illustration of this point is contained in the following anecdote in an anonymous collection of humorous stories that seems to date from the seventeenth century: Satan assumes the form of a beautiful boy to lead a repentant sodomite astray. After he has succeeded, he reassumes his original form—that of an ugly, one-eyed old man—and reveals his true identity, whereupon the initially disappointed sodomite says: “Look at my prick up your hole.”
58
What was merely sodomy with some boy became an act of “screwing”—and thus a cause of pride—when the passive partner turned out to be none other than Satan himself.
Where the attitude toward the passive partner tended to be unequivocally negative, the evaluation of the active partner was more ambivalent. From the perspective of the ideal of masculinity, the penetrator emerges from the sexual encounter with his honor unimpaired, if not enhanced. From the perspective of the ideal of conformity with the religious-moral norms of society, the penetrator is dishonored. It would be misleading to try to establish a correspondence between these two points of view and specific social groups. The religious scholars could, as we have seen, make unabashed use of the language of aggressive masculinity, while religious considerations were hardly irrelevant to the moral evaluations of the man on the street. Which perspective was adopted had more to do with the particularities of each concrete case than with the social background of the evaluator. Moral judgments are not, as is often supposed, a matter of the automatic application of clear and consensual principles. Rather, they typically involve selective and sometimes contestable use of the stock of generally accepted and usually loosely integrated maxims by individuals and social groups according to a myriad of contextual factors that cannot be exhaustively enumerated.
59
Within one culture (and subculture), the same act may be appraised differently according to the interest of the observer, the way in which the act becomes public knowledge, whether it is carried out discreetly or flauntingly, whether the perpetrator is male or female, young or old, a friend or a rival, a prominent religious scholar or a common soldier, and so on. In the words of the anthropologist J. Pitt-Rivers:
A system of values is never a homogeneous code of abstract principles obeyed by all the participants in a given culture and able to be extracted from an informant with the aid of a set of hypothetical questions, but a collection of concepts which are related to one another and applied differentially by the different status groups defined by age, sex, class, occupation, etc. in the different social ... contexts in which they find their meanings.
60
 
Transgenerational Homosexuality
 
The significance attributed to biological gender seems to vary both geographically and historically. Whereas some cultures are relatively androgynous, other cultures have strongly developed gender roles, sometimes to the point of “gender polarity”—that is, valuing, on the whole, opposing character traits in the two sexes, such as timidity in women and assertiveness in men. The early Ottoman Arab East evidently belonged to the latter category, with its separate and clearly demarcated male and female spheres, which legitimately overlapped only in certain well-defined contexts. Merely by virtue of his biological sex, a man was expected to participate in a world from which women were in principle excluded. This was the public world in which men competed and cooperated in the pursuit of money, status, and power. Succeeding in this world was to succeed as a male, to live up to the demands of masculinity, and was thus on the symbolic level linked to virility. Defeat, on the other hand, was symbolically equivalent to calling into question male gender identity, to emasculation.
61
Hence, the pervasiveness of sexual allusions to express nonsexual rivalries between men. The victor (e.g., the above-mentioned poet Mamayah) figuratively “screws” the defeated (e.g., Mamayah’s rival Amrallah), depriving him of his gender and transforming him into a woman. Male honor was symbolically associated with the biological expressions of masculinity, shame with their diminishment or loss. According to the oneiromantic handbook of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, an increase in the size of the penis or testicles in a dream forebodes an increase in the dreamer’s reputation, honor, and money. A decrease indicates the reverse: impoverishment and humiliation.
62
In the “homosocial” world of the early Ottoman Arab East, sexual symbolism was thus never far from the surface. Yet actual sexual intercourse between adult men was clearly perceived as an anomaly, linked either to violence (rape) or disease
(ubnah).
Homosexual relations in the early Ottoman Arab East were almost always conceived as involving an adult man (who stereotypically would be the “male” partner) and an adolescent boy (the “female”). The latter—referred to in the texts as
amrad
(beardless boy);
ghulām
or ṣ
abī
(boy); or
fatā, shābb,
or
hadath
(male youth)—though biologically male, was not completely a “man” in the social and cultural sense; and his intermediate status was symbolized by the lack of the most visible of male sex characteristics: a beard. The cultural importance of beards and/or moustaches in the early Ottoman Arab East is attested by both the European travel literature and the indigenous literature. The beard or moustache was a symbol of male honor, something one swore by or insulted. Slaves were expected not to wear a beard, and in early Ottoman Egypt at least, the phrase “he let his beard grow”
(arkhā liḥyatahu)
was a standard way of designating a master’s emancipation of his slave.
63
The appearance of a beard on the cheeks of a youth was frequently celebrated in verse, and was often used in the biographical literature as an age marker, the third stage, after
tamyīz
(i.e., the age of discernment—traditionally set at around seven) and
bulūgh
(puberty). The association of the beard or moustache with male virility is a circum-Mediterranean trait, and is clearly brought out in the dream analysis of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī:
The beard in a dream means for the man wealth and honor, so if he sees it grow in length to an agreeable, handsome, not immoderate extent, he will encounter honor, prestige, beauty, money, power, and comfort ... He who sees it [the beard] sparse to an ugly extent, his prestige and standing among people will diminish.
 
By comparison:
The penis of a man is his reputation and honor among people, and an increase in its size indicates an increase in these ... and he who sees that his penis is transformed into a vagina, his fortitude and strength will become impotence, weakness, feebleness, and submissiveness.
 
The symbolic equivalence of beard and penis is underlined in the following:
It is said that if a woman dreams that she has a penis or beard or wears the clothes of men, she will become impudent toward her husband.
64
 

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