Corollary to the tacit association of coarse facial hair with masculinity was the relative feminization of the teenage boy whose beard was as yet absent or soft and incomplete. This feminization must have been enhanced by the fact that, in the urban centers at least, women’s faces were normally veiled in public.
The feminization of male youths is apparent in pederastic courtship, which tended to follow the typical heterosexual pattern in societies in which premarital contact between unrelated men and women is not hindered by gender segregation and arranged marriages. The part of the pursuer was assumed by the man; that of the pursued by the boy. The latter would walk a tightrope between being considered haughty and arrogant (a frequent complaint in the love poetry of the period) and being “easy” or “cheap.” It was apparently the latter sort of boys that the Damascene poet Abū al-Fath al-Mālikī (d. 1567/8) frequented, to the detriment of his reputation.
65
Similarly, the Egyptian poet Ismāʿīl al-Khashshāb (d. 1815), who himself fell in love with a young scribe during the brief Napoleonic rule of Egypt, warned a friend who had become infatuated with a boy not to fall for a worn hackney
(mubtadhal).
66
A boy’s reputation for being “easy” would be an embarrassing liability in his older days, upon which opponents and detractors could pounce. In a defamatory poem, the Damascene Amin al-Dīn Muhammad al-Ṣāliḥi al-Hilālī (d. 1596) said of a rival:
... and who was in his youth a female camel, led to the worst of men and ridden.
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Though it was clearly held disreputable for the boy to display too much enthusiasm for his role as a coveted object, there are indications that many boys made the most of the interest shown in them by adult men. While they submitted to the sexual desires of men only at a peril to their reputation, they could hold a lover (or several lovers) suspended in hope, conceding a rendezvous or a kiss now and then, and playing admirers off against each other. Some boys clearly lorded it over their lovers, refusing to speak to them unless they composed a love poem, or asking them to prove their love by slitting a wrist or jumping into a moat.
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A man could be taunted by other men if the boy he pursued ended up bestowing his favors upon another. The Yemeni poet Shaʿbān al-Rūmī (d. 1736) was, for example, teased by an acquaintance when a handsome shopkeeper he loved moved store and started showing favor to another man called al-Iṣfahānī:
O Shaʿbān, we have noticed the dark-lashed, tender-handed [fellow] leave your quarter so as not to see you, and treat his eyes with Iṣfahānī [kohl]
The family of the boy was expected to shield him from the sexual interests of older men, and were liable to be dishonored if they failed to do so. This is underlined in the following anonymous couplet purporting to address a handsome boy:
Your beauty has deprived the gazelle of his attributes, and all beauty has gathered in you.
You have his neck, eyes, and shyness, but as to the [cuckold’s] horns, they are your father’s.
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The Meccan jurist Ibn Hajar al-Haytamī (d. 1566) asserted that fornication was not only a transgression of the law of God but could also be seen as a crime against other persons, since it reflected dishonorably on the relatives of the passive-receptive party—the woman or the sodomized
(al-malūṭ bihi).
71
The Egyptian scholar Ibn al-Wakīl al-Mallawī (d. ca. 1719) related with unconcealed sympathy a number of pederastic love stories that unfolded in Egypt in his own time. A recurrent feature of these stories is the intervention of fathers to prevent the adult lovers from frequenting their sons.
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A mother in sixteenth-century Aleppo ended her son’s apprenticeship with a tailor when she learned that the master had developed a liking for him, and one of the students of the Aleppine scholar Raḍī al-Dīn ibn al-Ḥanbalī (d. 1563) was evicted from the doorsteps of his beloved’s home by the boy’s father.
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Other parents seem to have been willing to look the other way, especially if the suitor came from a socioeconomic class far above their own. The attention of a rich notable would often translate itself into concrete material benefits for both the boy and his parents. The Damascene judge Ahmad al-Shuwayki (d. 1598) was, according to a colleague, in the habit of paying regular subsidies to the youths he courted, as well as conferring certain “worldly benefits” upon their parents.
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The outlined pattern of pederastic courtship could suggest that boys functioned as ersatz women, and thus at first sight lend support to the oft-heard idea that (supposedly) widespread “homosexuality” in the Arab world is caused by the segregation of women. Men did not, however, simply turn to boys because of the unavailability of women. There are indeed a few remarks in the biographical literature that linked a person’s interest in boys with his unmarried status. For example, the aforementioned biographer Hasan al-Būrīnī said of the Damascene poet Ahmad al-ʿInāyātī (d. 1606) that “he did not marry throughout his long life, and did not incline toward a female beloved
(khalīlah)
who would fortify him
(tuhsinahu)
against having a male beloved
(khalīl).”
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Būrīnīʾs use of the term
tuhsinahu
reflects the assumption that marriage could provide protection
(ihsan—a
widely used synonym for marriage) against the temptation to have paramours (male or female). However, it is far from clear that Būrīnī believed that ʿInāyātī was unable to marry, and thus turned to boys only as an alternative sexual outlet. It is more likely that ʿInāyātīʾs unmarried status was voluntary, and that Būrīni believed that he might have gotten involved in fewer love affairs with boys had he married. The case of Māmāyah al-Rūmī lends support to the idea that sexual interest in boys was not necessarily the effect of the segregation—and hence “unavailability”—of women, but could just as well be the result of a considered decision to remain unmarried. In a long poem in his
Dīwān,
he described how he had been hounded into divorcing his wife by his mother-in-law and her family. He concluded the poem by expressing his resolve to avoid women and to resort to beardless boys when lust got the better of him.
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In any case, even if it was widely believed that most unmarried men would be interested in boys (either because they constituted an alternative sexual outlet for unmarried men, or because men who chose to remain unmarried were not sufficiently interested in women), this does not show that it was also believed that most of those who were interested in boys were unmarried. Many of those who courted boys were married, and this was not depicted by the sources as in any way remarkable or strange. At most, the husband’s pederastic escapades were said to have led to domestic discord because of resentment and jealousy on the part of the wife.
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What little evidence we have of marital norms in the premodern Middle East suggests that marriage was nearly universal and was, moreover, usually entered into at a relatively early age, often at the onset of puberty.
78
The Egyptian scholar and historian ʿAbd al-Rahman al-jabartī (d. 1825/6), for example, was married at the age of fourteen, while his grandfather died at the age of sixteen, one month after his wife had given birth.
79
To be sure, not all scholars married that early, and some remained unmarried all their lives, but this was unusual enough to be considered noteworthy in the biographical notices dedicated to them. It is possible that early marriage was the prerogative of the wealthier segment of the population, but the abundant evidence we have concerning pederasty in the premodern Arab East relate primarily to this social class, so that the purported explanation of widespread “homosexuality” in terms of the unavailability of women still fails to gain any credence. It is also worth mentioning that there is evidence for the availability of female prostitutes in the major Arab cities during the centuries under considerations.
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It is thus far from clear that there were no heterosexual outlets even for the minority of adult men who were unmarried. There may indeed be some connection between gender segregation and widespread pederasty in the premodern Middle East. However, crude notions of blocked heterosexual libido being diverted toward boys fail to do justice to the complexity of the connection. Gender segregation in public, and arranged marriages, did not prevent women from being sexually available to adult men, but they may have severely restricted the possibilities for heterosexual courtship. One could suppose that courting fulfils certain emotional (rather than sexual) needs on the part of the courter, such as the thrill of fancying someone who is not straightforwardly available for sexual intercourse (in contrast to wives and prostitutes), the challenge of trying to win the favor of that someone, and the satisfaction of succeeding. In the premodern Middle East such needs could most easily be met by courting boys, not women.
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An explanation along these lines was offered by the French traveler Volney, who visited Egypt in the 1780S. Speaking of the Mamluk elite of that country, he wrote: “They are, above all, addicted to that abominable wickedness which was at all times the vice of the Greeks ... It is difficult to account for this taste, when we consider that they all have women, unless we suppose they seek in one sex that poignancy of refusal which they do not permit the other.”
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The connection between pederasty and gender segregation will be taken up again in the following chapter.
It is not a straightforward affair to determine the age during which a male youth was considered to be sexually attractive to adult men. The relevant terms, such as
amrad
or
ghulām,
tend to be impressionistic and somewhat loosely employed in the sources. For example, the term
amrad
(beardless boy) could be used to refer to prepubescent, completely smooth-cheeked boys, as opposed to adolescent, downy-cheeked youths, but it could also refer to all youths who did not yet have a fully developed beard, and hence to youths who were as old as twenty or twenty-one. According to a saying attributed to the first Umayyad Caliph Muʿāwiyah (d. 680) and quoted in an eighteenth-century dictionary:
I was beardless for twenty years, fully bearded for twenty years, I plucked gray hairs from it for twenty years, and dyed it for twenty years.
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If the upper age limit was physical maturity at around twenty, the lower age limit for the sexual interest of the pederasts seems to have been the recognized transition from childhood to youth, at the age of seven or eight. The weight of the available evidence tends to support the conclusion that the pederasts’ lust tended to be directed at boys whose age fell within this interval, and that the boy’s attractiveness was usually supposed to peak around halfway through, at fourteen or fifteen. The Egyptian Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, writing in the late seventeenth century, opined that a boy’s attractiveness peaks at fifteen, declines after the age of eighteen, and disappears fully at twenty, by which time he will be fully hirsute: “So infatuation and passionate love is properly directed only at those of lithesome figure and sweet smile from those who are in their tens
(awlād al-‘ashr)
.”
84
Similarly, an anonymous poem cited by the Damascene chronicler Ibn Kannān al-Sālihī (d. 1740) on the natural ages of man associated the “son of ten”
(ibn al-ʿashr—
presumably in the sense of “in his tens” rather than “exactly ten years old”) with incomparable beauty, the “son of twenty” with the heedless pursuit of pleasure, the “son of thirty” with the apogee of strength, etc.
85
In love poetry and rhymed prose, the age of the beloved was often said to be fourteen, probably a standard rhetorical device engendered by the conventional comparison of the face of the beloved with the moon, which reaches its apogee around the fourteenth of each month of the Muslim lunar calendar.
86
However, there is independent evidence from European travel accounts that catamites were “likely of twelve, or fourteene years old, some of them not above nine, or ten.”
87
Much depended, however, on the eye of the beholder as well as the individual rate of maturation. As will be seen in the next chapter, the comparison of the respective charms of beardless and downy-cheeked youths was a conventional topic in the belles-lettres of the period. Many poets expressed the opinion that a boy ceased to be attractive already at the appearance of beard-down ( ʿ
idhār)
on his cheeks, which would imply a somewhat lower upper age limit. The Damascene scholar and biographer Muhammad Khalīl al-Murādī (d. 1791) seems to have had enough beard-down by the age of fourteen to merit a poem celebrating the occasion. A grandson of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī was seventeen, and a son of the Iraqi scholar Mahmūd al-Alūsī eighteen, when they elicited similar poems.
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The prominent Syrian mystic Muhammad ibn ʿIrāq (d. 1526) veiled his son ʿAlī between the age of eight and sixteen, “to keep people from being enchanted by him,” suggesting that by the latter age his features were deemed by the father to be developed enough to make him unattractive to other men.
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On the other hand, the chronicler Ibn Ayyūb al-Ansdcl recorded the death of a seventeen-year-old Damascene youth who left behind a host of lamenting male admirers.
90
The Iraqi poet Qāsim al-Rāmī (d. 1772/3) traced in verse the development of a boy from the age of ten, when he “became settled in the sanctuary of beauty,” to the age of sixteen, when he (disreputably) started to pluck the hairs from his cheeks.
91
Plucking beard-down from the face seems to have signaled, in a too direct and indiscreet manner, that the boy actually enjoyed being coveted by men, and was in no hurry to become a bearded adult. To that extent, it was associated with the behavior of boy prostitutes or effeminate males. The above-mentioned Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī thus stated that the term
natīf
(literally “plucked”) was used of the beardless boy who, “if his beard starts to grow, and he enjoys being effeminate
(al-khināth)
or—God forbid—he has
ubnah,
will constantly shave his beard and beautify himself for the libertine
(fāsiq)
... for souls incline toward the beardless boy as long as his cheeks are clear,.”
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