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

Authors: Khaled El-Rouayheb

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (72 page)

The introduction of the new concept of
shudhūdh jinsī
thus seems to have cemented the emerging view that all forms of passionate attraction to boys were equally signs of “sickness” and “depravity.” Writing in 1946,the Egyptian historian Tawfīq al-Tawīl thus denounced what he considered to be widespread
shudhūdh jinsī
in Ottoman Egypt, and expressed his own surprise at Tahtāwīʾs remarks concerning the unacceptability of pederasty in France, “as if its being widespread was the natural thing.” Tawīl mentioned examples of scholars being in love with boys as examples of
shudhūdh jinsī
:
Examples of the third kind [of moral decadence], viz.
shudhūdh jinsū
, are plentiful and almost beyond count. We often read in the works of history and biography that this or that scholar used to love boys, may God forgive him.
28
 
The adversity toward all forms of “homosexuality” would seem to be typical of Arab historians writing in the second half of the twentieth century. As has been seen in chapter 2 of this study, many modern Arab literary historians are clearly uncomfortable with the pederastic themes in their literary heritage, and will often write as if it was a marginal phenomenon or did not exist at all. Closely related to this denial is the tendency—mentioned above in connection with
The Arabian Nights
and the
Dīwān
of AbūNuwās—to publish expurgated versions of pre-nineteenth-centuryworks. For example, the seventeenth-century satirical work
Hazzal-quhuf,
which is replete with ref erences to pederasty, was still being printed in Cairo in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.
29
After not being printed for more than halfa century, it was published in 1963in a heavily expurgated form, in which all references to homosexuality (and all explicitly sexual and scatological words and phrases) were removed.
30
Less reticent historians tended to adopt the dismissive and hostile attitude that came to the forefront in the 1920sand ʿ30s.Thus, Yūsuf Husayn Bakkar, writing in 1971about currents in Arabic love poetry, distinguishes between “sensual” (
hissī
), “perverted” (
shādhdh
), and “chaste” (
ʿ‘afīf
) love poetry.
31
“Perverted” love poetry is love poetry of boys, and the idea that love poetry of boys could itself be divided into “sensual” or “chaste” is not even considered. al-Khatībal-ʿAdnānī,in a recent book (published in I999) on fornication and “homosexuality” in Arabic history, subsumes sodomy, effeminate passivity, the love of boys, and lesbianism under the term
shudhūdhjinsī
.
32
He claims that homosexuals spread AIDS like a plague, upholds the strict Imāmī Shīʿite punishments for sodomy and same-sex intercourse, and deplores what he believes to be the widespread tolerance of homosexuality in the West. He is apparently unaware that the concept of
shudhūdh jïnsī
is Western in origin, and that two centuries earlier it was European travelers who complained about the openness with which men in the Ottoman Empire expressed their passion for boys.
In this respect, the cultural change has been quite dramatic. In less than a century, the unsympathetic attitude toward pederastic love that Ṭahṭāwī attributed to the French had been adopted by the articulate classes of Arab societies. Yet, other cultural strands have not disappeared from the scene. Islamic law still considers
liwāt
,defined strictly as anal intercourse between men, to be a punishable sin comparable to fornication or the drinking of wine. This traditional position is of course potentially in tension with the view that the desire for same-sex intercourse is pathological. Writers like al-Khatīb alʿAdnānī who wish to uphold both views accordingly devote some effort to reconciling them.
33
The punishment prescribed for the act in Islamic law has also remained largely unchanged, though—asnoted in the previous chapter—theincreasing influence of the revivalist and anti-scholastic Salafīmovement may have led more Sunnījurists to favor the death penalty in all cases, regardless of marital status. The rising influence of the Salafīmovement has also succeeded in putting Sufism, particularly of the monist, Ibn ʿArabī school, on the defensive.
34
However, the notion of appreciating divine beauty in humans was hardly widespread and uncontroversial before the nineteenth century, and the declining fortunes of monist mysticism hardly amounts to a dramatic shift in cultural attitudes.
The “polarizing” view of phallic penetration still looms large in popular, oral culture. The new literary term
shudhūdhjinsī,
which ignores the question of who does what to whom, has never really been adopted in spoken Arabic, and it is still a common assumption, particularly in the less westernized segments of Arab society, that engaging in homosexual intercourse as an “active” partner does not compromise one’s masculinity, nor reveal any constitutional abnormality.
35
From this perspective, the conceptual distinction between the supposed active and the supposed passive partner is maintained, despite the introduction of the new and indiscriminate concept of
shudhūdhjinsī.
Notes
 
Introduction
 
1
Bernard,
L‘orient du XVIe siècle
, 200; Rycaut,
The Present State of the Ottoman Empire
, 33-34; Buckingham,
Travels in Assyria
,
Media, and Persia,
I: 149ff
 
2
Pitts,
A Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahometans
, 26.
 
3
Sonnini,
Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt
, 1 : 251—52.
 
4
This point is pressed in Matar,
Turks
,
Moors, and Englishmen in theAge of Discovery
, ch. 4.
 
5
Miller,
Disorienting Encounters
, 161.
 
6
Tahtāwī,
Takhlīs al-ibrīz,
78. D. Hopwood cites this passage in Sexual Encounters
in the Middle East
, 247. I have consulted his translation, but deviate from it on some points. Most importantly, he translates the term
ʿarab
as ‟Arabs,”whereas I translate it as “‟Bedouin. In the history ofʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī,written one generation before Tahtāwīss visit to Paris, the term
ʿarab
clearly refers to nomadic Bedouin, not to ‟Arabs” in the modern sense of the word; see
ʿAjāʾib al-āthār
, 2:89(line 33), 2:257 (line 13), 3:173 (line 8- 9), 3 : 176 (line 7 - 8). When jabartīwishes to designate the Arabic-speaking people of Egypt, in contrast to the Turkish-speaking military elite, he uses the term
awlād al- ʿarab
or
abnā
ʾ
al-ʿarab;
see 2:248 (line 31), 4:265 (line 32). On the supposed absence of pederasty among the Bedouins, as opposed to the settled townspeople, see Burckhardt,
Travels in Arabia
, 1:364.
 
7
Bullough,
Sexual Variance in Society and History
, ch. 9.
 
8
Boswell,
Christianity
,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,
194—200.
 
9
Hodgson, The
Ventureof Islam,
2:146.
 
10
Lewis,
Music from a Distant Drum
, 26.
 
11
Jabartī,
Ajāʿib al-āthār,
1:209.
 
12
Shabrāwī,
Dīwān,
59.
 
13
Shabrāwī,
Dīwān,
54.
 
14
Shabrāwī,Dīwān,
69.
 
15
Shabrāwī,
Dīvān
,69, 48, 9.
 
16
Foucault,
The History of Sexuality
, 1
:
43.
 
17
This is stated inconscious opposition to constructionist claims, by Johansson and Percy,‟Homosexuality,”156,and Abukhalil, “A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,” 32a.
 
18
Nathan, “Medieval Arabic Medical Views on Male Homosexuality.”
 
19
Spencer,
Homosexuality: A History,
103—4; Greenberg,
The Construction of homosexq
uality, 176-77.
 
20
The secondary literature may for convenience be divided into four major types:
(i) General overviews of the theme by specialists in Arab-Islamic studies, such as the article ‟Liwat”(1986) in
Encyclopaedia of-Islam;
Bruce Dunne’s “Homosexuality in the Middle East: An Agenda for Historical Research”
Arab Studies Quarterly
(1990); Arno Schmitt’s “Different Approaches to Male-Male Sexuality-Eroticism from Morocco to Usbekistan,” in A. Schmitt and J. Sofer, eds.,
Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in moslem Societies
(1992); As‘ad AbuKhalil’s article ”A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,”
Arab Studies Journal
(1993); al-Khaṭībal-‘Adnānī’s
al-Zinā wa al-shudhudh fi altārīkh al-ʿarabi
(1999).
(ii) Chapters devoted to Islamic civilization in comparative and historical accounts of homosexuality such as Vern L. Bullough’s
Sexual Variance in Society and history
(1976), David Greenberg’s
The Construction of Homosexuality
(1988), and Stephen O. Murray’s
Homosexualities
(2000). Such chapters are written by nonspecialists who read no (or very little) Arabic, and consequently must rely on secondary studies, travel literature, and the odd translation of an Arabic primary source. The same applies to the contributions to S. O. Murray and W. Roscoe, eds.,
Islamic Homosexualities
(1997).
(iii) Remarks on the theme in studies with a more general scope, such as A. Bouhdiba’s
La sexualité en Islam
(1975; English translation 1985), Robert Irwin’s
The Arabian Nights:
A
Companion
(1994), and Thomas Bauer’s
Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des
9.
und 10. Jahrhunderts
(1998).
(iv) Discussions of a particular Arabic work or poem, or sometimes even one passage from a work or poem. This includes the discussion of AbūBakr al-Rāzī’s analysis of the disease
ubnah
by Franz Rosenthal (1978), and the discussion of Ibn Sīnā’s analysis of the same disease by B. Nathan (1994). Most of the contributions to E. K. Rowson and J. W. Wright Jr.,
eds.,Homeroticism
in
Classical Arabic Literature
(1997), also fall into this category. A few studies have tried to survey a collection of thematically related texts. For instance, Franz Rosenthal has surveyed the theme of ‟disputation”
(mufakharah)
between lovers of women and lovers of boys in classical Arabic literature (Rosenthal,“Male and Female: Described and Compared”). Arno Schmitt has recently surveyed rulings on sodomy
(liwāt)
in Muslim law (Schmitt, ‟
Liwat
im
Fiqh
”).
 
21
Burton’s terminal essay on pederasty was excised from most editions of his translation. It has since been published as a separate monograph under the title
The Sotadic Zone.
 
22
Pellat et al., ‟Liwātṭ” The article has been reprinted in Schmitt and Safer, eds.,
Sexuuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies,
151-64, with critical notes by A. Schmitt. Schmitt trenchantly exposes some of the conceptual confusions that mar the article.
 
23
Goitein, “The Sexual Mores of the Common People,” 47-48.
 
24
Bouhdiba,
Sexuality in Islam,
31—33, 200—201.
 
25
Schmitt, ‟Different Approaches to Male/Male Sexuality“; Schmitt, ‟
Liwāṭ
im
Fiqh”
; Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity”; Rowson, “Two Homoerotic Narratives from Mamluk Literature”; Bauer,
Liebe und Liebesdichtung,
163—74.
 
26
For a similar criticism of some of the secondary literature on homosexuality in Arab-Islamic history see Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire,” 362-63.
 
27
Monroe, “The Striptease That Was Blamed on Abu Bakr’s Naughty Son,” 116-17.
 
28
This point is made in a somewhat different context by Gellner, “Doctor and Saint,” and by Burke, ‟Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities.”
 
29
In adopting this approach, I have been influenced especially by Frazer and Cameron, “Knowing What to Say: The Construction of Gender in Linguistic Practice”; Loizos and Papataxiarchis, ‟Gender and Kinship in Marriage and Alternative Contexts”; and Baker, “On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution.”

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