by Khaled El-Rouayheb, University of Chicago Press 2005
Excerpts
"My central contention is that Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of 'homosexuality,' and that writings from the period [1500-1800] do not evince the same attitude toward all aspects of what we might be inclined to call homosexuality today.
The Arab literature of the early Ottoman period (1516-1798) is replete with casual and sometimes sympathetic references to homosexual love." p. 1
"Homosexuality is condemned and forbidden by the holy law of Islam, but there are times and places in Islamic history when the ban on homosexual love seems no stronger than the ban on adultery in, say, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. Some [classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish] poems are openly homosexual; some poets, in their collected poems, even have separate sections for love poems addressed to males and females." — Bernard Lewis, Music from a Distant Drum, Princeton 2001
"Both [Marshall] Hodgson and [Bernard] Lewis suggest that what was cultivated openly in society is precisely that which Islamic law prohibited... [T]his assumption is questionable. What Islamic law prohibits is sexual intercourse between men, especially anal intercourse. It is hardly credible to suggest that such illicit intercourse was carried out in public. What unfolded in public was presumably such things as courting and expressions of passionate love. It may seem natural for modern historians to gloss over the distinction between committing sodomy and expressing passionate love for a youth, and to describe both activities as manifestations of 'homosexuality'." P. 3
"My Lord, by Him who has granted you comeliness, splendor and beauty.
And who in your bewitching eyes has permitted lovers some licit magic.
And who has bestowed on your cheeks that thing which lovers have disputed as such length.
Grant nearness to a lover for whom infatuation is a strict duty and forgetfulness is impossible.
O gazelle! No! You are even more exalted, whose neck puts the gazelle to shame.
O namesake of al-Khalil [the epithet of the Prophet Ibrāhīm], you are cold and yet set my heart ablaze."
— The Egyptian scholar 'Abdallah al-Shabrawī (d. 1758), depicting a young male beloved by the name of Ibrahīm in one of his collected poetry (Dīwan). Al-Shabrawī was for over thirty years Rector of the Azhar college in Cairo, perhaps the most prestigious Islamic college in the Arab-speaking world.
"Shabrawī seems not to have had an attitude toward 'homosexuality' at all, comments El-Rouayheb, "but apparently drew a central distinction between, on the one hand, falling ardently in love with a boy and expressing this love in verse and , on the other hand, committing sodomy with a boy. Until quietly recently, it was common in Europe to tolerate or even value ardent love between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman but to condemn premarital sex. This combination of attitudes is only contradictory if one wrong-headedly insists on interpreting the coexisting judgements as expressions of both tolerance and intolerance of 'heterosexuality'. pp. 4-5
The assumption that it is unproblematic to speak of either tolerance or intolerance of homosexuality in the premodern Middle East would seems to derive from the assumption that homosexuality is a self-evident fact about the human world to which a particular culture reacts with a certain degree of tolerance or repression. From this perspective, writing the history of homosexuality is seen as analogous to writing, say, the history of women. One assumes that the concept of 'homosexuality,' like the concept of 'woman,' is shared across historical periods, and that what varies and may be investigated historically is merely the changing cultural (popular, scientific, legal, etc.) attitude towards such people. In contrast to this 'essentialist' view, a number of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, inspired in the main by the late French philosopher Michel Foucault,have recently emphasized the 'constructed,' or historically conditioned, nature of our modern sexual categories. They claim that the concept of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) was developed in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and that though its meaning may overlap with earlier concepts such as 'sodomite' or 'invert,' it is not, strictly speaking, synonymous with these. For example, Foucault stressed that the term 'sodomite' applied to the perpetrator of an act; someone who was tempted to commit sodomy but refrained out of moral or religious considerations was thus not a sodomite. By contrast, the category 'homosexual' would include someone who has the inclination, even if it is not translated into action. On this account, homosexuality is no more a synonym for sodomy than heterosexuality is equivalent to fornication." p. 5
"The adjudication of the dispute between constructionists and essentialists should of course be based on a careful investigation of the historical evidence. To avoid prejudging the issue, close attention will have to be paid to the pre-modern—in this case Arabic—terms and phrases used in various contexts to designate acts and actors that we would incline to call 'homosexual'.
What Islamic scholars condemned was not 'homosexuality' but liwāt, that is, anal intercourse between men. Writing a love poem of a male youth would simply not fall under the juridical concept of liwāt.
The possibility at issue is precisely whether pre-nineteenth-century Arab-Islamic culture lacked the concept of homosexuality altogether, and operated instead with a set of concepts (like ubnah or liwāt) each of which pick out some of the acts and actors we might call 'homosexual' but which were simply not seen as instances of one overarching phenomenon. In the course of this study I hope to show that this was indeed the case. I argue that distinctions not captured by the concept of 'homosexuality' were all-important from the perspective of the culture of the period. One such distinction is that between the 'active' and the 'passive' partner in a homosexual encounter—these were typically not conceptualized or evaluated in the same way. Another distinction is that between passionate infatuation (`ishq) and sexual lust—emphasizing this distinction was important for those who would argue for the religious permissibility of the passionate love of boys. A third distinction centers on exactly what sexual acts were involved—Islamic law prescribed severe corporal or capital punishment for anal intercourse between men, but regarded, say, kissing, fondling, or non-anal intercourse as less serious transgressions." p. 6
"Writing before the term 'homosexuality' was introduced into the English language, [Richard] Burton still assumed that he was faced with one phenomenon, 'pederasty,' which he claimed was widespread in the Islamic world and regarded as at worst a peccadillo. He believed that this was due to the 'blending of masculine and feminine temperaments' in the region. More recent commentators often proceed in the same fashion. The article 'Liwāt' in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published exactly one hundred years after Burton's essay, notes that homosexuality was prohibited by Islamic law but nevertheless widely practiced and tolerated in Islamic history after the eighth century." p. 7
In the present study I focus on the Arab-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 that came to be called 'sexual inversion' or 'sexual perversion' (shudhūth jinsī). The present work should hopefully set the stage for a study of this profound change." p. 9
"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 a 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 differently by the different status groups by age, sex, class, occupation, etc. in the different social ... contexts in which they find their meaning.
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."
Ibid., p. 25
"In the 'homosexual' world of the early 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')." Ibid., p. 26
"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 Allepine scholar Radī al-Dīn ibn al-Hanbalī (d. 1563) was evicted from the doorsteps of his beloved's home by the boy's father. Other parents seem to have been willing to look the other way, especially if the suitor came from 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 Ahmed al-Shuwaykī (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." , ibid., 28
"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 Dīwån, 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... 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... It is possible that early marriage was the prerogative of the wealthier segment of the population, but the abundant we have concerning pederasty in the premodern Arab East relate primarily to this social class, so that the purported explanation of the 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 prostitution in the major Arab cities during the centuries under consideration." Ibid., pp. 29-30
"The prominent Syrian mystic Muhammad ibn 'Irāq (d. 1526) veiled his son 'Ali 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." Ibid., p. 31
"The homosexuality represented in the texts of the early Ottoman period was, on the whole, of the pederastic, 'transgenerational' or 'age-structured' type well known from classical Greece and Rome. It is not that this was the only type that was thought to exist; nor was it the only type that was acceptable—it was not acceptable to many—but it was the type that was conceived as being usual." Ibid., p. 33
"According to a tradition which goes back to Plato, and which has been shown ... to have survived in Islamic mysticism, a beautiful human countenance, typically in the form of a handsome beardless youth, could serve as the channel for the manifestation of absolute, divine beauty." , p. 37
"A couplet by the Meccan judge Ahmad al-Murshidī (d. 1638) also associated the Sufis of his age with gluttony, drinking wine, sodomy, and the playing of musical instruments:
The Sufis of the age and time; the Sufis of the wine-press and the eating-tray.
They have outdone the people of Lot by adding the beating of drums to fornication." P. 37
"The biographical literature offers several examples of rumoured pederastic relations between notables and their slaves or servants."
The Palestinian scholar Muhammad al-Saffārīnī noted that liwāt in his time was especially wide-spread among 'theTurks' (al-atrāk), and since there is no evidence that Saffārīnī travelled to the Turkish-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire, it is likely that 'the Turks' he encountered and passed judgement on were mostly members of the political, military, and judicial elite." P. 41
"The difference in terms of actual behavior between 'the inclination to boys' and 'the inclination to beauty' need not have been particularly great, and it is clear that the two terms were often alternative ways of describing the same behavioral pattern." P. 56
"The Turkish judge and poet Bāqī (d. 1600) composes lines praising the beauty of a certain youth. The youth in question hears the lines, is impressed by them, and resolves to kiss the feet of the poet. But when attempting to do so, Bāqī reminds him that he had composed the poem with his mouth, not his feet." The Damascene scholar Ramadān al-`Utayfī (d. 1684) narrates the story of the deputy governor of Tripoli, ’Alī Sayfā: " ’Alī is sitting with a handsome youth at an elevated place at the outskirts of the town. The youth comments on the beautiful view—the red sand, the green meadow, and the blue sea. The governor subsequently asks the youth why he let unmentioned the white dune (kathīb) behind him—thereby alluding to the boy's rear." P. 58
Rifā'ah al-Tahtāwī (d. 1873), who was in Paris around the same time the great nineteenth-century Orientalist and Arabist Edward Lane was in Egypt, commented on the unacceptability of pederasty in that country [France]:
'One of the positive aspects of their language and poetry is that it does not permit the saying of ghazal [love poetry] of someone of the same sex, so in the French language a man cannot say: I loved a boy (ghulām), for that would be unacceptable and awkward wording, so therefore if one them translates one of our books he avoids this by changing the wording, so saying in the translation: I loved a young girl (ghulāmah) or a person (dhātan).'" El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, p. 62
My comment: That was how Victorian morality of the Orientalists and colonialists influenced the Arab-Muslim intellectuals of the period. See Jospeh Massad's Desiring Arabs.
"One may also legitimately conclude that a poem is pederastic when the beloved's male name is indicated in the poem, or he is described as a craftsman, or as entering a mosque or a public bath. Conversely, bracelets, anklets, veils, red-tipped fingers, earrings, or pigtails would usually indicate that a female is being eulogized. However, in terms of frequency of occurrence, mention of beard-down remains the major indicator of the gender of the beloved in love poetry. This implies that the poems that are clearly pederastic outnumber the ones that are clearly 'heterosexual' since the absence of references to beard-down usually leaves it undetermined whether a woman or a beardless boy is being praised. In many, perhaps most, cases the gender of the beloved cannot be ascertained, and this is a significant fact in itself." p. 64
Many similes "are used ad nauseam in the love poetry of the period, with no regard to the fender of the described object. In other words, it was largely the same features that were represented as being attractive in females and male youths. Being measured by the same yardstick, the beauty of women and youths was fundamentally comparable. "He is more beautiful than you," an Aleppine [someone from Aleppo, Syria] tailor enamored of his apprentice was reported to have told his jealous wife" p. 65
"In addition, many poets often chose to contrast, rather than gloss over, the charm of boys and women. Comparing the merits of the love of boys and the love of women was a conventional topic of classical Arabic literature, at least since the time of al-Jāhiz (d. 869)." p. 67
Public gender segregation "did not make 'heterosexual' outlets unavailable to men—most adult men were married and those who were not could resort to prostitutes—but it did pose no obstacle to the kind of ambiguous, jesting courtship of which the poet was apparently so fond. It is of course also unlikely that public gender segregation succeeded in preventing all illicit affairs between men and women." p. 69
"sexual and aesthetic preferences are not the same thing as sexual orientation ... A good example of how modern sexual categories are inadequate to understanding the genre of mufākharah [an epistle to the disputation] is the following couplet by the Damascene poet Ibrāhīm al-Akramī (d. 1638):
To the censurer who reproached me for loving boys I professed a noble motto:
I am but a son of Adam and therefore only ever fancy (ahwā) sons of Adam." p. 70
"The love of boys loomed large in the Arabic belles-lettres of the early Ottoman period. Passionate love was by far the most favorite theme in belles-lettres, and the portrayed beloved seem more often than not to have been a teenage boy. The idea—still widespread among modern specialists in Arabic literature—that premodern Arabic love poetry as a rule portrayed a female beloved may be true when it comes to pre- or early Islamic poetry. It is not true of Arabic poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century. As far as the early Ottoman period is concerned, the gender of the portrayed beloved, when it is indicated by the poem itself or by the supplementary remarks of the anthologist or redactor, is more often male than female." p. 75
"The lyrics of modern pop songs are not expected to reflect the real-life experiences of their singers or composers, but this does not imply that there is not an intimate connection between the lyrics and the values and assumptions of contemporary culture. One can hardly imagine a Frank Sinatra or Tom Jones singing about his love for a downy-cheeked boy of fourteen, and their audience would hardly react positively if they did... One might at the very least conclude from the profuseness of explicitly pederastic poetry in the premodern Middle East that images of an adult man pining for a teenage youth and begging for a rendez-vous or a kiss did not arouse disgust or derision among listeners." p. 77
"[T]he idea that pederastic liaisons were a common and visible part of the culture of the premodern Arab-Islamic East does not rest on the evidence of belles-lettres. It can be established solely on the basis of the biographical, homiletic, and juridical literature, as well as Western travel literature, of the period." p. 79
"The 'realist' perspective could be utilized by poets who on other occasions contributed to the idealization of refined, unconsummated love. The resulting poetry tends to have a marked deflationary character, and clearly parodies the established discourse of chaste and tragic love. [The physician Dāwūd] al-Antākī [d.1599] cited a poet as saying:
They say to me, 'By God, what would you do if your beloved visited you?' I said, 'Fuck him.'
In a similar vein, Ahmad al-Khafājī composed the following couplet:
Since he whom I fancy visited me, he offered me drink from a mouth [as intoxicating as] wine.
And his buttocks said to me from behind him: 'Today wine and tomorrow action.' p. 87
"The inversion of roles extends to the poetic imagery; in love poetry it was the beloved whose eyes were like swords wreaking havoc with the lover and setting his interior aflame. It is instructive to compare this with the defamatory passages cited in the beginning of chapter I, in which the penis penetrates and ravishes the receptive partner like a weapon. Sexual roles as a rule mirrored nonsexual relations of power, the sexually dominant (the penetrator) also being the socially dominant (the man, the husband, the master). Love, on the other hand, tended to overturn the established social order, causing a master to be enthralled by his slave, and a prominent Muslim scholar like Muhammad al-'Urdī (later to become Muftī in Aleppo) to be captivated by a Christian boy working in wine shop." p. 90
"It has hitherto been taken for granted that the adoption of a deflationary or an idealist perspective on love was independent whether the beloved was a woman or a boy. This seems to have been the rule in the premodern Arab-Islamic Middle East. It was of course not the rule in Europe, where idealization was normally confined to 'heterosexual' love. An interesting debate on this issue unfolded in the 1820s between the English traveler James Silk Buckingham, familiar from his own culture with idealist perceptions of love between unmarried men and women, initially responded with sympathy when his companion told him that he had a Christian beloved in Baghdad. When he found out that the beloved was a boy, he 'shrunk back from the confession as a man would recoil from a serpent on which he had unexpectedly trodden.'" p. 92
"The concept of male homosexuality did not exist in the Arab-Islamic Middle East in the early Ottoman period."
"Al-Khatīb al-Adnānī, in a recent book (published in 1999) on fornication and 'homosexuality' in Arabic history, subsumes sodomy, effeminate passivity, the love of boys, and lesbianism under the term shudhūth jinsī [sexual deviation]... He is apparently unaware that the concept of shudhūth jinsī 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." p. 160
Excerpts
"My central contention is that Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of 'homosexuality,' and that writings from the period [1500-1800] do not evince the same attitude toward all aspects of what we might be inclined to call homosexuality today.
The Arab literature of the early Ottoman period (1516-1798) is replete with casual and sometimes sympathetic references to homosexual love." p. 1
"Homosexuality is condemned and forbidden by the holy law of Islam, but there are times and places in Islamic history when the ban on homosexual love seems no stronger than the ban on adultery in, say, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. Some [classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish] poems are openly homosexual; some poets, in their collected poems, even have separate sections for love poems addressed to males and females." — Bernard Lewis, Music from a Distant Drum, Princeton 2001
"Both [Marshall] Hodgson and [Bernard] Lewis suggest that what was cultivated openly in society is precisely that which Islamic law prohibited... [T]his assumption is questionable. What Islamic law prohibits is sexual intercourse between men, especially anal intercourse. It is hardly credible to suggest that such illicit intercourse was carried out in public. What unfolded in public was presumably such things as courting and expressions of passionate love. It may seem natural for modern historians to gloss over the distinction between committing sodomy and expressing passionate love for a youth, and to describe both activities as manifestations of 'homosexuality'." P. 3
"My Lord, by Him who has granted you comeliness, splendor and beauty.
And who in your bewitching eyes has permitted lovers some licit magic.
And who has bestowed on your cheeks that thing which lovers have disputed as such length.
Grant nearness to a lover for whom infatuation is a strict duty and forgetfulness is impossible.
O gazelle! No! You are even more exalted, whose neck puts the gazelle to shame.
O namesake of al-Khalil [the epithet of the Prophet Ibrāhīm], you are cold and yet set my heart ablaze."
— The Egyptian scholar 'Abdallah al-Shabrawī (d. 1758), depicting a young male beloved by the name of Ibrahīm in one of his collected poetry (Dīwan). Al-Shabrawī was for over thirty years Rector of the Azhar college in Cairo, perhaps the most prestigious Islamic college in the Arab-speaking world.
"Shabrawī seems not to have had an attitude toward 'homosexuality' at all, comments El-Rouayheb, "but apparently drew a central distinction between, on the one hand, falling ardently in love with a boy and expressing this love in verse and , on the other hand, committing sodomy with a boy. Until quietly recently, it was common in Europe to tolerate or even value ardent love between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman but to condemn premarital sex. This combination of attitudes is only contradictory if one wrong-headedly insists on interpreting the coexisting judgements as expressions of both tolerance and intolerance of 'heterosexuality'. pp. 4-5
The assumption that it is unproblematic to speak of either tolerance or intolerance of homosexuality in the premodern Middle East would seems to derive from the assumption that homosexuality is a self-evident fact about the human world to which a particular culture reacts with a certain degree of tolerance or repression. From this perspective, writing the history of homosexuality is seen as analogous to writing, say, the history of women. One assumes that the concept of 'homosexuality,' like the concept of 'woman,' is shared across historical periods, and that what varies and may be investigated historically is merely the changing cultural (popular, scientific, legal, etc.) attitude towards such people. In contrast to this 'essentialist' view, a number of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, inspired in the main by the late French philosopher Michel Foucault,have recently emphasized the 'constructed,' or historically conditioned, nature of our modern sexual categories. They claim that the concept of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) was developed in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and that though its meaning may overlap with earlier concepts such as 'sodomite' or 'invert,' it is not, strictly speaking, synonymous with these. For example, Foucault stressed that the term 'sodomite' applied to the perpetrator of an act; someone who was tempted to commit sodomy but refrained out of moral or religious considerations was thus not a sodomite. By contrast, the category 'homosexual' would include someone who has the inclination, even if it is not translated into action. On this account, homosexuality is no more a synonym for sodomy than heterosexuality is equivalent to fornication." p. 5
"The adjudication of the dispute between constructionists and essentialists should of course be based on a careful investigation of the historical evidence. To avoid prejudging the issue, close attention will have to be paid to the pre-modern—in this case Arabic—terms and phrases used in various contexts to designate acts and actors that we would incline to call 'homosexual'.
What Islamic scholars condemned was not 'homosexuality' but liwāt, that is, anal intercourse between men. Writing a love poem of a male youth would simply not fall under the juridical concept of liwāt.
The possibility at issue is precisely whether pre-nineteenth-century Arab-Islamic culture lacked the concept of homosexuality altogether, and operated instead with a set of concepts (like ubnah or liwāt) each of which pick out some of the acts and actors we might call 'homosexual' but which were simply not seen as instances of one overarching phenomenon. In the course of this study I hope to show that this was indeed the case. I argue that distinctions not captured by the concept of 'homosexuality' were all-important from the perspective of the culture of the period. One such distinction is that between the 'active' and the 'passive' partner in a homosexual encounter—these were typically not conceptualized or evaluated in the same way. Another distinction is that between passionate infatuation (`ishq) and sexual lust—emphasizing this distinction was important for those who would argue for the religious permissibility of the passionate love of boys. A third distinction centers on exactly what sexual acts were involved—Islamic law prescribed severe corporal or capital punishment for anal intercourse between men, but regarded, say, kissing, fondling, or non-anal intercourse as less serious transgressions." p. 6
"Writing before the term 'homosexuality' was introduced into the English language, [Richard] Burton still assumed that he was faced with one phenomenon, 'pederasty,' which he claimed was widespread in the Islamic world and regarded as at worst a peccadillo. He believed that this was due to the 'blending of masculine and feminine temperaments' in the region. More recent commentators often proceed in the same fashion. The article 'Liwāt' in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published exactly one hundred years after Burton's essay, notes that homosexuality was prohibited by Islamic law but nevertheless widely practiced and tolerated in Islamic history after the eighth century." p. 7
In the present study I focus on the Arab-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 that came to be called 'sexual inversion' or 'sexual perversion' (shudhūth jinsī). The present work should hopefully set the stage for a study of this profound change." p. 9
"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 a 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 differently by the different status groups by age, sex, class, occupation, etc. in the different social ... contexts in which they find their meaning.
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."
Ibid., p. 25
"In the 'homosexual' world of the early 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')." Ibid., p. 26
"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 Allepine scholar Radī al-Dīn ibn al-Hanbalī (d. 1563) was evicted from the doorsteps of his beloved's home by the boy's father. Other parents seem to have been willing to look the other way, especially if the suitor came from 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 Ahmed al-Shuwaykī (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." , ibid., 28
"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 Dīwån, 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... 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... It is possible that early marriage was the prerogative of the wealthier segment of the population, but the abundant we have concerning pederasty in the premodern Arab East relate primarily to this social class, so that the purported explanation of the 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 prostitution in the major Arab cities during the centuries under consideration." Ibid., pp. 29-30
"The prominent Syrian mystic Muhammad ibn 'Irāq (d. 1526) veiled his son 'Ali 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." Ibid., p. 31
"The homosexuality represented in the texts of the early Ottoman period was, on the whole, of the pederastic, 'transgenerational' or 'age-structured' type well known from classical Greece and Rome. It is not that this was the only type that was thought to exist; nor was it the only type that was acceptable—it was not acceptable to many—but it was the type that was conceived as being usual." Ibid., p. 33
"According to a tradition which goes back to Plato, and which has been shown ... to have survived in Islamic mysticism, a beautiful human countenance, typically in the form of a handsome beardless youth, could serve as the channel for the manifestation of absolute, divine beauty." , p. 37
"A couplet by the Meccan judge Ahmad al-Murshidī (d. 1638) also associated the Sufis of his age with gluttony, drinking wine, sodomy, and the playing of musical instruments:
The Sufis of the age and time; the Sufis of the wine-press and the eating-tray.
They have outdone the people of Lot by adding the beating of drums to fornication." P. 37
"The biographical literature offers several examples of rumoured pederastic relations between notables and their slaves or servants."
The Palestinian scholar Muhammad al-Saffārīnī noted that liwāt in his time was especially wide-spread among 'theTurks' (al-atrāk), and since there is no evidence that Saffārīnī travelled to the Turkish-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire, it is likely that 'the Turks' he encountered and passed judgement on were mostly members of the political, military, and judicial elite." P. 41
"The difference in terms of actual behavior between 'the inclination to boys' and 'the inclination to beauty' need not have been particularly great, and it is clear that the two terms were often alternative ways of describing the same behavioral pattern." P. 56
"The Turkish judge and poet Bāqī (d. 1600) composes lines praising the beauty of a certain youth. The youth in question hears the lines, is impressed by them, and resolves to kiss the feet of the poet. But when attempting to do so, Bāqī reminds him that he had composed the poem with his mouth, not his feet." The Damascene scholar Ramadān al-`Utayfī (d. 1684) narrates the story of the deputy governor of Tripoli, ’Alī Sayfā: " ’Alī is sitting with a handsome youth at an elevated place at the outskirts of the town. The youth comments on the beautiful view—the red sand, the green meadow, and the blue sea. The governor subsequently asks the youth why he let unmentioned the white dune (kathīb) behind him—thereby alluding to the boy's rear." P. 58
Rifā'ah al-Tahtāwī (d. 1873), who was in Paris around the same time the great nineteenth-century Orientalist and Arabist Edward Lane was in Egypt, commented on the unacceptability of pederasty in that country [France]:
'One of the positive aspects of their language and poetry is that it does not permit the saying of ghazal [love poetry] of someone of the same sex, so in the French language a man cannot say: I loved a boy (ghulām), for that would be unacceptable and awkward wording, so therefore if one them translates one of our books he avoids this by changing the wording, so saying in the translation: I loved a young girl (ghulāmah) or a person (dhātan).'" El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality, p. 62
My comment: That was how Victorian morality of the Orientalists and colonialists influenced the Arab-Muslim intellectuals of the period. See Jospeh Massad's Desiring Arabs.
"One may also legitimately conclude that a poem is pederastic when the beloved's male name is indicated in the poem, or he is described as a craftsman, or as entering a mosque or a public bath. Conversely, bracelets, anklets, veils, red-tipped fingers, earrings, or pigtails would usually indicate that a female is being eulogized. However, in terms of frequency of occurrence, mention of beard-down remains the major indicator of the gender of the beloved in love poetry. This implies that the poems that are clearly pederastic outnumber the ones that are clearly 'heterosexual' since the absence of references to beard-down usually leaves it undetermined whether a woman or a beardless boy is being praised. In many, perhaps most, cases the gender of the beloved cannot be ascertained, and this is a significant fact in itself." p. 64
Many similes "are used ad nauseam in the love poetry of the period, with no regard to the fender of the described object. In other words, it was largely the same features that were represented as being attractive in females and male youths. Being measured by the same yardstick, the beauty of women and youths was fundamentally comparable. "He is more beautiful than you," an Aleppine [someone from Aleppo, Syria] tailor enamored of his apprentice was reported to have told his jealous wife" p. 65
"In addition, many poets often chose to contrast, rather than gloss over, the charm of boys and women. Comparing the merits of the love of boys and the love of women was a conventional topic of classical Arabic literature, at least since the time of al-Jāhiz (d. 869)." p. 67
Public gender segregation "did not make 'heterosexual' outlets unavailable to men—most adult men were married and those who were not could resort to prostitutes—but it did pose no obstacle to the kind of ambiguous, jesting courtship of which the poet was apparently so fond. It is of course also unlikely that public gender segregation succeeded in preventing all illicit affairs between men and women." p. 69
"sexual and aesthetic preferences are not the same thing as sexual orientation ... A good example of how modern sexual categories are inadequate to understanding the genre of mufākharah [an epistle to the disputation] is the following couplet by the Damascene poet Ibrāhīm al-Akramī (d. 1638):
To the censurer who reproached me for loving boys I professed a noble motto:
I am but a son of Adam and therefore only ever fancy (ahwā) sons of Adam." p. 70
"The love of boys loomed large in the Arabic belles-lettres of the early Ottoman period. Passionate love was by far the most favorite theme in belles-lettres, and the portrayed beloved seem more often than not to have been a teenage boy. The idea—still widespread among modern specialists in Arabic literature—that premodern Arabic love poetry as a rule portrayed a female beloved may be true when it comes to pre- or early Islamic poetry. It is not true of Arabic poetry from the ninth to the nineteenth century. As far as the early Ottoman period is concerned, the gender of the portrayed beloved, when it is indicated by the poem itself or by the supplementary remarks of the anthologist or redactor, is more often male than female." p. 75
"The lyrics of modern pop songs are not expected to reflect the real-life experiences of their singers or composers, but this does not imply that there is not an intimate connection between the lyrics and the values and assumptions of contemporary culture. One can hardly imagine a Frank Sinatra or Tom Jones singing about his love for a downy-cheeked boy of fourteen, and their audience would hardly react positively if they did... One might at the very least conclude from the profuseness of explicitly pederastic poetry in the premodern Middle East that images of an adult man pining for a teenage youth and begging for a rendez-vous or a kiss did not arouse disgust or derision among listeners." p. 77
"[T]he idea that pederastic liaisons were a common and visible part of the culture of the premodern Arab-Islamic East does not rest on the evidence of belles-lettres. It can be established solely on the basis of the biographical, homiletic, and juridical literature, as well as Western travel literature, of the period." p. 79
"The 'realist' perspective could be utilized by poets who on other occasions contributed to the idealization of refined, unconsummated love. The resulting poetry tends to have a marked deflationary character, and clearly parodies the established discourse of chaste and tragic love. [The physician Dāwūd] al-Antākī [d.1599] cited a poet as saying:
They say to me, 'By God, what would you do if your beloved visited you?' I said, 'Fuck him.'
In a similar vein, Ahmad al-Khafājī composed the following couplet:
Since he whom I fancy visited me, he offered me drink from a mouth [as intoxicating as] wine.
And his buttocks said to me from behind him: 'Today wine and tomorrow action.' p. 87
"The inversion of roles extends to the poetic imagery; in love poetry it was the beloved whose eyes were like swords wreaking havoc with the lover and setting his interior aflame. It is instructive to compare this with the defamatory passages cited in the beginning of chapter I, in which the penis penetrates and ravishes the receptive partner like a weapon. Sexual roles as a rule mirrored nonsexual relations of power, the sexually dominant (the penetrator) also being the socially dominant (the man, the husband, the master). Love, on the other hand, tended to overturn the established social order, causing a master to be enthralled by his slave, and a prominent Muslim scholar like Muhammad al-'Urdī (later to become Muftī in Aleppo) to be captivated by a Christian boy working in wine shop." p. 90
"It has hitherto been taken for granted that the adoption of a deflationary or an idealist perspective on love was independent whether the beloved was a woman or a boy. This seems to have been the rule in the premodern Arab-Islamic Middle East. It was of course not the rule in Europe, where idealization was normally confined to 'heterosexual' love. An interesting debate on this issue unfolded in the 1820s between the English traveler James Silk Buckingham, familiar from his own culture with idealist perceptions of love between unmarried men and women, initially responded with sympathy when his companion told him that he had a Christian beloved in Baghdad. When he found out that the beloved was a boy, he 'shrunk back from the confession as a man would recoil from a serpent on which he had unexpectedly trodden.'" p. 92
"The concept of male homosexuality did not exist in the Arab-Islamic Middle East in the early Ottoman period."
"Al-Khatīb al-Adnānī, in a recent book (published in 1999) on fornication and 'homosexuality' in Arabic history, subsumes sodomy, effeminate passivity, the love of boys, and lesbianism under the term shudhūth jinsī [sexual deviation]... He is apparently unaware that the concept of shudhūth jinsī 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." p. 160
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