Today there is a fond Western idea, seemingly corroborated by illiberal fundamentalist regimes, that Islamic society views sex with puritanical horror and disapproval. In fact over the centuries this wasn’t the case in huge areas of Muslim culture. Sex entered poetry, humour and courtly and urban life, making cheerful havoc in the nooks of classical morality. Medieval Baghdad rejoiced in the story of a man who was tricked by his mother first into sex with her, and, years later, with the daughter he sired by her, and in his groundbreaking novel Leg over Leg Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq amused himself over several pages by listing the various euphemisms for intimate parts of the body that he had found in a medieval Arabic dictionary. The vagina was ‘the sprayer’, ‘the gripper’ and the ‘large floppy one’; the penis was ‘the falcon’s stand’, ‘the big spider’ and ‘the little man’; and the anus was ‘the toothless one’, ‘the catapult’ and ‘the whistler’. As for the Thousand and One Nights, that great early East-West import (it was the second most popular book in America after the Bible) would be positively skeletal without the sex content —all that ‘kissing and clipping, coupling and carousing till day began to wane; when the Mamelukes rose from the damsel’s bosoms and the … slave dismounted from the queen’s breast’.
Whatever harm the contained atmosphere of the harem did to the nerves of inmates, it certainly bred fearless talk of sex—and not just talk, with illicitly introduced lovers ‘escaping through the roof of the harem, and royal concubines surprised in the basement with adolescent page boys, or half-castrated but still sexually-active eunuchs’.
Such debauch may have tickled Flaubert and some of the libertine French poets, but it offended the Anglo-Saxon morals that entered the region in the baggage of others.
George Nathaniel Curzon, who would later become viceroy of India and British foreign secretary, felt a thrill of outrage at the Shia institution of temporary marriage—under which men and women are permitted to marry for a set duration—as it was practised in the supposedly saintly city of Mashhad, in eastern Iran; he described it as ‘a gigantic system of prostitution, under the sanction of the [religious authorities]’. This was in 1890, five years before the high tide of Victorian intolerance carried Oscar Wilde away to Reading Jail. The appalled tone of Curzon, the imprisonment of Wilde—these were clear markers of what was acceptable and what was not in the abstemious world of modern virtue.
There was no word for ‘homosexual’ in the Islamic world, in the sense that was popularised in the 1880s in Europe by the psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing—unconventional patterns of behaviour had wound around accepted sexuality and decorum, and no portmanteau was capacious enough to fit them all. There was a canon of male courtship poetry in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and for many mystic poets the celestial God with which they desired union was made flesh in the rose-lipped pageboy whose face shone like the moon, and not any female object of longing. But these expressions of love were not proof of consummation, or foreplay, or indeed any kind of play at all—as the medieval philosopher al-Ghazali had written, ‘the beautiful form is pleasurable in itself even if carnal lust is absent’. For some Islamic teachers, echoing Plato, the attractiveness of young boys was a divine incentive to aid in the propagation and spread of knowledge, while brute desire for women (by definition inadequate conduits for knowledge) was useful only for perpetuating the species. What some Arabs called an ‘inclination to boys’, others called a ‘sensibility to beauty’; the ‘masculinity’ of the active partner was contrasted with the ‘femininity’ of the passive one. These nuances were reflected by the jurists, who devised a rising scale of sin, beginning with the relatively minor transgression of falling in love with a boy, going on to kissing and fondling him, and ending with sodomy itself—which everyone agreed was a major crime, easily as bad as fornication with a woman, and sometimes punishable by death.
For all the examples of chaste desire, sex between Muslim men evidently happened—and pretty often, to judge by the disapproving commentaries of European visitors.
The English mariner Joseph Pitts, who was captured and enslaved in Algiers in 1678, noted after his escape that ‘the horrible sin of Sodomy is so far from being punish’d amongst [the north Africans], that it is part of their ordinary Discourse to boast of their detestable Actions of that kind. ‘Tis common for men there to fall in Love with Boys, as ‘tis here in England to be in Love with Women.’ Two centuries later, in the words of Nasser al-Din Shah’s Austrian doctor, the practice of keeping a male concubine was ‘so overt that no one makes an attempt to conceal it. In almost every house of standing there is such a boy, even many, who are there to serve this purpose. No one is reserved about introducing them publicly. Indeed, one takes pride in possessing a splendid specimen.’ Soldiers from Napoleon’s Armee d’Orient who fell into the hands of hostile tribesmen during the march from Alexandria to Cairo, if they survived rarely made it back to safety with their honour intact, while female camp followers were killed without being sexually molested. This surprised the French as much as it shocked them.
The harems and baths of Turkey unsurprisingly encouraged female intimacy, the sixteenth-century geographer Nicolas de Nicolay noted, and he wrote that ‘there is very great amity proceeding only through the frequentation and resort to the bathes: yea & sometimes become so fervently in love the one of the other as if it were with men’. In Persia women took ardent vows of ‘sisterhood’, though it is impossible to ascertain whether these relations were typically sexual or not; there does not seem to have been the same tradition of romantic verse that existed among men.
We are obliged to take these lurid foreign accounts of Islamic mores on trust, but from Muslim accounts of Western life we know that there was (and remains) room for egregious misunderstandings. From the naked shoulders of the women he saw in the ballrooms of Europe, for instance, the Iranian traveller Mirza Fattah Khan Garmrudi, who visited Britain in the late 1830s, inferred that they were prostitutes. He also equated the small dogs that ladies of quality carried around with them to sex toys—a necessary supplement given the inability of even the most virile Western male to adequately cover his insatiable brood mare of a woman. Different grooming practices were also a cause of confusion, with some Middle Easterners equating clean-shaven Western visitors with the beardless youths of homoerotic verse, and the Westerners growing manly whiskers in response to correct such misconceptions.
Clearly, however, despite all the room for misinterpretation, there was a tolerance of homosexual behaviour and sentiment in the Muslim world that was at variance with modern Western morality. This tolerance was related to the segregation and slavery that had been inherent in the Middle Eastern social set-up, which rather than one society made up of two sexes, fostered two societies that met for purposes of procreation, and also to the absence of squeamishness concerning boys and sex. There was much more tolerance of rape than now. In the words of a historian of the subject, ‘great poets such as Sa’adi and Rumi wrote about the sexual molestation of boys or the castration of former beloveds … the modern reader cannot escape the fact that classical Persian poetry is brimming with accounts of non-consensual sex with junior male partners’.
But Middle Eastern tolerance—let alone the ‘pride’ of which Nasser al-Din’s doctor spoke—would not survive once contact with Europe was sufficiently intense (and imbalanced) for foreign opinion to matter. To some European observers the homosexual culture in the Middle East was not only a ‘sin against nature’; it also conspired to keep women at the margins of society, useful only for reproduction. In the same way that political pressure brought slavery to a close in the Middle East, so the cultural aspersions being cast by Westerners made opinion formers and modernisers in the Islamic world feel ashamed of their sexual culture, and seek to change it.
An example of this kind of shame and embarrassment can be found, again, in the writings of the Iranian traveller Mirza Fatah Khan Garmrudi. He evidently spent much of his visit to Europe in 1838 fending off accusations of pederasty, and he deplored the ‘unfair’ European stereotype of Iranians as inclined towards beautiful young men. On the contrary, he wrote somewhat defensively, ‘the people of Europe are known … especially for this evil act’, and he depicted Europe as awash with rent boys.
A few years earlier Rifaa al-Tahtawi had written approvingly of the French as not inclined ‘toward loving male youths and eulogizing them in poetry’. A curious consequence of the French love of women was self-censorship in the translation of homoerotic Arabic verses. ‘In the French language,’ Rifaa went on, ‘a man cannot say: I loved a youth, for that would be an unacceptable and awkward wording. Therefore if one of them translates one of our books he avoids this by saying in the translation: I loved a young female.
The gradual anathemisation of homosexuality began in the Middle East in the late nineteenth century. It was attributable not only to the importation of Western prejudice, but also to the end of segregation and to the gradual assumption by women of the position of a natural partner, helpmeet and equal of men. Religious traditionalists expressed opposition to increased socialisation between sexes; for them, putting an end to segregated social arrangements was of a piece with ending the veil, and they opposed it vigorously.
For social reformers, the moral and religious imperative of men loving women, and preferably one woman, was now being backed up by a growing appreciation of the link between promiscuity and syphilis. There was an expanding body of literature providing advice for women on how to keep their man happy, and the modern, progressive magazines mercilessly satirised the old institutions of child marriage, same-sex commitment ceremonies, and polygamy. In the 1880s, in an influential book called the Disciplining of Women, a male member of the Iranian ruling house depicted the ideal wife as docile and submissive to the extent of imagining a ‘garden of flowers’ even if her husband pushed her into a fire.
She must come to bed ‘fully perfumed and clean’ and never refuse her husband’s demands for sex, or else he would turn to a ‘lower-class temporary wife’ who would solace him ‘in the toilet cubicle or under the stairway’. The feminist riposte came a few years later, in the form of a popular screed enjoining men to be kind and considerate to their wives, and advising women to leave their husbands if they were not.
As a result of Western mores colliding with Islamic ones in the late nineteenth century, Muslim attitudes to sex began to align much more closely with the prevailing Western idea about what was right and what was sinful. Polygamy went out of fashion; it was unfair (on the women) and greedy (of the men) and speedily fell into desuetude among the Middle East’s new bureaucratic and intellectual elites. Homosocial ‘mentoring’ of young boys and men by older father figures came to be considered gross and old-fashioned. At the same time, with the decline of the harem and concubinage men and women began to settle down—on the surface, at least—to monogamous heterosexual relationships as quietly as middle-class people in Europe and America.
There was also a plea from many young people for an end to the old arranged marriages, and in 1889 a young male character in a popular Turkish novel, Serguzesht, by the Istanbul writer Samipasazade Sezai, argued that ‘the most important right of young people in the world is to marry whom they want’. Eventually that appeal was heard, as more people married partners they themselves had chosen, even if arranged marriages remained the norm among the upper classes for reasons of asset and gene management.
In the final years of the nineteenth century, romantic verse by men and for men was produced in ever diminishing quantities, and in the new century love poetry would be almost exclusively heterosexual in character. By 1925 attitudes had changed so much that an influential history of Arab civilisation authored by the Egyptian writer Ahmad Amin condemned the love of boys as ‘the greatest calamity to befall society’. Around the same time, the Iranian social and political reformer Hassan Taqizadeh was pressing for the eradication of ‘the shameful practice of unnatural love which has historically been one of the worst practices of our people and which is a major obstacle to civilization’. A strait-laced and puritanical air began to blow through the Middle East, and here as in high-Victorian Britain and the United States the Thousand and One Nights was censored in order to excise sexuality of any kind. No more would homosexuality be referred to by the old euphemism ‘sensibility to beauty’: an Arabic neologism, connoting ‘sexual inversion’, ‘sexual perversion’, had arrived in its place.
It was not until the 1990s, and the fraught entry of gay liberation movements to the Islamic world, that the idea of equal sexual rights would surface in the Middle East, and some liberals began to ask whether the old sexual tolerance hadn’t been preferable after all.
Excerpt From The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason - 1798 to Modern Times by Christopher de Bellaigue, 2017
See also
Comments