As I procrastinate writing a paper on Abbasid history, I thought the following may be a source of some amusement:
Al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi’ said, “When Muhammad al-Amin succeeded his father Harun al-Rashid as Caliph in the year 193 [809], he ordered me to count the clothing, furnishings, vessels, and equipment in the stores. I summoned the secretaries and storekeepers and continued counting for four months, during which I inspected treasures which I did not dream the caliphal stores contained. Then I ordered them to set down a total for each kind. The list of contents was as follows:
- 4,000 embroidered robes,
- 4,000 silk cloak lined with sable, mink, and other furs
- 10,000 shirts and shifts
- 10,000 caftans
- 2,000 drawers of various kinds
- 4,000 turbans (more…)
My friend Suroor has posed an intriguing question: “what happens to the lesbians?” This is in reference to the silence of the Islamic scripture on the issue of female homosexuality. Muslim jurists (especially nowadays) have usually expanded the definition of homosexuality to include lesbianism, but there is no question that it has been relatively less discussed and also often perceived differently from male homosexuality, which can be tied to the more ‘tangible’ issue of sodomy. In a lengthy comment, I pointed out that this is really a broader and deeper question of lesbianism in historical context. As always, I’m more intersted in the descriptive (and the historical) than the normative, and that is where the following comes in.
The excerpt below was quoted by Stephen O. Murray in an essay in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, an excellent collection edited by Murray & Roscoe and so far the best academic resource that I have come across on the subject. Murray cites one Sharif al-Idrisi (1100-66), who writes:
There are also women who are more intelligent than the others. They possess many of the ways of men so that they resemble them even in their movements, the manner in which they talk, and their voice. Such women would like to be the active partner, and they would like to be superior to the man who makes this possible for them. Such a woman does not shame herself, either, if she seduces women she desires. If she has no inclination, he cannot force her to make love. This makes it difficult for her to submit to the wishes of men and brings her to lesbian love. Most of the women with these characteristics are to be found among the educated and elegant women, the scribes, Koran readers, and female scholars. [Kitab nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq, in Walther 1981:118] (Quoted by Stephen O. Murray, “Woman-Woman Love in Islamic Societies,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, ed. S. Murray and W. Roscoe [New York: New York University Press, 1997], p. 99)
Murray interprets the above to suggest that al-Idrisi “attributes woman-woman relations to choice rather than to the lack or infrequent availability of male sexual partners, that is, so-called ’situational homosexuality’.” This is certainly a strong claim, and also quite significant, considering the common tendency (even today) to perceive lesbianism as reactionary or situational, rather than in its own terms. As a medieval document, the above is also remarkably striking in acknowledging the possibility of female agency. (Of course, one of the most bizarre phenomenon in contemporary sexual discourse is how lesbianism got co-opted by patriarchy, such that even the woman who desires women and not men has become an object of male fantasy! But that is the subject of a whole other discussion).
When I read about the quote, I did not immediately realize that the author is the same al-Idrisi the famous geographer, who created the first ‘accurate’ map of the world (though upside down!). The text, titled Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq (“The Delight of One Who Wishes to Traverse the Regions of the World”), is more commonly known as Kitab al-Rujar (“Roger’s Book”) because it was commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily. There’s a great article on al-Idrisi and Roger II by Frances Gies, published by Aramco World in 1977, available here.
I’ll be spending a considerable amount of time this season studying the Thousand and One Nights, not least because I have enrolled in an evening class on it at our famed institution in the neighborhood. We already had the first meeting last week, and it was wonderful to be back in the classroom after so many months! But I’m also hoping to devote some time to the history of medieval Arabic literature in general, as well as to other related topics, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron. What inspired me now to blog about this, however, was the following amusing quote:
whether the tales be really Arabick, or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty. If they be Oriental, they are translated with unwarrantable lattitude; for the whole tenor of the style is in the French mode: and the Caliph of Bagdat, and the Emperor of China, are addressed in the same terms of ceremony which are usual at the court of France. [James Beattie in "On Fables and Romance" (1783), quoted by Robert Irwin in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 2005), p. 17]
We may laugh (as I do!) at this allusion to the possibility that the 1001 Nights was entirely a creation of Antoine Galland, but truth is there are grounds for such skepticism. Galland, by the way, was the Frenchman who produced the first European translation of the Nights in 1704; his was also the first printed edition of the Nights in any language (the first Arabic print did not appear until over a century later, in Calcutta!). The textual history of the 1001 Nights, as well as the history of its European translations, is sometimes as remarkable as the stories themselves. Indeed, as one writer notes: “Essentially, everything you think you know about the Arabian Nights is probably wrong. Even the number of nights and stories. The history of the tales is itself an enormous puzzle.”
It is to Galland’s credit that the manuscript he used for his translation happens to be the earliest extant text of the Nights: a 14th century Syrian manuscript that now resides in Paris, and which eventually became the basis for Muhsin Mahdi’s more recent “authoritative” edition of the Nights. There are two points to be made: first, Galland didn’t quite produce an “accurate” translation, and second, that manuscript was not his only source for the stories. With respect to the first point, let me quote Husain Haddawy, who argues that “instead of following the text faithfully, Galland deleted, added, and altered drastically to produce not a translation, but a French adaptation, or rather a work of his own creation.” The second point, however, is probably the more interesting, and below is why.
It may surprise many to learn that neither of the two most popular or well-known stories of the Nights, that of Aladdin and Ali Baba, existed in written Arabic before Galland. That is, they were never a part of the “authentic” corpus of the Nights! (And I say that despite realizing that authentic is a very problematic term that we should refrain from using in the context of the 1001 Nights). Galland himself mentions in his diaries that he heard the story of Aladdin from a man named Hanna Diab, a Maromite Christian Arab of Aleppo, who was brought to Paris by a friend of Galland, and who personally narrated 14 stories to Galland (Apparently, seven of these fourteen later appeared in Galland’s edition of the Nights, says Irwin). Now, the first written Arabic account of the story of Aladdin appears in 1787, “in a manuscript written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysius Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis” (Haddawi). A second account appears between 1805 and 1808 in a manuscript written in Paris by another Syrian, Mikhail Sabbagh, who “claimed to have copied it in turn from a Baghdad manuscript written in 1703.” But guess what? It turns out that both Chavis and Sabbagh had “fabricated the text by translating Galland back into Arabic”!
Imagine the twist: from oral Arabic into written French and then back into Arabic! But wait, there’s more. These Arabic manuscripts then became the source of later translations into English, such as by John Payne and (the in/famous) Richard Burton! According to Irwin, “Burton adopted such a catholic attitude that he strayed quite a distance into the Nights Apocrypha. Finding no Arabic originals for some of Galland’s ‘orphan tales’, he adopted the bizarre procedure of translating them from Hindustani translations of Galland” (p. 30).
But of course, none of this should imply that the stories of Aladdin or Ali Baba did not exist before the 18th century. Rather, it would seem that they were a part of the oral tradition. This reminds us then, that to overly insist on “text” and “authenticity” is in some ways tantamount to betraying the spirit of the 1001 Nights, which have been transmitted over centuries through popular narrative. Indeed, scholars agree that many of the stories in the Nights actually predate the “frame” tale, i.e. the story of Scheherazade and Shahrayar. And much of what we call the “Arabian” Nights is hardly Arabian: the origins of many of the stories lie in India, Persia, and even China.
My first albeit cursory introduction to the textual history of the Nights was Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West, which I read just over a year ago in college for a class on Orientalism. Mernissi’s book is a confluence of many themes, but primarily she follows the journey of Scheherazade to Europe, through the translations of Galland, Lane, Burton and others. In trying to uncover the roots of Western fantasies about the harem, she offers an intriguing feminist reading of the European reception of the 1001 Nights.
But to meet your more immediate curiosities, if any, about the textual history of the Arabian Nights, I can refer to two articles that I have found online: one here by Gregory Frost, and another longer one here by Daniel Beaumont.
Last night, when browsing through my copy of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, I came across a very interesting passage about al-Ghazali’s take on the question of ethics and his response to the views of Ibn Miskawayh, who died about 3 decades before al-Ghazali was born. I went to bed thinking about some of the issues raised, and planned to write up something here. Unfortunately I don’t have enough time right now to reflect on everything that I would like to, but I decided I’ll copy the relevant quote here and then follow up on it later, hopefully tomorrow. So this is from the entry on “Islamic ethics”, contributed by the well-kown Oliver Leaman:
A particular interesting debate arose in the work of al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and is his response to an argument produced by Ibn Miskawayh. The latter argues that the religious and moral law is based on what is in our interest, and that we can see what the point of the law is by asking what its point is. Al-Ghazali replies that the point of the moral and religious law is that it has no point; it is entirely arbitrary and rests on nothing but the will of God. Some people may follow the principles of morality out of some confused idea that they are the right principles, but unless they follow those principles because they believe they are commanded by God to do so, their action is without value. Here al-Ghazali is using the idea of an earlier theological debate between the Mu’tazila and the Ash’ariyya on the basis of morality. For the former, morality can be derived from reason, and that is why God establishes it, since he acts in accordance with reason. The Ash’arites argued, by contrast, that morality means nothing more than what God demands of us, and it has no basis apart from that.
It was the Ash’arite view that prevailed in Islamic philosophy… (p. 447, Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. 2005)
I heard Peter Cole speak yesterday at a lecture entitled “Real Gazelles in Imaginary Gardens: Art and Scholarship in the Translation of Medieval Hebrew Poetry from Spain.” I believe this was the second time I had the chance to see him, because he had come for a reading two years ago, the same year that I learned of him through the readings for a class. Cole, himself a poet, is mainly known for his remarkable translations of Hebrew ‘Golden Age’ poetry, and I totally think he’s a genius, even though poetry is hardly my thing. Peter Cole alone can be credited, to a large extent, for the contemporary revival of works by the great Jewish poets from medieval Spain — such monumental figures as Samuel ibn Naghrilla and Solomon ibn Gabirol. This page at Words Without Borders provides a short but great compliation of poems by and information about three well known Andalusian poets. But Cole’s translation-mastery isn’t limited to the Medieval period, or to the Hebrew language: he has translated works by a number of contemporary poets, including the excellent Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali.
At the talk, Cole shared some of his ideas on translation, specially the translation of poetry, which is unquestionably quite complex, if not impossible. It was quite fascinating, particularly since I think the act of translation is something of a linguistic paradox, if not nearly a miracle.
I have recently taken an interest to the genre of travel narratives (having read several 19th century British examples for my Orientalism class): they are so funny and full of quirky details! As I already mentioned recently, I’m doing some research to find a topic for my senior essay, and was leafing through my old copy of Stillman’s great Jews of Arab Lands, when I came across an excerpt from the records of Meshullam of Volterra, who was apparently a 15th century Italian Jew who visited Alexandria, Cairo, Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus and then wrote down about it (Many people, of course, travel – but not everyone can/does write about it). I was studying in the library today and got hold of a bunch of random books for research, and lo and behold, who else but Meshullam of Volterra crops up in one of them!
The following is one of many funny passages I found on skimming the text (note particularly the line in bold!). Meshullam arrived in Jerusalem on 29th July 1481, and stayed there until 29th August.
The buildings of Jerusalem are very fine and the stones are larger than in the buildings of the other places that I have seen. The land flows with milk and honey although it is hilly and ruined and desolate, and everything is cheap; its fruits are choice and very good. There is a Karob honey which is called dipirasciativo, also date honey, and the honey of bees, and wheat and barley and pomegrenates and all kinds of fruits good and fine; and they have good olive oil, but they only eat sesame oil, which is very fine. The Moslems and also the Jews of this place are pigs at their eating. They all eat out of one vessel with their fingers, without a napkin, just as the Cairenes do, but their cloths are clean. They also have asses whose saddle is worth a lot of money, for they place upon it precious stones and gold threads. The customs of the Moslems are diverse from all people, for everyone marries twenty or thirty wives as he pleases, but they do not see them until they go home; and the men give dowries to the women, and from the day of marriage the man is only bound to give her food, but her clothes and all other things she requires she has to make herself; and when she is with child Moslems do not touch her till two months after the child is born,, for that would be a great sin, and the wife is bound to pay for the food and clothes of all her sons and daughters; therefore they are all openly harlots, and when they do not wish to stay with their husbands they go to the Niepo, the Lord of the City, and say that their husband does not give them food and they are believed, and the husband must divorce his wife; for the Moslems give divorce like the Jews. All men and women and children, Jews as well as Moslems, have these customs. They sleep in their clothes, and these customs are usual in the whole Kingdom of the Sultan, and not in Jerusalem only. I wrote this when I was in Alexandria of Egypt, but I forgot to write of some of their customs. They are all alike.
p. 194-5, “Rabbi Meshullam Ben R. Menahem of Volterra,” in Jewish Travellers, ed. Elkan N. Adler (London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930).
I know this topic is tricky business, but before one jumps to conclusions about what I may or may not believe, it should perhaps be clarified that I’m discussing not that, but purely a matter of historical research.
Past spring semester, in my seminar (“Literary Encounters of the Three Faiths in Medieval Spain”) with Maria Rosa Menocal – yes, the Menocal! – we were studying the fascinating muwashshah poetry from al-Andalus. While reading this one particular love poem, many of us in the class were completely taken aback when, halfway through the poem, we disovered that the poet was addressing not a she but a he. When a student then asked the professor, she explained that this was actually quite common in classical Arabic poetry, and was in fact a poetic convention. We also read parts of Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al-Hamama (which I talked about in a post a while back), and were further suprised to note that in discussing romantic attraction, the author was completely oblivious to any disctinction between male-female love and male-male love (This was, of course, only in terms of attraction. In the last chapter of the book, Ibn Hazm explains the legal punishment for the acts of sodomy and fornication, and reminds readers to be God-conscious.) Later, quite by chance, when perusing comments on a site online, I found the reference to an article by Louis Crompton, entitled Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain (and thanks to Yakoub so much for that!). It was excellent, and set me off on further research on the matter. It turned out that homoerotic desire as expressed in Arabic verse was not merely poetic convention (although often it was just that), but had practical parallels. Furthermore, I discovered that this thematic element was not limited to Muslim poetry alone, but was also quite common in Jewish poetry (in both Arabic and Hebrew)! As you may or may not know, medieval Jews and Muslims lived pretty much within the same cultural milieu, particularly in Spain, but also in Baghdad, Egypt and elsewhere. So enthralled by this whole business, I ended up writing my final paper on homoerotic tropes in Andalusian Arabic and Hebrew poetry.
Here though, I want to focus on a slightly different issue. In one of the references I used for my research, I came across a particularly enlightening section which I will quote below. The author, James T. Monroe, the well-known expert on Arabic poetry, points out in a brief but excellent analysis that the term homosexuality as we understand today is “a Greco-Latin linguistic bastard of nineteenth-century creation, used to designate a condition, also deemed pathological by the modern medical profession that coined the term” (p. 115). There is no precise word for homosexual in the Classical Arabic language (there is one in Modern Standard Arabic), which means that medieval Arabs did not have the concept denoted by this term. According to Monroe: “…we can state categorically that there were no homosexuals in premodern Arabic civilization and that as a consquence there were no heterosexuals or bisexuals in it either, simply because the concepts did not exist” (p. 116). Moreover:
In sharp contrast to Christianity, which considers homosexuality to be a pathological character defect and homosexuals to be abnormal, perverted individuals, Islamic jurisprudence adopts a more restrained attitude, according to which attraction towards members of one’s own sex is viewed as entirely normal and natural. Thus, the Hanbalite jurist Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597/1200) is quoted as having expressed the opinion that “He who claims that he experiences no desire when looking at beautiful boys or youth[s], is a liar, and if we could believe him, he would be an animal, not a human being.” In this respect, it should be indicated that the mystics of Islam included among their meditative practices the contemplation of beautiful pubescent boys, who were considered witnesses “to the beauty of God and the glory of His creation.” For the Sufis, we may thus conclude, boyishness was next to godliness. In his Epistle of Singing Girls, al-Jahiz (d. 256/869), who otherwise shows little sympathy for grand sodomy, discusses passion between male and female, which he declares to be an instinct natural to the animal world. He then adds: “If the passion (‘ishq) is felt by a male for a male, it is only derivative from this fundamental carnal instinct. [Yet passion between two males produces the same symptoms as true 'ishq.] Otherwise it could not be called passion when the carnal instinct is absent.”
But just because Islamic law views mutual attraction between males to be natural does not mean that it considers homosexual acts between them to be appropriate. On the contrary, such acts are punishable by the death of both partners if either (1) the transgressors confess to having committed the deed (in which case they are given three chances to retract their confession), or (2) four reputable witnesses can be found, all of whom have personally seen the act of penetration take place. But since neither of these two requirements is easy to satisfy, the penalty prescribed in theory often remains inapplicable in practice.
Thus, as is the case with crimes such as zina’ (fornication), wine drinking, and theft, erotic attraction between males is viewed as a natural temptation to which religious law forbids the believer to yield and for which it prescribes the specific and severe penalty of death. Grand sodomy, like fornication, wine drinking, and theft, is in Islamic law a crime against religion, as opposed to a crime between individuals, such as homicide. Within these parameters, the person committing an act of grand sodomy may personally feel the guilt incurred by a sinner or a criminal, but unlike his Christian counterpart he need not necessarily feel that he is an abnormal or perverted individual. Indeed, he may even be inclined to boast about his homoerotic exploits, just as the fornicator or adulterer may boast about his heterosexual conquests before an approving audience of confidants.
In this area, Islamic jurisprudence was concerned exclusively with acts rather than preferences, proclivities, tendencies, or personalities. Individuals may commit acts of sodomy, but not necessarily because of an inherently sodomitic nature. Since same-sex attraction is viewed as natural, surrendering to a natural temptation cannot make the individual abnormal – merely sinful. Hence, within the restricted limits of discussion set by Islamic law, there was no room for the emergence or delineation of a homosexual personality per se. As a result, the vast corpus of licentious poetry produced by medieval Arabic writers that triad of sins constituted by fornication, pederasty, and wine drinking tends to be interconnected, in the sense that the same poet will frequently boast, occasionaly within the very same poem, of having committed all three activities… Authors such as Abu Nuwas and Ibn Quzman, had we accused them of composing homosexual poetry, would simply not have understood the nature of our accusation and would have responded by pointing to their poems dealing with equally illicit, if heterosexual, escapades and even anacreontic themes; for to them, it was the illicit nature of the escapades they extolled that mattered, not their gender-specific orientation. Moreover, since homoerotic attraction was viewed as perfectly natural by medieval Islamic society (as adulterous attraction is viewed as natural by ours), the forms of repression, internalized guilt, and bids for freedom that characterized homosexuality in modern European and American societies could not and did not develop.
pp. 116-18, “The Striptease that was blamed on Abu Bakr’s Naughty Son: Was Father being shamed, or was the Poet having fun? (Ibn Quzman’s Zajal no. 133)” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J.W. Wright Jr. and Everett Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
So I actually wrote a 25 page paper and a 16 page paper within 5 days. Finished the first one Thursday afternoon albeit half-a-day overdue, and actually started the second one Thursday night and literally stopped writing barely 2 minutes before deadline. It was one crazy week: I hadn’t been slept in my room for 5 day straight, and was in the Branford library over 20 hours a day. Yes, that meant starving myself for long hours and etc.
Of course, as always, I wish I could’ve worked more on the papers, cause they were some really interesting stuff. The first one, for I.M.’s seminar, was on this Jewish guy named Samuel Ibn Naghrilla, who lived in Muslim Spain in the 11th century, and was vizier to the Emir of Granada. The case is interesting because classical Islamic law did not permit dhimmis to hold government office: not only was this an exemplary deviation of practice from rule, this guy was actually the most powerful man in the state, right after the King. The picture is, of course, more complicated, because arguably the Muslim Princes of Al-Andalus during the taifa period would employ Jewish court officials because they were politically less threatening than fellow Muslims who may be conspiring with rival kingdoms. My argument was about how, despite the atmosphere of tolerance that allowed individuals from such religious minorities to achieve success, the religious difference and the premodern conception of power hierarchy made even such a high position very precarious. (Basically, although the Emir and people in the royal family really favored the Jewish community, there were some Muslims who were pissed off to see such power wielded by a non-Muslim “other”).
The other paper (for which, if you believe it, I actually read the text Thursday night, literally for only 3 hours before starting to write the paper: this was probably my most efficient work ever, 16 pages in about 14 hours) was an analysis of Ibn Rushd’s (Latin Averroes) Kitab Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise, a 12th century work by the most famous Islamic philosopher, arguing for the reconciliation between religion and philosophy), as well as the ideas of Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani (a 12th century philosopher in Baghdad, who believed that philosophy and religion were both true but absolutely irreconcilable). Both I examined in light of Double Truth, a theory ascribed to a 13th century philosophical movement in the University of Paris, which comprised a bunch of people (labeled the Latin Averroists) insisting that a philosophical proposition and a theological proposition can contradict each other but still remain indepdentently and absolutely true (hence, “double” truth). This theory, of course, raised hell at the time and the Church issued several Condemnations threatening the excommunication of whoever believed in these theories. It is dubious though that Averroes was actually the root of this doctrine, but he certainly played a key role, and this is an excellent example of the influence of Islamic Philosophy on the debate between faith and reason in the Medieval West. In any case, although the paper itself was on a different level, I personally think a revival of medieval Islamic philosophy is necessary to stimulate serious thought on the role of rationalism in contemporary Islam.
So Friday night, after finishing the freaking papers, I stacked all the books I checked out from the library, and I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it was looking! And this wasn’t even everything: I’d already returned about a third. And yeah, I actually used each and every one of them (mostly partially) for my research…
