Today I came across a startling and rather absurd, but also somewhat amusing piece of information. I’ll quote the whole passage, to provide context:
Since jinn often move about in the world of men and transact business with humans, a significant body of law was elaborated by religious jurisconsults, dealing with such matters as the property rights of jinn and cases of mixed marriages between jinn and women. Ritual hygiene was another potential issue. Although women have to perform the major ritual ablution (the ghusl) after having had sex with men before they can perform the prayers, according to the legal compilation Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya there is no need for the ablutions after having had sex with jinn. [Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: 2005), p. 204]
Now, Irwin’s reference for this is Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s fairly well-known book, Sexuality in Islam. Thankfully, I happen to have a copy of it, so I was able to cross-check for better understanding. The way Irwin phrases the fact above isn’t quite as helpful as does Bouhdiba, who is paraphrasing from the primary source and states: “If a woman recognizes that she has a djinn [as lover] who visits her and makes her feel what she feels when her husband lies with her, this woman does not have to wash.”
On one level, a discussion of this nature shouldn’t be all that surprising for some of us who are intimately familiar with those Muslim societies – particularly in North Africa and South Asia – where jinns are deeply entrenched in popular belief. (If you ask me for stories of possessions and exorcisms, I wouldn’t even know where to begin!) On another level, this is also not that surprising if you’re aware of the remarkable degree of pragmatism with which most Muslim jurists used to address issues. For example, even though the classical jurists accepted gay sex as theoretically forbidden, many of them were sufficiently grounded in reality to feel the need to even discuss whether a man had to shower before he could pray, after sleeping with another man (as he would after sleeping with a woman)! In the words of Kecia Ali, “Clearly, in addition to a dogmatic condemnation of same-sex activity, the jurists also had a pragmatic approach to dealing with its occurrence.”
By the way, the source mentioned above, Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya, may be better known by some as Fatawa-e-Alamgiri. Considered today as one of the major references for legal opinion in the Hanafi school of thought, it is a monumental collection of fiqh rulings that was put together between 1664-72 by a certain Shaykh Nizam, under the commission of the Moghul emperor Muhyiddin Alamgir (Aurangzeb).
Back on the topic of jinns and sex: according to a post on this webpage, apparently most of the scholars, including Ibn al-Jawzi, Ibn Taymiyyah, and Suyuti, thought that sexual encounter between jinns and humans was possible. It seems that Al-Mawardi, on the other hand, was of the minority opinion that that could not be so, because the ‘corporeal’ and ‘incorporeal’ cannot mix.
Funny business, isn’t it?
A couple of weekends ago, I happened to be at a two-day feminist conference at a local college in Boston and the experience was as unsettling as it was enlightening. I came to know about the event quite by chance, months ago, through the personal website of Robert Jensen, the prominent UT Austin-based media critic often featured in liberal interviews and documentaries. I was interested in hearing Jensen speak live and much to my delight, found out that he was going to be in town for said conference. It was of course worth attending in its own right, and aside from speaking briefly with Jensen and getting his latest book signed, I had the chance to see and hear such well-known feminist activists as Diana Russell, Gail Dines, Rebecca Whisnant, and John Stoltenberg.
The first thing I should note is what I could not help but remain conscious of throughout the conference: and that was the fact that I was one of only a handful of men who made up less than 10% in an auditorium full of over 200 participants. If that in itself cannot dismantle androcentric tendencies, I don’t know what will. But of course, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with this type of situation. I do work for an organization where on most days I’m the only guy at lunch with three or four female colleagues. And I’ve written in the past about being an only guy in a class of nearly a dozen students — no, these weren’t Gender Studies courses, just ‘normal’ History. (Digression: I have a theory – based only on anecdotal evidence – that homosocial structures are breeding grounds for misogyny.)
The paradox of the male feminist is a matter I haven’t yet had much chance to ponder. But Bob Jensen’s work is a good starting point, since this is something he speaks about a lot, particularly in connection with his own experience as a “white, middle-aged, Minnesota man” in the feminist movement. In a brief talk at the conference, Jensen addressed himself to the men and made two key arguments that have begun to serve as focal points for my own relfections ever since. First: as men, we have to actively try and “take off the assumption of centrality” that we’re so used to. Second: we have to avoid the temptation of seeing ourselves as knights who can rescue women out of their situation. Both points pretty much hit the nail on the head and succinctly state what could use pages to elaborate. But of course, the complexities are many (Can men be the subjects of feminist theory? What does that even mean?). I hope to study and discuss this more in future.
What I found myself thinking about most during and after the conference is the relationship between theory and practice and between academia and activism. Until now, my understanding of and encounter with feminism has been largely theoretical. Sure, this understanding has been supported by perceptions of reality and observations over a short lifetime, but there’s no denying that most of the little that I know in this area comes from books (Though thanks also to a few precious friendships). In my quasi-intellectual demeanor, I have eagerly dropped academic buzzwords and theorized patriarchal domination. I have insisted on deconstructing the misogynistic subtexts of contemporary culture. I have believed that the need for a feminist movement is as obvious as the need for any other movements for justice, since women after all are history’s most oppressed group of people. At some point I even became conscious of the fact that by virtue of being male in this world, I was born with certain inherent privileges. I acknowledged the institutionalized violence that is committed on the bodies and souls of women. I somehow even believed that rape is worse than murder.
But I realized the limitations of my understanding as I sat there at the conference listening to women recount the pain of suffering, women who had been raped and abused, women who spoke of their experiences working with victims of child sexual abuse, women who dedicated their lives to activism. While the conference itself was about the feminist anti-pornography movement (a good review available here), these were the women in the audience who spoke up to comment, ask questions, or just share their feelings. It is an intensely intriguing experience, to hear a woman tell you how vulnerable she feels when faced with a visual discourse that evokes painful memories of abuse or reminds her of other women being systematically exploited. I walked away from the auditorium that chilly Sunday afternoon convinced that I know nothing of male violence. The experience I had can be equated to that of an academic who suddenly realizes there’s a whole world that exists outside and beyond the text.
That said, I want to recall a quote by Andrea Dworkin that I find as profound as distressing. The timing is oddly appropriate, considering that yesterday was the 9th of April and Dworkin died exactly two years ago. There is no question that Dworkin left behind an ambigous legacy, perhaps remembered more as a “man-hater” than anything else. But was there ever a radical activist who was not controversial? Whoever compared Dworkin to Malcolm X is probably right on track! Bob Jensen claims that Dworkin actually loved men, because she still believed in their humanity. In a speech to a group of men in 1983, Dworkin was explaining what is it she wants from men:
I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.
As simple as that.
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.
Given the considerable interest in a previous post about an alleged incident of ‘gay’ marriage somewhere in northwestern Pakistan, I thought I’d bring up this interesting bit in the news, in case you haven’t heard of it yet. Sometime last month, UAE police raided a hotel and arrested 26 men at what was apparently a “homosexual” mass wedding. According to an Interior Ministry spokesman, “It was a real party with balloons and champagne.” Click here to read the CNN report on this.
What was particularly interesting about this incident is that the Ministry official suggested that the arrested men might receive treatment with male hormones “to direct [them] away from homosexual behavior” — something that I think raises interesting questions regarding gender identity. Clearly, the UAE government does not think gay people just choose to be homosexual, which is what I thought was the traditional Muslim reaction to “the question of homosexuality”.
The AP report also included that:
The Arabian peninsula, nevertheless, has a long tradition of openly homosexual wedding singers and dancers.
“Lately people have been talking about (homosexuality), but it has been here for a long time,” said Nadia Buhannad, a Dubai psychologist. “It becomes shocking only when it is your own son.” (ABC News)
But it is unclear whether “those arrested were all gay men or if some were transsexuals. The transgendered have no legal recognition in the Emirates and sexual minorities in the region are often lumped into one category, homosexual.”
Complications, of course, abound. It turns out that a Public Relations officer in the government (Col. M. Ibrahim al-Hajiri) later claimed that the Ministry spokesman’s comment about hormone treatment was only a personal observation, and does not necessarily reflect the Ministry’s viewpoint. He asserted that the measures to be taken will be completely upto the court. This rather defensive response is probably in reaction to the comments from a US State Department spokesman.
Here’s what I found really surprising: apparently, this was not the first case of its kind in the UAE. There was another incident last year, in which two dozen men were arrested by police at an “apparent gay wedding” in Sharjah. They were given “symbolic lashings meant to humiliate, not inflict pain and then released from jail.”
Now, before you post comments: if you’re about to argue about the issue (as opposed to the news), please note that I don’t have a position on it. (And since you may be wondering: no, I’m straight, but I don’t have anything against gay people. They are people.)
Also, I had promised a response to some concerns that were raised after that other post, for example whether there’s such a thing as “Muslim gay —”. I obviously never got the time, and actually just forgot about it. But I’ll write about it, I promise (it’ll also be relevant to some concerns over the Tayeb Salih novel that I talked about and will talk about more). Perhaps once I’m done with papers/finals.
A friend just forwarded me an interesting piece of news that appeared on Pakistan’s The News International: it already became talk-of-town for the Pakistani community at Yale, some of whom are at a loss what to think, while others have found it rather hilarious.
Pakistan’s first gay marriage prompts death threats
PESHAWAR: Tribesmen have threatened to kill a gay couple who got married in a traditional ceremony, the first in the country, witnesses and a report said on Wednesday.A 42-year-old Afghan refugee “tied the knot” with a local tribesman of 16 in snow-covered Tirah Valley, part of the Khyber tribal region, they said.
“I witnessed the marriage in Tirah Valley three days ago,” tribal elder Millat Khan told AFP by telephone. “When I came to know that it was a gay marriage I left the party without taking food.”
A local media report said the elder man, named as Liaquat Ali, had fallen in love with a local boy called Markeen, “who is now his male bride”. It said the boy’s parents were poor and agreed giving their son’s hand in marriage for Rs 40,000. “The marriage was held amid usual pomp and show associated with a tribal wedding,” it said.
A Jirga in the remote area told the newly-weds on Wednesday to leave the area immediately or face death for “breaking all the religious and tribal values and ethics”, according to Khan.
Malik Waris Khan, a prominent local politician and former federal minister, also confirmed the marriage had taken place. “I checked the report with people in Tirah Valley and they confirmed it,” he told AFP.
I certainly thought Millat Khan’s comment was very funny: that he “left without taking food” when he found out it was a gay marriage. The news doesn’t appear to have gotten much attention worldwide, though BBC News did pick it up (see here).
While perusing relevant articles at the BBC link above, I came across this interesting article, where an anonymous gay Pakistani claims that he finds it easier to be gay in Pakistani society than in the West. At the bottom of the page, there are some interesting responses from other Pakistanis, at home and abroad. Most of these responses depict characteristic denial, with some trying to reassure that if this guy “dared” to go public, he would certainly be punished.
(Perhaps vaguely relevant, I had an earlier post about medieval Muslim attitudes to homosexuality – in the literary context – and about the theory that homosexuality as a pathological condition is a modern Western innovation)
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)
