Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures

Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day

Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera, Serena Tolino

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838604103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere – emerge from very specific social and historical contexts. The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.

Part I

WHO’S WHO: BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

Chapter 1

LOCATING DISCOURSES ON THE GENDER BINARY (AND BEYOND) IN PRE-MODERN ISLAMICATE SOCIETIES

Serena Tolino

Women are more inclined to be tender, ready to cry, envious, polemic, insulter, wrong-doer, impatient, rude, liar, deceiver and deceivable, to recall the worse things, to be inactive and lazy; this can be corrected only with patience. They are also less capable of defending the vulnerable.¹

With these words the well-known polymath Ibn Sīnā (d.428/1037), also known by his Latinized name Avicenna, summarizes what are for him the differences between masculinity (dhukūra) and femininity (unūtha) in reference to human beings. This difference in degrees but not in kind (women are something less or something more but not something different than men) lies at the core of the relation between the genders in

pre-modern Islamicate societies, which is characterized by the continuous tension between two main principles: on the one hand fluidity, on the other hierarchy, as I will show in this chapter.

Notwithstanding the rapid growth of research on gender, sex and sexuality in Islamicate societies over the last two decades, we still do not know much about what masculinity and femininity meant in pre-modern Islamicate contexts. Research on the topic is certainly mushrooming; however, while scholars working on sex and sexuality in pre-modern Islamicate societies particularly focused on homoeroticism from a historical, literary or legal perspective,² scholars working on gender mostly focused on women’s histories.³ This means that, if much has been written on women’s agency, on what women achieved and on how they moved in a patriarchal society, less has been produced on how they were defined and how their femininity was socially and historically constructed: what did it mean to be a woman in a certain period and in a certain place? What characteristics were attributed to femininity?⁴

Even less research has been devoted to masculinity, especially from a historical perspective.⁵ Few scholars have worked on sex difference in Islamic medicine. Inspired by Thomas Laqueur’s theory of the ‘one-sex model’, according to which, in pre-modern medical thinking, male and female anatomies were understood as belonging to the same sex, with the woman being considered to be an imperfect version of the man, Dror Ze’evi’s book Producing Desire tested this paradigm with reference to the Ottoman Empire,⁶ while Sherry Sayed Gadelrab’s did the same for the Arab-Islamic medieval culture.⁷

This relative paucity of scholarship is surprising if we consider that it has already been demonstrated that not only gender but also sex is historically and socially constructed. If we start from this assumption, then it is probably necessary to try to deconstruct the categories of female and male and, with Joan Scott, to consider that ‘“man” and “woman” are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.’⁸

This chapter is an attempt to understand how these empty concepts were ‘filled’ with meanings in different genres in the pre-modern period and, moreover, to see whether the gender binary, constructed in terms of men/women; male/female, makes sense at all with reference to Islamicate pre-modern societies. In this sense I am building here on Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa’s approach. In an article he published in 1982 under the title ‘Ǧāḥiẓ et les eunuques ou la confusion du même et de l’autre’,⁹ he demonstrated how, in al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d.255/868) writings on eunuchs, the most convincing analytical binary we have at our disposal is not the ‘men/women’ binary, but the ‘men/the other’ binary. The first term of the binary is defined by Cheikh-Moussa as such: ‘Est homme, celui qui est adulte, en pleine possession de la raison, des moyens de procréer et de se reproduire, et qui se plie aux normes de la Cité’ (A man is the one who is an adult, in full possession of his reason, able of procreation and reproduction, and who knows the norms of urban life).¹⁰ The second term includes, for him, eunuchs, children and women, but we could add also other categories.

Al-Jāḥiẓ, who was one of the most influential scholars of the Islamic Middle Ages, lived at the Abbasid Court of Baghdad, and composed many works of profane prose (adab), that were clearly addressed to the cosmopolitan urban elite of which he was part. The aim of this chapter is to verify whether this scheme (man/the other) can be applied also to sources that go beyond al-Jāḥiẓ, presenting an overview of gender and sex differences in lexicography, medicine and Islamic law.

The typologies of texts were selected for the key role they played in shaping medieval Islamicate cultures. The sources analysed here range from the ninth to the eleventh century, with the exception of lexicography, where I analyse sources from the period, but also later sources, as some of the most important Arabic dictionaries have been composed after this period.

The Islamic empire in this period was huge, and simple generalizations do not help to understand the reality. However, most of the written sources we have at our disposal for this period allow us to reconstruct only the vision of one specific layer of the society (namely the well-educated urban elite) on masculinity and femininity, and basically only the masculine perspective, as they were written by male authors for a male public. All the research that we do with these sources is thus necessarily a generalization. This is even more the case if we restrict ourselves to one single kind of source. Following Khaled El-Rouayheb’s approach,¹¹ the idea is that it is necessary to look at a wider range of genres to get a wider perspective on gender relations in the pre-modern Islamicate world. While El-Rouayheb mostly focused on how homoerotic behaviours were perceived and represented in pre-modern Islamicate societies, I build here on his approach and his findings to try to get a picture of how the two genders were understood and represented.

For this reason I will bring into focus different categories of sources in an attempt to reconstruct a picture that, far from being exhaustive, would at least be more inclusive and help us to understand what were the characteristics of what was considered to be the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and the ‘hegemonic femininity’ of that time.¹² Interestingly enough, as we will see, even though men and women were often defined in opposition to each other, it is often easier to understand what was really meant by these two concepts when we look at those figures that challenged this strict binary, particularly figures such as effeminates, eunuchs and intersex. While on the one hand these figures challenged a sharp ‘traditional’ gender binary (man/woman), on the other they somehow reinforced it: as a reaction to their presence, scholars writing on them had to reflect and articulate the (perceived) differences between being a man and being a woman, contributing to the crystallization of these categories.

The presence of ambiguous figures has often been seen as a demonstration that there was a certain fluidity between the genders in pre-modern Islamicate societies. While I agree with Dror Ze’evi¹³ that a certain fluidity between the genders existed, I also show that this fluidity was structured around the dominance of a particular masculine model, and that the gender system, even though not based on the male/female binary, was in any case a hierarchical system, with male at the top.

The chapter is divided into four sections: the first is devoted to lexicography; the second to medicine and the third to Islamic law. In the fourth and final section I will come back to al-Jāḥiẓ’s and Cheick-Moussa’s approach to the gender binary in terms of a ‘man/non-man’ binary.

Historiciz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Text
• Introduction THE MANY NAMES OF DESIRE: ON THE STUDY OF SEXUAL PRACTICES, NORMS AND BINARIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
• Part I WHO’S WHO: BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY
• Part II SUBVERTING THE SEXUAL NORM IN MODERN ARAB CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS
• Part III SEXUALITY, POWER AND RESILIENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA TODAY
• Index
• Imprint