Female Homosexuality in the Middle East

Histories and Representations

Samar Habib

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415956734
• eBook ISBN: 9781135910082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

This book, the first full-length study of its kind, dares to probe the biggest taboo in contemporary Arab culture with scholarly intent and integrity - female homosexuality.

Habib argues that female homosexuality has a long history in Arabic literature and scholarship, beginning in the ninth century, and she traces the destruction of Medieval discourses on female homosexuality and the replacement of these with a new religious orthodoxy that is no longer permissive of a variety of sexual behaviours.

Habib also engages with recent "gay" historiography in the West and challenges institutionalized constructionist notions of sexuality.

PART I

Introducing studies on female homosexuality and contemporary critical theory

1Introduction

Contemporary views of female homosexuality in the Middle East

This study of homosexuality in the Middle East is by no means an isolated event, though perhaps unique in its predominant focus on female homosexuality. Nor is it isolated from a host of interdisciplinary connections and implications. It is at once the product of literary analysis, historical research, comparative and cultural study, theological research and research of contemporary medical literature. However, at the same time that this study is expansive, it is also necessarily limited. I have limited myself to the study of female homosexuality in the Middle East, precluding other relevant and important groups to this kind of inquiry. In doing so I wanted to narrow the search, to focus exclusively on one of the many letters in LGBTIQ. My choice falling on the “lesbian” category is, of course, not an incidental one. Together with the fact that neglected primary information on the subject existed, I also felt that my enquiries would benefit from a host of emotional truths and experiences that informed a considerable cultural knowledge in my possession. The study of male homosexuality, at any rate, is a much easier one to achieve, with significant precedents springing to mind, written in English, Arabic and French.¹ To the contrary, studies on female homosexuality in this region are relatively unknown, which resonates with the neglected history of female sexuality in general. In the course of my research, I have discovered material from the Middle Ages to the present that has not been discussed in a modern context.

When one encounters material on the study of homosexuality in the Middle East, female homosexuality is treated, if at all, as some kind of secondary and unusual phenomenon. I have viewed a wide range of modern literature, which deals only slightly with female homosexuality in connection with: Arab cultures, Islamic civilizations, Semitic communities, “Middle Eastern” geographies, and such. What is curious is that the study of female homosexuality precedes the widespread enforcements of homophobic ideologies. This is, of course, only in reference to the particular regions in space and time that are covered by the literary² artifacts I deal with.

My research adventure began early in my last undergraduate year when I was writing a paper on Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.³ I had recently acquired a Lebanese novel entitled I Am You.⁴ A friend had told me that it was the first full length work of fiction devoted to a lesbian protagonist living in what is (possibly the late 1980s of) war-torn Beirut. Naturally I was intrigued — a novel that basically outed even the concept of “lesbian” to a culture so adamantly decided against sexual freedoms of any sort! In addition the very concept of a native Arab lesbian seemed incongruent with the popular theoretical trend of constructionism, which dominated the fields of queer theory and gay and lesbian studies at the time this project was beginning. I Am You signaled the entry of a very peculiar literary production into the world of published Arabic material. The centre of this text is a woman who is exclusively attracted to other women and who is unable to negotiate a form of bisexuality that was expected of her by her society (i.e. regular marriage and sex with women on the side). In the Lebanon of the novel, and indeed the Lebanon we know today, it is marriage which dominates the cultural bond between reputation and imputation — there are no other acceptable forms of socializing — at least not visibly. And so it seemed befitting to apply Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet to something which would, at first, seem incongruent. After all, many a theorist had warned us in the discourse against confusing physical acts of homosexuality with anything which remotely resembles Western notions of “lesbian” identity. The course teacher to whom I had delivered my paper in a class presentation suggested that I should consider this subject as a postgraduate research topic in addition to my planned translation of I Am You.

Since then I have translated I Am You and I often reflect on the innocence with which I first beheld it. There it was, an artifact, the first of its kind, I thought, the beginning, the crack in the ceiling which has oppressed innumerable sexual beings who could not fit the basic social contract of marriage and children. After I Am You I began to search for other texts containing possible references to female homosexual acts — naively assuming á la Foucault that female “homosexuality” in the Middle East was nonexistent. I encountered a series of writings, curiously published within a three-year span between 1999–2002, which dealt rather mercilessly with homosexuality and various sexual “aberrations” of the similar kind. In these heavily solipsistic, God-fearing texts, the devil was the prominent originator of homosexual sins and activities. I deal with this material briefly later on. I also encountered Aĥmad Ibn Yusuf Tifashi’s thirteenth century text Nuzhat al-Albab. I consider this text to be key to the argument I put forward and for this reason I dedicate chapter 4 entirely to a close reading of it. This text reveals that there can be no doubt as to the existence of female homosexuality, at least as a category, in the premodern Arabian imagination. In addition, the means and the rhetoric with which this material is written, strongly suggest a view of human sexuality which contrasts sharply with modern (Arab) orthodox notions of sexual pleasure and functional concepts of sex.

In translating from Tifashi’s chapter, I relied on Jamal Jomåt’s modern edition, published in 1992. Jomåt’s text is reliable and is compiled by the editor from manuscript versions, one of which he perused at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, while the other two are to be found at the National Library (BNF) in Paris. Jomåt’s introduction to the text relies heavily and without acknowledgment on Salaĥ Adeen al-Munajjid’s al-Ĥayat al-Jinsiya åind al Årab/Sexual Life among the Arabs,⁵ so much so that Jomåt may be Munajjid writing under a pseudonym or vice versa. Munajjid’s study was published in 1958 and reprinted in 1975, on both occasions by Dar al-Kitab al-Jadid in Beirut. It is perhaps one of the best and most comprehensive scholarly works on a history of sexuality among Arabs, in which Munajjid traces the evolution of sexual customs among pre-Islam Arabs through to the radical changes that Islam brought with it in terms of sexual prohibitions and social (re)organization. Curiously, in an academic style which resonates with but precedes Foucaultian habits, Munajjid is not thorough in his footnotes. However, he does write with a well deserved and thoroughly researched authority on the subject. I have often followed the trail of many a statement made by Munajjid to find that, even though he did not footnote his sources, his claims were still true. Munajjid could not have fathomed the momentous importance of his work — that it was to become a rare scholastic feat to be ignored and abandoned for the better part of three decades, as the Lebanese (civil) wars droned on and brought with them a host of political and social problems which seemed to be more pressing than frivolous study into human sexuality.

Since Munajjid’s work, Jamal Jomåt has been a leading figure in restoring medieval Arab erotology to modern availability. As well as preparing a modern edition of Tifashi’s Nuzhat al-Albab⁶ in 1992, he also re-introduced the ever-popular (particularly in the West) al-Rawd al-Åttir fi Nuzhat al-Khatir⁷ (The Perfumed Garden first translated into English by Richard Burton in 1886) two years earlier. In 1994, Jomåt also brought to modern availability the compilation of Abu Nuwass’s poetry Jocularity and Amusement — a collection of his lewd poems collected and first published in 1898 — more congenially re-titled for a twentieth century readership as The Forbidden Texts.⁸ Jomåt also belongs to that rare breed of Arabic-writing intellectuals who seek to liberate Arabic discourse on sex from the moral restrictions placed by orthodox (and solipsistic) scholars who are his contemporaries. Jomåt’s introductions to his compilations tend to contextualise the erotological material within a sociohistorical framework which sees these works as symptoms of a progressive Arabian intellectualism and sociability.

On the other hand, the predominant literature on homosexuality in Arabia is written from a moral and religious high ground, which sees the existence and acceptance of homosexual practices as indications, not of intellectualism, but of moral and intellectual degeneration. In these writings there can be no argument about the moral baseness of the subject and the biological, or purely mental, degeneracy it implies. These texts tend to rely rather dubiously on the kinds of evidence they bring to discussion. An exemplary text is Muntasir Muthhir’s al-Mutåt al-Muĥarama/The Prohibited Pleasure⁹ first published in 2001. In his concluding statement, Muthhir calls for a moral war, in an anxious tone that conveys the sense that the very constitution of decency and humanity are verging on extinction as a result of homosexuality. For example, he writes:

…those will come who will complete or add to, or better present what we have here presented…Our greater aim has been in putting a limit to “sexual deviation” in all of its manifestations. And this book is a loud cry, should it find those to hear it, which calls for functional cooperation and participation in saving humanity’s ark, which is in danger of sinking. (Muthhir, 197)

Muthhir includes a chapter on crimes committed by homosexuals to legitimize his claim that these individuals are unwholesome and threatening to the natural order of the human cosmos. In addition, throughout the text, Muthhir’s writing is coloured with adjectives and adverbs (such as “depravity” [rathala], “baseness” [nathala], “vileness” [khi’sa], “ugly and depraved habit” [åda qabiĥa wa marthula]) to contextualise his unmistakably moralistic view of his homosexual subjects. He makes a number of rather odd leaps of logic as well, such as in the instance where he ascertains that the execution of Plato (for his homosexuality) was a moment of “awakening” for the Greeks, who suddenly realized that “what vanquished their strength and swords and degenerated their sciences, was no other than their immersion in sodomy and sexual deviation [whilst] in contrast, the Romans [being conquerors of the Greeks at this point] … [executed] every sodomite they found” (Muthhir, 18). Muthhir’s knowledge of homosexuality is also dubious since he fails to establish a logical basis for his protestation against homosexuality and often conflates and confuses transgendered identities and pedophilia with homosexual ones. What he takes for granted as the most blatantly obvious: that homosexuality is a disease of the will and the body, is perhaps the point of his argument’s aporetic disintegration.

Muthhir’s ultimate failure in being convincing is not necessarily because he comes from an irrational religious prejudice, but rather because he fails to produce any genuine knowledge of the subjects he treats. He fails to demonstrate that he has any understanding of the deviants’ humanity beyond their sexual preference. Even the nature of their “deviance” is poorly represented to a readership which, due to the intellectual vacuum and censorship surrounding the subject, is unlikely to contest him on any of the points he makes. In his chapter entitled “Sodomy and Tribadism: Between the Law, Science and Medicine” he writes:

Scientist have asserted that for every man there is a feminine side, similarly for every woman there is a masculine side … so if the woman possessed a great deal of “male” traits then there appears the tribade in her, and if the man possessed a great deal of feminine traits thus appears the homosexual (read as sodomite) male. However it is possible for sexual deviance NOT to occur in such individuals despite this, if the environmental conditions and religious inclinations in which they are reared are good. It can be noted that in the tribade there is a weakness of maternal instinct and an absence in inclination towards men or being impressed by them, she is continually attempting to imitate them and competes with them … There also appears in her a tendency towards controlling her husband …. masculine (read as male) features appear in her face, she also has thick skin prone to developing pimples. Her hair is closer to baldness at the forehead …. hair also spreads throughout her body in which muscles grow …. As for the medical point of view …. deviant sex is the primary source for catching the dangerous immune deficiency disease, known as AIDS, which is an illness known to eliminate human beings within months because it is a virus which targets blood cells. (Muthhir, 186)

Highly reminiscent of obsolete medicine, some form of phrenology, it seems almost pointless and excruciating to have to sift through these claims and show their logical and evidential fallacies at every turn. And yet this is precisely the nature of the literature on homosexuality available to a curious readership. Even Muthhir’s basic explanation of AIDS fails to take into account the difference between AIDS and HIV or the relationship of lesbian sex to the contraction of HIV, or the heterosexual or non-sexual transmission of the virus.

Muthhir’s textbook and its Orthodox “No” which permeates the subject of homosexuality for Arab cultures (whether religiously devout or not), is preceded by Khatib Ådnani’s al-Zina Wal Shuthooth Fi Tarikh al-Årab (1999).¹⁰ In fact, Muthhir reiterates a considerable number of concepts presented by Ådnani, who in turn, reiterates them on behalf of a number of premodern Muslim scholars, oftentimes without acknowledgement. What both authors fail to do is take into consideration those texts written by other Arab scholars, ancient or contemporary, whose temperate views on homosexuality and scientific methodology of enquiry, tend to originate from less exclusive and stringent theological and social beliefs.¹¹ Ibrahim Maĥmood’s al-Mutåt al-Maĥthoora (2000)¹² is a more ambiguously written and rigorously researched work on the history of homosexuality among the Arabs. It offers the usual Orthodox “No” to homosexuality a little more vaguely and hesitantly, yet it assumes the abjection of homosexuality without seeking to prove this or to delineate its rhetorical axioms as such. Maĥmood’s presentation of evidence, however, is also heavily biased and resonates, at least in the theological discussion, with the texts abovementioned.

The main argument against homosexuality espoused in these kinds of texts, whether explicitly or implicitly, is as follows:

1. God has decreed against unlawful acts of sex. Homosexuality has been forbidden in the Torah, Quran and the Ĥadiţh. Therefore, the matter is indisputable, or so it seems, from the onset for believers. Both Sodomy and Tribadism were originally introduced to Lot’s people by the devil disguising himself as an old man who showed men sodomy, and then as a woman, showed women tribadism.¹³ Therefore, homosexuality is the work of the devil not God (Muthhir, 37; Maĥmood, 107).

2. Homosexuality was forbidden by God and is undesirable because it is unnatural, and because it negates the purpose of sex — which is childbearing — it indicates an individual’s desire for self-annihilation (Maĥmood, 273).

3. Homosexuality is a contagion which, if allowed to exist liberally, will spread and cause the annihilation of humanity due to lack of interest in breeding or inability to breed.¹⁴

4. Homosexuality spreads and causes diseases — namely AIDS (Muthhir, 189; Ådnani, 110).

5. Homosexuality itself, if not simply a sign of sheer moral degeneration, is then a disease or biological defect.

This argument is fundamentally flawed at each turn.

Points 1 & 2. The claims that homosexuality is strictly forbidden in the Quran is disputable. I deal with this issue in chapter 3 where I trace this idea to its medieval origin and attempt to contextualize its rise and wide dissemination in relation to the centuries which precede it. The Quran is much more ambivalent toward homosexuality than the Torah or the New Testament. Even the aĥadiţh which discuss homosexuality have been suspected, at least by one medieval intellectual, of being forgeries. A dispute as regards the view of homosexuality in Islamic theology exists, but it has not been properly attended to. Other theologians were either accepting or clearly tolerant of homosexuality, sometimes reflecting a culture of tolerance hidden from the traditional view of the canon — among such thinkers were Yaĥya Bi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Other
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transliteration legend
• Abbreviations
• PART I Introducing studies on female homosexuality and contemporary critical theory
• PART II The history and representation of female homosexuality in the Middle Ages
• PART III The history and representation of female homosexuality in the contemporary Middle East
• PART IV Conclusion and references
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index