Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, eds., Islamic Homosexualities: Culture,
History and Literature, 1997, New York: New York University Press, 340 pp., $50.00 (cl), $19.95 (pb)
One of the most encouraging developments in "queer" studies in recent years has been the tendency to appreciate the full complexity of sexual alterity. In this line of studies, sexual alterity is frequently examined in connection to a myriad of other forms of resistance to general social control and surveillance. And they tend to exhibit a variably amplified and unevenly successful theoretical effort to detect systematic patterns. This is nowhere more pronounced than in cross-cultural studies of sexuality, where the mandate of research oscillates between panoramic ethnography of sexuality, putatively illustrative cases of sexual "types," and the effort to discern either the universality of certain sexual mores--as the "essentialists" attempt--or to take the observed difference as another proof of the "constructed" nature of modern sexual identities. In this major contribution to the study of homosexuality in Islamic societies, the editors make it clear from the outset that their main target is the constructionists represented primarily by Michel Foucault and Jeffery Weeks, but also by Arno Schmitt, the co-editor of what has been until now the other major collection of essays in English on homosexuality in Muslim societies. Their critique of the constructionist model seeks to show how premodern societies also made room for identity formation along the lines of alternative sexualities. Many readers may disregard the theoretical nuances of this debate, in light of the simple need for basic information about such a deeply rooted, wide-spread, richly diverse and poorly studied civilization as Islam. This may indeed be the prudent reading strategy to assume, especially given that the collected essays are not necessarily as far removed from "constructionism" as the editors like to admit, and although the perspective they employ does raise certain problems which I will address below.
The 22 studies in Islamic Homosexualities are written by 10 contributors and divided into four segments: introductory, literary, historical, and anthropological studies. Co-editor Stephen O. Murray is fairly ubiquitous throughout the book, with more than half of the articles written or co-written by him. Unfortunately, many of these are far too short for a satisfactory discussion of the themes they introduce, and frequently they are inconclusive, giving the reader the impression of them being research notes and works in progress. But they invariably serve as pointers to clearly worthy research directions. For instance, Ch. 5 largely notes the comparative absence of evidence regarding lesbianism in Islamic history. But this conclusion is deceptive, and the editors would have done well to invite contributions from emerging scholars who have been more deeply involved in issues of women in classical Islamic history. This neglect is evident in the book, and in itself explains why only 2 other articles deal with issues contiguous to what we today call lesbianism. Both are anthropological in approach (although the first is classified as a historical study), which seem to fit well with the ill-supported editorial perception regarding the lack of textual evidence. Mildred Dickemanns article on the "sworn virgin" in the mountains of the Balkan collates the fragmentary evidence for a >type of woman in patrilineal rural societies, who cross-dresses and comes to be accepted socially as a man, with proscribed social penalties for deviating from that sworn role, which among other things precludes her from marrying. The extent of continued survival of this type is uncertain. >But the fact that it has been observed in Montenegro and Macedonia as well as Albania and Kosovo may lead one to question whether this is a good example of a sexual practice embedded in specifically Islamic concepts (a point which the author does not claim). The other very comparable piece is >an article from the 1950s by Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch on the mustergil, a >life-long female-to-male cross-dresser in Southern Iraq. Here again, Westphal-Hellbusch does not discuss this phenomenon in terms of homosexuality as such (or even of any sexuality), but rather in terms of >oppressed womens envy of male prerogatives.
Other than that, the book focuses on male homosexuality. In one very ambitious opening salvo, Jim Wafer revisits the Quran and hadith tradition (sayings attributed to Muhammad) to detect the original Islamic stand on male homosexuality. Wafers rightly concurs with other contributors, notably Roscoe and Murray, that the Islamic legal and popular attitudes toward homosexuality were far less troubled by it than traditions influenced by Talmudic and Christian edicts. He does further note the luring promise in the Quran to the believers of immortal ghilman in addition to the dazzling virgin houris in paradise, and makes a point of one mysterious saying attributed to Muhammad, in which he claims envisioning god as a beautiful youth. The centerpiece of Wafers analysis, however, concerns his bold but highly questionable interpretation of the notion of "submission." He ignores the fact that submission is only one of the meanings of the word "Islam," rather than its essential indicator. According to this theory, when a man submits to god, it becomes his duty to make others submit, and jihad becomes thus analogous to the stages of sexual initiation into masculinity. While obviously thought-provoking, following these analogues requires an insupportable leap of imagination, which is not easy to acquiesce to in light of the fact that the evidence is stretched too thin for one to feel safe upon it. And many readers may simply question Wafers extension of the meaning of liwat as a stand-in for all perversions, a position he borrows uncritically from Abdelwahab Bouhdiba.
Along with Murray, Wafer fares better in the articles concerned with literary studies, which nonetheless focus disproportionately on Sufi poetry. Wafer argues that as compared to Western mysticism, Islamic mystical poetry offers more complex possibilities of interlocution of god and lover. Murray makes the further argument that in some medieval Persian and Turkish mystical poetry, the "ambiguous" referent of love must be a boy rather than god, since many of the physical attributes in that poetry cannot be that of god. This focus on Sufism, while clearly interesting, is nonetheless stereotypical, since the genre is hardly the provider of the major tropes of male love in Islamic literatures. A corrective is offered by Louis Cromptons masterful essay on Islamic Spain, where a myriad of literary and philosophical treatises are explored, and where on finally finds an adequate contextual discussion of Ibn Hazms book on love, The Ring of the Dove. Crompton examines the complex dialectic in Islamic Spain between "harsh religious laws and overcharged romanticism," between the dominance of the stern Maliki school of jurisprudence and popular acceptance of normative bisexuality, practiced as it were by notable caliphs from Cordoba to Baghdad.
Of the six historical studies, five are written by Murray. The most informative are two pieces on the homosexual aspects of the Mamluk system, elements of which could be found in Ottoman Turkey in addition to Egypt, where it was firmly entrenched for centuries. The rather straightforward argument connects the prevalence of homosexual license among Mamluk officials to the fact that each generation of such military-administrative elites was recruited afresh as slave boys from the Caucus and Central Asia. A Mamluks wealth accumulated over his lifetime passed on to the state rather than to any progeny, as part of a system that actively sought to prevent the growth of alternative centers of power. According to this thesis, Mamluks sexual freedom resulted from the removal of the usual incentive for them to build a family.. The other articles in this section are far too short and fragmentary, and Murray makes little effort to unify his argument even when possibilities arise (for example, an article on some reports by 19th-century Western travelers could have been unified around Burtons more general observations).
The last segment of the book, which contains seven "anthropological" articles, provides the only space where one reads accounts of contemporary "gay" life, as well as writings by Muslims on homosexuality. The focus of these narratives is urban Pakistan. The essay by the Karachi journalists Nauman Naqvi and Hasan Mujtaba investigates the changing role of the transsexual hijras. The authors admirably refrain from categorical summaries, opting instead for showing through stories the variety of social origins of the hijras. Some become involved out of economic necessity, others out of sexual desire, while there are those who attribute their hijra transformation to a Sufi-like calling for spiritual devotion. A comparison of the hijra of South Asia to the Khanith in Oman is haltingly suggested by Murray, whose brief article revisits Unni Wikans 1970s fieldwork and subsequent criticism. In a separate article, Mujtaba roams the streets of Karachi to investigate thriving male prostitution, which he attributes to a seamless social web of family trouble, economic necessity, group pressure and police corruption. This story has little reference to Islam as such, and its embededdness in complex, multi-ethnic urbanity provides it with universal undertones.
This theme is capped by Badruddin Khans digressions on whether "gay" identity can be appropriately applied to the prototypical scene of male sexuality in contemporary Pakistan. While the main line of the discussion is not surprising--namely that the prevalence of homosexuality cannot be apprehended in terms of modern gay identity, the author moves on occasions beyond this point. He connects urban sexual chaos to the dizzying mix of entrepots culture of multi-ethnicity. And in some of the most riveting stories of sexual encounter in the book, Khan brings to the fore the forgotten issue of cross-class sexual contact, where sexual pleasure and pure commerce are often difficult to disentangle.
Like many edited volumes, the unity of this collection rests less on the editors outline of its theoretical ground than on the pure seduction of the area it examines. In the first three essays as well as in the conclusion, Murray and Roscoe strive to stitch together transhistorical and transregional patterns of Islamic homosexuality, in spite of their acknowledgment of the diversity of Islamic societies. The observed general patterns include the prevalence of "inegalitarian" sexuality, including pederasty and the definition of sexual roles in terms of activity and passivity rather than "gay" and "straight." These patterns also include the valorization of beauty over masculinity as basis of attraction, general public discretion, normative bisexuality, and tolerance being based on the lack interference of homosexuality with expected familial obligations, rather than on its acknowledgment. It is suggested that this tolerance has roots in the Quranic attitude toward sexuality in general which, in contrast to that of the Bible, accepted its pleasure component (at least for men), and did not confine it to procreation.
Such attitudes raise the question of origins, especially since they seem so contrasted to Western and Christian traditions--and for the uninitiated in surprising ways--given the current liberal hostility to everything Islamic. The editors suggest, but do not fully explore, a number of roots, including the mores of pre-Islamic Arabian society, the heritage of the oikoumene--including Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and South Asia, and very comparable mores across the Mediterranean, where a "rule of silence" was an implicit acknowledgment of the vagaries of human nature. Such spatio-temporal continuities seem to support the editors critiques especially of Foucaults notion of "ruptures." On the other hand, it also undermines the very argument regarding the specificity of an "Islamic" homosexuality, and raises a question as to whether their notion of an Islamic society as such is itself a construct of sorts. In fact, frequently the use of the word "Islamic" is highly misleading not just because what is being described transcends the territorial bounds of Islam. It is also because with few remarkable exceptions such as Cromptons article, the authors either confuse "religion" and "tradition," or simply fail (often appropriately) to draw connections between their case studies and the faith as such.
Further, the display of modern transformations in sexual mores in Moslem societies seems far less interesting to the contributors in general, except for those contributors who come from an Islamic background. The rest of the contributors opt for classical sources or anthropological studies of "premodern" conditions, and generally shy away from a contemporary reality in which much has changed. In both the opening and closing of the book, the editors briefly lament what they observe as dearth of homosexual references in modern literature from Islamic countries as compared to the classical period. They doubt the ability of ancient sexual tropes to survive in light of the introduction of "Western" notions of shame around homosexuality--or alternatively "Western" notions of homosexuality as an egalitarian species--and in face of the regulatory potential of the nation-state. The role of the nation-state is of course extremely interesting in introducing new regulations of desire, and it is unfortunate that the editors fail to make room for an adequate discussion of its role.
The point regarding "Western" influences, however, is more questionable. While influences of that kind clearly matter to Moslems living in or directly impacted by the West, it must be kept in mind that the vast majority of worlds Moslems are not as heavily attuned to this particular cultural "import." Change in sexual mores can happen nonetheless even in the absence of any contact, and it is not prudent to credit the "West" with every such shift, whether good or evil. In Moslem societies, non-traditional attitudes toward homosexuality are more tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie than to any simple emulation of the West. But this point is lost due to the fact that, with a few exceptions, a project oriented toward "Islamic" homosexualities at large fails to pay sufficient attention to important variations across class lines, where values regarding sexual culture tend to highly variable.
In the conclusion, Murray and Roscoe do in fact acknowledge that the "learning" process across cultures is not necessarily straightforward, as is stereotypically suggested. But little is made of this central remark, which seems to further undermine the specificity of Islamic homosexualities. The difference between East and West is perhaps not a question of substance as much as it is of a mode of expression: one may want to measure, for instance, the real distance from "status-differentiated" sexuality in the East to the advertisement of sexual roles in the West, or from the (unexamined) notion of friendship in the East to egalitarian gayness in the West, or from age-differentiated sexuality in the East to the glamorization of youth in every gay publication of any significance in the West.
The book teems with many glaring omissions and missed opportunities, and it is a puzzle why the field of contributors is so narrow given the available talents. Yet, this is an ambitious volume that must be heartily welcomed as an important contribution to the study of a highly stigmatized culture. Whatever its shortcomings, it can only serve as a corrective to the idle chatter of many Western gays that the bold assault on sexual dogma starts with their story in the late 19th-century. These studies are potentially readable by non-specialists, and thus the highly scholastic tone of earlier studies in this genre may disseminate to lay audiences.
Mohammed A. Bamyeh,
New York University