Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (13 page)

The Damascene poet Abū Bakr al-‘Umarī (d. 1638) was, according to a near-contemporary anthology of poets by Yusuf al-Badīʿī (d. 1662/3), inclined toward the “turbaned” (male) rather than the “veiled” (female) beloved, and was once apprehended with a beardless boy “in a state which it would be vile to call by its vile name.” The two culprits were subsequently pilloried by being dragged through the market places of the city. In his great biographical dictionary of the notables of the eleventh century of the Muslim era (1591—1688), the Damascene scholar Muhammad Amīn al-Muhibbī(d. 1699) quoted Badīʿīʾs passage in his entry on ʿUmarī, only to add:

In presenting ʿUmarī as an aesthete rather than a pederast, Muhibbī did not want to imply that the poet would not be attracted to boys. Quite the contrary, many boys were considered to be handsome, and an anecdote that Muhibbī quoted from ʿUmarīʾs own collection of poetry has him sitting with a friend in a coffeehouse admiring one of them.
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However, by recasting the object of ʿUmarīʾs inclination as beauty rather than boys, Muhibbī succeeded in presenting him in a more positive light. The phrase “he inclines to boys,” being equivalent to the ordinary, nontechnical meaning of the term
Lūtī,
had negative connotations. An inclination to beauty, by contrast, though it might make its possessor vulnerable to malicious rumors circulated by jealous rivals, was perceived as unobjectionable in itself. Muhibbī attributed it to several other persons, including close friends and relatives, and in contexts that indicate that he did not regard it as a negative trait: “gentle-mannered, of much beneficence to his students, a sincere, guiding teacher ... an elementary student would make a trite point and he would oblige him and listen to it as if he had not heard it before, and he was an aesthete
(jamālī)
in all his affairs, by character in love with beauty (
yuḥibb al-jamāl
), and he was diligent in conveying kindness and goodness to everyone in need”; “he would mention original witticisms and refined poetry, and mastered the Turkish language, and was enamored of beauty
(mughram bi-al-jamāl)
and spent his whole life in sprightfulness and joy and so was never seen except happy and smiling, and he was munificent and pious, fasting on most days.ʾʾ
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Other occurrences of the phrase in the biographical literature are usually equally devoid of negative connotations.
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Indeed, Muhibbīʾs distinction between a commendable aesthetic sense and a reprehensible sexual interest was conventional rather than idiosyncratic. One of the most influential Islamic theologians, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. IIII), in his seminal work
Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn,
which was widely read, quoted, and commented upon in the period under study, insisted on the distinction between the appreciation of beauty and carnal lust :

The chaste love of beauty is a recurrent theme in the collection of poetry of the Egyptian scholar and Rector of the Azhar, ʿAbdallah al-Shabrāwī (d. 1758). At one point, for example, he said:

The same contrast between love of beauty and lust is presupposed in the following lines of verse, in which the scholar Ismāʿīl al-Nābulusī (d. 1585), who was mentioned in the previous chapter in connection with an accusation of sodomy, denounced a contemporary:

The connection between refined character and the sensitivity to human beauty is apparent in the previously mentioned discussion of human love by Mulla Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 1640/I). The Persian philosopher explicitly attributed the refined love of handsome youths to
al-ẓurafāʾ
(the “genteel” or “elegant”), and asserted that