Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (15 page)

The following examples—among many others—are from the above-mentioned work of Murādī:

Ibrāhīm al-Safarjalānī (d. 1705): When his cheeks became striped with his
‘idhār
and his lover’s passion increased.
Aḥmad ibn Jaddī (d. 1714): For the roses of his cheek he fears a searing touch, so he veiled himself with the basil of
‘idhār.
Aḥmad al-Falāqunsī (d. 1759-60): They say [to me]: Can there be dissolute-ness after
‘idhār?
Ismā‘īl al-Manīnī (d. 1780): Do not think that the basil of
‘idhār
has appeared on the cheek of he who excels in beauty and splendor.
Aḥmad al-Bahnasī (d. 1735): There he is with the night of the face’s
‘idhār
when it darkened.
‘Abd al-Ḥayy al-Khāl (d. 1705): I used to say that my heart would forget [you] when
‘āriḍ
appeared on your cheeks.
‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Mawṣilī (d. 1706): (I) Is it sprouting
‘idhār
or anemones in a garden on which ants have walked with ink on their feet? (II)
ʿidhār
flowed down a cheek, as if it were interlocked pieces of musk on sheets of gold.
ʿAlī al-ʿImādī (d. 1706): I should not have thought before the sprouting of his
‘idhār
that
‘idhār
would confirm his beauty.
Muṣṭafā al-Ṣumādī (d. 1725): They looked at the gardens of your cheek, the roses being surrounded by the myrtle of
ʿidhār.
Muṣṭafā ibn Bīrī (d. 1735/6): Is it
ʿidhār
that has appeared on this your cheeks, or have snares appeared for the catching of hearts?
Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī (d. 1699): Beauty has protected his cheeks with
‘awāriḍ
[pl. of
‘āriḍ
]
,
with which he has killed souls and revivified eyes.
Yūsuf al-Naqīb al-Ḥalabī (d. 1740/1): The sprouting
ʿidhār
on his cheek was a blackbird arriving in an enchanting garden.
⁴⁵

These lines provide a sample of the conventional similes used of
‘idhār
which leave no doubt that what was meant was “down,” not “cheeks”: myrtle
(ās),
basil
(rayḥān),
ambergris
(ʿanbar),
musk
(misk),
night
(layl),
netting (shirk), writing
(khaṭṭ),
tendrils of smoke
(dukhkhān).

Descriptions of the beard-down of the beloved are common in Arabic poetry from the ninth century and remain very frequent in the poetry of the period under study.
⁴⁶Less often, the poets of the early Ottoman period directly spoke of the beloved as a male youth:

Muḥammad al-Maḥāsinī (d. 1662): I fancy him, a lithesome boy of paradise.
Aḥmad al-Jawharī al-Makkī (d. 1669): The eye was wounded by the beauty-spot on a boy’s cheek.
Aḥmad al-Bahnasī (d. 1735): I say to the censurer when he in ignorance reprimanded : Should you not turn away from loving this boy?
Muḥammad, al-Kanjī (d. 1740): I was taught passionate love and the nature of infatuation [by] the love of a boy whose glance is more than a match for me.
Mḥhammad, ibn al-Darā (d. 1655): A boy whose cheeks God has clothed in a cover of roses gilded by his shyness.
Muḥammad, al-Ghulāmī (d. 1772/3): A boy
(ghulām)
swelled my infatuation and unhappiness, so excuse me for crying over al-Ghulāmī.
ʿAbdallah al-Shabrāwī (d. 1758): I said: Don’t censure me, for I’m an old man who has regained his youth by loving a boy.
ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731): Or are you beauty that has appeared in the form of a boy?
⁴⁷

The Aleppine scholar Ahmad ibn al-Mullā (d. 1594/5) devoted an entire work to the description of handsome boys,
‘Uqūd al-jummān fī was fī nubdhah min al-ghilmīn.
⁴⁸This work seems not to have come down to us, but it is presumably modeled on earlier works that have:
Jannat al-wildān fī al-ḥisān min alghilmān,
by Aḥmad al-Ḥijāzī (d. 1471)
Marāti’al-ghizlān fī al-ḥisān min alghilmān,
by Muḥammad al-Nawājī (d. 1455);
al-Ḥusn al-ṣarīḥ fī mi’at malīḥ,
by Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363); and
al-Kalām ‘alā mi’at ghulām,
by ‘Umar ibn al-Wardī (d. 1349).
⁴⁹

One may also legitimately conclude that a poem is pederastic when the beloved’s male name is indicated in the poem, or he is described as a craftsman, or as entering a mosque or a public bath. Conversely, bracelets, anklets, veils, red-tipped fingers, earrings, or pigtails would usually indicate that a female is being eulogized.
⁵⁰However, in terms of frequency of occurrence, mention of beard-down remains the major indicator of the gender of the beloved in love poetry.
⁵¹This implies that the poems that are clearly pederastic outnumber the ones that are clearly “heterosexual” since the absence of references to beard-down usually leaves it undetermined whether a woman or a beardless boy is being praised. In many, perhaps most, cases the gender of the beloved cannot be ascertained, and this is a significant fact in itself. Whether the beloved was a woman or a boy was obviously not a pressing issue at the time, and as will be seen shortly, there was often no real beloved at all. Furthermore, the difficulty of determining the gender of the beloved is partly due to the fact that the poetic imagery remained—on the whole—the same in both cases: dark-lashed eyes that, like swords, cause havoc among admirers; beauty-spots compared to pieces of musk or to Ethiopians; earlocks that lure or incite to love; slim waists and large posteriors, the latter “oppressing” the former; supple and upright figures compared to a branch or a spear; teeth as pearls; cheeks as roses; faces as the moon; hearts as stone; a gazelle’s recalcitrance; skin as smooth and sleek as a mirror or water, etc. Such similes are repeated ad nauseam in the love poetry of the period, with no regard to the gender of the described object. In other words, it was largely the same features that were represented as being attractive in females and in male youths. Being measured by the same yardstick, the beauty of women and youths was fundamentally comparable. “He is more beautiful than you,” an Aleppine tailor enamored of his apprentice was reported to have told his jealous wife.
⁵²The comparability of boyish and female beauty also underlies a somewhat peculiar problem discussed in the juridical literature of the period. Some jurists held that it was forbidden for men to look at youths. At the same time, it was, by common consent, permissible for a man to look at a woman he intends to marry. But if he is unable to do so, could he look instead at her beardless brother or son if he hears that they are as beautiful as she is?
⁵³In the premodern Arab world, as well as in classical antiquity, an attractive youth could be described as having “feminine limbs”
(khanith al-a‘ṭāf)
.
⁵⁴The Damascene judge Muḥammad Akmal al-Dīn (d. 1603) related at first hand a story that occurred in Damascus in 1545-46: a man loved a beardless bookbinder by the name of ‛Alī. The latter actually turned out to be a hermaphrodite and was judged by physicians to be more of a female than a male. A local judge subsequently declared the bookbinder to be a woman. ‛Alī promptly became ‛Alyā (or ‛Aliyyā) and could thus be married to his (or rather her) admirer.
⁵⁵The story illustrates the problem of describing the original attraction to the boy as “homosexual.” A man was standardly represented as being attracted to the specifically boyish or feminine rather than masculine features of a boy, and hence there was usually no expectation that he would not be attracted to women. The taste for handsome youths and beautiful women was often presented in the poetry as going hand-in-hand:

‛Alī ibn Ma‛ṣūm (d. ca. 1708): I love ardently with a heart that remains enamored of both the turbaned [i.e., male] and the veiled [i.e., female].
‛Abd al-Raḥmān al-‛Imādī (d. 1641): And I was fond of beauty in every form and so was blinded [literally “veiled”] by this turbaned beloved.
ʿAlī al-Gīlānī al-Ḥamawī (d. 1702): He turned me from the love of beautiful virgins, and my rival for them was my love.
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Mallāh (d. 1635): Is my love a sun [
fem
.] or else a crescent [
masc
.], of the houris or of the boys of paradise?
⁵⁶

The difficulty in ascertaining the gender of the beloved in the love poetry of the period may suggest that a remark of Freud’s on pederasty in ancient Greece is equally applicable to the premodern Middle East:

It is clear that in Greece, where the most masculine men were numbered among the inverts, what excited a man’s love was not the masculine character of the boy, but his physical resemblance to a woman as well as his feminine mental qualities—his shyness, his modesty and his need for instruction and assistance.
⁵⁷

However, such a conclusion ought to be qualified. The poetic descriptions are highly stylized, and it is risky to draw conclusions regarding actual sexual and aesthetic preferences solely on their basis. Bringing in other kinds of evidence tends to complicate the picture somewhat. For example, the Egyptian belletrist and historian Ibn al-Wakīl al-Mallawī (d. ca. 1719) recorded several stories involving friends and acquaintances who meet very handsome beardless youths who later show themselves also to be courageous and physically strong, and this combination of features was apparently appealing to the author and his informers.
⁵⁸There is also some evidence to suggest that women were believed to find beardless teenage youths attractive. The Syrian ascetic ‛Alwān al-Ḥamawī (d. 1530), for instance, believed that the dressed-up beardless slaves who could be seen in the processions of political rulers were “a temptation to men and women alike.
⁵⁹Poets could likewise mention the eulogized male youth’s attractiveness to women as well as men. A couplet by the Iraqi scholar Khalīl al-Baṣīrī (d. 1762), for instance, stated:

Women reproached me for loving the dark-lashed deer, whose mouth exudes a musky fragrance.
So I quoted when they became enchanted with him: “This is he concerning whom ye blamed me.”
⁶⁰

The quotation is from the Qur’an (12:32), where it is attributed to the wife of “Pharaoh” (the biblical Potiphar). She addressed the words to the Egyptian women who were scandalized by her love for Joseph, after she had arranged for them to see the object of her affection and noted their enchantment with his appearance. In the Islamic religious tradition, Joseph (Yūsuf) was proverbially handsome. A saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad even stated that “Joseph has been given the moiety
(shaṭr)
of beauty,” in the sense that his beauty equaled—or according to other accounts exceeded—the sum of the beauty of all other people.
⁶¹Love poets of the period regularly compared the beauty of their beloved to that ultimate ideal, and it was an ideal that was believed to appeal to both sexes.

An exclusive focus on the “feminine” features of the beloved boys is not really warranted by the poetic descriptions themselves. The frequent descriptions of beard-down are a case in point. In addition, many poets often chose to contrast, rather than gloss over, the charm of boys and women. Comparing the merits of the love of boys and the love of women was a conventional topic of classical Arabic literature, at least since the time of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869), who devoted an epistle to the disputation
(mufākharah)
of the lover of boys and the lover of women.
⁶²A similar disputation also occurs in the version of
The Arabian Nights
printed in Cairo in 1835.
⁶³The theme was still pursued by poets and belletrists of the early Ottoman period. The Aleppine scholar ‛Alī ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥaṣkafī (d. 1519) expressedhis own preference forwomen:

Even if handsome beardless boys enchant the possessors of reason, and murder them with their eyes and brows,
The love of white, virgin women is my creed, and in love people are of many creeds.
⁶⁴

In a more ribald tone, another Aleppine, Fathallah al-Baylūnū (d. 1632/3), stated:

I have no wish for beardless boys and only seek to meet a beautiful woman for stomach-to-stomach [i.e., vaginal] copulation.
And say to those who dissimulate her love: “It is part of religious belief to love one’s place of origin.”
⁶⁵

The belletrists who expressed a preference for women rather than boys often struck such a bawdy tone. The Damascene belletrist Ahmad al-Barbīr (d. 1817), for instance, said in verse that pederasts “jostled for shit,” a reference to their supposed predilection for playing the “insertive” role in anal intercourse.
⁶⁶The Aleppine scholar ‛Alī al-Dabbāgh al-Mīqātī (d. 1760) pointed to the danger that the lover of youths could find himself assuming the receptive rather than insertive position.
⁶⁷Those who upheld the contrasting position in the early Ottoman period seem to have been less eager to appeal to such explicitly sexual considerations. Indeed, it was hardly an option to appeal to the one kind of sexual intercourse that could be had with male youths but not with women. The Egyptian scholar and judge Ahmad al-Khafājī (d. 1659) gave as a justification of the preference for male youths the claim—not obviously relevant to the question of sexual object-choice—that “the man is superior to the woman by common consent.”
⁶⁸The underlying thought, apparently, was that if males were superior to women, then loving males must be superior to loving women. The “argument” of course invited the retort, made by the defender of the love of women in
The Arabian Nights,
that by the same logic, loving fully mature adult men should be superior to loving adolescent youths—a conclusion clearly regarded as a reductio ad absurdum. Another Egyptian scholar and judge, Taqī al-Dīn Muhammad al-Fāriskūrī (d. 1647), simply expressed a preference for boys in the following couplet:

I was called to the religion of love by her long and flowing hair, and my creed is but to love the gazelle fawn [
masc.
]
,
A beloved in whom God reveals to us in this age the attributes of the Prophet Joseph in beauty and form.
⁶⁹

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