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The secondary literature may for convenience be divided into four major types:
(i) General overviews of the theme by specialists in Arab-Islamic studies, such as the article ‟Liwat”(1986) in
Encyclopaedia of-Islam;
Bruce Dunne’s “Homosexuality in the Middle East: An Agenda for Historical Research”
Arab Studies Quarterly
(1990); Arno Schmitt’s “Different Approaches to Male-Male Sexuality-Eroticism from Morocco to Usbekistan,” in A. Schmitt and J. Sofer, eds.,
Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in moslem Societies
(1992); As‘ad AbuKhalil’s article ”A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,”
Arab Studies Journal
(1993); al-Khaṭībal-‘Adnānī’s
al-Zinā wa al-shudhudh fi altārīkh al-ʿarabi
(1999).
(ii) Chapters devoted to Islamic civilization in comparative and historical accounts of homosexuality such as Vern L. Bullough’s
Sexual Variance in Society and history
(1976), David Greenberg’s
The Construction of Homosexuality
(1988), and Stephen O. Murray’s
Homosexualities
(2000). Such chapters are written by nonspecialists who read no (or very little) Arabic, and consequently must rely on secondary studies, travel literature, and the odd translation of an Arabic primary source. The same applies to the contributions to S. O. Murray and W. Roscoe, eds.,
Islamic Homosexualities
(1997).
(iii) Remarks on the theme in studies with a more general scope, such as A. Bouhdiba’s
La sexualité en Islam
(1975; English translation 1985), Robert Irwin’s
The Arabian Nights:
A
Companion
(1994), and Thomas Bauer’s
Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des
9.
und 10. Jahrhunderts
(1998).
(iv) Discussions of a particular Arabic work or poem, or sometimes even one passage from a work or poem. This includes the discussion of AbūBakr al-Rāzī’s analysis of the disease
ubnah
by Franz Rosenthal (1978), and the discussion of Ibn Sīnā’s analysis of the same disease by B. Nathan (1994). Most of the contributions to E. K. Rowson and J. W. Wright Jr.,
eds.,Homeroticism
in
Classical Arabic Literature
(1997), also fall into this category. A few studies have tried to survey a collection of thematically related texts. For instance, Franz Rosenthal has surveyed the theme of ‟disputation”
(mufakharah)
between lovers of women and lovers of boys in classical Arabic literature (Rosenthal,“Male and Female: Described and Compared”). Arno Schmitt has recently surveyed rulings on sodomy
(liwāt)
in Muslim law (Schmitt, ‟
Liwat
im
Fiqh
”).