Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  SEXUALITY IN ISLAM

  Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  SEXUALITY IN ISLAM

  Translated from the French by

  Alan Sheridan

  SAQI

  eISBN 978-0-86356-866-4

  First published as La sexualité en Islam

  by Presses Universitaires de France, 1975

  © Presses Universitaires de France, 1975

  This translation © Saqi Books, 2004 and 2012

  First English edition published 2004 by Saqi Books

  This eBook edition published 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Printed and bound by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD

  SAQI

  26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

  www.saqibooks.com

  Contents

  Preface

  Part I: The Islamic view of sexuality

  1 The Quran and the question of sexuality

  2 Sexual prohibitions in Islam

  3 The eternal and Islamic feminine

  4 The frontier of the sexes

  5 Purity lost, purity regained

  6 Commerce with the invisible

  7 The infinite orgasm

  8 The sexual and the sacral

  Part II: Sexual practice in Islam

  9 Sexuality and sociality

  10 Variations on eroticism: misogyny, mysticism and ‘mujūn’

  11 Erotology

  12 Certain practices

  13 In the kingdom of the mothers

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  This book is an attempt to think through the mutual relationship of the sexual and the sacral within the Arabo-Muslim societies. In pursuing this I am not following fashion. The dialectic of sexual ecstasy and religious faith, which is coextensive in the human being, is unaffected by variations of a socio-economic kind.

  Indeed one is struck by the way in which sexual and religious behaviour all too often assumes the character of a flight from the modern world. Without wishing to overdramatize a situation that is already disturbing enough, it would certainly be true to say that the crisis of faith is not unconnected with the crisis of consciousness that affects modern society. For a balanced society produces a balanced sexuality – and not the reverse! Now the Islamic model is offered as a harmonious synthesis and a permanent adjustment of sexual ecstasy and religious faith. But has this synthesis ever been achieved except in theory? Is it not rather a regulatory harmony, a norm to be attained rather than a practical model? These are some of the questions that I raise and hope to resolve in this book.

  Situating sexuality in the Arabo-Muslim societies involved at the outset the drawing up of a sort of inventory. As I pursued my research I tried to understand the place and function of sexuality in our society past and present. From the Quran to the ‘agony columns’ of women’s magazines there is no shortage of evidence. There is a remarkable continuity both in the problems that arise and in the positions defended.

  Of course, in a totalizing society like ours, the impact of Islam could not fail to be world-wide. Islamic ethics are certainly at the centre of discussion. Rediscovering the meaning of things also involves questioning the functions attributed to the sacred and the sexual in a particular civilization. And it is not so much a question of showing that the sexual is in essence sacral or that the sacred is sexual in origin as of establishing the ways and means by which the social may profit both from the majesty of the sacred and from the power of the libido. Islam in no way tries to depreciate, still less to deny, the sexual. On the contrary, it attributes a sublime significance to the sexual and invests it with such a transcendental quality that any trace of guilt is removed from it. Taken up in this way sexuality flows freely and joyfully. Sexuality is the reference and its content is a full positivity. Islamic life becomes an alteration and complementarity of the invocation of the divine Word and the exercise of physical love. The dialogue with Being and the dialogue of the sexes punctuate our daily lives. The social becomes a permanent attempt to integrate the religious and the sexual. What history reveals, then, is a three-term dialectic. In no way does this prevent economic and cultural factors from interfering with domestic ethics and from inflecting both the religious and the sexual in the direction of the survival of the group.

  There are no isolated sociological ‘sequences’. The phenomena are to be found in every century and every section of society; they are total, both social and psychological. An understanding of the sexual and the religious involves something beyond the phenomenon that only an interdisciplinary approach can grasp. The investigation then becomes a mobilization of all the resources of knowledge and research. So ambitious a programme requires indulgence – and modesty.

  One must set out from the Quran. It is the revealed source: the primary source, chronologically and ontologically, and the ultimate source for the Muslim consciousness. My first task was to disentangle the place of sexuality in the traditional Islamic view of the world, at least in so far as it is revealed in Scripture. I tried to clarify the ethics inherent in the fiqh and in Islamic thought. The traditional idea of Eros cannot but be compared with actual experience and behaviour. The aim of the second part of this book is to locate everyday life in the great economic, social, cultural and political axes on which this Weltanschauung is based, to elucidate certain processes of socialization and counter-socialization of the Islamic Eros and faith. All research is a gamble. This research is an adventure and a process. But will man on the inside be forgiven for objectifying a collective subjectivity in the light of which he could not but engage his own subjectivity?

  PART I

  The Islamic view of sexuality

  Tradition is a permanent element in the basic Arabo-Muslim personality. Quran, hadiths and fiqh are pre-eminently the invariants. Their value lies not so much in their historical import as in their revealed character. They are Revelation, that is to say, uncreated, eternal discourse. Even if Revelation is situated here and now, the content is perceived as an eternal and extra-temporal message. It lays down the model that God has chosen for his community; and this divine choice cannot undergo change. That is the basic intuition on the basis of which tradition proposes series of stereotyped forms of behaviour that at any given moment must be restored – at least as far as possible – in their entirety and in their original purity. The Quran is the divine Word, kalāmu Allah, the universal logos, pure idea. The Sunna of the Prophet is the practical model, the ideal behaviour that conforms to the sacred Word; behaviour embodied in a living being, of course, but which, though historical, is nevertheless the privileged echo of transcendence. In Islam, tradition is an ideal cultural set of rules. To conform to them strictly ensures that we are in the ways of God. Departure from them is tantamount to straying into error. Islam is essentially an orthodoxy. Hence the continual, ‘regressive’ temptation of ‘fundamentalism’.

  Of course one will find in the Sacred Texts innumerable passages marked by an indubitably hi
storical and existential will. Nevertheless the dominant tendency bears the mark of the eternal. The great debate between the ancient and the modern, the qadīm and the jadīd, is at the very heart of Islam: ‘Among the Arabs the qadīm, so vilified by the advocates of jadīd, might be another name for the “organic”. The traditionalists like to oppose living tradition to rotten tradition. Let us define qadīm as the rotten side of something that might be called archetypal.’1 There is a fundamentalism inherent in Arabo-Muslim culture. Hence the nostalgia for an absolute order that the Quran, the uncreated Word, reveals in a permanent way, which Muslim ideology will never be able to explain adequately and to the realization of which Muslim consciousness has never ceased to strive.

  Let us be attentive, as generation after generation of Muslims have been, to these Quranic positions: ‘And We sent Messengers before thee, and We assigned to them wives and seed; and it was not for any Messengers to bring a sign, but by God’s leave. Every term has a Book, God blots out, and He establishes whatsoever He will; and with Him is the Essence of the Book.’2 While possessing its own value historical existence is strictly dependent on the scriptural archetype. The very nature of Prophecy embodied in a living community symbolized here by wife and seed inscribes the meaning of the divine in the very hollow of historicity. The sign of Prophecy may be produced only on the order of God who, alone and sovereignly possessing the archetypal absolute, Umm al-Kitāb, may efface and confirm what He wishes. The phrase ‘every term has a book’ (li kulli ajalin kitāb), so controversial in both traditional and modern theology, certainly allows a historicizing understanding of the Word of God. This Word is embodied in different formulations, suited to different centuries. But the trans-historical meaning remains the same: the word pronounced here and now always refers back to the ineffable Word. And outside the archetype there are merely shadows or, rather, renewal is a plunging back into the absolute.

  The Sunna of the Prophet and, later, the fiqh are ultimately merely a continuous commentary upon the absolute. The effort of understanding, of exegesis, of penetration of the divine Word are so many successive points of view of a meaning that remains profoundly identical to itself. Although the viewpoint is historical, the meaning envisaged is eternal.

  So we must not be afraid of the non-historicity of Tradition. On the contrary, a rigorous analysis of Islamic culture requires that we situate ourselves at the very heart of that tradition and grasp it as a whole. For the overall corpus of the Quran, of hadith, of exegesis, of fiqh defines a total science (’ilm) whose purpose is to apprehend a non-temporal command defined by the ḥudūd Allah. It is also intended to be understood as such.

  It would, of course, have been highly interesting to carry out a historical and comparative study of the development of this corpus. One might even have been able to uncover a veritable ‘archeology’ of Islamic views of the world, although neither could nor ought to have been my main concern. Firstly, too many of the stages in such a development are missing: there is too much ignorance and too little knowledge of the matter. Secondly, and more importantly, to project historical preoccupations on to Tradition really would have been to sin by anachronism. For Tradition specifically rejects historicity. And what matters in my undertaking is to grasp Tradition as a whole, made up certainly of contributions from different ages, but forming an ethics that claims to be non-temporal. The fact is that, not so long ago, whole generations did not see Tradition in any other way.

  But there is more to it than that. For the traditional image of Tradition operated a veritable inversion of history.

  The historical Model embodied by the Prophet and described by the Sunna is an ‘ancient’ model. This means that, the more history moves forward, the more Muslims move away from that Model, the more the collective image that they have of it becomes degraded. The Companions of the Prophet were truly privileged men: they lived in constant and close contact with the ideal Model, concerning which, through their questions, they could at any moment bring down Revelation, waḥy. The Companions of the Companions, the Tābi ūn, are necessarily less privileged. But at least they were able to consult the men of the heroic generation who lived in contact with the prophetic Model. This ability declined as the years passed, so that the image that the group has of the Model is thus in a state of decline. Far from being a bearer of progress, history is a retreat, a gradual moving away from the original Model, which will necessarily be more and more enveloped in a halo, enlarged, mythified. In the end, history, prophecy, legend and myth merge together.

  As a result the entire Arabo-Muslim cultural system is centred on the need to identify, analyse and understand Tradition. Education, philosophy, politics, the arts, even science are no more than so many ways of learning to conform to this revealed ideal Model. It may be, of course, that there are objective explanations to account for this arrested history. But what really matters to us is to observe the extent to which the basic Arabo-Muslim personality was to be indelibly marked by this prior condition: to seek in all things conformity with the past. Exemplary behaviour will always be a restriction and a restoration. All original creation occurring after the Prophecy will be seen as innovation and perhaps even as culpable innovation (bid‘a). Authentic effort, on the other hand, will always be directed towards identifying oneself with the perfect example. It will be a matter of re-creation.

  In these circumstances one can see the extent to which the problem of sexuality was in a sense to be simplified by the Arabo-Muslim tradition. The understanding of sexuality would begin therefore not with the internal demands felt by the individual and by the community. It would start from the will of God as revealed in the Sacred Book. And in order to understand it better one must refer to the model realized by God’s Messenger. To begin with, then, I shall try to grasp the sacred representation of sexuality. From the traditional corpus conceived as a whole there emerges a Weltanschauung the permanence of which, right up to our own day, defines a set of ‘invariants’ in the Arabo-Muslim personality. The first part of this book will be an attempt to grasp those ‘invariants’. It will be devoted almost exclusively to the traditional corpus, which has formed a veritable super-ego presiding over all Islamic cultural development. I shall try to grasp the totality of impressions left by these collective ideals. I shall then try to analyse the different ways in which this sacred representation was understood by the Arabo-Muslim communities.

  Then only, indeed, will the dialectic of the erotic and sacral in Islamic social practice appear in all its majesty and all its clarity, and will enable us, I am convinced, to understand the nature and profound meaning of the present crisis in love and faith within the Arabo-Muslim societies.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Quran and the question of sexuality

  Everything is double and that is the sign of the divine miracle. Bivalence is the will of God, and sexuality, which is the relating of male and female, is merely a particular case of an absolutely universal divine wish. Many verses sing of it in triumphal fashion. The Sura known as ‘the Greeks’ especially so.1

  A view of the world based on bivalence and dual relations emerges from the Quran: opposition of contraries, alternation of the various, the coming into being of all things, love, causality, surrection and resurrection, order and call and, in the last analysis, prayer (qunūt). One cannot but be struck by the central place given to human love. Sexual relations, which are correlative to it, are mediators in this universal process that begins with opposition, continues through alternation and becoming, and culminates in prayer.2 It is no accident that the quranic text is placed under the sign of the Sign and that the word āya should recur in it so frequently. This is because all signs (āya) taken together sing the praise of the Lord by describing the miracle of opposition and relation, order and call. It may even be said that sexuality, by virtue of the central, universal position that it occupies in this process of the renewal of creation, is a sign of signs, an ‘āyāt al-āyāt’.

  Everything is centred on th
e notion of zawj, which assumes considerable importance. The Lisān al‘Arab3 emphasizes the fact that the duality included in the concept refers both to the parity and the opposition of the sexes. Azwāj is the unity of that which has a qarīn. Azwāj is two. Diversification and its corollary, copulation, are at the centre of the analysis here and Ibn Mandhūr himself refers us to the Quran. ‘Allah created the two zawj, the male and the female’;4 ‘of every thing we have created a zawj, a couple’.5 The letter and the spirit thus agree in saying that copulation is a universal law in the world. The sexual relationship of the couple takes up and amplifies a cosmic order that spills over on all sides: procreation repeats creation. Love is a mimicry of the creative act of God. The Quran, therefore, abounds in verses describing the genesis of life based on copulation and physical love.

  This is because sexual relations are relations both of complementarity and pleasure. ‘Your Lord’, says the Quran, ‘created you of a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the pair of them scattered abroad many men and women.’6 Elsewhere the Quran declares: ‘They are a vestment for you, and you a vestment for them. . . . So now lie with them, and seek what God has prescribed for you.’7

  Not only is the working of the flesh lawful, in accordance with the will of God, and with the order of the world, but it is the very sign of divine power. It is miracle, ever-renewed and permanent. It is also both a source of life and a sum of contradictions. Being is formed out of dust, ejaculation, abject water. But this emergence into existence is the very sign of human greatness and of divine majesty. The breath of life that runs through the Quran links biological dynamism with the movement of matter. The sense of this becoming sustained by the divine will is what creates in man repose, relaxation and pleasure. The original unity evolves towards duality by bipartition. But bipartition is not an end in itself. It is the springboard towards the continuous, ever-renewed search for an ultimate unity. Sexuality, then, is merely a variation on the one and the many. ‘He created you a single soul, then from it He appointed its mate. . . . He creates you in your mothers’ wombs, creation after creation is threefold shadows.’8 It is in the threefold secret of the abdominal wall, the womb and the placenta that stage by stage life develops and man undergoes his mutation. The Sura, ‘the believers’, provides a more specific description of the process: