Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  The theoretical importance accorded extreme cases does not derive as one might think from a gratuitous casuistry. On the contrary it expresses a real concern to establish as precisely and strictly as possible the limits of the sexes, for these are in fact, limits laid down by God. This concern to go as far as possible into detail shows how much the intersexual frontiers are difficult to draw up and the importance they have in the eyes of the Muslim consciousness which, having decided to limit sexual relations to nikāḥ, finds itself led more and more to set up an impenetrable wall between the sexes.

  CHAPTER 5

  Purity lost, purity regained

  The innumerable Islamic prescriptions concerning purification have always been a source of surprise. Analysed correctly, these long chapters may however tell us a great deal about the profound meaning of sexuality in Islam, about the biological and psychological conditioning of the Muslim man, all of whose energy is literally caught up in a permanent experience of his own body. Islam teaches the art of remaining pure as long as possible and of expelling impurity as soon as one becomes aware of it. The life of the Muslim is a succession of states of purity acquired then lost and of impurity removed and then found again. Man is never ultimately purified. Nor is he condemned to permanent impurity. Purity is a state that may be achieved and purification is a technique that may be acquired, the aim of which is to enable the good Muslim to face God.

  The nature of the purificatory act is of a metaphysical order. It is the art of sublimating the body, of removing pollution and of placing it at the service of the soul and spirit. A material, physical, psychological or moral pollution is never final in Islam and the purpose of the purificatory techniques is to restore man to his original purity.

  The original, essential purity of man may be affected simply by living. Indeed to exist is to maintain with the world a set of processes of exchange, borrowing and rejection that sully one’s initial purity: eating, drinking and breathing; and eliminating, too. Whatever the body eliminates is impure and sullies the body. And that pollution must be cleansed each time. It is not sin that creates impurity, but man’s very life involves pollution. This pollution concerns the functions of elimination and excretion, and nothing else.

  Pollution has nothing to do with sin and it may derive just as easily from lawful acts as from an unlawful act. Even sexual relations within the legitimate framework of nikāḥ produce pollution. But, conversely, an act of zinā that does not involve ejaculation produces no pollution if one of the two partners is impotent or if the act is abandoned prior to ejaculation. It is ejaculation, a physiological and material phenomenon, that produces pollution, not zinā. The fiqh poses, for example, the problem of the validity of the fast of a man who practises sexual intercourse with a boy or an alien woman in broad daylight. The answer is unanimous: no orgasm, no breaking of the fast. Which is not the same as to say that there is no sin!

  Purifying oneself from pollution is a technique, a pleasure, an art, a practice – and, sometimes, an obsession. Tahāra is that which gives man back his original status. It is a total, solemn act. And although purity necessarily results from cleanliness, cleanliness cannot be reduced to purity. One cannot be too much on one’s guard against hygienic or medical interpretations of the Islamic religion. Tahāra is essentially magico-religious: it wipes out pollution, it does not eliminate dirt and one should distinguish it carefully from naḍhāfa, which is hygiene or cleanliness. Indeed one can be perfectly clean and remain impure, and conversely, though it is more difficult and more unusual to be very pure and very dirty at the same time.

  It is the ḥadath, the event, rather than the ‘product’ that makes impure and it is the devil, the Shaiṭān, that presides at the ḥadath. The impure man comes dangerously close to evil. In him existence precedes essence, making essence secondary, denying it in some sense, if only temporarily. The angels who normally keep watch over man and protect him leave him as soon as he ceases to be pure. So he is left without protection, despiritualized, even dehumanized. He can no longer pray, or recite sacred words, still less say the Quran. The prohibition applies equally to reading the Bible, the Gospels, the Pentateuch and the Tora, even in translation.

  From the outset the impure man is exposed to every kind of danger: devils may do a great deal to him and he doesn’t even have the ability to pronounce the quranic words that might protect him, precisely because he is impure and the Quran may be touched only by the ‘most pure’, al-muṭahharūn. His security, his ḥasana, is seriously in question. It is important, then, to reestablish the system of protection and this is the role of the ritual, which is a social, magical and religious purification, at once. Purification is a security system. Indeed death itself is followed by a precise ritual of ultimate purification. On the deathbed many impurities may be produced and one must meet the Face of the Lord only in a state of absolute purity. Only the juthmān al-ṭāhir is worthy of the liqā ma wajh Allāhi.

  The fuqaha1 traditionally distinguish between two kinds of impurity (ḥadath). Major impurity (janāba) results from any emission of sperm, menstruation and lochia or cleansings. Minor impurity is contracted as a result of any excretion by ‘one of the two principal ways’ (aḥad al-sabīlain).

  Whatever emerges from the human body, gas, liquid or solid, is perceived by the fiqh as impure. What we have here is the universal horror2 at the sight of any rottenness, putrefaction or defecation. The body’s excreta are all impure and disgusting: gas, menstrual blood, urine, faecal matter, sperm, blood, pus.

  There are two fundamental forms of purification: wuḍū (minor purification) and ghusl (major purification). To these two forms one should add tayammun, or pulveral lustration, which occurs in cases where there is a lack of the water required by the two previous forms of purification. Lastly the two ways of bodily excretion must be kept pure. Hence two other forms of ritual associated with natural needs: istinjā and istibrā, which are the art of maintaining the anus and the urinary meatus in a state of ideal purity.

  It is not without interest to note the linguistic richness of the Arab terminology. Wuḍū, minor purification, also means embellishment. The Lisān al-‘Arab makes this quite clear: ‘The origin of the word is waḍhā-a, which means beauty’.3

  Ghusl is the total major purification of the body and must follow the sexual act. But the word came to mean the working of the flesh itself. An ardent, indefatigable man in love is called a ghussāl – which is logical enough as the Lisān al-‘Arab points out: ‘Ghasala means to have sexual intercourse, for the man who sleeps with his wife obliges her to wash.’4 Throughout the entire Arab world today such expressions as ‘to wash’, ‘to bathe’, ‘to go to the hammam’ have come to mean ‘to make love’.

  The same sliding of meaning occurs in the case of the word istinjā, which covers the whole of the ritual intended to keep the anus pure. The etymology of the word goes back to the word khalāṣ, deliverance. Hence the derived meaning of defecation. It involves eliminating all trace of excrement by means of water.5

  Istibrā is the entire ritual concerned with urine. Ibn Mandhūr defines it thus: ‘It is a way of emptying the urinary tract of all trace of urine, of purifying the place and the tract in order to restore them to their former state, as one pays back a debt. Istibrā is the way of purifying the penis of urine by shaking it, pressing it, striking it sharply and other procedures.’6 Major impurity, janāba is in the strict sense a form of ‘alienation’, a state in which one becomes ‘beside oneself’.7

  The purificatory techniques are well worthy of our interest. They are precise and rigorous and they involve constant attention to the body. In the rearing of the Muslim, they occupy a place of particular importance; even if in everyday practice one tends to simplify the ritual, to skimp it in a sense, the prescriptions are very frequently observed especially in stricter communities, notably those in the cities. In any case they reflect a climate, a way of life, a civilization that in a word rests on an ethical view of the body appr
ehended in terms of the categories of the pure and impure. A non-Muslim is regarded by a Muslim as being incapable of purifying himself and therefore the prisoner of the servitudes of his own body. In this very precise context purification is a permanent attention to the body and to its physiological functioning. There is a specific perception of the body as a whole, but more especially of the strictly sexual zones. To paraphrase Ferenczi we might say that the entire fiqh postutales an ‘ethics of the sphincters’.

  This is how the technique of istibrā is presented in the fatāwā hindiyya:

  One purifies oneself of urine by taking the penis in the left hand and by rubbing it several times against a wall or a stone. . . . One must not take the penis in the right hand, or the stone in the right hand, or the penis in the right hand and the stone in the left hand.

  If this cannot be done one must grasp securely between both heels a piece of well-dried mud and rub the penis on it, holding it in one’s left hand. If this cannot be done, one must take the stone in one’s right hand, but without moving it. . . . Istibrā must be continued until one is certain that nothing remains in the tract. . . . Some say that istibrā must take place only after one has taken a few steps. . . . Others say that one must strike the ground with one’s foot, cough violently, wrap one’s right foot around one’s left foot, descend and rise. In fact, it may vary from one individual to another. The essential thing is to proceed with the istibrā as long as possible and until one is certain that the urinary tract has been entirely emptied.8

  Anal purification (istinjā) is carried out by means of water:

  One uses the left hand. One must become as supple as possible. One raises one’s middle finger in such a way that it may be slightly pushed ahead of the other fingers and one washes the place [of the anus] thus touched. Then one begins the same operation again with the little finger. One goes on washing until one is certain that a definite or probable purity has been achieved. In istinjā, one should not use more than three fingers. One must use the sides, not the ends of the fingers. Water must be poured gently and one must not beat oneself violently. . . . One should stroke oneself gently. . . . Most of our learned men think that a woman should sit down with her thighs well apart; she then washes what appears [of her vagina] with the palm of her hand; she does not have to put her fingers inside. . . . One purifies the hand at the same time as the place on which the istinjā is taking place. But one must wash it afterwards. . . . When one washes in summer one tends to continue the action for a long time, for one likes to cool oneself in this way. But it is in winter that one must really persist in order to achieve a better state of cleanliness. This is particularly so if the water used is cold. But if it is warm the same thing happens as in summer [with cold water]. But the merit in the after-life (thawāb) thus gained is less than if one uses cold water.9

  What emerges without any doubt from the two texts quoted above is that purification is a meticulous, precise, complex and sometimes arduous technique. And the words of Salmān take on a new meaning: ‘The Prophet of God taught us everything, even how to defecate.’10

  This very special attention to the functioning of the body is just as apparent in the legal definitions of the boundary between the states of purity and of lawful impurity. The chapters concerning the nawāqịd al-wuḍū and the nawāqiḍ al-ghusl (the facts that break wuḍū and ghusl) reveal the same concern: to lay down, with all due care, God’s boundaries, ḥudūd Allah, between the two states. And it is no accident if the boundary between ṭāhir and khabīth is fixed with such precision.

  Ablutions are interrupted by anything that emerges from the two ways of excretion, urine, stools, wind emitted from behind, sperm and other seminal fluids,11 worms, stones. Stools, urine and wind emitted from behind require us to purify ourselves whatever the quantity. . . . Wind emitted by the penis or vagina does not interrupt ablutions. . . . If the urine only arrives in the urinary tract of the penis, it is not necessary to carry out new ablutions; but these are necessary if the urine reaches the glans. . . . If urine flows into the woman’s uterus, but does not reach her vagina, ablutions are annulled. . . . When it is proved that a hermaphrodite is in reality of the male sex the second sexual organ is regarded as a wound and what emerges from it does not annul the ablutions. . . . Thus a man who has a wound on his penis so that the latter has two extremities: the first through which flows what normally follows the urinary tract, and the second through which flows what does not normally follow the urinary tract; it is the first that counts and stands as the urethra. When urine appears at its end it is time to renew the ablutions, even if the urine has not actually left the penis. And if the urine appears at the end of the secondary extremity, one does not have to purify oneself until the urine has left the penis.

  If a man fears that urine may spread [because he cannot contain himself] there is no harm in placing cotton inside the urethra so as to prevent the urine from emerging; he does not have to renew his ablutions until the urine appears on the cotton. . . . If a man tries to put his anus, which has come out, back in place, directly with his hand, or by using a piece of cloth, once the anus is in place his purification has been annulled, for he has certainly soiled his hand with some excrement. For others . . . it is the emergence of excrement from the anus itself that annuls the ablutions.12

  I have already shown the extent to which the obsession with the boundaries laid down by God underpinned the fiqh. The conception of the pure does not escape the rule. The frontier between the pure and impure must be laid down, circumscribed precisely, strictly, scrupulously, meticulously. The Muslim owes it to himself to be pure for as long as possible. It is therefore of the utmost importance that he should know exactly when the state of impurity begins for him. Hence this ‘lying in wait’ for the body, this continuous self-observation of the slightest details of physiological life. To be a Muslim is also to know how to be aware of the slightest details of physiological life in order to confront them with the demands of purity.

  Of course this way of spying on one’s own body is an admirable training in will and self-control. The training of the sphincters is carried very far, more perhaps than in any other culture. Some people manage to control themselves when in continuous pain. For it is not easy to spy on one’s own organism without falling into excess. Ghazali is quite right to warn against the waswās of obsession. However the Islamic doctrine of purity seems to me to be fundamentally anxiety-inducing.

  So far we have dealt only with the minor purifications applicable to the needs of the digestive system. Where major purification, janāba, is concerned, even greater care must be devoted to the delimitation of the field of purity.

  Once again I shall refer to the fatāwā hindiyya, which provide the most relevant details on this question: they also enjoy the greatest authority throughout the entire Muslim world, independently of any Sunnite or Shi-’ite obedience.

  There are two conditions for janāba. The first is constituted by the emission of sperm by effusion and desire even without intromission, as a result of a touch, a look, a dream or masturbation. . . .

  Desire comes into play at the moment when the sperm leaves its source and not when it appears at the end of the glans. . . . If a man dreams or looks with conscupiscence at a woman and if the desire is [so strong that the sperm leaves its source] or if the man grips his penis so firmly that the desire disappears and if immediately there is [nevertheless] emission of sperm, one must proceed to major ablutions. . . . If a man proceeds to major ablutions before urinating or before going to sleep,13 then says his prayers and if then some portion of sperm flows, he must do his ablutions over again but not his prayers. . . . In the case of a dream, if the sperm leaves its source, but without reaching the end of the glans, no washing is necessary. . . . If a woman washes after her husband has made love to her, if then her husband’s sperm flows out of her vagina, she must proceed to the minor, not to the major ablutions. If a man wakes up and finds dampness on his couch or bed and remembers a nocturnal
dream, if he is certain that it is sperm, or seminal fluid, or if he does not know if it is one or the other, he must wash. If he is certain that it is some other liquid he does not have to wash. If the bed is found to be damp and if the husband attributes this to his wife and the woman to her husband they must both wash. . . .