Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  This admirable passage from Merleau-Ponty really enables us to understand that if Islam posits sexuality in terms both of sacrament and personal commitment, it is because it wishes to apprehend it without either reducing it or mutilating it. Hence that sense of happiness sometimes bordering on the tragic that seems to me to constitute a fundamental aspect of the Islamic view of sexuality. Whereas Christianity reduces the sexual by sublimating or transcending it, Islam, while also wishing to transcend the sexual, sometimes by sublimating it, has always refused to reduce it and still less to destroy it. If sexuality is coextensive with faith, it is also coextensive with man. Hence both that sense of pleasure that springs out of the Quran, and that hope that man, in spite of everything, will manage to save himself by accepting himself, that is to say, by loving.

  PART II

  Sexual practice in Islam

  CHAPTER 9

  Sexuality and sociality

  The Islamic view of sexuality, then, is a total one. Its aim is to integrate the sexual as everyday experience. Islam is a recognition, not a misapprehension of sexuality. But this recognition, itself unequivocal, bears on a reality that is essentially ambiguous. The serious and the ludic, the social and the individual, the sacramental and the historical – these are the fundamental, but ambivalent dimensions of sexuality. To say that Islam wishes to integrate the sexual, without reducing it, means that it accepts it, with all its tensions, its conflicts, with the contradictions that are necessarily part of it.

  But to refuse to reduce sexuality to one or the other of its elements amounts in fact to entrusting to the concrete social agencies the task of delimiting, selecting or at least stressing this or that dimension of the sexual. By admitting all sexuality, by rejecting no part of it, Islam lent itself to various incarnations of itself, which, while being more or less contradictory, could all claim allegiance to it. And it is at the level of concrete everyday life that the precise manners, the specific style that have made up the real embodiment of Islamic sexuality ought to be sought. For sexuality is experienced as much as it is conceived.

  Thus the study of Islam and of sexuality brings us back to the most delicate, yet broadest approach of Muslims to their sexuality. Now that we are ready to pass from the theological, cosmogonic view to the social practice of sexuality, we must see how this Islamic vision has been expressed in specific behaviour. In other words we must grasp at the level of everyday practice the three-termed dialectic of the sexual, the sacral and the social. Within the limits of nikāḥ, Islam permits, tolerates the sexual life. It integrates it into the social, communal life of the Umma while warmly recommending believers to take their share (nasīb) of the sexual pleasures, which are an essential prefiguration of the pleasures of paradise. It thus posits the sacralizing character of nikāḥ, which is iḥsan, the strengthening or fortifying of being. But at the same time it accepts dissolution of marriage, that is to say, the temporary, relative character of matrimonial bonds. It also accepts polygamy, that is to say, the multivocity of the bonds created by nikāḥ. Now it is quite obvious that such prescriptions lead to diversity and difference according to the more or less moderate use that is made of them. Familial structures, processes of socialization and methods of upbringing are bound to be affected.

  Paradoxically, Islam, a religion of theological unity, leads to social pluralization. The spiritual unity of the Umma in no way excludes difference. It is even the grandiose manifestation of God’s will that has created for us ‘races and tribes that you may know one another’.1 This cannot be repeated often enough: there is no one Muslim society, but a multiplicity of social structures all claiming allegiance to Islam. Without going so far as to say that each has its own Islam, one can show that between black Islam, Arab Islam, Iranian Islam, Malaysian Islam, etc., there are differences of behaviour and attitude that are much more a matter of ‘folklore’. I have already had occasion elsewhere to bring out this fundamental flexibility, this essential ‘plasticity’ of Islam, which in no way wishes to sacrifice the equivocity of being and the ambiguity of life.2 Indeed is not any society a variation on variables and invariants and a temporary, precarious balance between the permanent and the changing? Only research carried out on this basis will be able to grasp the profound, dialectical dynamism of Muslim societies, whose permanent structures and historical development are irreducible, I believe, from one another.

  Only a naive or dishonest mind could be surprised at the gaps that exist in any society between its ideals and its practices. The Arabo-Muslim societies are no exception. The fine egalitarian, democratic principles of original Islam have often remained at the level of pious intentions and Arabo-Muslim society has had its share of inequalities, aristocratism and feudalism. So it is perfectly conceivable a priori that the lyrical conception of life should exist in an Islamic society that is in fact prudish.

  Hence the need to bring out certain sociological dominants. The dialecticization of sexuality and the development of the ethics of love in precise, concrete directions, in particular historical conditions and social structures, seems to me to be important. Three factors – concubinage, the cleavage between rural and urban social environments and the economic base of Arab kinship – seem to have lent their weight in giving the societies in question their own historical profile, but also in dialecticizing the Islamic view of sexuality and turning it in a direction compatible with properly sociological requirements.

  Little analysis has been made of the role of concubinage in the development of Muslim societies and it is of the utmost importance to realize that the relations between masters and female slaves were also carnal relations. Polygamy was certainly limited by the fiqh to four wives, but the number of concubines remained unlimited.

  The laws of nikāḥ could of course be applied to the female slave. But this implied that a proper marriage had been contracted with her. Outside nikāḥ the legal sexual relations of the master with his female slaves were governed only by the good will of the owner. The only prescriptions laid down were for the protection of the interests and rights of the third parties especially in the event of a birth. For then the female slave changed status and became umm-walad.3 We read in Al Qudūri’s Mukhtaṣar:

  When a slave gives her master a child, she becomes for him a concubine mother: umm-walad. He may neither sell her nor transfer her to the ownership of another. But he may have coitus with her, require that she serve him, praise her services to others, and marry her. . . .

  When a man has coitus in marriage with another’s slave, if she gives him a child and he becomes her master, she will become his concubine-mother.

  When the father has coitus with his son’s slave and she gives birth to a child whose paternity is claimed by the said father, the child’s parentage is established in relation to him and this slave becomes the father’s umm-walad, and it is the father who owes her estimated value. But he does not have to pay the indemnity for the usurpation of this slave’s sex (‘uqr), nor the estimated value of his child.

  If it is the father’s father who has had this coitus during the lifetime of the father, the paternity is not established. . . .

  If the slave belongs jointly to two owners and she gives birth, and one of the two claims the child, the child is made his and she becomes his umm-walad. But he owes to the other half the indemnity for the usurpation of this slave’s sex (‘uqr) and half her estimated value. . . . If both the co-owners claim the child, its paternity is established with regard to both of them. The mother becomes the concubine-mother to both of them and each owes the other half the indemnity for the usurpation of the sex of that slave.

  If the master has coitus with the slave of his contractually emancipated male slave . . . and she gives birth and he claims paternity, paternity is attributed to the master if the contractually emancipated male slave accepts what the master says and the master will owe this emancipated slave the indemnity for the usurpation of this female slave’s sex and estimated value of the child. But she will
not become his concubine-mother. . . .4

  This passage brings out the existence, which is confirmed by hundreds of other texts belonging to every school, of ‘very free’ morals in the matter of concubinage. The ‘double’ concubine in a sense marries her master and makes possible a greater satisfaction of desire. With her, pleasure is in a sense free of all constraints, since, in principle, she is not expected to give birth to children. The concubine changes status precisely when she does give birth. She becomes umm-walad and acquires by that very fact certain rights that, though not entirely freeing her, somewhat attenuate her servile condition. A concubine is expected to provide pleasure or work or both. But, as the Fatāwa Hindiyya puts it, one must ‘respect the custom by which one gives better clothes to the concubine who provides pleasure alone’.5

  The legitimate wife appears to benefit from a superior status. This is only an appearance, however. For in the end the concubine becomes a veritable ‘anti-wife’, by usurping femininity and taking it over entirely for herself. One is jealous of one’s wife, not of one’s concubine. The first must be serious, but the second must be ludic. The enclosing of women, the relative ignorance in which they were kept, almost never applied to the concubine. As a result there is a double status of woman in Islam, depending on whether she is orientated towards nikāḥ or towards concubinage. This distinction, we should point out, is not quranic. It derives from the economic, social, political and cultural conditions of life.

  The jawāri became veritable anti-wives. They acquired a de facto situation that more than compensated for their servile condition. A just revenge? Perhaps. But one should point out that the presence in a single household of beautiful female slaves must have created scenes of jealousy between co-wives, who were already often forced to share the same favours of the master among themselves and who saw themselves outwitted by concubines. The concubine was the intruder par excellence. Nor should we forget the innumerable rivalries that resulted from concubinage and which set brothers of different beds – and different condition – against one another.

  But there was more to it than this. To differences of nature were added differences of culture. All these concubines were of different races, ethnic groups and ‘styles’: African, Sudanese, European, Iranian, Indian, Asiatic, Slav. . . . Educated in the manners of their own countries, they brought with them an exotic perfume of eroticism and contributed to the acculturation of Arabo-Muslim society – an acculturation at the base, so to speak.

  Under the Ommayads and above all under the Abbasids, the value of a concubine increased with her beauty, but also with her ‘skill’, her good manners, her poetic gifts, her talent as a dancer or singer.6

  The system of anti-wives organized on a large scale had an undeniable influence on the morals of classical Arab society, especially among the aristocrats and in the courts of the caliphs and other notables. Not all of them, of course, were of the quality of ‘the girl with the beauty spot’, who cost Harun al-Rashid 70,000 dirhems, or even of ‘Tawaddūd’, who, according to legend, cost only 10,000. But all strove to rival them and dreamed of one day having to submit like them to a lengthy examination before a jury made up of the greatest minds in the university world of the time. And it was with the greatest case that Tawaddūd replied, it is said, to everything that was asked of her concerning medicine, astronomy, music, mathematics, philosophy, lexicography, rhetoric, fiqh and hadith.7

  Parallel with his minions, El Amin, the son of Harun al-Rashid, organized a corps of ‘pagesses’, girls who wore their hair short, dressed as boys and wore silk turbans. This innovation was not slow in spreading throughout the rest of society. An eyewitness reports that one Palm Sunday, having presented himself to the caliph El Māmun, he found himself surrounded by twenty richly dressed Greek girls, dancing with gold crosses around their necks, palms and olive branches in their hands. . . . One author recounts how El Motawakkil had four thousand concubines, who all shared his bed. . . . 8 The competition must have been tough in that harem, but he was not exceptional.

  The wife was defeated in advance by these ‘anti-wives’. Arab feminism was a victory of these anti-wives. They alone, indeed, and almost to the exclusion of the legitimate wives, finally got their way over the men.9

  The cultural heritage is such that the Arab feminine archetype still remains, even today, marked by these customs. It is as if all seriousness lay on the side of the wife and all pleasure on the side of the jāriya. The jawāri, writes Ahmad ‘Amin,

  seem to me to have been more active than the ‘free’ women, from the point of view both of aesthetic creation and of the inspiration derived from the poets. This was due to the social organization of the period. Men, as we know from Jāḥiḍh, were more jealous of their free wives than of their jawāri. They veiled their free women strictly. If a man wanted to marry one of them a female marriage-broker was sent to inspect her and to come back with a description of her qualities and defects: but he himself did not see her until after the marriage. Things were quite different in the case of the slave women. To begin with any possible opprobrium caused by the jāriya did not reflect upon him as would have been the case if a relation of free condition had been involved. Besides, she was largely unveiled, because she could be bought and sold. It was also she who did the errands in the street. . . .

  From another point of view one was more preoccupied with the education of the concubine than with that of the free woman. . . . Indeed only a few members of a tiny privileged section of society concerned themselves with the education of free women. There was another factor: the jawāri were seen as a means of entertaining men. So those who exploited the jawāri took it upon themselves to refine these entertainments in accordance with the demands of the consumers. And since the jāriya was all the more able to conquer men’s hearts in that she was skilled in letter writing (adība), music and poetry, no effort was spared to satisfy this demand. Of course we find many free women instructed in some of the sciences. But they were so almost always for religious purposes, specializing above all in the hadith and in Sufism.10

  To sum up, wives enjoyed the austerity of knowledge, while the anti-wives indulged in the delights of artistic creation and aesthetic inspiration! In the race towards infinite love was it not to be expected that it was the anti-wife who notched up the greater number of points? Certainly concubinage had no small part to play in the devaluation of the wife. What, in principle, should have been the harmony of the sexes often turned into a pretext for slavery. Femininity was smashed. What was intended as a complementarity of the ludic and the serious led to the establishment of two opposed, different types of woman: the serious wife and the ludic anti-wife. Hence that disaffection so frequent among Arabs for their own wives and their endless quest for something beyond the wife. . . .

  Indeed concubinage was not the only preponderant social factor. Even more important was the cleavage between the town and the country. The system of concubinage, as indeed that of polygamy in general, affected only the towns, and even then only the better-off classes. Consequently we must regard the countryside as having different norms of behaviour. Historians and chroniclers, it is true, have not been over-lavish in providing information about rural life.

  One of the characteristics of the rural environment was that women worked in the same ways as men. Women picked the olives, harvested the alfa, gleaned, hoed the rice fields, tended the cattle, ploughed the fields; women concerned themselves with practically all the crafts. . . . It was they who carried water, ground the grain and brought in the firewood. The status of women, too, changed from town to country. Integrated through her work into active life, the peasant woman had a quite different status from her sister in the towns. Society continued, of course, to be divided sexually. But the division followed a quite different line from the town. Women were not confined: open air life did not allow it. There was no veil: it was not suited to work in the fields. There was no concubinage: the financial situation did not permit it.

  One ma
y wonder whether in the countryside polygamy played the role that it did in the town. Divorce, yes; that is to say, successive polygamy. But as far as we know from the few texts and documents that have come down to us the rural world was characterized by a greater stability of the family; the countryside was unaware of such refinements of civilization as the depreciation of the status of the wife, against whom the competition of the concubines played such a part. In sexual matters the Islamic view was to give birth to two divergent views, the ‘bedouin’ and the ‘beldia’.11 The first characterized by a greater attachment to the eternal feminine and an acute sense of fidelity, the second by a greater sensualism, refinement and sophistication. In one case one orientales oneself towards others and tries to lose oneself, in the other there is a hopeless quest for oneself that one wishes to realize through the multitude of experiences as varied and numerous as a rich and prosperous empire permitted. Introversion and extraversion, or, to put it another way, Don Quixote, the man who gives himself, and Don Juan, the man who seeks himself. . . . Majnūn and Ibn Abi Rabi‘a.

  It is certainly no accident if the two doctrines of love very soon polarized the individual and social psychical energies that have been referred to as bedouin love and urban love, ḥubb al-badāwi and al-ḥubb al ḥaḍāri.

  Chastity and fidelity are in fact essential features of bedouin love. The erotic works of a bedouin poet are entirely devoted to one exclusive lady. Chastity is de rigueur, for sexual union is the worst enemy of love. One loves and one delights in moral suffering. The tribe of the Banni ’Udhra was made famous by its chaste, pure, but unhappy lovers. Thus, through the ages, couples were formed. They became legendary and went on firing the imagination of both the rural and the urban world: Qais and Leyla, Jamīl and Butayna, Kutayir and ‘Azzā, etc.