Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  But nothing is as ‘moral’ as the tales that Shahrazād tells, we must not forget, in order to save her young sister Dunyazād, hidden under the marriage bed, the scarcely embarrassing, or embarrassed witness of the frolics of her elder sister and her royal and choleric husband. Appearances are always saved. The dénouement of the tales is always such as to satisfy the most demanding puritans. Filial piety, justice, honour, fear of God and honesty are exalted. But above all the most carnal love is always allied with the most spiritual faith. For love is the work of God. It is therefore the divine symbol of perfection and of Allah’s creation. God is blessed as the giver of pleasure and the arouser of joy. God is perceived as the support of love and as the permanent arousal of Eros. For the orgasm is a marvel that helps us to become aware of God’s effectiveness. It helps us to read the book of creation. Love is a personal experience of the miracles that makes us aware of the work of God. Shahrazād exclaims:

  Glory to Allah who did not create

  A more enchanting spectacle than that of two happy lovers.

  Drunk with voluptuous delights

  They lie on their couch

  Their arms entwined

  Their hands clasped

  Their hearts beating in tune.53

  In these tales everybody evokes the Quran, God and his Prophet to magnify the work of the flesh. Almond is described thus:

  Her slight body has the colour of silver, and stands like a box-tree; her waist is a hair’s breadth, her station is the station of the sun, she has the walk of a partridge. Her hair is of hyacinth, her eyes are sabres of Isfahan; her cheeks resemble the verse of Beauty in the Book; the bows of her brows recall the chapter of the Pen. Her mouth, carved from a ruby, is an astonishment; a dimpled apple is her chin, its beauty spot avails against the evil-eye. Her very small ears were lovers’ hearts instead of jewels, the ring of her nose is a slave ring about the moon. The soles of her little feet are altogether charming. Her heart is a sealed flask of perfume, her soul is wise. Her approach is the tumult of the Resurrection! She is the daughter of King Akbar, and her name is Princess Almond. Such names are blessed!54

  The body of a woman, therefore, is a microcosm of the masterly work of God. To lose oneself in it is to find oneself in God. To run over it is to continue the great book of Allah. For it is a reference to the Quran, the Calam and the Resurrection. To take possession of it and to travel with it towards orgasm is to live in anticipation the delights of janna. This is how Shahrazād, towards the end of the cyle, on the 998th night, sings this splendid hymn to divine love:

  Love was before the light began,

  When light is over, love shall be;

  O warm hand in the grave, O bridge of truth,

  O ivy’s tooth.

  Eating the green heart of the tree

  Of man!55

  How can one resist Shahrazād, who knows so many good things about love and who knows how to evoke them in such a way as to move the most insensitive hearts. On innumerable occasions she describes the joys of the flesh with consummate art:

  Then the girl suddenly dropped her nonchalant pose, as if driven by some irresistible desire, and took me in her arms, and held me tight against her body, and, turning quite pale, swooned into my arms. And she was soon in movement, panting and bubbling over with so much pleasure that the child was soon in its cradle, with no cries, no pain, like a fish in water. And, no longer having to concern myself with my rivals, I could give full vent to my pleasure. And we spent all day and all night, without speaking, without eating and without drinking, in a contortion of limbs. And the horned ram did not spare this battling ewe, and his thrusts were those of a thick-necked father, and the jam he served was the jam of a big pizzle, and the father of whiteness was not inferior to the prodigious tool and the one-eyed assailant had his fill, and the stubborn mule was tamed by the dervish’s stick, and the silent starling sang in tune with the trilling nightingale, and the earless rabbit marched in step with the voiceless cock, and the capricious muscle set the silent tongue in movement, and, in short, everything that could be ravished was ravished, and what could be repeated was repeated; and we ceased our labours only with the appearance of morning, to recite our prayers and to go to the baths!56

  One can see how Shahryar was seduced during a thousand and one nights! Who could have complained! In any case Shahrazād was able to interpose between her and her terrible companion the enchantments of love poetry and its poetic loves had an immediate effect since they created in the most admirable way a durable love, a peace of hearts. So much so that at the end of the cycle the king is cured. He emerges convinced that the love in which, when he was jealous and selfish, he did not believe is something marvellous and majestic. It is the king himself who draws these conclusions when he declares to Shahrazād’s father: ‘May God protect thee, since thou hast married to me thy generous daughter, who hath been the cause of my repenting of slaying the daughters of the people, and I have seen her to be ingenuous, pure, chaste, virtuous. Moreover, God hath blessed me by her with three male children; and praise be to God for this abundant favour!’57 To be converted to love, therefore, is to be converted to God. The more one cultivates the flesh the better one worships the Lord and the worship of God is a continuous, heartrending call to savour again, to savour forever the constantly renewed joys of a pleasure that is divine in essence. The fervour of the flesh is a fervour of God.

  What is even more astonishing is that Shahrazād does not invite us to this conversion by travestying sexuality, by concealing women’s defects. On the contrary, the realism, the honour, the cruelty that unfortunately exist and that often exasperate love are not killed, but exposed and often elaborated quite crudely. One abandons everything, business, kingdom, wealth, parents, to find the love that is presented, as in the olden days, as total, embracing all its deviations. For The Thousand and One Nights is a sort of sexological encyclopaedia before its time. And nothing is missed out: prostitution, polygamy, homosexuality, male and female, impotence, frigidity, voyeurism, narcissism – and almost anything one can think of!58

  If The Thousand and One Nights was so popular it is because its tales do not in fact idealize and magnify woman as she was represented in courtly society. They also succeed in showing the back of the décor. They allow the humble to speak for themselves, but they show everything that women are capable of.

  Indeed love is universal and everybody has a right to it, the street porter and the vagabond, as well as the prince and the rich merchant. But, alas, not everybody realizes his dream. And, in The Thousand and One Nights, not every love is satisfied. There is, for example, the unhappy tailor, who is tricked by a woman who promises to give herself to him, but in fact denounces him to her husband. He is forced to work free of charge for the suspicious husband. His fate is often that of the poor and humble. He loses everything. Five things combine to bring him low: love, lack of money, hunger, nakedness, tiredness. Tricked and ridiculed, he is thrown out naked into the street.

  He found himself falling headlong into the street of the leather-sellers of Baghdad. When these good fellows saw Haddar appear among them, shaven, naked, and with his face all ruddled like a harlot’s, they hooted at him and began thrashing him with their skins, until he fell down in a faint. Laughing robustly, they set him on an ass and made a procession with him round all the markets. Finally they carried him to the wali who asked: ‘Who is this?’ ‘He fell among us,’ they answered, ‘through a trap in the house of the grand wazir. He was like this when he did so.’ The wali then ordered Haddar to receive a hundred lashes on the soles of his feet and to be driven from the city.59

  The tales also convey the social values of love. They are imbued with sociality. They are like a social protest through the demand for love: brigands, ayyarun, are not always antipathetic and there are hunchbacks who know how to make love admirably. And why is it so surprising if a woman who has fallen into the hands of a grumpy or suspicious husband takes revenge on him in her own way by cuckol
ding him? She avenges her class in avenging her sex. Shahrazād wins our applause for adulteries that are merely good tricks played on old greybeards.

  Take the lady who, having collected the rings of a hundred lovers who have slept with her, makes this confession:

  ‘The givers of these seal-rings have all coupled with me on the unwitting horns of this Ifrīt. So now, O brothers, give me yours!’ Then they gave her their seal-rings, taking them off their hands. Whereon she said: ‘Know that this Ifrīt carried me off on the night of my marriage, prisoned me in a coffer and placed that coffer in a box and fastened about the box seven chains, yes, and then laid me at the bottom of the moaning sea that wars and dashes with its waves. But he did not know that whenever any one of us women desires a thing, nothing can prevent her from it.’60

  This is pure mujūn, but assumed in the lucid mode of radical feminism. From misogyny to intransigent feminism, The Thousand and One Nights develops a remarkable logic.

  It is the same continuity that I have tried to develop through the variations evoked in this chapter. These variations situate us in relation to eroticism at points and counterpoints that seem to be contradictory, but are in fact subtly connected to one another through the combined dynamics of love and faith. Misogyny is ultimately a homage to physical love in the sense in which hypocrisy is a homage to virtue, or, to put it another way, it is an anti-homage paid to mujūn.

  Mujūn seems to me to be one of the summits of Arabo-Muslim culture and The Thousand and One Nights is erected as a monument to the glory of fundamental unity. But we can now see that at the level of everyday life and at every level of social life the sacral and the sexual support each other and are both engaged in the same process: that of the defence of the group. This ethics of marital affection based on a frenetically lyrical vision of life leads to a veritable technique of Eros that is itself indissociable from its religious base. Just as there is a religious ritual, there is an erotic ritual and each parallels the other. Arab eroticism, then, is a refined, learned technique whose mission is to realize God’s purpose in us. It is therefore a pious, highly recommended work. Indeed it is a matter of helping nature, concretizing life in its most beautiful, most noble aspects and realizing the genetic mission of the body.

  In this respect eroticism is a technique of the body and of the mind. Perhaps Arab misogyny is an illusion after all! Supposing it were merely a ruse of love? Or the starting point for any conversion? In every Arab man there may be a dormant Shahryar and in every Arab woman an unsuspected Shahrazād. And here the identification of the teller and the told is not a gratuitous device. It is not a tendency to be sublimated, but an example to follow and a fantasy to be realized. Hence, it seems to me, that unity in functionality of both the descriptions of paradise and the techniques of love. It is not a question of opposing the superior and the inferior. They are welded together as one. So a good orgasm culminates in morning prayers. It is as if prayer is also an expectation of pleasure. Our God, give us this day our daily orgasm!

  Lyricism and sacralization of life, the art of assuming sexuality and satisfying it, on the one hand, glorification of God and of his works, on the other, combine in a single reaction: wonder. Wonder conceived by the imaginary and realized in orgasm gives, beyond appearances, the unity of the personality in Arabo-Muslim society. Hence, ultimately, that dialectic of the sacral and the sexual of which misogyny or blasphemy are merely negative moments, and therefore herald the full positivity of orgasm and the vision of God.

  CHAPTER 11

  Erotology

  Arab eroticism, then, flourished in socio-cultural conditions that were exceptionally favourable to it. Over the centuries, an erotology of great scope and refinement (bāh) developed that is only now beginning to be studied. Pious souls, grave lawyers, eminent theologians, worthy kadis and venerable sheikhs devoted themselves without the slightest embarrassment to the study of eroticism: none of them could have conscientious scruples, for none of them was contravening either the letter or the spirit of the canonic teachings. Muhammad himself set the example, when he encouraged his disciples to venerate the flesh, to attend to the preliminaries of love-making, to sexual play and to fantasy. Beauty is a gift of heaven that one must know how to exploit and set off. For there is an art of making things beautiful, of releasing and refining pleasure. And it is a pious duty for a good Muslim to help all other members of the Umma to become aware of the art of pleasure, to use it consciously, to benefit from it, in a word, to assume their bodies. The techniques of sexual pleasure must be widely spread among the faithful so that the community of Allah does not suffer depression or sorrow. Being a. Muslim means knowing how to be happy and cheerful and to know that God’s purpose is achieved through the beautiful, not through the ugly, through pleasure, not through contrition. ‘Your mouths’, said the Prophet,1 ‘are a passageway for the Quran. So perfume them and place suwāk2 in them.’ An author who deals with questions of eroticism, perfumery, hygiene and beauty has no reason to blush, therefore, when approaching questions that are neither more nor less noble than grammar, prosody, canon law or history.

  The development of Arab civilization, together with its contacts with other eastern cultures, Persian and Hindu in particular, was to create a still greater erotological demand. Concubinage and a more refined lifestyle aroused in everybody a thirst for the new, for change, for fashion and a concern to avoid satiety, monotony and disgust.

  Even the norms and canons of the beautiful change from one place and time to another. The ideal woman, for instance, might be variously corpulent, plump, slim or obese. Sometimes large breasts were preferred, sometimes firm round ones. Pink flesh, chubby and curved (samīna, malḥūma), a wasp-like waist or bamboo-like figure (ghusn al bān, quḍīb khaizurān . . .) were fashionable in turn.

  Salaheddin al-Munajjid, in a fine essay on ‘The canons of female beauty among the Arabs’,3 lays down the various stages in the evolution of taste in this matter in the history of Islamic civilization. Over the centuries taste moved from fat women to well proportioned (majdūlat) women, to tall, slim ones. Bellies with folds of fat, which had been the delight of men in the pre-Islamic period, lost the hold that they had exerted over men, only to be rediscovered in the Ottoman Empire. The Ommayads and Abbasids preferred them taut and smooth. Huge breasts like goats’ udders, which had been so highly prized right up to the first century of the Hegira, came to be despised. Increasingly men came to prefer well-proportioned or hemispherical breasts, just large enough to be held in the palm of a single hand. Sometimes even the eccentricity of a fine flat chest had its hour of glory.

  The extremely slim waist and the upright bearing came to dislodge the heavy, ‘duck-like’ walk, only to lose out in turn to a calm, assured step and a more proportioned waist. Pre-Islamic woman was often compared to a cow, a gazelle, the moon or the sun. This reference to nature declined and woman came to be loved for herself alone and the canons of the beautiful became once again more human. ‘Can one deny,’ Jāḥiḍh wonders, ‘that the human eye is in every respect more beautiful than the eye of the gazelle or the cow and that between them there is an irreducible difference?’4 On the other hand one became more sensitive to the beauties of the mind and to the art of conversation.

  Two features however remain permanent: a firm, well-rounded behind and a large, but well-proportioned and clearly visible vagina.

  On this eternal evolution of taste as far as women were concerned a very marked homosexual element sometimes played a role. Faced with competition from boys, Arab women sometimes tried to resemble them. The Abbasids, for example, even preferred a tomboy type of woman, with hair cut very short and a manly stride. There is a whole area of Arab erotology – the shaving of the vagina, for instance – that cannot be understood except by reference to this homosexual element that played such a crucial role in the development both of pederasty and of lesbianism.

  So there was a strong demand for erotology and the various specialized handbooks responded t
o that demand in a systematic way. The erotological literature known to us stretches at least from Jāḥiḍh to Hassan Khan, that is to say, a period lasting almost a thousand years. Unfortunately very little of it has survived. Ibn Nadīm’s Fihrist, of the late tenth century, gives us the titles of about a hundred treatises, almost all of which are lost. Some have survived in manuscript form in public or private, eastern and western collections. There are also, as we might expect, a good many ‘inventions’, of which the Jawāmi‘al-ladhdha (Encyclopaedia of Pleasure), at present in the hands of Salaheddin al-Munajjid, is a fine example. But at present fewer than ten or so of the treatises have been published.

  The oldest treatise in our possession is certainly Jāḥiḍh’s Mufāk-harat al-jawārī wal ghilmān5 (Concubines and Youths in Competition), which dates from the ninth century. The Kitāb al‘urs wal‘arā-is (Book of Marriage and Newly-weds) has also been attributed to Jāḥiḍh, but would seem to be of a later date.

  To the same period belongs a book that is now lost, but whose contents we know: Al alfiyya (The Thousand). It consists of the ‘Memoirs’ of a Hindu woman who, having married a thousand men and thus acquired an unrivalled sexual experience, wishes to share with the reader the lessons that she has learnt. Moreover the book was illustrated, a rare thing for the period, with erotic nudes illustrating the various sexual positions. This learned, exhaustive, systematic anthology was highly successful. It was plagiarized and copied, but unfortunately has not survived.

  Ibn Nasr’s Jawāmi‘-al ladhdha has not yet been published. We know it through the work of al-Munajjid, who seems at present to be the owner of the only copy.6