Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  Then there is the Nuzhat al ash‘āb fi mu‘āsharatal aḥbāb by As Samaw-al Ibn al-Maghribī al-Israyly, who died in 1170/576. Chapter 10 of that book is of particular interest. It concerns the buying of concubines and provides judicious information on the mores of the time. It gives useful advice as to how to palpate and examine the merchandise so as not to be cheated by the slave merchants. Before concluding a deal over a new acquisition one should proceed to a detailed examination of the organs of the body one by one. Chapter 10 also refers to physiognomy (‘ilm al firāsa), which, as we can imagine, had great importance at the time: how can one deduce from the body of a jāriya the spiritual and intellectual qualities that she may possess? The same chapter provides the ‘tricks’ to be used against the ploys of the nakhkhāsūn (concubine merchants), who set up their stalls in fairs or street corners and who all too often try to deceive the purchasers. This manuscript is still unpublished.7

  Ahmad Ibn Yūssef at Tīfashī (died 1253/651) left a work entitled Nuzhat al-albāb fī mā lā yūjadū fī kītāb. This treatise is devoted almost entirely to forbidden loves. How is zinā to be performed undisturbed, how is one to recognize at a distance and beneath her canonical veil a woman who is ready to trade her charms, even if external appearances do not at first sight reveal this? Pederasty and its advantages are described at some length. There are also youths who are available and the chapter described how they are to be located and seduced. Hermaphrodites are not forgotten. There are even precise instructions as to how to make the best of their company. Lesbianism and nymphomania are the subjects of a well-documented and salacious chapter. Another chapter is devoted to masculine women, who behave like males with effeminate passive men. This book is also in manuscript.8

  The Kitāb al-bāhyya wal tarākīb alsulṭāniyya by Nusayr al-dīn al-Fūsi (died 1273/672) is devoted above all to medicine and pharmacopoea. It includes a very interesting chapter devoted to a sort of erotology of clothes in relation to the different seasons. Clothes are seen as an oneiric value capable of concealing or improving the body and therefore of arousing desire. There is a whole art involved here that takes advantage of seasonal changes.9

  Better known is the Rujū‘ al shā-ib ilā ṣibāh. (How an Old Man Rediscovers his Youth) by Ahmad Ibn Sulayman, also known as Ibn Kamal Basha (died 1573/940). This book, written at the request of the Sultan Selīm Khan, is an intelligent and exhaustive compilation, largely made up of borrowings from earlier works. The author stresses the purity of his intentions in coming to the aid of the sexually handicapped, who are ‘incapable of realizing their wishes in a lawful manner’. The book gives an important place to medicine, to which the whole of the first part is devoted. The second, more varied part concerns the arousal of desire, perfumery, poetry, techniques and positions, narcotics, drugs, somnambulism and semi-conscious states.10 The Tuḥfat al ‘arūs wa rau ḍhat al-nufūs by Mohammed al-Maghraby al-Tījānī (died 1543/950), begins with a very classic evocation of chastity in marriage. The search for satisfaction of the sexual appetite is legitimate and to be recommended on condition that it is carried out in a lawful manner. There follow very detailed, very pictorial and highly eroticized descriptions of the female body. Chapter 12, which concerns ‘coitus and dance’, is highly original. Chapter 13, on ‘coitus elsewhere than in the vagina’, provides information concerning intimate and sometimes unexpected behaviour in Arab societies. This book, too, as far as I know, is as yet unpublished.11

  Mention should be made of an anonymous poem of 2,400 verses, Nuzhat al nufūs wa daftar al ‘ilm wa rauḍat al ‘arūs fi umūr al nikāh wa ghayrihi.12 This is a compendium of Arab eroticism in the form of urjūza, a strictly classical form. One chapter is devoted to physiognomy and a sort of characteral geography of penises and vaginas (‘mā yata‘allaqu min ‘ilmal-firāsa biljimā wal dhukūri wal furūj wa tibā‘i ahl al-bilādi’).

  It would have been surprising if the prolific Suyūti (died 1505) had not devoted some of his time to erotology. In fact he wrote several treatises, some of which have survived, including the nawāṣir al-īk fi nawādir al-nīk, al-wāfi bil wafiyat, al-wishāh fi fawā-id al-nikāḥ,13 al-yawāqīt al-thamīna fī ṣifāt al-samīn, mu’akkid al-maḥabba bayn al muhibb wa man ahabb.14

  These five books are still in manuscript. On the other hand, alidhāḥ’ fi ‘ilm al nikāḥ15 has been published many times: it is a very popular work. Special mention should also be made of another of Suyūti’s books, al-raḥma fīl-ṭibb wal-ḥikma,16 which includes twenty-nine chapters devoted to therapeutics and sexual pharmacopoeia.

  Certainly the book written by the sheikh Nefzāwi in the sixteenth century for a bey of Tunis, al-Rauḍ al‘āṭir fī nuzhat al khāṭir,17 more commonly known in the west as The Perfumed Garden, represents the most popular prototype of this erotic literature. After describing in turn what is praiseworthy and blameworthy in men and women, the sheikh analyses in masterly fashion the various stages in the work of the flesh, accompanying his descriptions with spicy details, indecent stories and judicious advice.

  Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 are a review of the various names given to the male and female sexual organs in man and in the animals. Chapters 11 and 12 add to the pleasures of the act itself an evocation of female wiles. Then come the aphrodisiacs (Chapter 13), sterility (Chapters 14 and 15), abortion (Chapter 16), the untying of laces (Chapter 17), prescriptions for enlarging the male member (Chapter 18), perfumes (Chapter 19), pregnancy (Chapter 20) and, finally, a supplement devoted to the art of increasing one’s virility. All this is intercut with erotic poetry, witticisms, riddles and spicy antecdotes.

  Is it mere chance or is it because The Perfumed Garden is so perfect that erotological literature seems to have dried up? It was not until the nineteenth century that a revival of the genre began to take place, but then the influence of Europe was particularly marked. Only one handbook from this period seems to me to be worthy of its illustrious forebears. This is an essay by Mohammed Sādiq Hassan Khān published in Constantinople in 1878/1296, under the title Nashawāt al-sakrān min sabbā tidkhār al-ghizlān,18 which may be translated as Delights, Drunkenness, Wine, Memories and Gazelles. It is in a sense the swansong of Arab erotology. After the first part, devoted to ‘ishq (passionate love), the author analyses the notion of the beautiful (ḥusn), distinguishing between the beautiful woman who reveals her beauty at once (jamīla) and the one who reveals it only gradually, as one explores her with one’s eyes, gestures or any other way (malīḥa).19

  Hence the pleasure of discovering and the acted-out inventory of the female body. Love is an aesthetic, explorative adventure of the other’s body. All eroticism consists, then, of a woman beginning with malāḥa and with jamāl. The opposite betokens a lack of taste, an error of judgment and a crime against pleasure.

  The author, who was well acquainted with the Kāma Sūtra and the Atharvaveda, sets out to explain the erotic differences between the Hindu and Muslim domains in terms of the difference in juridical status enjoyed by women in the two cultures.20 In India a woman is always the woman of a single man. She follows her husband even to the funeral pyre. Furthermore, in India, it is the woman who takes the erotic initiative, whereas in Islam it is the man who does so, since the rotation of women gives him a measure of choice. The author also provides us with valuable historical clues as to the homosexuality of his time. At first, it was a matter of Greek acculturation; then it became Turco-Persian before being fully integrated into the Arabo-Muslim societies. However, homosexual eroticism was to remain unknown in India. The ‘typology’ of women, which the author draws up according to age, acquired experience21 and natural gifts22 is not without interest or insight. The end of the essay is an anthology of erotic poetry in which rhythm, metaphor and expression constitute a veritable festival of mind, heart, imagination and, of course, body.

  I have mentioned only those works that I have been able to consult personally or those concerning which al-Munajjid has provided valuable information. But ther
e are many others, scattered throughout various public and private collections. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris there are other erotic manuscripts, but I have not been able to study them.23

  I have given some idea of the quantity of this technical literature. It developed according to a number of axes, the most important of which I shall now analyse.

  By a curious coincidence, the sheikh Nefzāwi, like Shahrazād, also had to save his head. And it was the promise made to the monarch who had just condemned him to death to write the Rauḍ al-‘Āṭir that was to get him pardoned. According to a legend well known in the Maghreb, he was about to be put to death by the bey of Tunis when, in order to save himself, he promised the sovereign to write a book that would arouse his exhausted ardour. As in the project of The Thousand and One Nights, initiation into the secrets of eroticism is presented as the only thing worthy of bringing back to the joys and pleasure of life not only those whom one has initiated, but also the initiator himself. Eroticism saves love and maintains life in the master as well as in the disciple. The purpose of the erotological project is to provide a sufficient dose of joie de vivre, the renewed miracle of sexuality, both at the level of practice and at the level of knowledge, at the level of experience and at the level of the art of organizing experience.

  When we look at the content of Arab, eroticism more closely, we cannot fail to be struck by the role invariably played by language and by speech skilfully used to incantatory ends. It is as if the verbal evocation of sexual acts, gestures and organs were itself erotic. There is an erotology simply at the level of naming. The accumulation of words creates a veritable verbal hallucination. The magic of erotic discourse explodes in the three chapters of The Perfumed Garden in which the sheikh gives the series of words that designate the organs of generation. ‘The male organ is called the bellows, the dove, the piston, the untamable, the liberator, the rampant, the agitator, the witty gambler, the sleeper, the sledgehammer, the hewer, the extinguisher, the turner, the striker, the master-swimmer, the enterer, the leaver, the one-eyed, the bald one, the battering-ram, the stubborn one, the necked one, the hairy one, the shameless one, the weeper, the raiser, the spitter, the lapper, the rammer, the seeker, the rubber, the rummager, the discoverer.’ And the sheikh adds, not without explaining the reason and origin of each name, ‘There are others and it is up to everyone to find other names for his own use!’24

  When he comes to women, the list is hardly less exhaustive or suggestive for the vagina is also called: ‘the crest, the asker, the hedgehog, the sprinkler, the taciturn, the starling, the crusher, the voracious one, the sweller, the glutton, the fortified, the broad, the dissimulator, the bottomless, the little hunchback, the doubly lipped, the restless one, the possessive one, the sieve, the complaisant one, the assistant, the moon, the cavernous one, the lengthened one, the stretched one, the one opposite, the fugitive, the patient, the purged one, the juicy one, the one that bites, the one that sucks, the delicately erect, the warm, the source of pleasure’.25

  The sheikh is quite obviously amusing himself here, as he is throughout the book. Indeed he is merely continuing a tradition that was well established in Arabic erotic literature in which the word conjures up a whole state of mind or series of images. One literally gargles with words. And the oneiric charge is made all the stronger. Of course rhythm and rhyme lead to poetry that is sometimes obscene, but sometimes of excellent quality.

  A fine example is the magnificent poem that ends the Nashwat al-sakrān by Hassan Khan, who attributes it to Ghulam Ah Azad al-Baljarāmy. This poem of a hundred and five lines describes the poet’s lady from top to toe. The forty-five parts of the body and the seven colours are each given a distych, the last line constituting a sort of conclusion. In this model of the genre erotic evocations are carried to an extreme and the poem as a whole is written in the most classical qasida style.

  The breasts inspire these lines:

  Two friends!

  A profusion of elegance,

  Breast of my lady,

  Understanding with the heavens,

  On the prow of the perfect,

  Erection of pride;

  And that little red cap

  Stuck on the head.26

  The vagina is evoked thus:

  Gift of Eden,

  Once given to my lady,

  Two bananas perhaps,

  To shorten, to entwine.

  No. Double bow for a single arrow.

  Hope, yes, my arrow,

  Hope, that I shall not feel pain.27

  Sheikh Nefzāwi’s lines are hardly less moving or less obsessive, though they already advocate the art of ‘making love not war’:

  I, fight

  Against Turks, Arabs and Persians?

  Never!

  Love is my preference,

  Work of the flesh, my joy,

  Without fear or favour.28

  The beginning of the Īḍhāḥ by sheikh Suyūti is interesting in a number of ways; for its verbal play and also for its great impertinence. The tone is irreverent and the text begins with what is quite simply a pastiche in rhymed prose of the traditional Friday sermon. This is extraordinary on the part of a pious faqīh, reputedly a great commentator on the Quran. Here are a few significant – and relatively decent – passages:

  Praise be to God, who created rods straight and hard as spears to wage war on vaginas and hardly anywhere else!

  Praise be to him who made our preference go always to girls and never to boys!

  Praise be to Him who gave us as a gift the pleasure of nibbling and sucking lips, of laying breast against breast, thigh against thigh and laying our purses on the threshold of the door of clemency!

  You who believe, may God be clement to you, be attentive, use to the full so many delicate pleasures!

  Eternal glory and salvation be to those among you who know how to embrace as one should a delicate cheek, to give the right-accolade to a slender waist, mount the largest vaginas in the correct way and sprinkle them quickly with the sweetness of their honey. . . .

  Give thanks to God in fitting manner, let us rub and plunge, drink wine and warm ourselves, batter and retreat, make our demands and knock on the door, know how to alternate the proudest with the most energetic acts.29

  The erotic pleasure itself is duplicated by that of impertinence. Blasphemy is an erotic factor, for it adds to the intrinsic pleasure the real joy of contravening common morality and of adding to the frissons of the flesh the spice of the forbidden. In so far as Islam tolerated the work of the flesh recourse to blasphemy gives a touch of non-conformity without which eroticism would be lost in the well-trodden paths of canonical tradition. Did not Abu Nawās show the way when he declared that ‘a mujūn without blasphemy is worthless’.30

  So the stories, descriptions, anecdotes, poetry with which the Arabic erotological works are studded, are very often recounted in a mocking, libertine tone – and sometimes quite simply in one of unbelief, apostasy and kufr. The love of a Christian youth inspires one poet to the following somewhat unMuslim reflections:

  Perhaps my wrong is to be a Muslim in his eyes? But the sins that I have piled up since I have loved him have certainly lessened my faith!

  My praying and fasting have become irregular and because of my beloved the unlawful has become lawful for me.

  I would be very disappointed if my beloved did not allow me a victory.

  Can I be for him a cross [that he would always wear]? I would then always be present at his side. . . .31

  The homosexual affections of the qāḍi often give rise to fine, somewhat indecent jokes at the expense of religion.32 The impertinence becomes cruder when the youth who has made the qāḍi lose his head is himself a Jew or a Christian.33

  The story of Mossaylama, the man who claimed to compete with Muhammad in prophecy and to whom one owes the famous pastiches of the Quran, inspires sheikh Nefzāwi to a truly Voltairean tone. He recounts how a woman, Shajāḥ’a al-Thamīnya, who also claimed to be a Pr
ophetess, threw out a challenge to Mossaylama, who, perplexed and annoyed, decided to follow the erotic advice that he had received from a friend!

  Tomorrow morning, erect a tent of many coloured silk. Spread rich silken materials on the ground. Sprinkle it with perfume of rose petal, orange flower, eglantine, jasmine, carnation, violet and other essences. Then in golden containers burn incense. Take care to make the tent air-tight so that none of the scents may escape. When the smoke of the incense has mingled with the odours of the scented waters, take your place upon your throne and send for her.

  Then receive her in the tent alone. When she has smelled so many odours, everything within her will soften. She will become intoxicated. She will almost lose consciousness. Then make advances to her worthy of a man such as yourself. She will give herself entirely to you. Possess her. Once you have lain with her she will be delivered of the evil that she can do to you and to her men.

  Of course things turn out exactly as planned, since even our enemies cannot resist the intoxicating powers of perfumes. On her return home the false prophetess describes her conversion to ‘the religion of Mossaylama’ in these terms: ‘He recited the revelation of God to me. And he showed me the truth. I am therefore joining him.’34

  Elsewhere the sheikh shows great powers of observation and in what he writes sensuality is allied to spirituality. Amber paste and sandalwood are used in the making of sweet-smelling rosaries that are highly prized by the Muslims. Now, with time, these rosaries take on a fine, velvety, shiny polish. Sheikh Nefzāwi observed that, to the delightful aroma given off by the beads when stroked by the fingers, is added a sort of highly erotic tactile pleasure. For him, to tell his beads is to caress a woman and conversely!

  For a woman is like basil: if one wishes to savour its perfume one must take its leaves between one’s fingers and rub them; then the plant will give off its scent, otherwise one will get nothing, for it will jealously keep its delectable essence. Similarly, to bring a woman to sexual incandescence, treat her like basil. Use every means of giving her your mouth, your tongue, your hands and your member.35