Sexuality in Islam

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Sexuality in Islam Page 25

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba


  Very precise information is provided by Ibn Hazm, who poses the problem of relations with very close relations. He expresses surprise that Abraham was able to marry his half-sister or that the Kharigites should have allowed marriage between grandparents and grandchildren or between uncles and nieces.80 Indeed he tells us that Zāwi Ibn Zīrī the Berber had over a thousand wives, all of whom were descendants of his brothers.81 Again he notes that a good Muslim will never covet his sisters and nieces, ‘even if they be more beautiful than the sun and he the most debauched of men and the most prone to love. And if, most unusually, such a thing does occur, it is only in the households of impure persons on whom religion no longer has any hold and to whom therefore all lewdness is permitted and who are forever ready for love.’82 And he adds this fine ‘rationalization’:

  One could not be sure that a Muslim’s affection for his female cousin would not turn into passionate love and exceed the affection that he had for his own daughter and niece, even if they were both more beautiful than the first. Indeed he might wish to obtain favours from his uncle’s daughter that he would never expect from his own or his father’s daughter.83

  The very fact that the question is so explicitly posed and above all that love of the female cousin is placed on the same footing as love for one’s own daughter or niece suggests a whole range of possibilities.

  The three cases of incest recounted in The Thousand and One Nights reflect a certain climate, to say the least. Although it is true that Sharkān marries Nuzhat and has a child by her without knowing that she is his sister, Budūr falls in love with As’ad, son of Hayyāt-al-Nufūs, who in turn falls in love with Amjad, son of Budūr, knowing full well what they are doing.84 The two young men are half-brothers.85 It is also knowing full well what they are doing that two young brothers and sisters withdraw to live together. Indeed, walled up in a grave, they are burnt to death.86

  The theme of flirtation with a female cousin has been taken up in innumerable novels and tales. There are the curious Tunisian confessions in which Shemseddin recounts his amorous adventures with his cousins Hanifa and Mahbūba.87

  More recently, there is the fine evocation of the theme in Rachid Boujedra’s La Répudiation, a rich mine of social observation.

  ‘During the wedding, the women were separated from the men; but the boys of the house took advantage of a certain confusion to join the women who, in any case, were only too ready to dispense their favours.’88 Of course, ‘some women went home to content their excited husbands and came back in haste to have their breasts caressed by insatiable cousins in search of something to do that would not only pass the time, but that would also satisfy them.’89

  A highly coloured, realistic passage describes how the ‘hero’ slips into his cousin’s bedroom. ‘She watched me come in, but all I could make out was my own shadow in front of me. . . . She saw me approaching her and she must have been afraid of that large, grotesque shadow. At first she said that she did not understand, then that she did not want to, on religious grounds. . . .’90 Obviously the seduction had its effect and everything was consummated in sorry disenchantment. ‘Suddenly, I went back to my room, leaving my cousin panting, stupidly female. . . . Grotesque, lazy and above all unhappy at the idea of a sin so sordidly consummated.’91

  Rachid’s ungovernable desire was to lead him to sleep with his beautiful stepmother, the young Zūbia.92 ‘We had no other recourse than rapine, incest and wine.’ And there is this terrible observation: ‘My parricidal pleasure gaped. To kill the cat, all cats. Rather swallow the sea! she said. . . . Did she often make love with my father? (“Why, would you be jealous?” she would ask, surprised. . . .) In order to make her husband hateful in her eyes, I recounted, with great bitterness, the story of my younger brother, who had been brought up in Arab traditions.’93

  But there was more. In this tangle of sisterly relations with half-sisters, quarter-sisters, blood sisters and milk sisters, young Rachid was lost. Then there was a newcomer to the large house of Si Zūbir, Leila, who was like a new sister. ‘I chased her from my bedroom when the buzzing of my senses warned me of the ineluctable squandering derived from the genetic father, for Leila did everything to excite me and became my accomplice. . . . Had I violated my half-sister?’94

  To what extremities did the system of sexual division not drive one? How could one not speak of deviance and inversion? The meeting of the sexes was so enveloped in prohibition, so meticulously regulated, so jealously reduced to the strict minimum that there was a constant temptation to violate them.

  Thus homosexual relations were relatively encouraged by the Arabo-Muslim societies, to the detriment of intersexual relations. In the end segregation exalted promiscuity. It is difficult for those who have not experienced it to imagine what life under a strict separation of the sexes is like. But it is understandable that homosexuality, so violently condemned by Islam, could be so widely practised among both men and women. Mujūn more or less included pederasty and lesbianism, despite the remonstrances and sermons of the ‘Uqbāni. The fact that homosexuality was always being condemned proves only one thing: neither the religious nor the social conscience could put an end to practices that were disapproved of by Islamic ethics, but to which in the last resort society closed its eyes. Cousinage, prostitution, amorous intrigues of all kinds were inadequate to cope with the expression of desires that turned quite ‘naturally’ to homosexuality.

  Pederasty and lesbianism were merely consequences, derivatives and compensatory forms created by sexual division and explicitly perceived as second best. Rachid Boujedra provides this fictional sample.

  In winter, he confessed, I’m fond of dozing off and the master can do nothing about it because I’m blackmailing him: last year he made immoral propositions to me and I agreed to them so that he would leave me alone. . . . Everyone accepts the quranic master’s propositions! He furtively strokes our thighs and something hard burns us at the base of the spine. That’s all there is to it! I know it isn’t serious. . . . Parents, who generally know what’s going on, shut their eyes to it, so as not to have to accuse a man who bears the word of God in his heart. . . . My sister says it’s a consequence of the Arab golden age. Later, I understood that it was poverty that incites the ṭālib to homosexuality. For in our town one has to have a lot of money to get married. Women sell themselves in the public square . . . and the brothels are too expensive for small pockets.95

  The victim expresses his bitterness thus: ‘Yet again childhood had been pillaged, betrayed, attacked point-blank by some monstrous adult.’96

  We should note, too, the hypocrisy of the schoolmaster: ‘How could one denounce the wretch whom everybody had seen that very morning, saying his rosary and sacrificing his sheep.’97 With its promiscuity of the sexes, its imprisonment of children, the cynicism of some adults and the sordid calculation of others, the whole system has failed, the young Rachid concludes. How many other Rachids, sickened and rebellious, has Arabo-Muslim society produced!

  One may even wonder whether homosexuality did not constitute the exposed, conscious level of a deeper reality. The inversion of the male brought up in such an atmosphere cannot but find release in such a crude way as that described by Rachid Boujedra. It may seek other disguises, other justifications, in the same hypocritical way. For one will find with significant constancy and frequency certain features proper to male homosexual eroticism in female eroticism. The prototype of the masculine woman (the ghulāmiyya) refers back by antithesis so that of the effeminate boy and beardless ephebe. Such sexual equivocation and ambiguity tells us a great deal about the ambivalence of amorous feelings in a sexually divided society. One loved women, of course, but one sought to find them through boys and, in the end, one liked only women who looked like boys. Abu Nawās expresses well this ideal of ghulāmi love:

  Sufferings and love of boyish women.

  Kiss-curls on be-ribboned temples.

  Tall and slim-waisted.

  Striding off in buttoned
shirts.

  Promises made and hopes of two loves.98

  Does this account for the special affection given to the buttocks? Much debate in the fiqh has been devoted to waṭ fi duburin (anal intercourse). Such a polemic combined with judicial records, poetry and what we know of personal accounts show that the sodomization of women even in the framework of the most regular union is fairly widespread. There can be no doubt of the frequency of anal intercourse in both sexes. Plump, shapely buttocks have won the praise of more than one lyric poet.

  Salaheddin al-Munajjid does not hesitate to write:

  The canons of female beauty require a protruding behind and voluminous buttocks. . . . The behind has to be tender and supple. It has been compared with a sand dune on account of its height and softness and also to a sandy hill. The two buttocks have been compared to two bags. Reddish and pink buttocks are preferable. Arabs have always had a passionate love of buttocks, boys’ as well as women’s, and poets, from the pre-Islamic period to our own time, have striven to sing of the praises of their suppleness, their fullness and their roundness.99

  There is a whole social psychology of buttocks, which are often a prestige object. Full volumes give an idea of pleasure to the eye that is an anticipation of the possession of the object coveted in the course of the sexual act. Indeed Arab erotology tells us that they are an essential element in sexual pleasure. This is why women in the Maghreb, Egypt, Arabia and Iraq, etc., have resorted to systematic overeating (tasmīna). At Djerba, in Tunisia, the future bride was shut up for months on end in a cellar with a view to fattening her up. She emerged only when the family considered that she had reached an honourable weight and there would be no doubt in the public mind that the future bride did not come from a poor family. I completely agree with Gérard Zwang when he speaks of ‘exclusive mythification’.100 Indeed one can speak of a whole symbolism of the buttocks: ‘Full, smooth, hairless and rounded, the buttocks are for many the mythical image of the female body.’101

  What passion must have been aroused at the sight of bodies prostrating themselves in prayer (ṣalāt), thrusting the behind outwards and upwards. Indeed the language of the vulgar identifies prayer with coitus precisely because of this prostrated position.102 And legend has it that Joseph, once the young, handsome man, indifferent to the charms of Zuleikha, the wife of Putiphar, became at last aflame with desire at the sight of her prostrated on the ground, her buttocks raised in the air, protected only by a veil of tantalizing thinness.103

  In Arabo-Muslim culture there is a systematic passage from the values of the buttocks to the values of the woman’s body as a whole. J.-P. Sartre has an admirable passage in which he elucidates the almost magical attraction of the buttocks. After observing that ‘to know is to devour with the eyes’,104 which is strongly reminiscent of the zinā of the eye analysed in the fiqh, he writes:

  The idea of ‘carnal possession’ offers us the irritating but seductive figure of a body perpetually possessed and perpetually new, on which possession leaves no trace. This is deeply symbolized in the quality of ‘smooth’ or ‘polished’. What is smooth can be taken and felt but remains no less impenetrable, does not give way in the least beneath the appropriative caress – it is like water. This is the reason why erotic descriptions insist on the smooth whiteness of a woman’s body. Smooth – it is what re-forms itself in its passage over the stone which has pierced it.105

  The smooth is an unfinished dream. The rough, on the contrary, prevents dreaming. Hence the rejection of hairs and the excitement aroused by hairlessness (amrad).

  So the female sex is particularly loved when it is hairless. Indeed the fact is that depilation is an important element in the practices of the hammam, of hygiene, of the art of making oneself beautiful and ready for sexual activity. An unshaven woman is supposed to be repugnant, dirty, careless of her person. So-called superfluous hair is supposed to make a woman look unpleasantly manly (mirjila). Hairiness is anti-erotic and indeed only young girls and women in mourning are released from the obligation to shave pubic hair and depilate the body. An unshaven vagina is readily compared with an evil eye.

  Hygienic considerations have certainly come into play: there is nothing more effective than shaving to eliminate parasites in the pubic hair. Indeed the custom is not confined to the Arabo-Muslim societies: it is equally Mediterranean, even African. It was practised by Greek women, among whom it corresponds, if Gérard Zwang is to be believed, to a desire ‘to rob their sexual organ of part of its mystery, part of its complexity; if men’s pubic hair rests on safe ground, femininity will always suggest, to the timorous, treacherous vegetation covering a swamp. It is in a sense in order to inspire less fear in the male that Greek women showed their vagina naked.’106

  In my opinion, the explanation is to be found elsewhere: what depilation suggests is not so much a fear of the damp, hairy hole, as a homosexual element. It is a means of rediscovering the boyish girl in the very temple of femininity. An ultimate consequence of the sexual division of society, it is really no more than a compensatory practice that finds the best outlet in the psychology of the smooth, so admirably described by Sartre.

  Of course there are other outlets in Arabo-Muslim societies. In addition to these erotic compensations there are others that are frankly obscene. For it is almost a miracle that Arab poetry and art succeeded in celebrating without bad taste a part of the body almost unanimously regarded as shameful, ridiculous and disgusting – in short, obscene. There is a flight into obscenity that, as a compensatory practice, deserves all our attention. It concerns neither nakedness nor eroticism. Sartre, to whom we owe an excellent analysis of obscenity, remarks:

  The most graceful body is the naked body whose acts enclose it with an invisible garment while entirely disrobing its flesh, while the flesh is totally present to the eyes of the spectators. The ungraceful, on the contrary, appears when one of the elements of grace is thwarted in its realization. . . . The obscene appears when the body adopts postures which reveal the inertia of its flesh. The sight of a naked body from behind is not obscene. But certain involuntary waddlings of the rump are obscene. . . . This revealed flesh is specifically obscene when it is revealed to someone who is not in a state of desire or without exciting his desire.107

  An unshaven vagina is regarded as obscene because it is deprived in the partner’s eyes of all erotic value – so much so indeed that a woman who exhibits her vagina unshaven to a man commits a serious injury, and is regarded as having turned a particularly dangerous evil eye upon him. Hence the power of so many of the gestures to be found in the Maghreb. In the streets, in the souk, in the market one still sees people scratching their behinds or proudly exhibiting their virile members. Quite obviously such gestures are crude affirmations of power and are the negation of desire and the death of pleasure.

  Gestures are symbolic, spoken words still more so: the mother’s – and secondarily, the sister’s – vagina shares with the mother’s – and, secondarily, the father’s – religion, the sad privilege of being insulted and cursed all day and every day. A whole verbal flow, from spoonerisms (ghasksk) to double meanings, perpetually maintain an equivocal attitude that is indeed very Mediterranean. This compensation by gesture and word is merely a means of freeing oneself from sexuality by ridiculizing it, by emptying it of any meaning. It is a ‘forward flight’ whose infantile, regressive character is quite evident.

  Sometimes it is a veritable ritual, in which women themselves take part, that takes place in public. Take the Egyptian baṣbaṣa.108 Neither men nor women are shocked by this. A woman passes by in the street. She may be veiled, of course, but the way she walks, swings her hips and wears her veil, the tinkling of her jewellery and the heavy perfume she leaves in her wake serve to exhibit her to the public. Men then began to stare at her and to give vent to their delight with various more or less obscene exclamations. The woman must then slow down her walk, drag her feet, judging by the words addressed to her the measure of her own attractiveness.
It is after all only a veiled form of ‘counter-striptease’.

  A woman who passes unnoticed in the street is much more often disappointed than one might believe. Sometimes the women perform a baṣbaṣa among themselves and even the men among themselves. . . .

  Genuine pleasure is to be found at the physiological level of the look and language. One can understand the place of voyeurism in a society that regulates and codifies the look in its slightest details.109 And this pleasure of the look rebounds upon the pleasure of speaking. Since Freud we know how profound are the links that bind language with the sexual drive. And we have innumerable examples of this in Arab erotology.

  The multiplicity of names given to the sexual organs and to coitus belong to the magic of words. Words replace gestures and gestures refer back to words. The word in the physical way in which it is pronounced is a substitute. It is compensatory, but the pleasure that it procures is certainly real.

  In another book110 I have tried to show that tales are an opportunity to indulge in an oneirism whose links with the sexual are undeniable. The relationship between the teller and the listener, especially in the case of children, creates imaginary bonds that play a crucial role in the socialization of individuals. Myths, dreams and symbols refer back to one another in a psycho-social arabesque the most obvious effect of which is to maintain by speech and orality the compensatory models without which life would become unbearable.

 

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