Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  In a more serene tone, President Bourguiba once made the following confession:

  When I was little, men always used to say to me: ‘Don’t sit next to women; one must fear their evil fate.’ But what they meant by that was that women were an instrument of humiliation and, because of their sex, vile creatures. . . .

  It was thanks to my contacts with the female element, in the family atmosphere sustained by my mother and grandmother, that my mind was awakened, my eyes opened and I realized the evil fate that was theirs, despite their gifts, their abilities, their struggles and the services that they gave in bringing up and educating their children. At the same time they were dominated by a feeling of inferiority. Words were used about them that I dare not repeat, so gaping is the wound that they left in me. . . . Deep down inside I suffered for them and I told myself: but they are human beings. Furthermore they are necessary to society! They do their duty! . . .

  Such a childhood, with the strong relationships that I established with women and particularly with my mother, have made me regard the feeble creature that woman is with immense affection.15

  More than one Arab identified with the Tunisian president when he admitted in public what most men preferred to keep to themselves. By the pity that she inspires and by the love that she unstintingly gives, the mother appears as an effective, unconscious recourse against the castrating intentions of the environment. In such circumstances it is hardly surprising if the relationship with the mother is preferred to the relationship with the father and that every patriarchal society is doomed to be marginally maternalistic. Marginally! No, rather at the very heart of the private, personal life.

  A woman’s relationship with her husband will be of the same type and nature as her relationship with the feared father. For the Arabo-Muslim girl marriage is merely the passage from one type of submission to another. The form will change but the authoritarianism will remain. However, it will be mitigated to some degree, for a certain freedom achieved through the exercise of her charms and through the advantages brought with pregnancy will bring her some compensation. Though far from being the free fulfillment of being and the full affirmation of the body dear to the quranic ethic, marriage will certainly represent an improvement on life under the paternal roof.

  For the boy, marriage is quite likely to be a prolongation of his relationship with his mother. All too often the wife is merely a substitute mother. Of course, this tendency is universal, but it is particularly striking in the Arabo-Muslim societies. In any case C. G. Jung’s fine description of the imago of the mother is evidently valid in the socio-cultural context that concerns us here: ‘The first bearer of the soul-image is always the mother; later it is borne by those women who arouse the man’s feelings, whether in a positive or negative sense.’16 In Arabo-Muslim societies, the negative certainly dominates the positive, given the distribution of male and female roles, the status of children, the different types of child rearing and the rigidity of the relations between the sexes and age groups.

  The emancipation of the son from the dominant influence of his mother represents a crucial stage in his life that circumcision and the expulsion from the women’s hammam, for instance, have prepared him for, but only in what may seem a terribly inadequate way. The child is literally snatched up by the adult male world, the only world that society teaches one to take seriously and which indeed immediately exerts its power. To live with the world of the fathers is to assume one’s social responsibilities, to be accepted by the group, legitimated, integrated. One rejects the kingdom of the mothers or one remains marginal. In the world of the fathers, the Arabo-Muslim boy has no other choice. Indeed he has no choice at all for he is thrown into it almost without knowing it.

  Jung goes on: ‘The consequence is that the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife; and the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else trenchant, tyrannical, hypersensitive, and always thinking about the prestige of his superior masculinity.’17 Of course it is this second attitude that will dominate him like a mythical halo, with which the husband clothes his wife, who all too frequently plays the magical role of mother. Hence that excessive idealization of woman inevitably followed by disappointment. The instability of marriage expresses, it seems to me, that profound inability to detach oneself entirely from the mother and to perceive the woman-wife as an equal partner in the work of building up a family together.

  I have already noted that Islam inaugurated a system based on the rotation of woman. In fact the system turned all too often into a scarcely disguised Don Juanism. The Prophet may condemn ‘those who are merely tasters in love’ (al-dhawāqūn wal dhawāqāt), but the Arab is a born Don Juan who has found his best ally in the fiqh. It has been observed that ‘in Egypt there are many men who have married twenty or thirty women in the space of ten years. Similarly, women who are by no means old have successively married a dozen or more men. I have heard of men who are in the habit of changing wives every month.’18 Again this is a reality of everyday observation. This instability is such that in present-day Tunisia, the government seriously considered for a time forbidding any remarriage during the year following a divorce! The Arab loves to marry. He is a born mizwāj. This tendency is so deeply rooted in every section of society that one begins to wonder whether there is not something fundamental here that frequently prevents the male in our societies from being a man with a single wife. It is as if there were for him only one ideal model of purity and perfection and that he is therefore doomed to a hopeless, perpetual, ever-renewed quest for a woman who can measure up to that ideal.

  My own research and observation have convinced me that there is a profound erotic anxiety here. Each new wife arouses such expectations that reality, in the shape of a wife herself conditioned by the same society, cannot but fall short of it. In his magnificent trilogy, Najib Maḥfūdh19 describes one admirable example: Yā Sīn, the eternally unsatisfied man. His inadequacies as a lover, defects of character, attachment to a frivolous mother, all these factors combine to turn into failures a series of marriages, which always begin well, but which the most refined erotological techniques are unable to save. Behind the ideal woman, the jealousy of the male, the search for a perfect marriage, what one is ultimately looking for is a mother-substitute. ‘His fear of the dark incalculable power of the unconscious,’ Jung writes, ‘gives his wife an illegitimate authority over him, and forges such a dangerously close union that the marriage is permanently on the brink of explosion from internal tension – or else, out of protest, he flies to the other extreme, with the same results.’20 This fine analysis seems to me to sum up the problem under discussion and to account both for the prestige of the mothers and the ambivalence of the roles that Arabo-Muslim society accords women.

  One cannot stress too much, then, the privileged relationship of mother and son, which dominates all other types of interpersonal relationships within the group. In a sense the mother constitutes the pivot and epicentre of life.

  Again it is The Thousand and One Nights that provides an exemplary image of this in the tale of Judār.21 The hero, Judār the fisherman, guided by a Moorish magician, has set out in search of treasure buried in the depths of the earth. The magician Abdes-samad, after burning incense and reciting secret formulas, manages to dry up a river beneath which entry to the treasure is to be found. Judār had to open the first six doors by reciting the appropriate formula in each case. But he must be courageous enough not to blench when he is given a mortal blow, from which he will miraculously recover.

  You will then knock at the seventh door, and it will be opened by your mother. She will say: ‘Be welcome, my son. Come near, that I may wish you peace.’ You must answer: ‘Stay where you are and undress!’ ‘My child, I am your mother,’ she will say. ‘You owe me respect, because I suckled and educated you. How can you think of setting me naked?’ You must cry out on her, saying: ‘If you do not take off your clothes I will kill
you!’ When you take down a sword, which you will find on the right wall, and bid her begin, she will try to move your pity. Be on your guard against her wheedling and, each time she takes off one of her garments, cry: ‘The rest, the rest!’ and menace her with death until she is quite naked. As soon as she has no more clothes, she will vanish. Then, O Judār, you will have broken all the charms and loosened all the enchantments without hurt to yourself.22

  And the Moor adds: ‘Have no fear for that, O Judār, the guardians of the door are but phantoms.’

  But when Judār finds himself confronted by his mother he dares not ask her to remove her final garments. He is troubled by his mother, who goes on berating him: ‘O my son,’ she says in a shamed voice, ‘It was indeed lost labour when I reared you! Is your heart of stone that you make me show my middle nakedness? Do you not know that this is forbidden and a sacrilege?’ When he hears the word ḥarām (unlawful, a sacrilege), he gives up his plan and says to his mother: ‘I allow you to keep on your drawers.’ The exultant mother then cries: ‘Beat him, beat him, for he has drawn back!’ And Judār is given a sound thrashing and thrown out of the treasure hall, the doors of which immediately shut behind him.

  However the Moor and Judār refuse to acknowledge defeat. A year later Judār begins his magical operations again, but this time with more success. His mother undresses until only her drawers remain. ‘Remove them, O hag!’ he orders, and ‘as they dropped about her feet she vanished.’ And Judār is able to seize the treasure.

  We cannot fail to admire how the fable, whose richness is unsuspected by those who still refuse to take the tales of The Thousand and One Nights seriously, expresses faithfully the preferential relationship that is established between the child and his mother. Life is a treasure that can be acquired only if one is first able to kill the inanimate shades (shabaḥ bilā rūḥ). Psychological maturity is an attack on the mother. One must kill in oneself the image of the mother, profane it, demythify it. To kill in oneself the false image of the mother is to find security (aminta). It is our hesitations, our scruples, our childhood memories that prevent us from realizing our desire for happiness. Respect for our mothers prevents us from flying with our own wings. We have to see the mother, that is to say, the truth, in her complete nakedness, face to face, without blenching, without accepting the slightest veil. When we have stripped her of all her garments we will then see that she was merely a creation of fantasy (ashbāḥ) and that the soul (rūḥ) was elsewhere. We are prisoners of the shades of our mothers, that is to say, ultimately doubly prisoners. We are suffering from what Jung calls ‘the anima in the form of the mother-imago’.23 He who does not free himself from the mother-imago is beaten and defeated in advance. On the other hand, everything is possible to him who has the courage to hold fast to the end and tear away the false bonds that bind him to his mother. This tale of Judār is a good lesson in demystification and teaches us, in the profound words attributed to the Imam Ali, that ‘one must kill the soul in ourselves in order to be born again’.

  What the myth of Judār tells us is that it is only the image of the mother that holds us back. In order to release consciousness (‘irfa‘ al-awsād, ibṭal al-awsād’, as the Arabic text puts it), we must free ourselves from the abusive presence of the false image, the fantasy of the mother.

  But the tale goes on to tell us that Judār has to behave in this way not only in his own interest, but in that of his real mother. As long as Judār hesitated to cross the Rubicon, in this instance the final garment that concealed her sex, their life together would be a poor one. The real mother had sunk into dire poverty, a dirty, wandering beggarwoman, sitting at the city gates, holding her hand out to passers-by. But as soon as her son is able to realize in himself the necessary conversion she is saved. For Judār’s first concern when he has possession of the treasure is to give her the same security that he had obtained for himself.

  This is what the decipherment of the rumūz (symbols) consists of. The mother is a riddle that one must follow to the end. She must know how to distinguish between true respect for one’s mother, the true filial piety that takes the form of giving help and security, the struggle against hunger, poverty, uncleanliness, humiliation and the false marks of uterine fetishism. Only then will the ‘locks’ (al-awsād) be broken. One could not have a better demonstration of how the uterine relationship may be a source of repression and how psychological maturity depends on the liquidation of the survivals of maternal desire.

  Do we not have here all the elements, psychological and social, individual and unconscious, pathological and normal, rational and oneiric that enable us to speak of a ‘Judār complex’ in the sense in which one speaks of an Oedipus complex? Certainly there is, it seems to me, a fundamental unity of the universal Oedipus complex, which we find at the heart of Arabo-Muslim culture. But in so far as, according to Roger Bastide’s profound words, ‘there are as many types of unconscious as there are . . . types of society’,24 it may be said that Judār brings an archetypal but specific response to the great questions of life, love, hate, violence, insecurity and need. It defines a type of behaviour stripped of all guilt. The true Oedipus is guilty. He has after all committed parricide and incest. So he pierces his eyes. But Judār deals only with false appearances, and it turns out that his act is an authentic liberation of himself and of his own mother. It seems quite legitimate to me to see the Judār complex as the form of the Oedipus complex that is specific to Arabo-Muslim culture, an Oedipus, that is, unburdened of all guilt.

  Oedipus’ guilt is, of course, eventually removed, but at what cost? And could sexual dimorphism lead to anything other than a heavy tribute paid by women to ensure the socialization of Eros?

  And the mother does not play her role in an exclusively male society with impunity. Men derive a certain freedom from the multiplicity of roles that they play. Women on the other hand can only suffer when they see themselves reduced to a role that is mutilation and lack. Arab women can find security only by playing to the utmost of their awareness and ability the cards of pregnancy, weaning and childbearing. These very rights are the ones evoked by Judār’s false mother when she begs him to abandon his sacrilegious intentions. But the true mother is a poor woman, the victim of an iniquitous fate, brought about by her son’s absence.

  If Judār is an archetypal image of the Arabo-Muslim adolescent, Judār’s true mother represents the Arab mother at her best. She is the faithful prototype who has lost neither the symbolic value, nor the economic, social and cultural characteristics that are still attached to the role of mother in our societies today.

  This, too, is what the myth of Judār is telling us. In the common interest of the man and his mother one must tear away the veil of the mother and demystify motherhood. I think I have shown that the divorce between the quranic ethic and the requirements of society have imprisoned women in a de facto ‘status’, rationalized in law after the event, that is essentially ambiguous and ultimately has the effect of reducing the mother’s role. If Islam has developed historically a logic different from that laid down in its theology, it is only by advocating the lyrical vision of life, by giving back to the flesh all its value, by removing guilt from love that it has opened up the way to the acceptance of nature. The mother is everywhere the reference and the vessel of concrete existence and everyday experience. The social finds its ultimate realization only in reference to nature. Hence that ‘pan-sexualism’ that is the golden rule of Islamic poetry, art and theology. As one of Ibn Rumi’s poems has it:

  Today nature is a pleasure to the sight,

  Spectacle, unveiling, vision.

  Praise be to God, creator of the rain.

  The earth is in flower.

  Its clothes are all new.

  Luminous with light,

  Flourishing with flowers.

  Gone all modesty.

  The female burns with desire for the male.25

  Indeed the Arab feminine is the conductor of nature. It is what makes it pos
sible to unveil mysteries, decipher signs and also to countermand the prohibitions that are imposed upon it. Yet man refuses this essential role, thus blocking off so to speak the femininity in himself. Woman, who is all, is regarded as no more than a shadow. The eternal feminine is then relegated to a bygone age. At best woman is a complement, an adjunct, an ornament, a figurehead perhaps. She who is the essence is denied.

  Is not that too what the myth of Judār means? One accedes to the truth of femininity only after drying up a river, crossing seven doors, experiencing death seven times and taking advantage of a propitious astrological conjunction. One has to plunge into a pit deep down in the earth. In short, motherhood and naturality are accomplices of one another. The rumūz (symbols) of nature are fully deciphered only in so far as one is able to distinguish in the maternal Woman what is shadow (shabaḥ) and what is truth (ḥaqīqa). The awsād (locks) have secrets that only the penetration of the deepest truth of the mothers can help one to decipher. Everything begins and ends in the mother! Hence that double struggle of Arabo-Muslim woman in relation to man and in relation to nature. It is hardly surprising if she is exhausted in this double effort and pays very dear for the maintenance of the Arabo-Muslim personality. But if in each Arab there is a dormant Judār, where are the magicians who will initiate us into the art of forcing the locks, deciphering the riddles and rediscovering peace of mind?

  CONCLUSION

  The crisis of sexuality and the crisis of faith in the Arabo-Muslim world today

  These various historical adjustments, then, have meant that the sexual ethic experienced by Muslims and the vision of the world that underlies it have less and less to do with the generous declarations of the Quran and of Muhammad himself. One can even speak of a degradation, which began at a very early date, of an ideal model. The open sexuality, practised in joy with a view to the fulfillment of being, gradually gave way to a closed, morose, repressed sexuality. The discovery of one’s own body and that of another, the apprehension of self through the mediation of otherness, turned in the end into male selfishness. Furtive, secretive, hypocritical behaviour assumed an ever more exorbitant place. Sexual division turned into an inhuman, untenable social dimorphism and a source of untold suffering. All freshness, all spontaneity were eventually crushed as if by some steamroller. The price paid by women and by the young in the maintenance of this social status quo was a terrible one. This reification of being deprived it of all autonomy, freedom and value. Youth and femininity were finally robbed of all seriousness and even denied any real existence.