Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (4 page)

Toward the end of the year 1701, a Druze chieftain (Emir) from the Wādī al-Taym area in Syria came to Damascus to be officially invested as head military official
(Yāyābāshī)
of his home region by the governor of the city. According to a contemporary chronicler, the Emir was a notorious womanizer, who “in Damascus was determined to conduct himself with his characteristic lewdness.” Once, while at the house of a local woman, he was surprised by around twenty Turcoman soldiers, who gang-raped him and robbed him of his clothes, leaving him barefoot and clad only in his inner garments. “He who encroaches upon the womenfolk
(ḥarīm)
of the Muslims deserves more than this,” they reportedly said before letting him go. “new of the incident,” the chronicler added, “reached the women and children [of the city], and songs about him [i.e., the Emir] were composed and performed by singers ... He then departed to the land of the Druzes, his home, and it was said that the woman remained untainted [i.e., she was not dishonored before the arrival of the soldiers], and thus God forsook the damned Emir at the hands of the Turcoman.”
¹
The quoted remarks make it clear in what terms the chronicler, and the Muslim population of Damascus in general, viewed the reported action of the soldiers. An outsider, and a non-Muslim at that, by his attempt to seduce or rape a local woman, had threatened the honor of the community at large. The threat was not only averted, but the potential dishonorer was himself dishonored by being buggered, and the Turcoman troops came in this particular case to be seen as instruments of poetic justice. Underlying the interpretation, of course, is a tacit identification of sexual penetration, both the one averted and the one committed by the soldiers, with dishonor. This assumption is one that will be all too familiar to anyone acquainted with the more bawdy or ribald aspects of present-day Arab (and Mediterranean) culture, as manifested for example in jokes and insults: to penetrate phallically is to dominate, subjugate, and ultimately to humiliate. According to the oneiromantic handbook of the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), to dream that one is sexually penetrating a rival or enemy forebodes that one will get the better of him in real life, whereas being penetrated by him is ominous, signifying the reverse.
²
A strikingly uncompromising expression of this way of conceiving phallic penetration is contained in the following defamatory poem in which Ibrāhīm al-Ghazālī (d. 1678), deputy judge at one of the courts of Damascus, lampooned a contemporary:

Instead of references to desire and pleasure, the quoted verses of Ibrāhīm al-Ghazālī contain a remarkable profusion of metaphors derived from the language of violence and war: infliction, fire, armor, raid, spoils. Conversely, literary descriptions of battles in classical Arabic often conjure up, perhaps unconsciously, the imagery of sexual intercourse: the defeated soldiers “turn tail”
(wallaw al-adbār);
the swords of the victorious ravage the turned tails
(fataka
or
ʿamila fī adbārihim)
of their enemies; the sword of the powerful military commander was said to “make courageous men into women” (
yuʾannithu al-buhm al-dhukūr)
or to “make male enemies menstruate”
(jaʿala al-dhukūr min al-aʿadī ḥuyyaḍan).
⁸
The word
futūḥ
can be used equally of military conquest and of sexual penetration or deflowering. If the act of penetration can be seen as a uniting of two persons or as “making love,” it can also be perceived as a deeply “polarizing” experience, which distinguishes the dominant from the dominated, the dishonorer from the dishonored, and the victorious from the defeated.
⁹
Some recent writers seem to want to juxtapose the two views, and attribute the former to the modern West and the latter to the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern area.
¹⁰
Yet the idea of sex
as jimāʿ(i.e.,
bringing together, combining) was not foreign to the premodern Middle East, nor is the idea of “screwing” in the sense of defeating or insulting in any way absent in the contemporary West. Having said this, it is still undeniable that the aggressive, masculine-centered view featured much more prominently in the public (male-dominated) discourse of the early Ottoman Arab East than the affectionate-androgynous view. In the ongoing rivalries for posts, money, status, and influence in the exclusively male public sphere, allusions to phallic penetration were always near at hand. When the poet Mamayah al-Rūmī (d. 1579) was appointed as interpreter at one of the courts of Damascus at the expense of the previous holder of the position, a Turk by the name of Amrallah, he composed the following lines in celebration:

The modern concept of “homosexuality” elides a distinction that, in the Middle East, was (and still is) fraught with symbolic significance: that between the penetrator and the penetrated. Not surprisingly, in ordinary language there was no corresponding concept that would apply to both those who preferred the active-insertive role and those who preferred the passive-receptive role in a homosexual act. The term
Lūṭī
was typically used of the former, while
mukhannath
or
maʾbūn
or (more colloquially)
ʿilq
was reserved for the latter. It is worth dwelling on this point, since there is a persistent tendency among some modern scholars to overlook this distinction and render the indigenous term
Lūṭī
as “homosexual.”
¹²
In Islamic law, the
lūṭī
is a man who commits
liwāṭ
(i.e., anal intercourse with another man), regardless of whether he commits it as an active or passive partner.
¹³
However, in ordinary, nontechnical language (as manifested in, for example, bawdy-satirical anecdotes) the term
Lūṭī
almost always meant “pederast” One short anecdote illustrates the fact that a stereotypical
lūṭī
was thought to be interested in active-insertive anal intercourse with boys: “... of another person it was related that he was a
lāʾiṭ
[variant of
Lūṭī
], and so his wife told him: I have what boys have (ʿ
indī mā ʿind al-ghilmān
). He replied: Yes, but it has an unpleasant neighbor [i.e., the vagina].”
¹⁴
A tradition related by the Shīlʿī scholar Muhammad al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1693) also confirms that
liwāṭ
was normally understood to be equivalent to sodomizing boys: a heretic
(zindīq)
asked ʿAlī ibn Abī Talib (the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law) for the reason behind the religious prohibition of
liwāṭ.
ʿAlī supposedly answered: “If carnal penetration of a boy
(ityān al-ghulām)
were permitted, men would dispense with women, and this would lead to the disruption of procreation.”
¹⁵
In the Egyptian version of the popular, orally transmitted epic
Sīrat Baybars
, the term
lūṭī
is used of adult males who make sexual advances to beardless youths, and the term is used interchangeably with the colloquial term
bitāʿ alşighār,
which roughly translates as “he who is for youngsters.”
¹⁶
According to an anonymous and tongue-in-cheek couplet cited in both a late seventeenth-century Egyptian and a late eighteenth-century Damascene text:

The image of “the people of Lot” in the Islamic tradition was, to be sure, not entirely uniform. In commenting on the just-quoted verse of ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-ʿUmarī, the Iraqi scholar Muhammad Amīn al-ʿUmarī (d. 1788) reminded readers that the people of Lot not only sodomized boys but also adult male strangers.
²⁰
This was the standard dual image of the “people of Lot” in the Qur’anic commentaries of the time: on the one hand they were portrayed as pederasts and, on the other, as an aggressive people who anally raped trespassers.
²¹
In both cases, however, they were assumed to be the “active” or “insertive” party, and this assumption tended to reflect back on the juridical literature itself. The Palestinian religious scholar Muhammad al-Saffārīnī (d.1774), for example, defined
Liwāṭ
or “the act of the people of Lot” (ʿ
amal qawm Lūṭ
) as “carnal penetration of males in the anus (
ityān al-dhukūr fī al-dubur
)
.
”
²²
Though Saffārīnī was committed to the idea that the man who willingly assumes the passive-receptive role in anal intercourse has committed sodomy and may be prosecuted accordingly, it still seemed natural for him to define sodomy in a way which suggests that it is only the active-insertive party who commits it. Similarly, the Egyptian jurist Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) stated that
liwāṭ
was “the act committed by the people of Lot (
fiʿl qawm Lūṭ
), for they were the first to sodomize men (
fa-innahum awwal man atā al-rijāl fī adbārihim
)
.
” He went on to claim that the habit disappeared after the destruction of Sodom, and was only resurrected after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East. Many soldiers were away from their women, and availed themselves of native, subservient males instead, and so they “did it to them and treated them as women” (
fa
ʿ
alū bihim wa ajrawhum majrā al-nisāʾ
)
.
²³
Bājūrīʾs remarks are not particularly valuable as a historical observation, but again reveal that even jurists were prone to make the tacit assumption that
liwāṭ
(“the act of the people of Lot”) was active rather than passive sodomy, and that the paradigmatic
Lūṭī
was therefore the active-insertive partner. The assumption was articulated clearly in nonjuridical discourse, such as the following defamatory poem by the Aleppine poet Husayn al-Jazarī (d. ca. 1624):