Hi! Welcome to Al Muqaddimah, my name is Syawish. Today we’re gonna talk about homosexuality in the Islamic World.
While today, the Islamic World and homosexuality don’t seem to go together, in the past, there was a rich tradition of homosexuality being expressed through stories and poetry. While it was never completely allowed, it did become an open secret. So, without further ado, let’s get to it.
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Back to the video. Before we begin, I'd like to say two things. First, the term Islamic or Islamicate World is often objected upon by people because it implies that Islam is responsible for whatever the topic of discussion might be.
Here, as in all my videos, the term Islamic World is used for its geographical meaning. The world that comprised of Empires that called themselves Muslims. Of course, this is a huge region, going at times from Spain to India, and not everyone followed the same practices and social norms.
Second, there was a lot of pederasty in the Islamic World. Older or even old men often had sex with underaged children, mainly boys. In the modern times, we call that rape.
This video isn’t about that. I didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about that in a video about homosexuality because they’re two completely different things but I know a lot of people will mention it in the comments so I wanted to address it here. Let’s continue.
Now, this is not a theology channel but Islam’s stance on homosexuality is related to its history and so, we must talk about it. Most, if not all, scholars of Islam maintain that homosexual acts are forbidden in Islam. In the modern era, there are some who are starting to find room for homosexuality but before the modern era, there are no Islamic scholars, at least to my knowledge, who tried to reconcile homosexuality with Islam.
If the prohibition was merely in the Hadiths, there could be room for discussion but the Qur’an itself makes it quite clear with the story of the Prophet Lut and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for homosexuality. So, according to all schools of thought, it is forbidden. However, there’s a range of opinions about the punishment for it but like I said, this isn’t a theology channel.
This prohibition, however, didn’t stop people from doing it. Before the modern era, there wasn’t such a thing as a sexual identity. People could indulge in homosexual acts without having it contribute to their identity.
Especially in the Islamic world, there was such a thing as homosexuality but not such a thing as a homosexual. Of course, there were other identities that sometimes overlapped with sexuality. For instance, there were women who dressed like men and this contributed to their identity but they could have sex with either men or women and it had nothing to do with how they dressed.
Although, I found it quite interesting that Ibn Sina, or as he’s known in the west, Avicenna, actually talks about homosexuality being a state of being rather than just an act. Though, he considered it an incurable disease. Of course, even if you had homosexual relationships, you were still expected to be part of a familial unit and have children.
As long as you did that, there was no dishonor or anything like that for having sex with a person of the same gender. In fact, it wasn’t even scandalous. This was certainly true for two of the Islamic monarchs who preferred to have sex with men.
First, Abbasid Caliph, al-Amin, Harun al-Rashid’s son and successor, had a preference for Eunuchs, he began appearing with them in public. This was quite scandalous in Abbasid Iraq in the 9th century, but primarily because it seems that al-Amin was spending too much time with them instead of running the empire. So, his mother, Zubayda, prepared a counter-attraction for him by dressing up beautiful girls in the clothing that was worn by eunuch servants at the time.
Since al-Amin began appearing with them in public, this started quite a trend of women wearing male clothes. Second, we know that Caliph al-Hakam II of Cordoba had a preference for men. This got to such a level that he didn’t even touch women and hence, couldn’t produce an heir.
His wife, Subh, had to cut her hair and start dressing up like men. She was even given the nickname of Ja’far, a male name. Ja’far was also the name of al-Hakam’s closest friend from childhood.
Al-Hakam wasn’t able to produce his first heir till he was 46. Other than these two, we know stories of many homosexual relationships between Monarchs and their courtiers. We know that al-Hakam II’s father, Abd al-Rahman III had a male harem as well as a female one.
We also know that al-Mu’tamid, the Emir of the Taifa of Seville, was in love with a poet named Ibn Ammar. Wherever slave soldiers were involved, there was almost always a sexual relationship between the monarch and one or more of his trusted men. Some famous examples involve Mahmud of Ghazna and Malik Ayaz, Ala ad-Din Khalji and Malik Kafur, and of course, the Mamluks of Egypt were famous for it too.
It was even so common among the Ottoman soldiers that they often appointed someone to keep an eye on new soldiers and their superiors. In the Islamic world, we usually don’t see egalitarian homosexual relationships between two people of a similar social class. They were, almost always, between people of different social classes.
Monarchs and Servants or Slaves, Sufi teachers and their students, etc. Speaking of Sufis, one area where we often imagine homosexuality being common is Sufism. Sufi poetry is full of seemingly homoerotic themes and mentions love between men again and again.
So, naturally, it is often interpreted as being sexual in nature but that’s way too simplistic a view of this poetry. Obviously, it’s not always easy to tell whether that love is just platonic love between two friends or if it’s romantic and even if it’s romantic, does it involve sex? I mean, in the modern mind, Rumi and Shams Tabrizi were lovers in the nighttime, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case.
Of course, Rumi loved Shams Tabrizi, there’s hardly any doubt about that, but it’s tough to tell what kinda love that was. Rumi was an adherent to the Shariah and he explicitly talked against sodomy so, we can assume that their relationship wasn’t sexual. However, that wasn’t the case for all Sufis.
Sufis spanned the entire spectrum in regards to their adherence to the Shariah. Some sufis stuck to the Shariah to the finer details while some rejected it almost completely. While none outright admit to having sex with other men, out of the fear of orthodox Muslims, there are inferences here and there.
This also extended to the concept of Shahidbaazi. To grossly simplify the concept, Shahidbaazi is the idea that you can love God by loving one of God’s creations which mostly meant beautiful men and boys. Again, how far you can go in this was debated.
Could you just appreciate their beauty, could you love them or could you even have sex with them? Among the advocates of Shahidbaazi, we find names such as Jami, Attar and Hafiz. Like I said before, none explicitly advocated for sex.
Some people even interpret this love for other men in poetry to be a metaphor for their devotion to God. But then why use the metaphor of men and not women? Because, a lot of Islamic philosophy was inspired by the Ancient Greeks and they usually mentioned the love between two men in their poetry.
This was so common that, unless otherwise stated, an ancient Greek readers would normally assume that any kind of love mentioned in literature was between two men contrary to most modern readers who’d usually assume that it was between a man and a woman. Some poets and scholars did say that attraction to other men is natural but you must resist it and be pious. This includes Ibn Hazm, an Andalusian Polymath who mentions stories of men who fell in love with other men and died from heartbreak.
He also mentions how common homosexuality was in al-Andalus and how people were often tolerant of it. This tolerance of homosexuality is even mentioned in contemporary Christian sources which mention it as a sin of the lustful Arabs. While male homosexuality seems to very common, we don’t find many references toward female homosexuality.
Europeans who visited the Islamic World in the late medieval and early modern periods imagined a lot of lesbian stuff going on in the Harems but there’s hardly any mention of it in Islamic sources. One example I found interesting and funny is from a Venetian envoy at the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent who writes that if women of harem wanted cucumbers, they were sent to them sliced so they wouldn’t use them for. .
. pleasure-related purposes. How much of this is reality and how much is just fantasy is tough to tell.
Though, this is probably almost completely fantasy because there’s basically no way that the envoy would know what went on in the Harem. We do know of one example from Abbasid Caliph al-Hadi’s era. He was Harun al-Rashid’s brother and predecessor.
He beheaded two women in his harem because he had caught them in a lesbian affair. There are some mentions of female homosexuality outside the Harem. There are even female poets who wrote about female lovers in the same way that male poet often wrote about male lovers.
Though, unfortunately, we only know of these poetesses due to them being mentioned in passing and their poetry hasn’t survived. Interestingly, Muhammad al-Idrisi mentions that women who were intelligent often took female lovers because they didn’t want to “submit to the wishes of men”. It also seems that Ottoman Hamams or bathhouses became quite an attraction for ladies to see their female lovers.
So much so that orthodox Muslims took the matter to the Sultan who appointed guards to some bathhouses. Although, I can’t imagine it was very effective since the guards were men. So, how exactly did homosexuality become so common in a society where it was outright forbidden?
There’s various ideas on how early Muslims reacted to homosexuality. One idea is that homosexuality was already quite common in some of the areas that Muslims conquered such as Iran. Additionally, Muslims started studying Greek philosophy which clearly had homoerotic themes so, Islamic philosophy and in particular poetry helped normalize these ideas.
Credibility is lent to this idea by the fact that most pre-Islamic Arabic poetry used metaphors involving female lovers and not male lovers but slowly poetry began to shift toward male lover metaphors. For more credibility, we can also see that when discussing homosexuality in the medieval Islamic World, there’s a huge emphasis on people’s passive and active roles during intercourse just like there was in ancient Greece. We also can not put aside the impact that gender-based segregation in the Islamic world must’ve had on the development of homosexuality as a necessity.
While homosexuality was quite common, pre-marital heterosexual intercourse or *zina* doesn’t seem to be that common. This was certainly what al-Jahiz had in mind when he wrote that homosexuality came to the Islamic world from Khorasan when during the Abbasid Revolution, their commander Abu Muslim forbade his men from having contact with women. Now, while it was normalized, it was still criminalized.
In early history, we do find examples of people being punished for homosexuality but later on, these examples become increasingly rare. As a result, the Islamic World developed, as Stephen Murray calls it, the will not to know. It became an open secret.
You could have sex with a person of the same gender but. . .
let’s not talk about it. Now, a lot of people think that the Ottoman Empire decriminalised homosexual acts in 1858. That’s not really true.
Suleiman the Magnificence’s lawcode had actually criminalised it but the punishment was mostly just a fine. This stands in stark contrast to Europe where in England and Germany, the punishment at the time was death. This was also the era when female characters in theater were played by young boys in Elizabethan England.
The same was true for most of the rest of the Islamic World. However, like I mentioned, charges were usually not brought up against anyone in the Islamic World. This was because you need witnesses to prosecute someone and if an act was committed in private, then technically, you couldn’t be prosecuted for it.
So, in practice, sodomy was okay in private. But then again, most things are legal if no one catches you. The 1858 penal (hehe) code didn’t mention homosexual acts in private.
It only mentioned performing indecent acts in public, which it made illegal. So, that’s where the misconception comes from. So this brings us to the question, what changed?
I mean, of course, today, the Islamic world isn’t exactly considered friendly to homosexuality. Even if homosexuality in the Islamic World still exists, and it certainly does, it’s not as open as it used to be. Poets don’t openly talk about their male lovers anymore.
In fact, the modern editions of medieval poems and stories that had a lot of homoerotic themes, such as Abu Nuwas’ poetry and the Arabian Nights, are now published after heavy censorship. This change almost seems to be overnight. As with all sociopolitical changes, it’s a little tough to pinpoint the timeline and the reasons.
The transition happened roughly in the five decades around the 1900s, from the 1870s to the 1920s. We know that even in the first half of the 19th century, people were writing about homosexuality. A Moroccan writer who visited Paris, for instance, shows his surprise at how all flirtation, romance and courtship is reserved only for women.
In the second half of the 19th century, most of the Islamic World was under foreign rule and so, Muslim Scholars began to think that this was because we had strayed from God’s path and hence, we had lost His favor. So, many reformist and revivalist movements began to appear and gain power. We saw the Deobandi Movement in India, the Salafi or Wahaabi movement in Arabia etc.
These movements gained influence and were able to push for stricter punishments for Homosexuality. These punishments were, frankly, less in line with the norms of the Islamic World than they were with Victorian England. Certainly, Victorian values did influence this shift in Islamic values.
Credibility is lent to this idea by the fact that even the Hindus of India, the people who wrote the Kamasutra and drew this, were against homosexual relationships by the 1920s. See you next time. Don’t forget to subscribe and press the bell icon.
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