The assumption that it is unproblematic to speak of either tolerance or intolerance
of homosexuality in the premodern Middle East would seem to derive
from the assumption that homosexuality is a self-evident fact about the human
world to which a particular culture reacts with a certain degree of tolerance
or repression. From this perspective, writing the history of homosexuality
is seen as analogous to writing, say, the history of women. One assumes
that the concept “homosexual,” like the concept “woman,” is shared across
historical periods, and that what varies and may be investigated historically is
merely the changing cultural (popular, scientific, legal, etc.) attitude toward
such people. In contrast to this “essentialist” view, a number of anthropologists,
sociologists, and historians, inspired in the main by the late French philosopher
Michel Foucault, have recently emphasized the “constructed,” or
historically conditioned, nature of our modern sexual categories. They claim
that the concept of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) was developed in
Europe in the late nineteenth century, and that though its meaning may
overlap with earlier concepts such as “sodomite” or “invert,” it is not, strictly
speaking, synonymous with these. For example, Foucault stressed that the
term “sodomite” applied to the perpetrator of an act; someone who was
tempted to commit sodomy but refrained out of moral or religious considerations
was thus not a sodomite. By contrast, the category “homosexual”
would include someone who has the inclination, even if it is not translated
into action.16 On this account, homosexuality is no more a synonym for
sodomy than heterosexuality is equivalent to fornication.
Foucault’s “constructionist” claim has inspired much recent work in the
history of homosexuality, but it has also provoked sometimes heated “essentialist”
rejoinders. It is generally acknowledged that the term “homosexualität”
was coined in the late 1860s by the Austro-Hungarian writer Karl
Maria Kertbeny, and that the first English equivalent first appeared in print
some twenty years later. “Essentialists” insist that though the term “homosexuality”
was new, the concept was not. Rejecting Foucault’s claim of
conceptual discontinuity, they believe that the new termcorresponds in meaning
to earlier terms such as the medieval Latin sodomia or the classical Arabic
liwa¯t.
The adjudication of the dispute between constructionists and essentialists
should of course be based on a careful investigation of the historical evidence.
To avoid prejudging the issue, close attention will have to be paid to the premodern—
in this case Arabic—terms and phrases used in various contexts to
designate acts and actors that we would be inclined to call “homosexual.”
Only then will it be possible to determine whether such terms and phrases are
equivalent in meaning to the English term “homosexual.” Unfortunately,
modern scholars are often not so careful. For instance, one recent author
translates the Arabic medical term ubnah as “homosexuality,” even though he
himself acknowledges that the term only applied to the male who desired to
be anally penetrated.18 A man who regularly anally penetrated other men was
not thought to have ubnah but would presumably be deemed a “homosexual”
today. The two terms are simply not synonymous. Recent general histories
of homosexuality find a “disparity” between the proclaimed ideals and
actual behavior of some Islamic scholars who, on the one hand, condemned
“homosexuality” but, on the other, wrote “strongly homoerotic poetry.”19
What Islamic scholars condemned was not “homosexuality” but liwa¯t., that is,
anal intercourse between men. Writing a love poem of a male youth would
simply not fall under the juridical concept of liwa¯t..
What such examples show is that care should be taken before translating
as “homosexual” any Arabic term attested in the texts. The possibility at issue
is precisely whether pre-nineteenth-century Arab-Islamic culture lacked the
concept of homosexuality altogether, and operated instead with a set of concepts
(like ubnah or liwa¯t.) each of which pick out some of the acts and actors
we might call “homosexual” but which were simply not seen as instances of
one overarching phenomenon. In the course of this study I hope to show that
this was indeed the case. I argue that distinctions not captured by the concept
of “homosexuality” were all-important from the perspective of the culture of
the period. One such distinction is that between the “active” and the “passive”
partner in a homosexual encounter—these were typically not conceptualized
or evaluated in the same way. Another distinction is that between passionate
infatuation (ishq) and sexual lust—emphasizing this distinction was
important for those who would argue for the religious permissibility of the
passionate love of boys. A third distinction centers on exactly what sexual acts
were involved—Islamic law prescribed severe corporal or capital punishment
for anal intercourse between men, but regarded, say, kissing, fondling, or
non-anal intercourse as less serious transgressions.
