Homosexuality in the Islamic World | Al Muqaddimah

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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