Sahar Amer. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 18, Issue 2, May 2009.
If the absence of a specific terminology to denote lesbianism in medieval Europe seems to have compromised the production of scholarship about same-sex love and desire among women, the existence of the label sahq and sihaqa, musahaqat al-nisa’, or sahiqa (Arabic words for “lesbianism” and “lesbian,” respectively) in medieval Arabic writings did not result in a richer critical production. In fact, if relatively little research has been conducted on female same-sex desire in medieval Europe, even less has been produced on homosexuality in the medieval Arabic literary or Islamicate tradition, and almost no research at all has been done on medieval Arab Islamicate lesbianism. This state of scholarship into alternative sexual practices in the Arab Islamicate world is especially astonishing considering the survival of a noteworthy body of primary texts dealing precisely with this topic. Furthermore, if one broadens the category of medieval Arab lesbian to include women who were “lesbian-like,” as Judith Bennett has invited us to do in our construction of the history of Western female homosexuality, we uncover additional expressions of medieval Arab lesbian presence. For indeed, the cultural and social life of some women in certain medieval Arab courts, including their work and lifestyle, may well unveil unsuspected spaces in which same-sex activities might have occurred. If it is not always clear that these practices could be dubbed lesbian, they may well be considered lesbian-like.
Medieval Arab Lesbians
One might argue that the Arabic terms for “lesbianism” (sahq, sihaq, and sihaqa) and “lesbian” (sahiqa, sahhaqa, and musahiqa) refer primarily to a behavior, an action, rather than an emotional attachment or an identity. The root of these words (s-h-q) means “to pound” (as in spices) or “to rub,” so that lesbians (sahiqat), like the Greek tribades, are literally those who engage in a pounding or rubbing behavior or who make love by pounding or rubbing. In fact, some medieval medical views of lesbianism, reported in the Arabic sexological tradition, point to rubbing as an essential cause of the practice. Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose own daughter was a lesbian, according to medieval Arabic writers, is supposed to have examined his daughter’s labia and surrounding veins and to have concluded that her lesbianism was due to “an itch between the major and minor labia” that could be soothed only by rubbing them against another woman’s labia. Similarly, according to the famous ninth-century Muslim philosopher al-Kindi:
Lesbianism is due to a vapor which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.
In al-Kindi’s view, then, the cause of lesbianism is the heat that is generated in the labia and that can be reduced only through friction and orgasm with another woman. Interestingly, it is only friction between two labia that can cure this condition, since it permits the ejaculation of a cold liquid that calms the original heat; the reduction in heat cannot be achieved through intercourse with a man, since the man’s liquid is hot and, as al-Kindi points out, “heat … cannot be extinguished by heat.”
Foreshadowing the medicahzation of homosexuality in nineteenth-century Europe, lesbianism in the medieval Islamicate medical tradition seems to have already been regarded as a medical category (though not a deviant one) requiring specific treatment, namely, rubbing. In the ninth century some physicians from the Islamicate world thought of lesbianism as an inborn state caused by the mother’s consumption of certain foods that, when passed through the milk during nursing, led to labial itching and lifelong lesbianism. Hence, according to the ninth-century physician Yuhanna ibn Masawayh, known in the medieval European history of science as John Mesue (d. 857), “lesbianism results when a nursing woman eats celery, rocket, melilot leaves and the flowers of a bitter orange tree. When she eats these plants and suckles her child, they will affect the labia of her suckling and generate an itch which the suckling will carry through her future life.” Rubbing is here presented as capable only of relieving, not of curing, the woman; female homosexuality is thus clearly depicted as both innate and lifelong. Such views were standard and were repeated from one century to the next and from one medical treatise on sexualities to the other.
If sahq denotes a behavior both etymologically and medically, culturally speaking and in the context of medieval Arabic literary writings, sahiqat (lesbians) were associated rather with love and devotion, and at times they were even known to form an exclusive and supportive subculture. As a matter of fact, the origin of lesbianism, according to popular anecdotes in the Arabic literary tradition, is regularly traced back forty years before the emergence of male homosexuality to an intercultural, interfaith love affair between an Arab woman and a Christian woman in pre-Islamic Iraq. The earliest extant erotic treatise in Arabic, Jawami al-ladhadha (Encyclopedia of Pleasure), dates to about the end of the tenth century and was written by a certain Abul Hasan Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib. It tells us the story of the first lesbian couple, the enduring love between Hind Bint al-Nu’man, the Christian daughter of the last Lakhmid king of Hira in the seventh century, and Hind Bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah from Yamama in Arabia, known as al-Zarqa’ and reportedly the first lesbian in Arab history:
She [Hind] was so loyal to al-Zarqa’ that when the latter died, she cropped her hair, wore black clothes, rejected worldly pleasures, vowed to God that she would lead an ascetic life until she passed away and, as a result, she built a monastery which was named after her, on the outskirts of Kufa. When she died, she was buried at the monastery gate. Her loyalty was then an example for poets to write about. There are also other women who continued to shed tears on their beloved ones’ graves until they passed away.
Even though it is impossible to ascertain the veracity of this account, the fact that it continued to circulate throughout the Islamicate world is sufficient to demonstrate that lesbianism was thought to be far more than a medical condition and a simple sexual practice. In the Encyclopedia of Pleasure this lesbian love story is praised and presented as evidence of the greater loyalty and devotion that women have for their female partners compared to heterosexual men’s attachment to women. Ibn Nasr cited the following verses written by an unnamed (presumably male) poet about the love of Hind for al-Zarqa’: “O Hind, you are truer to your word than men. / Oh, the difference between your loyalty and theirs!”
If the relationship between Hind and al-Zarqa’ is the one most often cited in the Arabic erotic tradition on lesbianism, it is not the only lesbian relation in Arabic literary history. In fact, in al-Fihrist (The Catalog), al-Nadim (d. ca. 995) listed the names of twelve lesbian couples who were known in the tenth century but about whom nothing else has been preserved. Because al-Nadim lists every Arabic book of which he was aware, we know from his inventory about the existence of twelve books dating before the end of the tenth century devoted to named lesbian couples. (All the titles given are named after characters, presumably the lesbian couples whose story each book tells. Since all Arabic names have specific meanings, I provide in parentheses a translation of some of the more intriguing ones.) These works are the Book of Rihana and Qoronfel (literally, the Book of Basil and Clove); the Book of Ruqayya and Khadija; the Book of Mo’ees and Zakiyya; the Book of Sakina and al-Rabab (of Calm and the Mistress of the Household); the Book of al-Ghatrifa and al-Dhulafa’; the Book of Hind and Bint al-Nu’man (of India and the Daughter of al-Nu’man, undoubtedly the couple described above); the Book of “Abda al-Aqila and Abda al-Ghaddara (of the Wise Slave Girl and the Treacherous Slave Girl); the Book of Lu’lu’a and Shatira; the Book of Najda and Zu’um; the Book of Salma and Su’ad; the Book of Sawab and Surur (of Justice and Happiness); the Book of al-Dahma’ and Ni’ma (of the Dark One and the Gift from God).
In the medieval Arabic literary erotic tradition, as in the Kama-sutra, from which it may have borrowed elements, lesbians are said to have formed groups, to have held meetings, and to have led schools in which they taught other lesbians how best to achieve pleasure. The thirteenth-century Tunisian physician, philosopher, and poet Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Tifashi in his Nuzhat al-albab fi ma la yujad fi kitab (literally, a Promenade of the Hearts in What Does Not Exist in Any Book), for instance, gives some fascinating information about a “lesbian community” and the same-sex teachings of Rose, the head lesbian therein. Similar groups of lesbians are evoked by Leo Africanus, the fifteenth-century traveler from Granada, in his account of female diviners of Fez (in modern Morocco). Interestingly, in his travel narrative written in Italian Leo Africanus described these groups as suhaqiyat, the Arabic word for lesbians.
Al-Tifashi also provided in his Nuzhat al-albab specific examples of the teachings of famous medieval lesbians, notably on the most successful sounds that ought to accompany lesbian sexual practices. He related the following advice given by an experienced lesbian mother to her daughter: “You should snort heartily while wiggling lasciviously.” A bit later in the text al-Tifashi spoke of “wheezing, panting, purring, murmurs, heartbreaking sighs.” The most striking depiction of lesbian sexual practices in al-Tifashi’s Nuzhat al-albab is perhaps his portrayal of lesbian sex, which he dubbed “the saffron massage”:
The tradition between women in the game of love necessitates that the lover places herself above and the beloved underneath—unless the former is too light or the second too developed: and in this case, the lighter one places herself underneath, and the heavier one on top, because her weight will facilitate the rubbing, and will allow the friction to be more effective. This is how they act: the one that must stay underneath lies on her back, stretches out one leg and bends the other while leaning slightly to the side, therefore offering her opening (vagina) wide open: meanwhile, the other lodges her bent leg in her groin, puts the lips of her vagina between the lips that are offered for her, and begins to rub the vagina of her companion in an up and down, and down and up, movement that jerks the whole body. This operation is dubbed “the saffron massage” because this is precisely how one grinds saffron on the cloth when dyeing it. The operation must focus each time on one lip in particular, the right one for example, and then the other: the woman will then slightly change position in order to apply better friction to the left lip … and she does not stop acting in this manner until her desires and those of her partner are fulfilled. I assure you that it is absolutely useless to try to press the two lips together at the same time, because the area from which pleasure comes would then not be exposed. Finally, let us note that in this game the two partners may be aided by a little willow oil, scented with musk.
Needless to say, stories and descriptions such as these are significant for the history of lesbianism, not least because they have few equivalents in medieval European literature. Arab lesbians were both named and visible in medieval Arabic literature. Moreover, and in contrast to their status in the medieval West in the same period, for example, Arab lesbians were not considered guilty of a “silent sin,” and there is no clear evidence that their “crime” was punished by death. In fact, lesbianism in the medieval Islamicate literary world was a topic deemed worthy of discussion and a lifestyle worthy of emulation. I do not wish to imply here that medieval Arabic literature on sexuality was either prolesbian or protofeminist—far from it. The Arabic writings that have survived focus on men much more than on women; they remain for the most part phallocentric and ultimately reflect a male perspective. Whenever they are mentioned in the erotic literary tradition, lesbians occupy only one chapter. Even the Encyclopedia of Pleasure spoke much more loudly about men and male homosexuality. Nevertheless, the material on lesbianism in the Arabic literary Middle Ages, while undoubtedly a smaller proportion in the overall economy of medieval Arabic sexological writings and at times even contradictory, is significant and merits investigation.
The surprisingly positive valuation of lesbianism and homosexuality in medieval Arabic literary writings is most likely a consequence of the general commendation of eroticism and (hetero)sexual practice in Arab and Islami-cate discourses. Not only is sexuality explicitly celebrated in a large number of medieval Arabic scientific and literary texts, but sexuality is positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In contrast to medieval Christianity, for example, sex is not a sin in Islam, and heterosexual desire (whether in marriage or concubinage) is viewed as both licit and desirable. The Qur’an itself describes Paradise in sexual terms and proclaims the primacy of physical sensual pleasures.
It is worth noting that the principal and most vehemently condemned sexual sin in the theological Islamic discourse is adultery (zina) and not homosexuality (liwat). In Islam zina is defined very specifically as vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman who is neither his lawful wife nor his concubine. Much more than same-sex desire, zina is emphatically and unambiguously condemned in both the Qur’an and the Sunnah (the early Islamic legal tradition) and served traditionally as the focus of Islamic jurisprudence. Interestingly, the interest in zina may have encouraged, at least partly, the acceptance of liwat in Islamicate societies. This is what ibn Falita, the fourteenth-century author of Rushd al-labib ila mu asharat al-habib (An Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Art of Coition), suggested in his chapter on lesbianism: “Know that lesbianism insures against social disgrace, while coition is forbidden except through marriage.” This perspective is so embedded in medieval Arabic writings on homosexuality that Everett Rowson, the leading scholar of medieval Islamicate homosexuality, has concluded that “because of the cult of female virginity and the dependence of a man’s honor on the chastity of his female relations, heterosexual philanderers were in fact playing a more dangerous game than lutis [homosexual men], and an argument could be made for a shift over time in the weight of societal disapproval towards the former and away from the latter.”
Because the Qur’an did not prescribe a specific punishment for homosexuals, and despite general agreement among Islamic jurisprudents that homosexuality was one of the major sins (kaba’ir), there existed no consensus regarding its punishment, which varied according to the traditional schools of Islamic legal thought (madhahib). The Maliki school (which was the strictest one in this regard and followed especially in North Africa during the medieval era) considered liwat to be more serious than zina and thus deserving the harshest of hadd penalties (those defined in the Qur’an and the Sunnah and not left to the judge’s discretion), namely, stoning to death for both partners. This school is said, however, to have permitted homosexual practices between a man and his male slaves. The Shafi’i school (followed especially in Egypt and Syria) assimilated zina and liwat and thus distinguished between married and unmarried homosexuals and between active and passive partners. It condemned partners accordingly to be stoned to death (if married) or lashed (if unmarried). The most “liberal” school, the Hanafi (the school associated with Iraq and with the Persian- and Turkish-speaking regions of the Islamic world), prescribed a ta ‘zir punishment, that is, a discretionary penalty aimed to punish, reform, and deter others and that amounted to no more than ten lashes and a term of imprisonment. It must be noted that all these punishments addressed liwat understood only as anal penetration by a man. Kissing, caressing, tafkhidh (intercrural intercourse), and the like, while considered reprehensible, were technically not liwat and thus were not subject to these penalties.
Though also considered a sin, sahq was generally deemed to be a less serious offense than liwat and the least serious form of zina, since it did not involve penetration by a man. It was hence given a lesser punishment than either liwat or zina, although its sentence varied also among different jurisprudents. While some theologians prescribed one hundred lashes, the eleventh-century theologian from Cordoba, ibn Hazm, prescribed the ta’zir punishment (ten lashes, and it remains unclear whether a prison term was also required or not), and others did not penalize it at all. In most legal compendia of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) sahq is not even regularly addressed.
Sexual Categorization and Sexual Deviance in the East and in the West
From the existence of a category of lesbianism in medieval Arabic writings and from the information gathered about Arabic (literary) lesbian subcultures, we must not rush to equate the medieval Arabic Islamicate notions of female-female sexuality with modern Western notions of lesbianism and sexual identity, for the very categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern Western concepts, as many scholars have demonstrated, and do not have parallels in the medieval Arabic tradition. Even if medieval Arabic erotic writings are obsessed with identifying and defining all forms of sexual practices and thus regularly use a rich and precise vocabulary, including the terms sahq (lesbianism), sahiqat (lesbians), mutazarrifat (elegant courtly ladies-lovers), haba’ib (beloveds), liwat (active male homosexuality), luti (active male homosexual), ubnah (passive male homosexuality), ma’bun (passive male homosexual), qatim (passive male homosexual in Andalusian dialect), tafkhidh (intercrural intercourse), bidal or mubadala (taking turns in active and passive homosexuality), as well as nisa’ mudhakkarat (masculinized women) and rijal mu’annathin (feminized men) or mukhannath (male effeminate), no medieval Arabic word existed for the sort of bisexuality that was considered as the unmarked, most common form of sexual practice, for heterosexuality, or even for sexuality.
The contemporary Arabic word jins, used today to refer to sexuality, did not acquire this connotation until the early twentieth century. Up to that time, jins (derived from the Greek genos) denoted only type, kind, and ethnolinguistic origin. Its connotation of biological sex, national origin, and citizenship is a modern development, resulting from Arabic translations of Freud in the 1950s and of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the 1990s. Interestingly, the impact of these Western medical and theoretical ideas about (homo)sexuality on the Arab world has led to the replacement of the medieval Arabic terms liwat and, to a lesser extent, sahq with mithliyyah (sameness) to mean homosexuality and ghayriyyah (differentness) to mean heterosexuality and even more recently with al-shudhudh al-jinsi (sexually rare, unusual, or odd) as an equivalent for the Western concept of queer. The notions of sexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality as sexual deviance seem thus to be part of the Western imperial legacy to the Arab world today. Ironically, and despite its promise of “modernizing” and “liberating,” the hegemony of the Western cultural and intellectual capital has ended by erasing the more extensive and flexible medieval Arabic model of sexuality, declared it “deviant,” and imposed instead a binary view of sexuality onto the Arab world.
Medieval Arab Lesbian-like Women
Any attempt to trace the literary history of medieval Arab lesbianism must extend beyond the spaces where Arab lesbians were linguistically named and their sexual practices explicitly depicted. In parallel to the overt descriptions of lesbian sexual practices in medieval Arabic writings (erotic, theological, or medical) one also encounters numerous examples of eroticized gender bending in Arabic literature. Tales of cross-dressed heroines, including stories of female warriors and Amazons, poems describing slave girls dressed as male cupbearers, little-known sufi (mystical) rituals, the ambiguous use of masculine pronouns to refer to the beloved in the courtly lyric, and even the social practices of some women in Islamicate courts are some of the unrecognized spaces where expressions of homoeroticism in the medieval Arabic tradition may well have occurred. Many of the same cultural elements have been identified by modern critics as key narrative strategies for the exploration of same-sex desire in medieval European writings and, accordingly, have been dubbed “second-degree homosexuality.” (24) Yet the same practices have failed to draw a similar attention from Arabists, even though they permeate medieval Arabic writings.
One could argue that the study of medieval European homosexuality had to resort to the exploration of second-degree homosexuality only because overt depictions of same-sex desire are lacking. The situation of Arabic literature, as we have seen above, is quite different. If female homoeroticism is explicitly identified and articulated in medieval Arabic writings, one might argue, why search for indirect discourses? I would like to posit that an exploration of the multiple spaces in which expressions, both explicit and implicit, of same-sex desire occurred in medieval Arabic writings leads to a richer understanding of same-sex sexuality in the Islamicate world. Such an approach is useful because it gives us a glimpse of the complex and at times contradictory currents that circulated beneath the literary representations of lesbianism in the medieval Islamicate world. Because implicit expressions of lesbianism in medieval Arabic literature have not been explored, I propose some directions for future research that I hope will enrich, expand, and complicate our conception of female homoeroticism in the medieval Islamicate world.
Arabists can indeed fruitfully heed Judith Bennett’s call to broaden the investigation of lesbianism to include “women whose lives might have particularly offered opportunities for same-sex love; women who resisted norms of feminine behavior based on heterosexual marriage; women who lived in circumstances that allowed them to nurture and support other women.” If these are the women whom Bennett dubs lesbian-like, this is how she describes the “range of practices” that such women might engage in and that scholars might search for:
If women’s primary emotions were directed toward other women, regardless of their own sexual practices, perhaps their affection was lesbian-like. If women lived in single-sex communities, their life circumstances might be usefully conceptualized as lesbian-like. If women resisted marriage or, indeed, just did not marry, whatever the reason, their singleness can be seen as lesbian-like. If women dressed as men, whether in response to saintly voices, in order to study, in pursuit of certain careers, or just to travel with male lovers, their cross-dressing was arguably lesbian-like. And if women worked as prostitutes or otherwise flouted norms of sexual propriety, we might see their deviance as lesbian-like.
Bennett’s category of lesbian-like has many advantages, not least that of being more specifically sexual than Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum,” which included all woman-identified experiences. It also possesses undeniable value for the study of literary Arab lesbians in the Middle Ages because the range of practices that Bennett describes permeates much of medieval Arabic writings. Diverse as literary medieval Arab lesbians may be, many displayed primary emotional attachments to other women; most lived in exclusively female quarters, cross-dressed, or at times prostituted themselves; and some were surprisingly autonomous from male control. The literary representations of such characters in medieval Arabic texts, while not explicitly lesbian, may certainly be considered lesbian-like. The study of such characters is pertinent, therefore, to the history of medieval Arab lesbianism.
In the caliphate court of ninth-century Baghdad, for example, the tradition of ghulamiyyat, slave girls who cross-dressed as boys (at times even with painted mustaches) may be an unsuspected space in which same-sex attachments could have taken place. This courtly tradition, which soon became the cultural fashion eagerly imitated even by upper-class Baghdadi women, is said to have been launched by Zubayda, wife of Harun al-Rashid and mother of Caliph al-Amin (and patron of Abu Nuwas [d. 814], one of the most famous early Arab poets of male homoeroticism), in an effort to deter her son from his homosexual inclinations:
Zubaida, noticing her son’s marked taste for these eunuchs and the ascendance they were gaining over him, chose young girls remarkable for the elegance of their figures and the charm of their faces. She had them wear turbans and gave them clothes woven and embroidered in the royal factories, and had them fix their hair with fringes and lovelocks and draw it back at the nape of the neck after the fashion of young men. She dressed them in close-fitting wide-sleeved robes called qaba and wide belts which showed off their waists and their curves. Then she sent them off to her son. Amin, as they filed into his presence, was enchanted. He was captivated by their looks and appeared with them in public. It was then that the fashion for having young slave girls with short hair, wearing qaba and belts, became established at all levels of society. They were called “page-girls.”
While some critics have pointed out that this prevalent practice of cross-dressed women ought not be interpreted as evidence of medieval Arab lesbianism since their role was to compete with boys for the attention of men, we may say that such cross-dressing can nevertheless be considered lesbian-like. After all, the ghulamiyyat tradition, especially once it spread to the urban milieu of ninth-century Baghdad, may have been a liberating fashion, at least for some medieval Arab lesbians who might have used it to symbolize their dissociation from other female gender expectations.
Instances of female cross-dressing are not only present in the social history of the Islamicate world but are abundant also in the medieval Arabic literary tradition. In fact, the poetry of Abu Nuwas boasts an entire genre devoted to the ghulamiyyat in which the beloved is a woman dressed as a man. Similarly, the tales of Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights), although difficult to date, and the Islamic and pre-Islamic siyar sha biyya (Arabic folk romances), which survive from at least the early eleventh century on, offer countless examples of women warriors and amazons. In A Thousand and One Nights some of the most celebrated examples include the characters of Abriza, whose story is embedded in the tale of ‘Umar al-Nu’man, Princesses Boudour and Hayat el-Nefous in the story of Qamar al-Zaman and the Princess Boudour, or the island of Waq, which is inhabited exclusively by women and depicted in the tale of Hasan al-Basra. In the Arabic folk romances representative examples of cross-dressed women warriors and Amazons include Princess ‘Ain al-Hayat in Qissat Firuz Shah (The Story of the Shah Firuz); the characters of Queen al-Rabab, al-Ghayda’, Ghamra, and Nitra in Sirat Antar (The Romance of Antar); the characters of Fatima, Aluf, al-Samta’, Nura, and Zananir in Sirat Dhat al-Himma (The Epic of Dhat al-Himma); Princess Turban in Sirat Hamza al-Bahlawan (The Romance of Hamza al-Bahlawan); and the female army of Munyat al-Huda and the all-female Isles of Waq al-Waq in Sirat Hayy ben Yaqzan (The Epic of Hayy ben Yaqzan).
The presence of one or more cross-dressed heroines in each of these texts gives rise to a multitude of ambiguous situations, while the women’s frequent obsession with warrior activities and their aversion or categorical refusal to marry (often until defeated in combat) invite an exploration and an interrogation of gender, sexual hierarchy, and power relations. In addition, if some of the female characters in Dhat al-Himma may be considered lesbian-like because of their voiced lack of interest in men, some can certainly be viewed as lesbians, especially when they express their marked preference for women. Aluf, for instance, asserts: “I do neither long for marriage nor for men, but my heart has an inclination for the ladies.” Similarly, Nura is said to “love women and detest men,” while Zananir “does not even feel desire towards young men.” Even though almost all the female characters in these popular Arabic epics eventually end up marrying men, these Arabic texts betray an ambivalence toward heterosexuality as the only form of sexual relations for women and portray lesbianism as an alternative if not viable parallel form of sexual practice. Because of the sheer length of these Arabic texts (estimated to be thousands of folios for popular romances alone), critical work on these stories has been limited to typological surveys of themes and motifs. Only recently have several young scholars begun to reread these famous Arabic epics and various tales from A Thousand and One Nights and to uncover the endless possibilities of gender bending and gender trouble that these texts invite through their literary depictions of cross-dressing and of lesbian-like attachments.
Cross-dressing is not the only narrative strategy that permits the exploration of second-degree homosexuality in the medieval Islamicate tradition. The life of mystics constitutes another promising source for the exploration of same-sex desire and intimate alternative attachments in the medieval Islamicate world. Indeed, in the eleventh century the meditative practice among Sufi mystics of nazar, “the contemplation of a beautiful pubescent boy, who was considered a ‘witness’ (shahid) to the beauty of God and the glory of His creation,” gave rise to yet another perhaps controversial space for the potential development of same-sex conduct. Nazar often became associated with male homoerotic sentiments despite the attempt by some schools of thought, Shafi’i in particular, to distinguish between gazing on boys with lust, which was sinful, and gazing without lust, which was permitted. While a comparatively small proportion of information has survived about women Sufis generally (their stories were simply added as appendices to biographies of male saints), no information has survived documenting the existence of a parallel nazar practice among female Sufis. Yet despite the fact that the nazar question has been formulated exclusively from a male point of view in the Islamic tradition, it is not impossible that such a tradition was also observed among female Muslim mystics. If so, it could constitute another heretofore unexplored space for the development of lesbian or lesbian-like attachments. More research needs to be conducted on the practices of medieval Muslim Sufi women to reveal the details of their mystical experiences and visions.
One of the most significant cultural practices in the medieval Arab Islamicate world that holds great promise for the study of lesbian-like attachments is undoubtedly that of zarf, a tradition that has been commonly translated as “refinement,” “stylishness,” or “courtliness.” It is a cultural practice that began in Medina in Arabia during the pre- and early Islamic eras, then spread from there to the urban centers of the Islamicate world from east to west. This tradition, followed by men and women alike, centered on the promotion of a nexus of behaviors that involved an overarching sophistication in clothing, food, language, and home decoration as well as an intellectual atmosphere in which participants engaged in debates related to love, recited poetry, sang, danced, and told stories. This tradition encouraged the development and circulation of the bawdy literature of mujun (libertinage), which even included treatises on copulation (kutub al-bah). Women played a prominent role in the development of zarf by holding literary salons to which they invited not only members of the aristocracy but also the increasingly wealthy bourgeoisie, enriched by trade and international commerce. If the activities in which these women engaged cannot always be specifically labeled lesbian, the lifestyles that they led, their surprising independence from male control, and the androgynous nature of the poetry they transmitted may certainly be considered lesbian-like.
Much has been written on the development of zarf throughout the Isl-amicate world, and much survives from the centuries in which the practice flourished. The most important source of our knowledge of medieval Arab courtly practices remains undoubtedly the Kitab al-zarf wa al-zurafa’ (Book of Refinement and Refined People), also known as the Kitab al-muwashsha’ (literally, the Varicolored Book), written by a tenth-century grammarian from Baghdad, Mohammed ibn al-Washsha’ (d. 936). In it he describes at length how the zurafas (refined courtly men) and mutazarrifat (refined courtly ladies, but a term also used for lesbians) adorned their homes with poetry, which was sculpted on their doors, windows, ceilings, beds, tables, and sofas, or decorated pillows, curtains, rings, shoes, belts, and other items of clothing with poetic verses that were luxuriously embroidered with gold and precious stones.
The case of Wallada (d. 1087 or 1091) deserves mention in this regard. She was a daughter of Muhammad III (ruled 1024-25), also known as al-Mustakfi, die caliph of Cordoba (the capital of Islamic al-Andalus in modern Spain). More important, Wallada unquestionably stands as the archetype of the practitioner of zarf and thus also of the unparalleled refinement of the Andalusian aristocracy in the eleventh century and of women’s unsuspected sexual freedom. Hostess of a literary salon in eleventh-century Cordoba, Wallada defied convention, as she is said to have openly entertained two male lovers (Ibn Zaydun and Ibn ‘Abdus) as well as one female lover (Mohja). She had the following two verses embroidered in gold thread on her coat: “By God, I am fit for greatness, and stride along with great pride” and “I allow my lover to reach my cheek, and I grant my kiss to him who craves it. ” Although Wallada uses here nouns and pronouns that are grammatically masculine (“my lover” and “to him”) and although these have been read as referring to her active (heterosexual) love life, I would like to propose that the use of the masculine may simply be part of the literary conventions of the time and that her verses therefore need not be read exclusively as heterosexual ones. After all, addressing the female beloved as male was part and parcel of the Arabic literary tradition. Wallada’s famous embroidered lines, if not specifically or exclusively lesbian, can no longer be read as exclusively heterosexual either and may be more fruitfully considered lesbian-like. Her lifestyle, which was part and parcel of the development of the zarf tradition in medieval al-Andalus, makes Wallada one among the multiple aristocratic mutaztzrrifat of the Is-lamicate world. Evidently, in the medieval Islamicate world courtliness and courtly love were not exclusively heterosexual practices.
Most of what we know about medieval women and the practice of zarf concerns not aristocratic women like Wallada but rather slave girls (jawari) and especially singing slave girls (qaynas). Slave singers, despite or rather because of their social status as slaves, played a significant role in the medieval Islamicate world not only because they were freer to express themselves (in contrast to freeborn women, who were veiled and kept outside the public sphere) but also because of their superior intellectual skills and extraordinary beauty. Freed slaves could sometimes achieve lucrative careers; some in fact rose to the top levels of society, marrying caliphs and other rulers.
The tradition of jawari and of qaynas in particular may be considered as yet another significant sociocultural space in which Arab lesbians may have thrived and Arab lesbian-like intimate attachments may have flourished. Some of the most successful singing slave girls left traces in the historical records of the period. A few were prominent poets of the Abbasid period in Basra (in modern Iraq) and considered the most trustworthy transmitters of the oral repertoire as well as the most accomplished performers and entertainers. Occasionally, they even had their own singing schools and owned slaves themselves. The best known of these slave girls remain undoubtedly ‘Inan (d. 841), Fadl (d. 875), and ‘Arib (d. 890), all of whom were cited by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (897-972), the tenth-century Abbasid historian, poet, and musicologist, in his Kitab al-aghani (Book of Songs). (40) Although none of these three famous qaynas was explicitly referred to as lesbian (sahiqa) in the surviving sources, they were labeled mutazarrifat, that very term for elegant courtly ladies who practiced zarf and who sometimes displayed lesbian-like characteristics. Additional research into the lives and production of qaynas could reveal the extent to which their erotic practices and the verses they left behind reflect not only heterosexual relations but also same-sex attachments. If so, qaynas, like the cross-dressed heroines from A Thousand and One Nights or Amazon warriors from Arab epics, could be some of the forgotten representatives of lesbian or lesbian-like desire in the medieval Islamicate world.
Lesbianism in the Medieval Islamicate Tradition: Modern Implications
Perhaps not surprisingly and given the sociopolitical climate in the Islamicate world today, a significant number of primary sources, whether composed in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, that have survived documenting medieval same-sex practices between women or lesbian-like attachments are today silenced or censored. Most of the medieval erotic treatises remain unedited, unpublished, and difficult to obtain not only in manuscript form but also in libraries and bookstores across the Arab world. Indeed, very few of them have been examined by scholars either within or outside the Islamicate world. One of the main challenges of my research into medieval Arab lesbianism has been precisely that of locating and obtaining copies of relevant material. Understanding these difficulties and appreciating who is permitted to have access to Arabic materials on alternative sexuality provide a glimpse of the potential for political and social subversion that these documents undeniably possess.
I would like to give one example of the current state of the earliest erotic treatise in Arabic, the Jawami’ al-ladhdha, or Encyclopedia of Pleasure. I became aware of the existence of an Arabic edition of this text in 2003 (it was published in 2002) but acquired it only through the intercession of a male Arab friend who was able to buy the book in secret at a bookshop in Cairo. When I had tried to buy the book myself one summer earlier, the owner of the largest (and supposedly most liberal) bookstore in Egypt told me that although he had copies of the text in his back room, he could not sell it to, in his words, “a proper Muslim woman such as yourself.” At the same time that I discovered the existence of this Arabic edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure. I found out that it was published as part of a series entitled Adab al-jins ‘inda al-Arab (The Erotic Writings of the Arabs), which to date includes half a dozen titles on Arabic eroticism published in Damascus, Syria, by a press called the Arabic Book Press (Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi). Still today, several years after the press’s first publication (2002), many of these Arabic erotic treatises are more widely available in specialized bookstores in the West, such as London and Paris, than in the Arab world.
The initial moment of celebration at acquiring the Arabic edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure was quickly tempered when I actually examined the Arabic text. The name of the press had been carefully blacked out, as was the date of publication. The entire book was printed in black ink on white paper, and prints of large trees in red ink had been superimposed over the text. Most likely this design represented a cheap attempt at avoiding censorship by making quick identification of the book’s subject matter difficult, but it also made the reading of the entire book quite challenging. The superimposition of image over text and of red over black ink over white paper literalized for me the multiple layers of veils that had covered the Arabic erotic text over time. In addition, the Arabic edition remained incomplete at best, most likely because it was based on a single, unidentified, and probably extremely defective manuscript. Several of the chapters found in the English translation, particularly those dealing with same-sex relations, had been left out of the Arabic edition. Still today, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure remains known primarily through an English translation, a 1977 Canadian PhD dissertation by Salah Addin Khawwam, translated by Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam and published by Aleppo Publishing in Toronto. The existence of this published translation should not deceive us into thinking that this text is readily available even in English. Quite the opposite: Aleppo Publishing has since gone out of business; none of the translators is to be found in any scholarly listings or directories; no information is given on the university where the dissertation was submitted and defended; the book is utterly unavailable for purchase anywhere; and it can only be consulted through two known copies, one at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the other at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
In 2001 the Egyptian artist Ghada Amer (who is my sister) created a sculpture inspired from the medieval Arabic text and entitled it The Encyclopedia of Pleasure (Fig. 1). This sculpture is the first and only work in any media, as far as I know, devoted exclusively to this groundbreaking Arabic text. Her sculpture is an unprecedented and perhaps subversive gesture by an Arab woman to save from oblivion this essential text and, in broader terms, to break the silence imposed upon female eroticism in the Arab world and to resurrect a frank and nonjudgmental discussion around women’s sexuality that until today continues to be absent in the East.
Yet the difficulty of obtaining access to medieval Arabic writings on alternative sexualities should not be understood to be a problem specific to the Arab world; it manifests itself also in the West, though under a different guise. To give but one example, the only English translation of al-Tifashi’s Nuzhat al-albab is called The Delight of Hearts and was translated by Edward A. Lacey from a French translation by Rene Khawam rather than from the Arabic original. The translation has ended up ghettoizing this important Arabic text. Even though it is almost certain that this medieval Arabic work was addressed to a much wider audience, its contemporary English translation is published by an exclusively male gay press called the Gay Sunshine Press and thus has a limited circulation and is likely to be known primarily to a gay audience. Moreover, Lacey has taken the liberty to excise from his work the chapter on lesbianism as well as other sections dealing with heterosexuality because of budgetary concerns and press policy, which dictates that Gay Sunshine Press address exclusively male gay literature. The manipulations that Nuzhat al-albab has thus undergone have transformed this important text almost beyond recognition. Not only has this English translation utterly erased those lesbian voices that were audible in the medieval Arabic tradition, but it has also categorized sexuality in ways that were certainly not present in the medieval text. Translating only the sections on gay men’s sexuality has imposed a modern and Western perspective onto the medieval Arabic work that places sexual desires and behaviors much more on a continuum.
There is no denying the extraordinary wealth of material documenting same-sex love and desire between women in the medieval Islamicate world. The medieval Arabic tradition of eroticism is particularly noteworthy because it is far more progressive than is commonly imagined, given the current reappropriation of Islam by fundamentalist political regimes. It brings to light a much richer understanding of sexualities than is imagined to be possible in lands with a majority Muslim population. The texts that have survived are especially valuable because they paint medieval Arab and Muslim women with unexpected agency over their social and sexual lives and have thus the potential to become powerful models of resistance for contemporary Arab and Muslim women. Recovering the evidence of lesbianism and of lesbian-like attachments in the medieval Arabic tradition speaks thus to the emancipatory possibilities of the history of sexuality. Moreover, the medieval Arabic practices of homosexuality and lesbianism also challenge contemporary Western and Eastern (Arabic) assumptions about gender and, in particular, the binary constructions of masculinity and femininity. It is thus significant for the cross-cultural history of sexuality and holds great promise in redressing what Bennett has termed “the heterosexist bias of history.”