Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (43 page)
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Authors: Khaled El-Rouayheb
BOOK: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800
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This stands in sharp contrast to literary descriptions of, or allusions to, sexual intercourse, where the masculine, active partner establishes his domination over the feminine and passive. The inversion of roles extends to the poetic imagery; in love poetry it was the beloved whose eyes were like swords, wreaking havoc with the lover and setting his interior aflame.
166
It is instructive to compare this with the defamatory passages cited in the beginning of chapter I, in which the penis penetrates and ravishes the receptive partner like a weapon. Sexual roles as a rule mirrored nonsexual relations of power, the sexually dominant (the penetrator) also being the socially dominant (the man, the husband, the master). Love, on the other hand, tended to overturn the established social order, causing a master to be enthralled by his slave, and a prominent Muslim scholar like Muhammad al-ʿUrd
i (later to become Mufti in Aleppo) to be captivated by a Christian boy working in a wine shop. In the words of the scholar Hasan al-Bu
ri
ni
:
166
It is instructive to compare this with the defamatory passages cited in the beginning of chapter I, in which the penis penetrates and ravishes the receptive partner like a weapon. Sexual roles as a rule mirrored nonsexual relations of power, the sexually dominant (the penetrator) also being the socially dominant (the man, the husband, the master). Love, on the other hand, tended to overturn the established social order, causing a master to be enthralled by his slave, and a prominent Muslim scholar like Muhammad al-ʿUrd
i (later to become Mufti in Aleppo) to be captivated by a Christian boy working in a wine shop. In the words of the scholar Hasan al-Burini:Strange affairs result from love, for in it the brave is cowardly, the rational bewildered, the patient anxious, and the hard-hearted tearful; its phases are wondrous and its vicissitudes strange; it does not follow the rules of analogy, nor accord with the expectations of people.
167
There is abundant evidence to suggest that many individuals actually experienced passionate love as an addictive submission to a beloved who would otherwise occupy a lower status than themselves. The historian Rad
i
al-Di
n ibn al-H
anbali
related how a merchant from Jerusalem became so enamored of a youth from Aleppo that he would lick up the latter’s spittle from the ground and swallow it, saying: “I am afflicted with this and I am sixty years of age; what is this condition?”
168
The poet Abu
Bakr al-ʿUmari
reported an incident that took place in Aleppo during his lifetime: a man met his death when his beloved boy asked him to prove his love by jumping into the moat surrounding the citadel of the city.
169
Abū al-Su
ʿ
ūd ibn al-Kātib (d. 1646/7), the son of a wealthy merchant of Damascus, met an equally tragic end. According to the biographer Muhibbī,he fell in love with a boy who behaved toward him in a very quarrelsome and accusing manner. The unhappy lover eventually committed suicide by taking an overdose of opium. Muhibbī added that the story was well known, indeed proverbial, among the people of Damascus in his day, and that it started a trend of similar suicides in the city.
170
ial-Din ibn al-Hanbalirelated how a merchant from Jerusalem became so enamored of a youth from Aleppo that he would lick up the latter’s spittle from the ground and swallow it, saying: “I am afflicted with this and I am sixty years of age; what is this condition?”168
The poet Abu
Bakr al-ʿUmarireported an incident that took place in Aleppo during his lifetime: a man met his death when his beloved boy asked him to prove his love by jumping into the moat surrounding the citadel of the city.169
Abū al-Su
ʿ
ūd ibn al-Kātib (d. 1646/7), the son of a wealthy merchant of Damascus, met an equally tragic end. According to the biographer Muhibbī,he fell in love with a boy who behaved toward him in a very quarrelsome and accusing manner. The unhappy lover eventually committed suicide by taking an overdose of opium. Muhibbī added that the story was well known, indeed proverbial, among the people of Damascus in his day, and that it started a trend of similar suicides in the city.
170
Such stories lent support to the belief that love was a tragic affliction for which an individual could not be held accountable. According to Būrīnī: “A lover is not to be blamed because love is an involuntary matter, and man cannot repel that which is involuntary.”
171
Muhibbī articulated the same conviction in verse:
171
Muhibbī articulated the same conviction in verse:
You who has no heart [the censurer], leave me be! I am not the one who has chosen this tortuous fate.If there was a choice in love, you would not find the lion of the jungle [the lover] captivated by a gazelle.
172
To the “realist” position that love was the consequence of looking at an attractive woman or boy, “idealists” could argue that often an involuntary glance was all it took to fall in love.
173
Idealists could also take a different line, and point out that one might look at many beautiful individuals without falling in love with them. In other words, looking at physical beauty was not in itself sufficient
(mūjib)
for the appearance of love on the part of the beholder.
174
In Arab-Islamic love theory, aesthetic appreciation (
istihsān
)usually featured as the first stage in a process that culminates in passionate, ardent infatuation. But the procession from one stage to the other was not necessarily depicted as inexorable or mechanical. It was recognized that love was not simply the function of physical beauty, and could instead cause a person to see as beautiful that which was not so. Those who saw love as sublime and praiseworthy were inclined to reject deflationary explanations that would make it the effect of lustful looking or the excessive accumulation of semen in the body. Instead, they sometimes proposed intricate and supernatural accounts of its origin. The Egyptian mystic Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn al-Bakrīal-Siddīqī (d. 1696), for example, suggested that God originally created a composite, spherical soul from which He derived individual human souls by repeated division. Emotional affinity reflected closeness in this spiritual genealogy.
175
A related explanation was propounded by Muhyī al-Dīn al-Saltī in his treatise on love. He located the origin of love in that moment, mentioned in the Qurʿan (7:171),when God drew forth from the loins of Adam the whole of humanity and made them attest that He was their Creator. In this scheme of things, looking served as a reminder of a primordial proximity.
176
Both accounts are strongly reminiscent of the theory attributed to “Aristophanes” in Plato’s
Symposium:
love is the search for one’s other half, severed by Zeus in primordial times. A more sophisticated attempt at explaining love from a thoroughly idealist perspective was made later on in that work by “Socrates” —that is, by Plato himself. Individual beautiful things are, he maintained, instances of the eternal and incorporeal Form of Beauty. A lover captivated by a handsome person—Plato’s examples are almost always boys—is therefore captivated by a shadow of the world of Forms, to which his soul originally belonged. As he proceeds to love ever more abstract instances of beauty, he simultaneously draws nearer his own otherworldly origin. As will be shown in the following section, related ideas remained very much alive in the early Ottoman Middle East.
173
Idealists could also take a different line, and point out that one might look at many beautiful individuals without falling in love with them. In other words, looking at physical beauty was not in itself sufficient
(mūjib)
for the appearance of love on the part of the beholder.
174
In Arab-Islamic love theory, aesthetic appreciation (
istihsān
)usually featured as the first stage in a process that culminates in passionate, ardent infatuation. But the procession from one stage to the other was not necessarily depicted as inexorable or mechanical. It was recognized that love was not simply the function of physical beauty, and could instead cause a person to see as beautiful that which was not so. Those who saw love as sublime and praiseworthy were inclined to reject deflationary explanations that would make it the effect of lustful looking or the excessive accumulation of semen in the body. Instead, they sometimes proposed intricate and supernatural accounts of its origin. The Egyptian mystic Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn al-Bakrīal-Siddīqī (d. 1696), for example, suggested that God originally created a composite, spherical soul from which He derived individual human souls by repeated division. Emotional affinity reflected closeness in this spiritual genealogy.
175
A related explanation was propounded by Muhyī al-Dīn al-Saltī in his treatise on love. He located the origin of love in that moment, mentioned in the Qurʿan (7:171),when God drew forth from the loins of Adam the whole of humanity and made them attest that He was their Creator. In this scheme of things, looking served as a reminder of a primordial proximity.
176
Both accounts are strongly reminiscent of the theory attributed to “Aristophanes” in Plato’s
Symposium:
love is the search for one’s other half, severed by Zeus in primordial times. A more sophisticated attempt at explaining love from a thoroughly idealist perspective was made later on in that work by “Socrates” —that is, by Plato himself. Individual beautiful things are, he maintained, instances of the eternal and incorporeal Form of Beauty. A lover captivated by a handsome person—Plato’s examples are almost always boys—is therefore captivated by a shadow of the world of Forms, to which his soul originally belonged. As he proceeds to love ever more abstract instances of beauty, he simultaneously draws nearer his own otherworldly origin. As will be shown in the following section, related ideas remained very much alive in the early Ottoman Middle East.
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