Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (60 page)

(d. 1702), also accepted the tradition, though in the first two cases, note was taken of the existence of the controversy.
¹³⁶
It was possible to argue that the tradition applied only to heterosexual love. This was the position of Zabi
di
and the Egyptian scholarʿAbd al-Raʾu
f al-Muna
wi
(d. 1622), who both asserted that the saying only applied to “what could conceivably be the object of licit sexual intercourse,” thus excluding a man’s love for a boy.
¹³⁷
However, this seems to have been a minority opinion. The stricture proposed by Muna
wi
was explicitly rejected by the Rector of the Azhar college Muhammad al-Ḥafni
(d. 1767), who insisted that the martyrs-of-love tradition applied “even if [the man’s love was] for a beardless boy, in accordance with the works on positive law and contrary to the commentator [i.e., Muna
wi
].”
¹³⁸
Hafnfs reference to the works on positive law (
furu
ʿ
) reflects the fact that the authoritative works of the Sha
fiʿi
school to which he belonged regularly included a discussion of the various kinds of death that conferred martyr status on the deceased. Their conclusion was almost invariably that a man who dies from passionate but chaste love should be seen as a martyr, whether his love was for a woman or a boy. Ibn Hajar al-Haytami