Sexual Ethics in Islam (32 page)

33.
On these categories and their use, see Abou El Fadl,
Speaking in God’s Name
, p. 97.

1. Of course begging the question of how they were expected to apply across the board even in previous centuries.
   

2. Peirce,
   Morality Tales
   , p. 353.
   

3. Michael Cook addresses this problem, along with a number of related issues, in
   Forbidding Wrong in Islam
   .
   

4. And in any case, “legal coercion is a flawed instrument for securing moral persuasion.” Sanneh, “
   Shari’ah
   Sanctions and State Enforce- ment,” p. 161. Unlike Ramadan, who acknowledges discrimination in the application of
   hadd
   punishments, Sanneh ignores women’s vulner- ability and the disparities in punishment. These are highlighted by Sidahmed, “Problems in Contemporary Applications of Islamic Crim- inal Sanctions.”
   

Notes to Chapter 5

1. Keller,
   Reliance of the Traveller
   , p. 986. This translation is mine, based on Keller’s presentation of the Arabic text, and differs in several aspects from Keller’s English rendering. For Keller’s biographical sketch of Ibn Hajar, see p. 1054.
   

   notes 175
   

2. On the genre, see Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists.”
   

3. Al-Dhahabi,
   Al-Kaba’ir
   ; for biographical information on al-Dhahabi, see
   al-Kaba’ir
   , pp. 9–14 and Keller,
   Reliance of the Traveller
   , p. 1045. Discussion of enormities occurs in mainstream modern circles as well.
   

4. Al-Dhahabi, pp. 60–70.
   

5. Al-Dhahabi, pp. 105–6. On
   qadhf
   , and the Qur’anic connection to
   zina
   , see chapter 4.
   

6. Al-Dhahabi, pp. 155–6.
   

7. Al-Dhahabi, pp. 157–9. A
   muhallil
   is a man who agrees to marry a woman then divorce her after consummation in order to make it pos- sible for her to remarry a husband who has divorced her absolutely.
   

8. Al-Dhahabi,
   Al-Kaba’ir
   , pp. 201–9. On
   nushuz
   more generally, see chapter 7 and works cited there.
   

9. Keller’s note, Keller,
   Reliance of the Traveller
   , p. 990. See Keller, p. 1033, for a biographical sketch of Abu Talib Makki.
   

10. Keller,
    Reliance of the Traveller
    , p. 991. My translation.
    

11. Keller,
    Reliance of the Traveller
    , p. 991. My translation. Keller translates as “Two are of the genitals: (12) adultery; (13) and sodomy.”
    

12. Keller,
    Reliance of the Traveller
    , p. 966.
    

13. Keller,
    Reliance of the Traveller
    , p. 986; my translation here differs from that in the epigraph by leaving
    zina
    and
    liwat
    untranslated.
    

14. Ibn Hajar specifically condemns a man having sex with his
    wife’s
    corpse, making clear that it is the act of intercourse with a dead body that con- stitutes an enormity. If the text referred to any woman’s corpse, one might mistakenly attribute the prohibition of intercourse to the lack of the legal tie between the parties required for any touching, let alone sex, to be licit. Of course the deceased wife is no longer really a person, and so the marriage does not actually exist after her death, but most jurists grant a man the dispensation to see and touch his dead wife’s body in order to wash her corpse. If intercourse with the wife’s corpse is forbid- den, though touching her for purposes of final ablution is permitted, intercourse with another woman’s corpse is even more strongly forbid- den, given that an unrelated man may not touch a woman even to per- form the pre-burial washing.
    

15. I use “same-sex” as a neutrally descriptive term, sidestepping important controversies over the appropriateness of terms such as lesbian, gay, homosexual, and queer that are largely beyond the scope of this essay. Recently, some have advocated use of the Arabic phrase
    al-mithliyya al-jinsiyya
    (“homosexuality” in its literal sense of sexual sameness), while others have suggested that
    shudhudh jinsi
    (sexual queerness) is a useful phrase. In any case, I will use the term “sex” to denote the cate- gories male and female, while recognizing that there is a debate over whether the use of sex to denote biology and gender to denote socially and culturally determined aspects of behavior takes account of the con- structed nature of seemingly natural “sex.” On this, see the discussion of hermaphrodites and sex-change operations, below.
    

16. See, e.g., Dunne, “Power and Sexuality in the Middle East.” On the attribution of “deviant” behavior to the Other, and particularly the attribution of deviant sexual practices to Muslims by Westerners, see Uebel, “Re-Orienting Desire.” “The vice of sodomy,” according to
    

    176 sexual ethics and islam
    

    Crusader literature of the time, was “not only tolerated in Muslim society, but actively encouraged and openly practiced.” (p. 241) Although Uebel does not ask this question, it occurs to me to wonder in what ways the current scholarship positing a “homosexual-friendly” Islamic past draws on, and contributes to, the same type of generaliza- tions.
    

17. Duran, “Homosexuality and Islam,” p. 183. Even more recently, none of the twenty-one chapters in Thumma and Gray’s
    Gay Religion
    discusses Muslims, and the only mention of Islam is in passing in a foot- note (p. 6, n. 1). The founding of several organizations in the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century (al-Fatiha, the Yoesuf Founda- tion, Queer Jihad) by Muslims living in the West both signaled and furthered a shift in the discussion. The emergence of the Internet as a vital educational and organizational resource has contributed to the increased social and intellectual presence of gay and lesbian (and, to a far lesser extent, bisexual and transgendered) Muslim individuals and groups. Most likely, if research on a similar volume were to begin today, at least one organization would be mentioned.
    

18. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” p. 198. Of course, as Kugle goes on to argue, homosexuality is an anachronistic term.
    

19. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” pp. 197–8.
    

20. Malti-Douglas, “Tribadism/Lesbianism,” p. 124. This begs the question of who gets to be a “man” – how maleness and masculinity were constructed is a crucial issue. See also Rowson, “Gender Irregularity as Entertainment.”
    

21. Al-Rouhayeb,
    Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800
    .
    

22. The term
    sihaq
    is sometimes considered to be derogatory, as
    liwat
    clearly is. Neutral descriptive terminology adopted by some contempo- rary Arab activists includes masculine and feminine variants of “homo- sexual.” Helem, “Fihrist al-‘ibarat al-‘arabiyya.” Thanks to Ariel Berman for sharing the magazine reference with me.
    

23. On mundane consequences of even illicit sex, see chapter 4. However, marital prohibitions could be engendered, in some views, by sexual touching falling far short of intercourse; in such a case, the same rules could apply to same-sex contact between women, making their omis- sion notable.
    

24. And this, of course, returns us to the question of how to define what is “Islamic” – discussed in chapter 6.
    

25. My modification of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation. On this matter, see Malti-Douglas, “Tribadism/Lesbianism,” p. 123.
    

26. One may also infer that the verse addresses two men if one accepts that it addresses an exclusively male audience; Q. 4:16’s “from among you” could theoretically be inclusive of women, but it stands in contrast to
    

    Q. 4:15’s “from among your women.”
    

27. Duran, “Homosexuality in Islam,” p. 181.
    

28. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” p. 219. See also Hidayatullah, “Islamic Conceptions of Sexuality,” pp. 277–9.
    

29. Jamal, “The Story of Lot.”
    

30. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” p. 204.
    

31. See, for example, the website of a South African organization called
    

    notes 177
    

    “The Inner Circle.”
    http://www.theinnercircle-za.org/index_files/page 0002.htm, last accessed 06.27.05.
    

32. Biblical comparisons might be fruitful, both with reference to the story of Lot and also the parallel story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges, chapters 19–21. I was made aware of this latter parallel through Azam, “Sexual Violence in Islamic Law.”
    

33. Kugle, “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics,” p. 215. See also p. 224. 34. Q. 23:165–6.
    

1. Halperin,
   How to do the History of Homosexuality
   , p. 41; italics in ori- ginal.
   

2. What Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sivola argue for the Greeks holds just as true for medieval Muslims: “Seeing that it was possible for the Greeks to think differently of things that many moderns have regarded as nat- ural or even necessary helps us to remove the false sense of inevitability of our own judgments and practices.” Nussbaum and Sivola, “Intro- duction,” in idem, eds.,
   The Sleep of Reason
   , p. 10.
   

3. See, e.g., Dover,
   Greek Homosexuality
   . As David Halperin has argued, with respect to the ancient Greeks, “The physical act of sex itself presup- posed and demanded ... the assumption by the respective sexual partners of different and asymmetrical sexual roles (the roles of pene- trator and penetrated), and those roles in turn were associated with social distinctions of power and gender – differences between dom- inance and submission as well as between masculinity and femininity.” Halperin,
   How to do the History of Homosexuality
   , p. 147. See also Brooten,
   Love Between Women
   , p. 2, for the remark that “Roman-period writers presented as normative those sexual relations that represent a human social hierarchy. They saw every sexual pairing as including one active and one passive partner, regardless of gender, although culturally they correlated gender with these categories.” Quoted in Halperin, p. 56. See also Walters, “Invading the Roman Body,” esp. p. 31; Dover, “Clas- sical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior;” and, on Muslim discussions of male desire to be penetrated, Rowson, “Gender Irregularity,” p. 53; and Rosenthal, on
   ubnah
   , “passive male homosexuality,” (p. 45) in “Ar-Razi on the Hidden Illness.”
   

4. Published as “The Pleasures of Girls and Boys Compared,” in Colville, trans.,
   Sobriety and Mirth
   , pp. 202–30. This essay also appears as “Boast- ing Match over Maids and Youths,” in
   Nine Essays of al-Jahiz
   , trans. Hutchins, pp. 140–66. See also, in the same volume, “The Superiority of the Belly over the Back,” pp. 167–73. Hutchins’ translation should be used with caution; see A.F.L. Beeston’s detailed review in the
   Journal of Arabic Literature
   , pp. 200–9. On the genre, see also Rosenthal, “Male and Female: Described and Compared.”
   

5. See Rowson, “Gender Irregularity,” p. 60 and, for comparison, Dover, “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior,” p. 25. The difference between the two settings is not the naturalness of men’s attraction to younger males but the illicitness of this desire in a Muslim context.
   

6. Keller,
   Reliance of the Traveller
   , p. 512. See also Maghen,
   Virtues of the Flesh
   , p. 261 on ablution after touching boys.
   

7. Boudhiba,
   Sexuality in Islam
   , p. 200.
   

8. Murray, “Woman-Woman Love in Islamic Societies,” p. 102.
   

9. Debra Mubashshir Majeed, who describes herself as a “recovering
   

   178 sexual ethics and islam
   

   homophobe,” writes insightfully on certain parallels between same-sex marriage and polygamy in “The Battle Has Been Joined.” Like others who write on this topic, Majeed drafts her categories in such a way as to assume the question of gay marriage does not apply to Muslims.
   

10. Muslim Canadian Congress press release, “Human Rights for Minor- ities not up for Bargain: Muslim Canadian Congress endorses Same-Sex Marriage legislation.”
    

11. See, for a brief personal account, Saed, “On the Edge of Belonging.”
    

12. Muslim Women’s League, “An Islamic Perspective on Sexuality.”
    

13. As Kugle puts it, “[C]ontemporary Muslim moralists are not insulated from modernity, even as they depict gay and lesbian Muslims as cor- rupted by modernity.” Kugle,
    Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics
    , pp. 197–8.
    

14. Murad, “Fall of the Family.”
    

15. Rather, a desire that arises in relation to an unlawful source should be channeled in a lawful direction, as reflected in the Prophet’s counsel that a man who is aroused by a woman he sees should go home and have sex with his wife.
    

16. Rainbow Crescent, “Consider the Following: Logic and Reason.” Capitalization in original.
    

17. Jakobsen and Pellegrini,
    Love the Sin
    , use the phrase “born that way” to describe the essentialist position on sexual orientation and identity. I choose “just created that way” to emphasize the external, divine inten- tionality of the creation of a human being with a particular set of desires.
    

18. “One effect of (mis)understanding the history of sexuality as a history of the discourses of sexuality has been to preserve the notion of sexuality as a timeless and ahistorical dimension of human experience, while pre- serving a notion of discourse as a neutral medium of representation. A second effect has been to draw a deceptively simple and very old- fashioned division between representations, conceived as socially specific and historically variable products of human culture, and realities (sexual desire, in this case, or human nature), conceived as something static and unchanging. Foucault, I argue, was up to something much more novel, a radically holistic approach that was designed to avoid such hoary metaphysical binarisms. His aim was to foreground the his- toricity of desire itself and of human beings as subjects of desire.” Halperin,
    How to do the History of Homosexuality
    , p. 9.
    

19. Weeks,
    Invented Moralities
    , pp. 98–9. See, for a brief survey of modern American views as to whether same-sex or same-gender desire is innate or chosen, the essays by Jeannine Gramick and Robert Gordis, along with associated materials, under the heading “Are Homosexual and Bisexual Relations Natural and Normal?”
    

20. Jeffrey Weeks, “The Rights and Wrongs of Sexuality,” p. 21.
    

21. Hidayatullah, “Islamic Conceptions of Sexuality,” p. 279 points out that “the notion that Islam tolerates homosexual tendencies but not behav- iors points to an inconsistency in Islamic allowances for the satiation of ‘natural’ sexual desire.”
    

22. On the “macrocosmic” dimensions of sex, gender, and marriage, see Murata,
    The Tao of Islam
    , pp. 143–202.
    

23. Of course, I do not mean to imply that promiscuity is in any way char- acteristic of same-sex sexual activity; I am merely making the point for contrast.
    

    notes 179
    

24. Abdul-Ra’uf,
    The Islamic View of Women and the Family
    , p. 35. Quoted in Smith, “Women in Islam,” p. 532, n. 14. Abdul-Ra’uf elaborates on the “inherently indisputable evil and filth of homosexuality for its own sake” in his
    Marriage in Islam: A Manual
    , pp. 71–2.
    

25. Notably, even sources that discuss non-consensual crimes such as rape seem to be virtually silent about “incest in the normal English sense, whereas the ‘milk-incest’ peculiar to Islam is a recurrent preoccupa- tion.” Van Gelder,
    Close Relationships
    , p. 83.
    

26. That is, women who are too closely related to be potential marriage partners.
    

27. Haskafi,
    The Durr-ul-Mukhtar
    , trans. Dayal, pp. 1–2. In the style of many commentaries, the words of the commented-upon text are incorporated into the commentary. Dayal keeps them distinct through the use of bold-faced type, but I have not retained that feature here, considering it an unnecessary distraction.
    

28. Music,
    Queer Visions of Islam
    , p. 4. While I agree with Music on this point, I am not convinced of the prospects for success of his “search for queer-affirmative Qur’anic messages that have been hidden by centuries of biased interpretations.” (p. 5) Rather, I think this topic is analogous in an important way to that of male privilege and patriarchy in the Qur’an. One cannot simply blame everything on bad interpret- ation. See chapter 7. On hermaphrodites, see Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body;” and Cilardo, “Historical Development of the Legal Doctrine.”
    

29. On this point, see Najmabadi, “Truth of Sex.” The article’s summary reads: “While trans-sexuality in Iran is made legitimate, homosexuality is insistently reiterated as abnormal.”
    

30. Skovgaard-Petersen,
    Defining Islam for the Egyptian State
    , pp. 319–34; Harrison, “Iran’s Sex Change Operations.” See Najmabadi, “Truth of Sex,” for a cogent critique of this celebratory discourse. See also Music,
    Queer Visions
    , p. 10.
    

31. Skovgaard-Petersen,
    Defining Islam
    , p. 334. Dupret summarizes this case, presents further developments, and considers its implications in “Sexual Morality at the Egyptian Bar.”
    

32. Skovgaard-Petersen,
    Defining Islam
    , p. 321.
    

33. Skovgaard-Petersen,
    Defining Islam
    , p. 326.
    

34. In a marriage between two males, would each spouse retain the right to marry three additional husbands? Imagine the chaos that would result if Husband A and Husband B each independently married Husband
    

    C. Presumably, in a lesbian marriage, both women would have to remain monogamous – but if pregnancy is not a possibility, and there would be no need for determinations as to paternity, then what would be the rationale for female monogamy? I raise these questions not to be flippant or absurd, but because thoroughly working through their implications can give insights not only about same-sex intimacy but also about expectations in male/female marriage.
    

35. Kugle wonders eloquently about this at the same time he
    assumes
    that it goes without saying that consent is vital for good (in the sense of ethical, divinely approved) intimate relationships.
    

36. Schmitt, “
    Liwat
    im
    fiqh
    .”
    

37. BBC News, “Saudi sets sights on 60th bride.”