Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  It all ends in the expected way. Innocence is revealed and the temptress confounded. Furthermore it is an essential feature of the eternal feminine that the Quran wishes to bring out: ‘Inna kaida-hunna ‘adhīm.’20 This ‘your guile is great’ is addressed beyond Zuleikha, to the whole female sex.

  Certain misogynists have seen this incident as proof of the eternal damnation of women. One really must be deaf to the poetry of the language not to feel the tender emotions at work in the quranic account. Zuleikha certainly constitutes the prototype of the female temptress, intriguing, false, lying. But how sly and playful she is! Wickedness, artifice, trickery and false innocence, the kaid is all these things at once!

  The second act of the quranic version gives the temptation its true dimension, which is social. Indeed persistence in murāwada (temptation) is expressed by the active participation of the entire community of women.

  Indeed the news is not slow to spread and the passion for Joseph, which had taken place on the enclosed theatre of the Powerful One’s house, becomes in the end a subject of gossip in the streets: the passion itself becomes social. All the woman are summoned to a feast at which, according to tradition, oranges and knives were served. Joseph comes in and all the women ‘slash their hands’. They think he is ‘wonderful’, akbarnahu, as the Quran puts it. The word itself also means the menstrua, and if one follows the interpretation of al-Azhari, quoted by Razi,21 we should translate the passage as ‘they had their periods’. Indeed the emotion felt at the sight of Joseph was so great that the charming assembly was seized by a collective physiological pain. One can imagine all the women of the town gathered together at the house of the great al-Azīz, all having their periods at the same moment. But the menstrual blood has its corollary and counterpart in the blood shed on their own hands. Their admiration for Joseph was such that they could no longer distinguish between either the fruit and their hands, or the blades and the handles of their knives! The symbolism could not be more transparent: the oranges and knives are substitutes for an act of love so desired by the women, but refused by Joseph, the mere sight of whom brings on a collective orgasm on their part. The eroticism here derives from the divine, angelic character of Joseph. Love and prophecy are identified: the beautiful reveals the sacred. And it is no accident if Islamic tradition has always insisted on the exceptional character of Joseph’s beauty: ‘When he walked through the streets of Egypt,’ writes Razi, ‘the reflections from his face shone on the walls like sunlight lighting up the sky.’22 Marvellous beauty combined with exemplary virtue – this is the very essence of prophecy. One cannot help but fall passionately in love with a prophet, but one is unable to seduce him. The prophet is the unsinning seducer.

  Faithful to himself, therefore, Joseph persists in his indifference and is cast into prison. Note the irony here: he was rescued from the well into which his brothers had thrown him only to go back to prison. The entire trial is ultimately no more than an interlude between one hole and another. Indeed is this not the profound meaning of initiation? Having been initiated by Allah in person, Joseph did not need to be initiated by women. There are two types of initiation: by God and by love. The first, of course, is preferable and Allah provides Joseph with ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’. In such circumstances the revelation that love might bring him would cut a very poor figure. It is nothing but intrigue, error, cunning, danger: in a word, feminine kaid.

  Nevertheless the Quran refrains from condemning in an irremediable absolute way the attempts by Zuleikha and her companions on Joseph’s virtue. Side by side with divine wisdom there is room for feminine guile. But one must be on one’s guard against it and at any price avoid zinā. With Zuleikha female initiative in sexual matters finally acquires its letters patent of nobility! Indeed the way the theme is treated reveals a whole area of Arabo-Muslim dream life. Can a faqih fail to identify himself with Joseph? Certainly one wants to emerge triumphant from temptation. At least one must be tempted: one can see why this Sura is so popular with Muslims. It encourages mistrust of the female sex, while providing considerable compensations. Delighting in the words of the Quran, one can dream without sinning. Sexual pleasure is all the purer for its sacred context, for exalting the ultimate triumph of virtue. Temptation can do nothing against the ḥisān. But what Muslim, providing of course that he remains pure, would not have loved to meet the beautiful Zuleikha?

  As it happens, Islamic tradition imagined a sequel to the story of Joseph and Zuleikha. Indeed, could so much love really lead nowhere? Was there not some frustration at the sight of so much beauty, so much judgment and so much passion going to waste? The quranic version was to find a significant extension in legend.

  This is what Abu Nasr al Hamadhāni says of the matter in his essay Kitābal: sab‘iyyāt:

  The death of the pharaoh’s ‘azīz (officer) left Zuleikha poor, old and blind. But her love for Joseph and her passion for him went on increasing from day to day in her heart. Her patience was exhausted. Her condition became very serious.

  Now up to that day she still worshipped idols. One fine day she threw her idols to the ground, became converted and began to believe in the Living Eternal God. One Friday night she said many prayers to God: ‘My God,’ she said, ‘I am no longer well and I have lost all my charms. I am no more than a poor, old, humiliated woman, without a penny to her name. You certainly tested me when you aroused in me such a passionate love for Joseph, may Salvation be upon him. Grant me the joys of union with him, or turn me away from that passion and inspire in me indifference!’

  The angels heard this voice and in turn addressed this prayer to God: ‘Lord and Master! This day Zuleikha addresses Thee and invokes Thee in the name of her faith and sincerity!’ God the Most High replied: ‘My angels, the moment has come to save her and to free her.’

  Now one day Joseph, still as pure as ever, was walking through the streets of the town. Zuleikha set out to meet him and, when he was near her, she cried out: ‘Glory to Him whose Clemency transforms slaves into kings!’ Joseph stopped and asked her:

  ‘Who art thou?’

  ‘I am she who wanted to buy thee with gold and precious stones, silver and pearls, musk and benjamin! I am she who ceased to feed her belly till it was full from the day she loved thee, she who has not slept a single night since she saw thee!’

  ‘Art thou Zuleikha, then?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘I am!’

  ‘But where are thy beauty, thy fortune, thy riches?’

  ‘My passion for thee has ruined everything I had!’

  ‘But how is thy passion now?’

  ‘As it always was! What am I saying? It has not ceased to grow with every hour, with every moment!’

  ‘What dost thou desire now?’

  ‘Three things: beauty, riches and union with thee!’

  Joseph was about to pass on, but God said this to him: ‘Joseph, thou hast asked Zuleikha what she desired. Why now dost thou refuse to answer her? And knowest that God now marries thee to her. He has carried out in heaven all the formalities of canonic marriage.’

  Joseph said unto Gabriel:

  ‘But Zuleikha has nothing: neither wealth, charm, nor youth!’

  ‘God has asked me to tell thee,’ said Gabriel, ‘that although she has neither wealth, charm, nor youth, she has strength and majesty, power and good actions!’

  Then God gave back Zuleikha her youth and beauty so that she became even more beautiful than she was before. She became like a fourteen-year-old girl. God then cast love and passion into Joseph’s heart, may He be praised. The beloved became the lover and the lover became the beloved.

  Joseph returned to his house and wished to retire with Zuleikha . . . but Zuleikha first prepared herself for the ṣalāt. Joseph waited while she completed her ṣalāt. . . . His patience at an end, he finally tugged at her shirt, which he tore. Gabriel then descended from heaven and said: ‘Shirt for shirt. You are now quits. I remove any reproach that might still separate thee from Zuleikha.’23
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  Though certainly apocryphal, this text seems so much to be part of the most authentic quranic tradition that it seems to complement it perfectly. For the death of the ‘azīz makes Zuleikha available for a new nikāḥ. With widowhood the question of zinā no longer arises. Lastly, the conversion to monotheism removes any other barrier. Indeed it is as if the realization of the wiṣāl (carnal union) was achieved through spiritual conversion and we find once again the dialectic of the sacral and the sexual noted above. The union, therefore, is consecrated in heaven by God himself before it is realized on earth.

  As for the exchange concerning the woman’s passing charms, the ravages of old age, these are so typical of quranic narrative that the final touch, ‘shirt for shirt’, represents a veritable reemergence of the symbolism of clothing and it is now Zuleikha who is quddat min duburin. In a word Zuleikha is the archetype of the excessively amorous woman who nevertheless arouses our sympathy on account of her suffering, her passion and her all-too-lovable ‘vice’.

  The Islamic tradition is marked by a very high degree of sensitive feeling; the archetype of the eternal feminine, of which Putiphar’s wife represents only one, albeit deliciously pernicious aspect, emerges at every stage. There are chosen women as there are chosen men; and the men as well as the women may be condemned. Or perhaps one should say that they are tested, but hardly ever condemned when they love to excess. Muhammad himself underwent this trial by love more than once, first with Khadija, then with Aysha, then with the beautiful Zaynab. . . .

  CHAPTER 4

  The frontier of the sexes

  The Islamic view of the couple based on the pre-established, premeditated harmony of the sexes presupposed a profound complementarity of the masculine and the feminine. This harmonious complementarity is creative and procreative. By that is meant that the extension of life, which is happiness and appeasement of tension, but also satisfaction and legitimate pleasure, may take place only within the framework of nikāḥ, whose global, total and totalizing character we have already stressed. Indeed Islam conceives of both the separation of the sexes and their union, their differentiation and their mutual adjustment. Hence the unique value attributed to each of the two sexes.

  The bipolarity of the world rests on the strict separation of the two ‘orders’, the feminine and the masculine. The unity of the world can be achieved only in the harmony of the sexes realized with full knowledge. The best way of realizing the harmony intended by God is for the man to assume his masculinity and for a woman to assume her full feminity. The Islamic view of the world removes any guilt from the sexes, but it does so in order to make them available to one another and to realize a ‘dialogue of the sexes’ in a context of mutual respect and joie de vivre.

  Anything that violates the order of the world is a grave ‘disorder’, a source of evil and anarchy. That is why zinā arouses such strong, unanimous condemnation. However, in a sense, zinā still remains within the framework of order. It is a disorder in order: it does not strictly speaking violate the fundamental order of the world; it violates only its modalities. It is, in its own way, a form of harmony between the sexes. It is a false nikāḥ, it is not an anti-nikāḥ. It recognizes the harmonious complementarity of the sexes and its error lies in wishing to realize it outside the limits laid down by God.

  Islam remains violently hostile to all other ways of realizing sexual desire, which are regarded as unnatural purely and simply because they run counter to the antithetical harmony of the sexes; they violate the harmony of life; they plunge man into ambiguity; they violate the very architectonics of the cosmos. As a result the divine curse embraces both the boyish woman and the effeminate man, male and female homophilia, auto-eroticism, zoophilia, etc. Indeed all these ‘deviations’ involve the same refusal to accept the sexed body and to assume the female or male condition. Sexual deviation is a revolt against God.

  ‘God has cursed those who alter the frontiers of the earth.’1 In these terms the prophet condemns any violation of the separation of the sexes. Tradition has it that four categories of person incur the anger of God: ‘Men who dress themselves as women and women who dress themselves as men, those who sleep with animals and those who sleep with men.’2 Homosexuality (liwāṭ)3 incurs the strongest condemnation. It is identified with zinā and it is advocated that the most horrible punishment should be applied to those who indulge in it.

  In the final analysis, liwāṭ even designates all forms of sexual and parasexual perversion. Nevertheless, in Islam, male homosexuality stands for all the perversions and constitutes in a sense the depravity of depravities. Female homosexuality (musāḥaqa), while equally condemned, is treated with relative indulgence and those who indulge in it incur only the same reprimand as those condemned for auto-eroticism, bestiality or necrophilia.4

  Lot, as we shall see, has a quite different significance in Islam and in Christianity.5 Indeed, in Genesis there is an extension of the myth6 that does not exist in the Quran. Held alone in a cave with their father, Lot’s two daughters get drunk and sleep with him in turn in order to perpetuate the race threatened with extinction by the destruction of Sodom.

  The Quran,7 unlike the Bible, makes no mention of Lot’s incest, let alone justifies it. So a veritable change of meaning in the approach to sexual questions takes place in the movement from the Bible to the Quran. A modern dictionary can declare:

  The biblical account is our first tradition of incest, extrapolations from the Egyptian civilization forming only part of our culture and Oedipus being no more than a poetic idea. Indeed the difference between the three incestuous states is quite considerable. The incest of the pharaohs belonged to a sort of sacred biology to which they submitted themselves. Oedipus’s incest is an involuntary drama worked out by fate. Only Lot’s incest with his daughters is a willed act, at least on the part of the two women; even if we do not ignore that the purpose was to perpetuate the race, incest, willed and willing, is nevertheless present.8

  For a Muslim, on the other hand, it would be unthinkable that Lot, the virtuous prophet, the man spared from the destruction of Sodom, could, even unknown to himself, sink into incest. This is because the meaning of Lot’s paradigm has been displaced in Islam from incest to homosexuality. Not that incest is less serious. It is an abominable depravity and strictly prohibited. There is no legal nikāḥ between ascendants and descendants, between laterals and collaterals, between uncles and nieces, and between aunts and nephews. But the crime of incest is never actually mentioned in the fiqh. It is not differentiated, not even linguistically, since there is no word in Arabic to designate it specifically. Indeed we have already noted that the notion of incest is quite different in Islam and in Christian canon law. This is because the great sexual taboo of Islam is not so much failing to respect a kinship relation as violating the order of the world, the sexual division and the distinction between male and female. In addition to being a depravity, a search after refined pleasure, homosexuality is a challenge to the order of the world as laid down by God and based upon the harmony and radical separation of the sexes.

  So much so indeed that the segregation of the sexes almost ends up embracing the segregation of the age groups, and by affecting beardless boys whose virility is not yet sufficiently marked to discount any wicked temptation of homophilia. The mere sight of pretty boys is regarded by the fiqh as disturbing and terribly tempting. According to one hadith there are three sorts of male homosexual: ‘those who look, those who touch and those who commit the criminal act’.9

  ‘Grown men’, comments Alūssi, ‘have behaved in an exaggerated fashion in turning away from beardless boys, in refraining even from looking at them and sitting next to them. Al-Hassan Ibn Dhakwām said: “Do not sit next to the sons of the rich and noble: they have faces like those of virgins and they are even more tempting than women.” ’

  Thus we pass imperceptibly from a world based on the dichotomy of the sexes to a world based on the dichotomy of ages, since youth is quite simply projec
ted on to the feminine side – and duly repressed! This is because the frontier between the masculine and the feminine was to be so carefully marked in terms of the ḥudūd Allah. After all the temporary devirilization of the fityān and murd constitutes no more than an additional precaution arising from the laying down of rigid frontiers between masculine and feminine.

  The sexual dichotomy ought quite naturally to be marked at the level of clothing. It is hardly surprising, then, that the books of the fiqh regulated the ways in which each of the two sexes were to dress right down to the slightest detail. The collection of Bokhari’s hadiths represent an entire book on correct dress.10 Of course, the Muslim is left free to dress as he wishes providing he respects everything that serves to differentiate the sexes, while covering the shapes of the body. What it amounts to is a substitution of the anatomical forms of the body by a sexual symbolism of clothing. Clothes fulfill, therefore a very precise function over and above their universal utilitarian one: that of transcending the biological towards the theological. Clothes cease to be a mere custom and become a system of ethics, even of theology. Thus the toga (izār) must reach the ankles. Clothes must not be tight or cling to the body. Canonical clothing consists of: a loose burnous, very loose-fitting trousers for those who do not have cloth, sandals, a turban, a night cap and a flannel belt, which may be decorated. The way the clothes must be worn is also laid down. One must not wrap oneself in a single garment, thus allowing the sexual organs to be exposed in whole or in part. The prophet also advised against touching other men’s clothes or pulling on them violently lest they be accidentally removed.11