Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  There is ultimately something splendid about the devil’s rejection. He ends the myth with the veritable demystification of the devil. Indeed at the outset Muhammad has warned his companions to exercise intelligence and understanding. Indeed one has only to understand Satan’s stratagems to avoid their dangers. In the end Satan is both rationalized and de-realized. There is no mystery of evil. There is a transparency of the devil, which is revealed in the course of the dialogue. The devil himself shows us how to arm ourselves against him: by the words of the Quran, by purity of intention, by faith and virtue.

  The Islamic vision of the world, then, helps individuals to integrate their fantasies, not only because of the sexual lyricism that is essential to it, but because it is one of the few systems of thought to have given a social, juridical, legal place to sexual relations with spirits. Like the djinns, the devils have a status, a role and a function that Muslim theology has defined in the most precise, most positive way. Belief in Satan, in the devil, in the spirit of evil is, of course, universal. It might be thought that it is incompatible with the spirit of Islam which, rationalizing life and giving sex its legitimate place, might have been able to do without demonology. In Christian demonology one might see the effect of ‘a concerted plan, a war machine, that aims at making the world ridiculous or vile, by assimilating it to the themes of a diabolical teratology. . . . In other words, the direct, immediate view of impurities is alone capable of curing the crowds of them.’20

  Behind Satan what is in question is all the lechery imputed to the flesh. Satan is the medieval Christian archetype of all sexual excess. In the devil are embodied the obsession with the flesh and the depravities that stem from it. For in the Christian view the world is the geometrical locus of desires, sins, vices. Satan is excluded from the order of grace, condemned, expelled from Paradise. But although he has fallen, he remains an angel, endowed therefore with virtues, imagination, cunning. He is stronger than man and he is always victorious over men who cannot place between themselves and him the effective barrier of faith. Hence the meaning of the pact with the devil, black masses, witches’ sabbath and sorcery.

  The erotic significance of Christian demonology has often been pointed out.21 But Michelet’s theory that relations with the diabolical result from a profound lack of satisfaction in love has seldom been bettered. It was because they were disappointed in their flesh and in their spirit that the men of the Middle Ages turned to the witch and the devil.

  All that was once said to the confessor is said to the witch. Not only the sins that one has committed but those one wishes to commit. One confides to her both physical illnesses and those of the soul, the burning concupiscences of a bitter, inflamed blood, pressing, furious envies, sharp needles with which one is pricked and pricked again.

  Everyone visits her. One is not ashamed to talk to her. One speaks frankly, one asks for life and for death, for remedies and for poisons. A girl arrives, in tears, to ask for an abortion. . . . Then the stepmother arrives . . . to say that her husband’s child by an earlier marriage still eats a lot and shows no sign of dying. The sad wife arrives, burdened every year with children that are born only to die. She begs her compassion, learns to freeze the pleasure of the moment, to make it unfruitful. Then, on the other hand, comes a young man who would buy at any price a love potion that might move the heart of a lady in high estate, persuade her to ignore the distance that separates them and to look with favour on her young page.22

  As we have seen, the devil had a very precise function in Christian society. At the official, orthodox level, he symbolizes all our temptations and everything that is evil in us. He is the attention that is continually attracted to the thousand and one weaknesses of the flesh. His myth is destructive, his image repugnant. Moreover he is both a source of anxiety and tension and the expression of continual conflicts. He is both repressed and represser. But, on the other hand, at the level of everyday life, of concrete experience, he liberates anxieties and sorrows and, as such, he does possess a certain curative value. The myth of the devil is therefore liberating and sometimes one of collective liberation.

  The richness and importance of the concept of the devil derive from that ability to repress and liberate at the same time and to sustain contraries within himself. He is the beautiful and the ugly, cunning and stupidity, in short, the fallen angel. The biblical Satan is a devil, while at the same time Lucifer, the bearer of light.

  The quranic Iblis is a creature of fire, he is nār, not nūr. In Islam, of course, as in Christianity, the diabolical subconscious is opposed by the celestial subconscious and the ambiguity of our double connection with the animal and the angel remains. But although Islam takes over the biblical content of demonology it does so by taking into account the sensual lyricism that is inherent in it. Thus Islamic demonology is, in a sense, a rationalization of our unlawful desires.

  The devil may be an outcast, but he is not an unsympathetic one. He is an amiable enemy. He is not to be trusted. But after all did not the Prophet himself converse with him? Muslim theology was to make another step along this road with the djinns, with whom relations are so close that they even include sexual relations, since there are perfectly good canonical grounds for a possible nikāḥ between men and djinns. Here we are at the antipodes of Christianity and at the very heart of that commerce with the invisible that characterizes all Muslim oneirism.

  Indeed the djinns23 form one of the most fascinating areas of Islamic belief. The Quran accepts the possibility of union between women and djinns: ‘Those elementary beings’, to use Louis Massignon’s term, have, as we have seen, a well-defined status in the fiqh. They are normally invisible to the naked eye, for they love to hide themselves from our gaze. Indeed etymologically the word jān means the hidden, the invisible.24

  And belief in them constitutes an important credo of Islam itself, even if in the course of time its importance has changed. Ibn Majīm in his essay al-ashbāḥ wal naḍhā-ir supplies all the data of the problem; indeed he draws most of his documentation from al-Shibli, Suyūti and the fiqh treatises. He cites innumerable examples to show the perfect lawfulness, as far as the fiqh is concerned, of sexual relations with djinns. People from Yemen wrote to Malek to ask his opinion concerning nikāḥ with djinns. One djinn had asked for the hand of one of their slave girls and claimed to have honourable intentions. Malek replied that there was no religious objection to such a nikāḥ. His only fear was that every pregnant woman, when asked who the father of the child was, would reply that it was a djinn. ‘It would become all the more difficult to uncover unlawful sexual relations.’25

  A recent author maintains that it is lawful for a man to marry a djinnia, but not for a woman to be married to a djinn. The nikāḥ, he adds, must be carried out in the presence of two witnesses.26 The same author advocates the use of this marvellous, but curious prayer: ‘My God, procure for me a djinnia who will keep me company wherever I go.’27

  The sexual relationships with djinns are regarded as very widespread. The Tazyīn al-ashwāq provides details of six ‘true’ cases.28

  This is because we live in a silent world, peopled with invisible beings: everyone has his angels and devils and at least one qarīn. Indeed some qarīns became very famous, like the djinn of the beautiful Aysha, the Prophet’s wife, who made her beautiful, desirable, entrancing, but also coquettish, feminine and jealous. Every inspired poet, musician and artist is supposed to owe the virtues of his creation to his qarīn.

  By taking our fantasies seriously, the fiqh helps us to give them meaning and, by absorbing them, to purify ourselves. A brilliant essay by C. G. Jung has helped me a great deal to understand the logic of the fiqh, which connects the individual’s dreams and fantasies to the great myths of Iblis and the djinns:

  To apply correctly the right archetype is not only the art of the primitive medicine-man, but also that of our directors of conscience; for the suffering of the symbolic hero on which the entire Christian religion rests is also an
archetypal image of a kind that, while assuaging it, raises the suffering of each individual to the level of the suffering of all. In what does the assuaging power of these images lie? Great suffering, a great shock of some kind, removes us from the foundations of our lives and instincts, and the subject affected in this way then experiences an excessive sense of his particularity, a sense of isolation and disorientation. These salutary images show the suffering soul the state in which he finds himself, the kind of stage in his life that he is living through; if he is able to glimpse what they convey, he will benefit enormously from them. In everyday life, as we can see, we use a similar approach, without having at our disposal however the same resources of amplification.29

  ‘To apply correctly the right archetype . . .:’ this is just what the fiqh has done. To recover not only man himself, but also his instincts, his deepest tendencies, in a word, his shadow.

  For the djinns of the Quran are merely our doubles, the underside of ourselves, the object of our desires. We must accept this shadow. And Islam urges us to do so. Better still, it helps us to integrate it by ‘rationalizing’ it, by finding for it an explanation that is capable both of dedramatizing situations and of freeing man from guilt. This is what the myth of Iblis means, this is the deep meaning of the djinns. Through that shadow of himself, accepted and assumed, man realizes himself and frees himself.

  Muhammad’s dialogue with Satan, the ins-jānr relations, are ways of rationalizing the irrational. If we were to take over Jung’s terminology, we would say that the profound meaning of this Islamic commerce with the invisible is to help us to integrate the shadow and to pass from a ‘fallow anima’ to an actual anima. By offering him an image in which he recognizes himself, Islam makes man capable of having stimulating, even exalting relations with his own personality. Yes, each man has his jinniyya. Yes, each woman has her qarīn and everyone should follow the example of the Tunisian followers of Sidi Abdeslam Lasmar, who, facing the invisible, ended their initiatory dances with this very beautiful, deeply meaningful verse:

  If every man has a furtive inspirer who inspires his actions.

  By God, it is Thou alone who art my furtive inspirer.30

  The fundamental law of Islam, then, is one of totalization, integration. Nevertheless whatever is not integrated into the personality runs the risk of bang projected. This controlled, rationalized projection exists none the less. And this is the profound meaning of the myth of Paradise.

  CHAPTER 7

  The infinite orgasm

  The preponderant role of sexuality is closely bound up with Muslim representations of Paradise (Janna) and of hell (Nār). The traditional eschatology is of interest here on two accounts. Firstly, paradise is a place of sexual pleasure. Secondly, the symbolism of the delights and torments of the afterlife is of such oneiric richness that it is necessary for our purpose to dwell on it for a time since it implies the dual integration of life with the hereafter and of the hereafter with life. More than three hundred verses of the Quran deal with this question, in terms that repeat, complement and qualify one another and are the point of departure for a whole dynamic mythology.1

  Furthermore the Sunna has left us hundreds of hadiths that expand on the theme and orchestrate the way in which the good and bad actions of human beings are rewarded. Around these venerable texts an abundant literature has grown up.2 As Louis Gardet remarks, ‘tradition constantly embellishes and enriches with ever new details’3 the eschatological vision of the afterlife.

  Without wishing to ignore the importance of the evolution of traditions that have changed throughout the ages by undergoing the influence of extra-quranic, Christian, Judaic, but also Iranian and Hindu traditions, it is enough for my purpose to consider that those traditions more or less stabilized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. I would like to leave to one side any conjectures as to relations through historical connections and consider the dynamic configurations and images conveyed by popular tradition. Two compilations, generally published independently, seem to me to be highly representative in this respect of the way in which the people – and the elites – traditionally saw the afterlife. The epistle Daqā-iq al-akhbār al-kabīr (sic) fi ahikr al-jannati wal nār, by the imam Abderrahman Ibn Ahmed al Qādhi, and the Kitāb al-durar al ḥisān fil ba‘thi wa ha‘ā imil-jinān, by the sheikh Jalal Addin al Suyūti,4 are two exceptional documents in terms both of content and of popularity.

  These two treatises present both a highly coloured, highly pictorial description of paradise and hell and a universal cosmogony of the afterlife. Everything begins with the creation of the supreme soul from the tree of certainty, with its four branches, reaches a high point with the creation of Muhammad’s Nūr, placed under a veil in the form of a white pearl, and ends with the eternal torments of hell or the heavenly contemplation of the face of God. But let us concentrate our attention on paradise.

  Indeed paradise is merely the splendid, reassuring counterpart of the infernal nightmare. It is vast, as big as hell, comprising a hundred degrees, each separated from the other by five hundred years. Its eight gates are in solid gold, encrusted with emeralds, diamonds, rubies, corals, enamel and other precious stones. The first bears the inscription: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.’ Through this gate enter the prophets, the martyrs, the tender-hearted (al-askhiā).

  Through the second gate enter those who purify themselves and say their daily prayers in a perfect, regular fashion. The third is reserved for those who give as alms what for them is dearest and most desirable. Through the fourth pass those who are able to order good and to dissuade others from carrying out evil. Through the fifth gate enter those who have been able to resist their desires and passions. The sixth is reserved to pilgrims; the seventh to those who fight for the faith, the last to pious men who abstain from casting indiscreet and concupiscent looks and who perform only good actions.

  The eight gates lead to the eight paradises. The first, bar al-ḥalāl, (House of Lawfulness), is made of white pearls. The second, Dar al-salām (House of Peace), is made of red amethysts. The third, Jannat al-ma-wā (Garden of Retreat), is made of green emeralds. The fourth, Jannat al-khuld (Garden of Eternity), is made of red and yellow coral. The fifth, Jannat al-na-‘īm (Garden of Delights), is made of white silver. The sixth, Jannat al-firdaus (Garden of Paradise), is made of red gold. The seventh, Jannat ‘adn (Garden of Eternal Stability), is also made of red gold. As the pivot (qaṣaba) of eternity, it leads to all the other paradises. It is made of alternate gold and silver bricks. The ground is covered by a clay made of musk and a dust made of amber.

  The grass that grows there is of saffron. There are abundant rivers. The river of Clemency runs through all the paradises. The river of Kawthar is Muhammad’s private property. The Kāfūr, the Tasmīm, the Salsabīl and the Raḥīq have their source in a cupula and more precisely in the four words that make up the basmālah5 written on this cupula, which is the centre of centres.

  God offers drink to the Elect. On Saturday he serves them the water of paradise, on Sunday he gives them his honey, on Monday his milk and on Tuesday his wine. When they drink, they become drunk; when they become drunk, they fly off for a thousand years, at the end of which they reach a huge mountain made of sweet-smelling pure musk. The Salsabīl has its source in this mountain. The Elect drink from it on Wednesdays. They fly off for a thousand years again and then reach a very high castle. In this castle there are raised beds and prepared goblets, as it is said in the verse. Each Chosen One sits on a bed. He is then given ginger wine, which he drinks. It is then Thursday. Then for a thousand years a white cloud of pearls falls on the Elect. To each pearl a houri is fastened. They then fly off for a thousand years and reach the seat of sincerity (Maṣ‘ad ṣidq) on Friday. They sit at the table of Eternity, receive the raḥīc al-makhtūm sealed with a seal of musk. And that is the ultimate drunkenness.6

  The trees of paradise have also inspired marvellous descriptions.7 The branches of these trees neve
r grow hard or dry and their leaves remain eternally green and laden with sap. The Tūbā tree is particularly described in detail. The trunk is a pearl; the middle of the tree is made up of hyacinths; the branches are topazes and the leaves silk. It has seventy thousand branches, but all tied to the sky of our visible world. Indeed in paradise every room, dome or tree is shaded by a branch of a Tūbā.

  There are also many other different trees on the tops of which grow richly worked costumes and on the bottoms of which grow winged horses, already saddled and bridled, and encrusted with pearls and hyacinths. These horses have neither bile nor urine. The Elect of God mount them and fly off through paradise.

  Paradise is a place where one eats as much as one likes without having to undergo the inconveniences of digestion and evacuation. Suyūti tells us that ‘the food of paradise is perpetual. When the Elect have eaten or drunk something, they have just a little sweat, which is as fresh and sweet-smelling as musk. The inhabitants of Paradise have no behinds. These behinds were created for defecation and in Paradise there is no defecation.’8

  Pleasure there is also carnal. For paradise is peopled with houris. These creatures are as feminine as can be imagined, their faces white, green, yellow and red at once. Their bodies are made of saffron, musk, amber and camphor and their hair of raw silk. ‘From the toes to the knees they are made of saffron, from the knees to the breasts of musk, from the breasts to the neck of amber, from the neck to the top of their heads of camphor. If a houri spits on the ground, the place on which she spits is turned at once into musk. On their breasts is written the name of their husband, linked with one of the beautiful names of God. They wear on each arm ten gold bracelets, on each finger ten rings and on each foot ten rings of precious stones and fine pearls. . . . All the houris are in love with their husbands. . . .’9