Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  It is as if, by this means, bedouin woman had sensed that she had at her disposal great power, which allowed her to make up for everything in the rising Arab civilization that was fatal for her. In this way, in a sense, the bedouin woman took revenge on her urban sister. Indeed the imperialism of love alone could bring the Arab woman revenge for confinement, the veil, in a word, derealization. The Islamic view of love as infinite and life as lyrical was to be transformed into sublime spiritual forces. The bedouin woman was to become a spiritual value per se, because she embodied beauty, freedom, justice, happiness, the absolute. To love was to attach oneself to that ideal. The bedouin erotic poets became the ‘standard bearers of women’.12 Thus, without knowing it, Arab poetry committed itself to a feminist enterprise that identified the ideal with femininity. Sexuality and the flesh remain silent and it is the spirit that speaks – in a sense a desensualized love.

  Urban love, on the other hand, was licentious (ibāḥi) lightness, frivolity and carnal union. What mattered was the flesh and the most highly prized woman was the one who procured the biggest and longest orgasm.

  It is perhaps al-Walid II who represents the very type of this tendency. Blachère sees in him ‘a repressed man who liberates himself in the debauchery of an impossible love’. Gaston Wiet describes him as ‘a poet, a composer and singer, who indulged in every form of debauchery, whose conduct was scandalous not only in Damascus, but in the Holy Places. . . .’13

  This apposition of the badāwi and the ḥaḍāri14 in erotic poetry was to lay down a fundamental alternation that was to last for centuries, right up to our own day. It is as if the totality conceived by Islam, qua doctrine, could not but fall apart in contact with the facts of life. Henri Pérès has also found it in Andalusian poetry.15 After observing that for Ibn Sārā ‘udhri and ‘afāf are synonymous, he writes:

  The cult of woman, then, was carried very far by the Andalusians; it is legitimate to believe that the poets merely reflected the ideas of their time, or, if many of their contemporaries had different ideas, they were able . . . to modify their attitude towards woman, cultivate in themselves, in order to bring them out all the more, the natural qualities that led them to be discreet, courteous, exquisitely refined.16

  And it is Ibn Dāwūd who, in that endlessly sensual Spain, posited that ‘the ideal is not the union of bodies, but the mutual renunciation that is perpetuated desire!’17

  So it is as if the harmony of the sensual and the spiritual were so difficult to assume that Islamic doctrine was ultimately transformed into a creative tension. This was because the conditions of practical life necessarily imposed gaps that dialecticized, while exploding, the quranic views of love and sexuality.

  To be more precise, the reciprocity of the perspectives in the sexual act and in love is broken. Love ceases to be the common act of the lover or of the beloved and becomes a hopeless quest. In bedouin love we have the beloved, desired woman who is impossible to possess. In the urban view we have the vainglory and swagger of the lover, desired by the ladies, but himself haughty, insensitive and blasé.

  Love is no longer a meeting and complementarity. The agreement of the participating persons is no longer anything more than a theoretical aim laid down by the Quran. The break in the equivocity of love culminates in fact in sublimating the beloved or in driving the lover into splendid, narcissistic pride. On the one hand, we have male egocentrism, a desire to possess that amounts to the enslavement, the demeaning and even the negation of the partner, and, on the other, a sincere, but gloomy, complaint, sometimes not untouched by sado-masochism. In any case, there is a loss of reciprocity in sexual relations. The quranic balance, has, in actual fact, rarely been attained!

  Yet another sociological fact, and one likely to dialecticize the Islamic view of sexuality is the economic base of the familial group. Islam set up women’s rights in paternal inheritance. But this breech in the traditional system of the circulation of wealth and capital was never accepted by the Arab societies.

  Germaine Tillion18 has shown in a book of penetrating insight the extent to which the question of inheritance was determinant in the pastoral societies in creating an endogamic system and impeding the circulation of women. Wealth circulated at the same time as women. The more rapid the one, the more rapid the other. And if one wished to impede one, one had to impede the other. The pastoral economy, above all, was expressed in the inferior status of women, whose lessened condition was still more emphasized by systematic exclusion from inheritance. Refusal to share the patrimony, lands and animals deprived woman of any claims to the inheritance. A woman was allowed to share in the inheritance only on the express condition that she did not marry outside the group. Now Islam had set up a rapid rotation of women: polygamy and repudiation ought to have been expressed in fact in relations of filiation, kinship, sororate, cousinship, in such a way as to fragment the patrimony of the groups.

  Islam may have limited the share of the daughter’s inheritance to half that of the son, but the risk was nevertheless enormous. One has only to see the extraordinary complexity of the Islamic rules of inheritance to realize the importance of the chapter. A whole science, the ‘ilm al farā-iḍ, governed inheritance law. By admitting a daughter to the inheritance of the father and by organizing the rotation of women, Islam threatened one of the most secure economic bases of the social structures of the Mediterranean groups that were converted to it.

  Hence that wealth of ingenious reasons for dissociating the circulation of wealth from that of women through the system of the waqf or habus, or again, for impeding the rotation of women through endogamy. In either case the effect is the same: a veritable sexual discrimination. There was no shortage of rationalizations to justify this disinheritance: in any case, women were weak creatures and needed protection, didn’t they?

  This disinheritance usually took the form of the habus (waqf in the Middle East), which consisted in a deed of immobilization of property. The habus seemed to favour the woman, ‘for in the absence of any contrary stipulation, the share of the heir of female sex would be equal to that of the heir of the male sex.’19

  In fact it is nothing of the kind. To begin with, it only needed the man claiming ownership of the patrimony under habus to stipulate the contrary. But above all, although the daughters of the deceased were admitted on an equal footing to the enjoyment of the inheritance, the usufruct of which they shared with their brothers, they were not able to convey their rights to their children of both sexes. The right of daughters to the usufruct of a habus died with them. For the juridical akeb restricted the benefit of habus wealth to the children of both sexes of the founder, that is to say, to the first generation, but thereafter to the children of both sexes of their descendants of male sex to the exclusion of the daughters. Furthermore the founder had a perfect right to constitute the habus solely to the benefit of the males and to the exclusion of the girls, whatever their degree and relationship. It is true that one sometimes added, perhaps to give oneself a quiet conscience, the following minor clause: ‘unless the girls are indigent or unmarried’.20 How far we are from the feminism of the Quran! The intention is quite clear: to prevent the patrimony leaving the familial group at any cost. Women will circulate alone: wealth will not follow them. Indeed in innumerable contexts of customary law (uorf), the daughter was quite simply excluded from the succession. Usually the land, the house, the commercial property, jewellery, the library or arms went exclusively to the male children.

  Popular Tunisian opinion, which was not lacking in humour or cynicism, called this operation of disinheritance of the daughter ikrād or ‘elimination of ticks’. One could hardly express more clearly the notion that the rights of women to a patrimony constitute for a group a veritable scourge that must be rooted out as soon as possible! Woman was certainly a parasite and one had to limit the damage she wreaked.

  Just as effective in the Arabo-Muslim societies was the practice of endogamy. We know that Islam accepted marriage between cousins
even in the first degree. The systematization of marriage between consanguine cousins made it possible to reconcile the demands of the continuity of the group based on the permanence of the property with the ḥudūd-Allah. Marriage between consanguine first cousins, while remaining within the bonds of God’s will, avoided the circulation of patrimony. As a result matrimonial alliance within the same fraction of the familial group had ‘a certain stabilizing effect’,21 as Cuisenier points out. ‘For what a man gains as a brother on the withdrawal of a sister, he loses as a husband on the withdrawal of his wife, so that at each inheritance the land is divided into as many parts only as there are male descendants of the deceased.’22

  After a meticulous, patient study of Ansarine, in Tunisia, Cuisenier arrives at this conclusion, which forms an excellent basis for reflection: ‘At the third generation all men who were able to do so effectively married their parallel cousins.’23 I have myself made similar observations at Kairwan, where, in the large families, marriage with the parallel cousin has been the rule and the system right up to present-day generations and is always justified in the same way: ‘It is pure madness to give one’s wealth to others’, or again, ‘Why irrigate the jujube tree? Priority for water belongs to the olive tree.’

  The same practice is to be observed further east. Jacques Berque, using his own observations and the researches of Abbas al-‘Azzawi,24 insists on ‘the “preferential” marriage that qualifies the son of the paternal uncle, Ibn al-amm, to obtain, so to speak, his female cousin. This agnatic aspect is so marked in the Ahwār that a decreasing race of the mahr sanctions the parental proximity of the claimant, that the uncle has a right to veto, nahwa, in his niece’s marriage and that, if it is ignored, he can resort to punishment.’25

  We can even speak of a veritable system of ‘cousinage’. Preferential marriage with the consanguine cousin closes the agnatic group upon itself, impedes the rotation of women and leads to social exclusion of women from the group, further emphasizes sexual division and derealizes women. The man gets major status, the woman eternal minority. The woman is nothing more than man’s shadow.

  Three major facts, essentially social in nature, then, have worked against Arabo-Muslim women and led to a de facto status markedly inferior to the quranic ideal. Concubinage and the concurrent, permanent presence of educated, gifted, beautiful anti-wives, scrupulously selected from various parts of the empire; the gap between urban and rural life, with their different sharing out of work and leisure; the economic basis of endogamy systematizing the practice of cousinage and in doing so impeding the rotation of women, the expansion and expression of any love that does not conform to the interests of the group, all this could only lead inevitably to a scarcely disguised ‘slavery’ of Arab women. Despite a juridical status that was markedly favourable in principle, women were reduced to the role of housewife and mother, providing children and supervising the running of their husband’s household. Femininity deserted the Arab wife, who was literally dispossessed of herself to the advantage of mistresses of every kind. Arab man is haunted by extra-matrimoniality. This is astonishing, given the laxity of nikāḥ, but perfectly logical when concrete socio-cultural structures are taken into account.

  It is precisely in terms of specific social contexts that we must understand why quranic equivocity ceased to be a harmony and became a matter of tensions, conflicts and contradictions. What was unified in Revelation fell apart at the historical level. Here the social reduced neither the sexual, nor the sacral, but fully exploited them, if only to allow each to violate the other. So the libidinal as well as the sacral found itself integrated by the group in terms of vital social needs. It was this dialectical adjustment of the sacral, the sexual and the social, it seems to me, that gave Islamic civilization its specificity and accounts both for what is permanent in it and for what is a matter of history and circumstance. It is this ‘interplay’ that I now propose to analyse in certain of its most typical manifestations. Without claiming to exhaust the question, I shall content myself with locating a few characteristic moments in this formidable profusion of attitudes and expectations, aspirations and nostalgias.

  CHAPTER 10

  Variations on eroticism: misogyny, mysticism and ‘mujūn’

  One might be surprised at this variation on Islamic sexuality in the form of three Ms and find paradoxical that misogyny, mysticism and mujūn may be conceived together. The paradox is only apparent, for these three forms of behaviour are all ways of outwitting the spirit of Islam.

  Islamic civilization is essentially feminist. One ought to be able to deduce from this that a Muslim cannot be a misogynist. Islam and ‘hatred’ of women appear to be incompatible de jure. And yet the devaluation of femininity in the Arabo-Muslim countries is such that the mildest of feminism is still widely regarded even today as an anti-quranic revolution!

  This ‘contradiction’ between law and fact derives fundamentally from the socio-economic status and the socio-cultural situation of Arab women: one really cannot deprive women of their economic and civil rights or frustrate them of what the Quran grants them and at the same time magnify them! Hence that male bad faith that betrays women, sexuality and pleasure in a thousand and one ways.

  Hence, too, the flight before woman. Fear of women, anxiety when confronted with the procreative forces that they bear within them, the strange unease that is aroused by that mysterious attraction for an unknown being who is often no more than the unknown of being. In many societies all this frequently turns into a rejection of women.

  Arab culture abounds in misogynist features and moral austerity. But mysticism, Sufism and Marabutism also express, in their own ways, this flight from women that is reinvested in a state beyond love. And even sexuality is sometimes regarded as merely a preparatory technique for mystical ecstasy and refuge in the Supreme Being.

  But sometimes, too, this flight from woman becomes a flight into woman, into lechery, in short, into mujūn. Make no mistake, misogyny, mysticism and mujūn are merely variations in three Ms on one and the same thing: sexuality. All these forms of behaviour conceal a veritable obsession, conscious or unconscious, assumed or refused, with woman, whom one devalues only in devaluing oneself. The negation of woman is always a negation of self. Misogyny encloses us in our own empire. Mysticism sublimates us. Mujūn releases our inhibitions. Three ways of dealing with a single problem.

  In actual fact, many of the texts of the fiqh and sunna, but not a single text of the Quran, can be given a misogynist interpretation. Whatever the authenticity of the hadiths, one has only to remember that an apocryphal one is perhaps even more significant than a true one. It expresses a historical moment, a need felt by the community. Nevertheless tradition is hard on women and on sexuality. It was Muhammad, for example, who declared, on the occasion of his nocturnal ascension, that he had ‘noticed that hell was populated above all by women’.1 He went on to say, ‘If it had been given to me to order someone to be submissive to someone other than Allah, I would certainly have ordered women to be submissive to their husbands, so great are a husband’s rights over his wife.’2

  Muhammad lived with his mother Amina for only two years. When orphaned, he transferred to his nurse, Halima, the vibrant, frustrated affection that was to make him say that ‘paradise is to be found at the feet of mothers’.

  Omar was quite the reverse. He congratulated himself that he was responsible for the introduction of the veil and for Muhammad’s victory over his harem.3 It was he who said: ‘We Quraichites were masters of our wives: but we have come to live at Medina among people who are dominated by their wives. Just imagine!’4

  The Imām Ali was fond of saying: ‘Woman is wholly evil; and the worst thing about her is that she’s a necessary evil!’5

  The history of Arabo-Muslim culture swarms with resolutely anti-feminist declarations. The beginning of the celebrated poem, Lamia, by the Ibn el Wardi,6 is illuminating from this point of view. It begins thus:

  Do not trust songs! And fle
e from love poems!

  Say only serious things and break with those who indulge in facile pleasantry!

  Beautiful women must be abandoned: there is no pleasure in them.

  Such is the way of glory, power, honour.

  Flee musical instruments, and handsome youths.

  Do not be misled by their plump, seductive behinds. . . .

  Here is a significant commentary: ‘Since women constitute the basis of all fitna (revolt against God), since they are the principal element in Satan’s traps, the author of the poem begins, quite rightly, by putting us on our guard against them.’7 Fitna and Ḥabā-il al-shaiṭān! There is a whole programme there. Fitna is both seduction and sedition, charm and revolt. For it is when they are under women’s charms that men revolt against the will of God. Female beauty is a bait that leads to perdition, to damnation. From this point of view, woman is regarded as one of Satan’s traps. And Mas’ud al-Qanāwi also explains that ‘looks cast at women’s finery are Satan’s arrows’.8 Then comes a quotation from the Imām Ali:

  Men, never obey your women in any way whatsoever. Never let them give their advice on any matter whatsoever, even those of everyday life. Indeed allow them freely to give advice on anything and they will fritter away one’s wealth and disobey the wishes of the owner of this wealth.

  We see them without religion, when, alone, they are left to their own devices; they are lacking in both pity and virtue when their carnal desires are at stake. It is easy to enjoy them, but they cause great anxiety. The most virtuous among them are libertines. But the most corrupted among them are whores! Only those of them whom age has deprived of the shadow of any charm are untainted by vice! They have three qualities particular to miscreants: they complain of being oppressed, whereas it is they who oppress; they make oaths, whereas they are lying; they pretend to refuse men’s solicitations, whereas they desire them most ardently. Let us beg the help of God to emerge victorious from their evil deeds. And preserve us in any case from their good ones.9