You begin with circumcision and you end in marriage, and still your horse neighs in the forest.
You begin with circumcision and you end in youth, and still your horse neighs among the bachelors.
Let us call quickly for his mother, let us call quickly for his aunt, let them come quickly and throw money on the procreative rod.43
The symbolism is perfectly obvious. Circumcision and marriage are marked here as the two steps, initial and final, in the single process of living. Circumcision is the open way to marriage, it is the promise of a permanent youth, in the sense that it will spare man the disappointments of old age. For in this business there is a horse that will always neigh and will always be standing, present and master of all, of the cohort of bachelors. What is this horse if not the ‘procreative rod’ (‘ammāra) on which one asks the female relations to come and throw propitiatory money. The money must match this ‘ammāra, which must be strengthened, prepared, maintained, glorified and protected from the evil eye. Circumcision is both a promise and a guarantee of a future genetic life that one hopes will be as full, as great and as durable as love.
Everything is carried out in such a way, therefore, that circumcision is seen as quite different from castration. Does it succeed? The question really should be asked. For circumcision is carried out at an age when the boy has long since been made aware of the difference between the sexes. Very often a state of anxiety is induced in the boy by his family and friends. He is soon made aware of the exorbitant privileges that go with being a male. He has been made well aware of the importance of that ‘little thing that hangs down’, as little Muslim girls invariably refer to it. Hence the fear that it will be cut off if it is not circumcised or, even, that what remains will be cut off after circumcision. Such a fear is part and parcel of the paradox and contradiction of childhood experience. There is a symbolic valorization of the phallus and an obsessional fear of losing it. This situation is likely to last for a long time, especially in an authoritarian society and one in which the terrifying father holds all kinds of goods, pleasures, wealth – and women – in ‘trust’ for him. If, in the end, everything seems to settle down without too much difficulty and heartache it is certainly because of all the forms of socialization set in train, but also because of the early age of marriage, which follows soon after circumcision.
But for the young Arab girl in the Middle East excision is hardly less traumatic. Excision, which, despite the canonical regulations, is very often quite simply a clitoridectomy, is merely the first step in ‘a veritable plot intended to frustrate the woman of her share of fulfillment’, in Youssef al-Masry’s words.44 This ‘blinding’ of women is not dissimilar to the fear of mutilation felt by men. In both cases one can speak of a castration complex inherent in all Muslim child rearing and which, of course, has a quite different significance in a Christian, Jewish or animistic setting.
Commentators have often observed the correlation in Arab society between the use of narcotics, homosexuality, circumcision and excision.45 The operation carried out on the genital organs cannot be considered in isolation from a set of social, sometimes a-religious, even frankly anti-Islamic practices. From the cradle to the grave, or rather ‘from the uterus to the cumulus’, and at every moment of life, the Arab female personality is ruthlessly, systematically, irremediably denied. The ‘drama’ of Arab frigidity that has all too often been observed clinically is to be inferred from a sexual life, physiological and psychological, that is a series of traumata that bring with them insurmountable fears and anxieties. Sometimes excised to begin with, but always brought up in the cult of necessary virginity, deflowered almost publicly on her wedding night, transformed into a child-producing machine, the Arab girl comes in the end to lose even what is biological in the act of loving. The evidence presented by Youssef al-Masry can leave us in no doubt. Having become resistant to orgasm, an Arab woman needs, if she is to be satisfied, a husband who is prepared to make ever increasing proof of his prowess and to try to acquire marvels of virility by resorting to artificial means. Indeed I have already pointed out the importance in Arab erotology of love philtres and herbal aphrodisiacs.
One should also draw attention to the relation, often observed in Arab culture, between violence and love, which is merely another variant of the castration dialectic. The mutilated man rapes. The raped woman is mutilating. Enver F. Dehoï’46 has already pointed out the extent to which the fear of castration is to be found in The Thousand and One Nights, which are in a sense a variation on the endless theme of sexual mutilation. In these tales the woman is all too often a castrator, the guaranteed prototype of so many strange, dangerous, anxiety-inducing Arab women. But let us hear the handsome Aziz recounting his own misfortune:
The slaves did as they were bid, while their mistress put a red copper pot upon the fire, containing oil and soft cheese. When the cheese was well mixed into the boiling oil she came back to me and pulled down my drawers; alternate waves of terror and shame shook me, and I knew what was to happen. Having bared my belly, she took hold of my eggs and bound them at the root with the noose of a waxed cord; the ends of this cord she gave to two of her slaves, who bore strongly upon it, while she herself took up a razor and, with a single stroke, cut off my manhood.47
A just revenge by an Arab woman? Revolt, compensation? Violence against violence in the continuous war of the sexes? It is all of these things, as the story goes on to show only too clearly:
When I came to myself, I saw that my front was like a woman’s and that the slaves were even then applying the boiled oil and cheese to the wound. My blood soon stopped flowing, and my mistress came to me . . . saying scornfully: ‘Return whence you came! You are no use to me. I keep all that was ever valuable to me.’48
Certainly from circumcision to excision, deflowering and the vagina dentata, there is a guiding thread. All the feminist demands, all the stereotypical beliefs about women’s wiles (the celebrated kaid al-nisā) appear quite clearly here through a battery of symbols. The vulgar, obscene image of the merguez served up on a dish between two eggs is raised here to a higher literary level. The soft cheese, the boiling oil, the eggs, the cord, the copper pan, culinary magic, the chemistry of elements, satisfied desire. The beautiful girl is a penis eater: a fantastic displacement of virility in a society determined to refuse free expression to feminine affectivity.
We now understand why sexual mutilation (circumcision and excision) hold such an exceptional place in our Arabo-Muslim societies, whereas there is nothing in the law that would lead one to expect it. It amounts to an initiation into love, not in its more hedonistic aspects, but in its most negative ones. It is a warning that life is anxiety and danger, but it also teaches how this danger may be overcome and resolved. Circumcision and excision are like a vaccination against the dangers of sexuality.
In any case the deflowering of the virgin on her wedding night is much more an equivalent of the circumcision of the boy than is excision. Through festivities, violence, blood, pain and exhibitionism, too, we have in each case different types of traumata wittingly inflicted by the group in order to maintain its own cohesion: the sacrifice of the hymen is a rite having the same nature and the same meaning as that of the foreskin. As we have seen, there is a clear correspondence for the boy between circumcision and marriage. The wedding night is the time when the man experiences and proves his virility and when the girl proves her honesty. As Rachid Boujedra writes of his father’s remarriage:
A fully-fledged wedding. The bride was fifteen, my father fifty. A tense wedding. Plenty of blood. The old women were amazed when they washed the sheets, next morning. Tambourines, all night, had drowned the tortures of the flesh torn by the patriarch’s monstrous orgasm. . . . The father was ridiculous and tried to show that he was still up to it: the young men of the tribe had to be silenced. Since he had made up his mind to remarry, he had taken to eating honey with a view to regaining the hormonal vigour of his youth.49
Virginity is an essenti
al element of Arabo-Muslim erotic life. The Prophet himself advised Zayd to marry a virgin for preference. And indeed is not the houri of paradise an eternal virgin? Virginity is the object of a veritable cult. Of course in ancient societies virginity proceeded from the religious ritual. Pierre Gordon has shown in a striking and definitive way the essential role played by the sacred deflowerer disguised as a beast. ‘Towards the end of the tribal initiation ceremonies, the young virgin was admitted to sexual life and offered to the divinity, who was represented by a sacred personage, filled with supernatural mana, the first fruits of her new existence; the divine world finally penetrated her and sanctified her in the shape of a sacrosanct deflowerer.’50 In a later period it was the husband himself who became the deflowerer of his own wife: he could no longer leave the task to another. ‘The idea that a girl could present herself as a virgin to her husband has long seemed repugnant and unseemly’, the Dictionnaire de sexologie observes.51 This certainly does not apply to the Arab girl: her virginity has to be the preserve of her first husband. She is reared to preserve ‘that precious property, that bakāra, that would be the object, at the right moment, of a public examination and the secret loss of which would brand her forever with a redhibitory defect. The first steps in love are marked by a cruel wound, a narcissistic experience of oneself. Fear of castration is not confined to boys. If it is true, as Marie Bonaparte once wrote, that defloration engenders ‘the lasting female rancour of pain’, one has to admit that Arabo-Muslim society does everything it can to aggravate it still further. Is it a male strategy to devalue women? Perhaps that is what it amounts to.
3 Prostitution
Prostitution (bighā, khanā) has always flourished throughout history and throughout the Arabo-Muslim countries. And yet it might be thought that Islam’s extreme tolerance in sexual morals would have protected our societies from the commercial exploitation of sex. I have shown how sexual relations in Islam rested on a total and totalizing view of the flesh, how the rotation of women and therefore of men was organized, how the structures of the polygamous family, the very simple procedure of divorce and remarriage made possible an adequate, permanent, varied, renewed and constantly lawful satisfaction of carnal desire.
That is no doubt why, considering his tolerance to be quite broad enough, Muhammad must have decided, very early on, and after much hesitation, to reject the temporary marriage of pleasure, known as nikāḥ mut‘a, which is merely prostitution under another name. Having organized sexual relations within the framework of nikāḥ and concubinage, Islam regarded as sinful anything that lay outside the consensual contracts of sexuality.52 As a result any distorted form of prostitution was vehemently condemned. Thus the female slave enjoyed a special status. She was required to render sexual services to her owner(s), but exclusively. The owner could not hand her over to a third party and force her into prostitution. Indeed the Quran recommends:
And constrain not
your slavegirls to prostitution, if they
desire to live in chastity, that you may
seek the chance goods of the present life.
Whosoever constrains them, surely God,
after their being constrained, is All-forgiving,
All-compassionate.53
Tradition54 adds some interesting details to this revelation. A rich man, Abdullah Ibn Ubayy, owned six female slaves, whom he put out to prostitution. Living from their income, he was eventually able to set up a system of contractual payments whereby they had to pay him a certain sum every day and it was up to them to find this minimum. In the end two of these concubines complained to the Prophet, who then received the revelation. According to another tradition the rich man himself took the initiative of going to the Prophet, accompanied by one of his beautiful slave girls, and made the following request: ‘This is a jāriya who has been inherited by the children of such and such a man. If she goes into prostitution she will bring the orphans a great deal of money. Let me guide her in these activities.’ The Prophet refused, but when the man insisted, the quranic verses were finally revealed.
Indeed, the request was neither impudent nor imprudent. In relation to the pre-Islamic mores it was perfectly ‘lawful’. What it did betray, however, was that Ibn Ubayy, usually classed among the hypocrites (munāfiqūn), had failed to understand the new spirit established with the theory of nikāḥ and concubinage. In spite of his conversion he continued to think and behave as before.
Apart from lawful marriage the pre-Islamic Arab knew at least three other institutionalized forms of intersexual relations. Istibdhā certainly expressed a eugenic concern that seems very interesting today. A husband might order his wife to go and live for a time with another man, preferably a good-looking fellow, a poet, a sage, or some other intelligent, lucky man. . . . Indeed the husband himself abstained from any relations with his wife until he was assured that she was pregnant. In this way, the husband was assured of having a ‘first-class’ child. Thus in the pre-Islamic tribes there was a category of men to whom recourse was had to improve the Arab race. This distribution of sexual labour was fairly rare and original, especially in the institutionalized forms just described.
There was also collective marriage, known as nikāḥ rahṭ. A group of men, who must not number more than ten (hence the name rahṭ), collectively married a woman, with whom they lived in turn for a period laid down in advance. If the woman became pregnant she waited until her confinement, then summoned all her husbands to her house. None of them was allowed to absent himself. She then named the one whom she wished to appoint as father of the newborn child. This appointment was irrevocable.
The last institutionalized form of marriage was prostitution pure and simple (bighā). Specialized women were available to the public. They could be recognized by the flags that they hung over the doors of their houses. Anyone who was interested could go in quite freely. The woman did not have the right to refuse any client. If she became pregnant and gave birth to a child all the men who had visited her came to her house and skilled physiognomists (al-qafāta) were summoned to guess, on the basis of various external signs (colour of eyes, hair, shape of the nose, facial features, special marks, etc.), who the father was. The man decided upon was declared the father. He did not have the right to refuse and he took the child with him.55
It may be inferred that pre-Islamic prostitution was very wide-spread, took many forms and was legitimated by society. Islam was to tolerate only nikāḥ and concubinage and regard as zinā all other forms of sexual relation. And we have seen how zinā was classified among the most serious sins.
The surprising thing is that this did not in any way prevent prostitution from prospering. Aysha, the Prophet’s wife, was complaining, only a few years after the death of her holy husband, of the shameful conduct of women. And ‘Ainī added the following disillusioned comment: ‘If Aysha had seen the blameworthy innovations (bidā‘), the depravities, the crimes committed by the women of our time, her disapproval would have been even greater. As for the women of Egypt, they have invented indescribable acts and crimes, and no one knows how to stop them.’56 And ‘Ainī, who lived in the thirteenth century, provides details of every kind of depravity practised by his contemporaries. Among others he quotes the example of ‘women who sell depravity to men in broad daylight’, ‘bawds (qawādāt) who corrupt women as well as men’, ‘prostitutes who seek out debauchery’. ‘Some walk the streets looking for men’, others ‘set up their traps in specialized houses and in the hammam’; some ‘present on behalf of men requests for coitus to married women, to whom they know how to present matters in an agreeable manner’.57
Thus we have ample evidence that brothels and red-light districts finally became accepted after long having been more or less secret. Indeed, in the end, the state came to accept them. It saw in them a considerable source of income. In Andalusia prostitutes were called kharā jiyyāt, those who pay the kharāj, or property tax! I do not know by what juridical subterfuge the tax on brothels came to be rega
rded as a property tax. We know, for example, that in the tenth century, under Sayf-al-dawla and under the Fatimids in Egypt prostitution was offically taxed.58
A. Mazahéri sums up the situation very well when he writes: ‘At Latakia, a port in Syria, it was the muḥtasib himself who taxed and set the charges for each of his public women, according to age, attractiveness and beauty. Thus everyone knew where he was. At Suza the brothels were situated next to the mosque, and every town had its harābat bazaar, or brothel.’59
Again according to Mazahéri:
In the medieval East there were three kinds of places of ill repute. The harābat bazaar was a string of taverns in which procurers received the clients and led them to an adjoining courtyard on to which opened the rooms of their resident girls. In this bazaar one found rather mean-looking houses in which low-quality prostitutes, covered with make-up and dressed in gaudy colours, sitting on sofas, gossiping among themselves and munching grilled pistachio nuts, awaited the clients. . . . The clientèle of such houses consisted of working men, soldiers and sailors.60
The gilded youth of the time and rich strangers had more elegant houses where the women were less vulgar. At a still higher level there were better known villas in which lived ‘extremely expensive courtesans reserved for the use of noble lords, important functionaries and superior officers. In an atmosphere scented with amber, nard and incense, in a setting of refined luxury, these beauties of pearly complexion, langorous eyes made to look much longer with kohal, cheeks like tulips and pomegranate flowers, poured intoxication into men’s hearts.’61
Sexuality in Islam Page 23