At Kairwan, or Tunis, there were, and still are ‘quartiers réservés’, or red-light districts, situated near Zauias. At Kairwan over half the houses used for prostitution had been set up as church property (waqf, habus). The pious constituents had not hesitated to devote the income derived from these places of debauchery to the maintenance of the holy places. There is not a single Muslim town of any importance that does not have its brothels. The more important towns even had one per quarter. The situation could not have been very different from what one could still observe during the colonial period when ‘every town’, as J. Berque tells us, ‘has its red-light district, which attracts peasant girls who have been sent away from home. . . . At Casablanca . . . tourists, artists, writers, including Gide himself, visited the Rue des Ouled Nayl at Bou Saāda.’62
First the Ottoman Empire, then the colonial administration were to organize prostitution as a legal and sometimes official and even military institution. In addition to the special military brothels, the French colonial authorities encouraged the Algerian nailya, the Moroccan hajjala and the Tunisian azriya. The obvious requirements of public order, writes J. Berque, ‘have forced the police to confine one day to the legionnaires, another to the infantry, etc. For the slightest dispute soon turns into a brawl.’63
In Tunis, in the 1930s, prostitution would appear to have been organized along just such lines. At that time, Tunis, with a population of some 300,000 had five quartiers réservés (Rue Sidi-Abdallah-Quèche, Rue du Persan, Rue Sidi-Baïane, Rue Ben Osman, Rue Mahjoub), in which close on three hundred ‘filles soumises’, or registered prostitutes, worked in six ‘maisons de tolérance’, or licensed brothels (‘La Mossa’, ‘Le Chabanais’, ‘La Féria’, ‘Les Palmiers’, ‘L’Athéria’, ‘La Grande Maison’). Furthermore ten ‘maisons de rendez-vous’, or hotels of assignation, each run by a French ‘Madame’, were distributed throughout the new ‘European’ quarters. Lastly, there was a maison de rendez-vous for male prostitution, ‘Le Mayol’, in the ḥāra (former Jewish quarter), also known as the Étage des Waqui. In this apartment some fifteen resident prostitutes, all male (thirteen Jews, a Frenchman and an Italian, in 1937), wearing women’s clothes and heavily made up, were at the disposal of clients. The official price of a visit varied from five to ten francs, according to the age, looks and skill of the prostitute and the duration of the visit. Of course the distribution between quartiers réservés, maisons de tolérance and maisons de rendez-vous depended on the clientèle, which was popular and noisy in the first case, discreet and better-off in the second and very well-off in the third.
The filles soumises over the age of twenty were authorized, after having requested and obtained their registration, to agree for money to have sexual relations with the first man to request it in a place planned for the purpose. Medical supervision was obligatory and they could not leave their place of work at night or during the day, except on Mondays, their day off. They could only be freed from their obligations after a series of steps had been taken and for certain reasons: the advanced age of the girl or her ‘return to God’.
There was always a marked tendency to ageing in legalized prostitution. The distribution according to age could not have been very different from what it is today. In Tunis in 1967 prostitutes were distributed according to the following age groups: 2% between 20 and 25, 8% between 25 and 30, 40% between 30 and 40, 35% between 40 and 50, 7% between 50 and 60, and 7% over 60. Of course the youngest ones practised in maisons de rendez-vous, the older ones in the quartier réservé, and because everything has its price the cost of a visit varied from one place to another, though there was no fixed price system.
In the maisons de tolérance, the outer door led to an enclosed courtyard, which led in turn to the various rooms. The girls themselves waited for their clients in the bar. But in the quartiers réservés things are much less discreet. The registered prostitutes, very scantily dressed (bathing suit or bikini), wait in the shops, which give straight on to the street. Sometimes, especially when it is hot, they stay in the street itself, sitting on the threshold of their shop. The success of a girl, especially a new or young one, is to be measured by the length of the queue that forms in front of her shop. And it is not unusual to see men outside getting impatient, when a particularly favoured client takes too long.64
There is, then, a certain, permanence in the particular, unlawful model of sexual relations represented by prostitution.65 The gaps in our historical knowledge and the difficulties in filling those gaps are easy to understand. However we have enough information to state that Islam, despite its extreme tolerance with regard to sexuality, which it sees as self-fulfillment and happiness, despite the great ease with which it organized lawful sexuality – has utterly failed in preventing Arab societies from having recourse to prostitution. Though anti-Islamic par excellence, prostitution was nevertheless profoundly rooted in Arabo-Muslim mores. From the bazaar of the harābats to Bousbir and Abdallah-Quèche, there is a remarkable continuity.
Of course, from time to time, in a reaction of indignation, a particularly pious – or elderly – sovereign decided to close the ‘houses of vice’. In 934 the Hanbalites organized raids in the houses of ill-repute in Baghdad and occupied the premises. In 1014 the Caliph al Hakin66 went so far as to forbid women to go out into the streets. At Kairwan, in 895, Ibrahim Ibn Aghlab, in a public act of repentance, smashed his own wine jars, dismissed the prostitutes and cleaned up the city.67 Not so long ago, even King Farouk had his moments of austerity. A law of 1949 decided to close the houses of prostitution throughout the kingdom of Egypt. But in such matters the most Draconian measures seldom last and their promulgators are driven to writing pamphlets or preaching sermons against prostitution, always to no avail.68
Such persistent ability to withstand all attacks upon it cannot be fortuitous and shows quite clearly that prostitution fulfills an essential need in the Arabo-Muslim societies, even when one might have believed that those societies had no need of such sexual services.
Despite a good deal of Phariseeism, the ostensible attitudes of official morality do not accurately reflect the realities that may be uncovered by objective research. In fact we can certainly say that the juridical framework of nikāḥ is insufficient to satisfy the sexual needs of the members of the group as a whole. To begin with, nikāḥ involves a dowry, which, though limited in principle, is all too often very high as a result of the pretensions of the family, or a sense of competition. And, in spite of everything, not everyone can afford to get married. Every society has its déclassés, its outcasts or, quite simply, those who live on the fringe of society. Whatever ability a society has to integrate the individuals who compose it, there will always be deviants and non-conformists. By institutionalizing prostitution society kills two birds with one stone: it controls the deviants as well as giving a status to deviance. In the last resort institutional prostitution forms part of the secret equilibrium of the Arabo-Muslim societies.
Indeed the prostitute is an ‘outlaw’, she is a-typical. But precisely as such she corresponds to a particular social type. In the traditional social organization, she is the safety-valve. She is still more or less institutionalized, very often legitimated, sometimes legalized. The prostitute has a precise role, a well-defined function in Muslim society. She canalizes vice and by giving it a status tries to circumscribe it. De facto tolerance with regard to prostitution is an instance of the dialectic of the normal and the pathological.
But, beyond the ethical and canonical problems posed by prostitution, what matters for us is to detect the psycho-sociological impact of the institution. Prostitution is a de facto institution by which boys are initiated into sexual life. Indeed the clientèle is largely made up of adolescents who, already pubertal but not yet married, have recourse to it to satisfy normal biological needs.
In the Arabo-Muslim town the red-light district is part of the familiar landscape of the town; sometimes, of course, as in Beirut or Kairwan, it is at some distanc
e from the centre. But sometimes, as in Tunis, it is at the very heart of the city and even forms a link between the old and new quarters. ‘For this reason the red-light district is in direct communication with the streets and quarters where honest, law-abiding families live and work. Similarly it serves as a short-cut for everybody to pass from the old town to the new town and vice versa. For these two reasons, one sees there every day children between twelve and eighteen, often clutching their school satchels.’69 Indeed even when the red-light district is more or less concealed topographically from the town centre, this merely serves to point it out all the more clearly to the young, who always discover it anyway. In either case, prostitutes, especially in small towns, are known by name and they are not necessarily spurned. Sometimes they are even regarded as practising a profession like any other, until such time as they change their job and get married. They are sometimes invited to family celebrations to amuse the women and children with their indecent talk. Once married, despite some prejudice on the part of a few puritans, they invariably become re-integrated into ordinary life. This is certainly ‘tolerance’. For her part, the prostitute does not seem to see herself, any more than does the maternal bawd, as really on the edge of society. ‘Tonight, my son, I have a new delivery of girls, whose prices, per evening, vary according to their deserts.’70 These words, spoken by one of the innumerable bawds in The Thousand and One Nights, are not exceptional. Well regulated prostitution of this kind suggests an atmosphere that has little in common with the austerity of the ḥisba and fiqh and the sitt al-sutūt, the ‘ladies’ lady’, is not always an object of derision.
All this explains why the sexual life of the young Arabo-Muslim is very often, if not almost entirely, taken over by organized prostitution, whether public or not. Other experiences, with cousins, neighbours or maids, are in no sense a viable alternative.
I spoke above of maternalism. It is more than an empty phrase. For, in this initiation, the only one left in a society in which women are confined and the sexes strictly separated, we must take into account the gap in age between most prostitutes and their clients – the average age for prostitutes in Tunisia is at present forty-two. There is no reason to suppose that it was any different in the past.
Furthermore the bawd, the ‘ladies’ old woman’ (ajūzat al-sutūt) helped to give prostitution a very strong touch of maternalism. ‘Your father was my lover’, said one ‘Madame’ to a young client. ‘I’ll give you a good bargain tonight.’71
I should now like to advance a hypothesis that does not seem to me to be in any sense absurd: in this initiation into love the prostitute is merely the substitute for the mother. In a society that exalts desire and, at the same time, impedes it, only the prostitute can transcend taboos, violate prohibitions and satisfy it. In a society in which a look is often sinful, in which the veil conceals shapes from view while deforming them, the prostitute offers total nudity. She represents a double promise of freedom: freedom from social constraint and freedom from the constraints of desire. The role of prostitution is to appease tensions, to transcend anxieties and to integrate, in an ambiguous form, the margins of sexuality.
What is disturbing is the systematic infantilization and regression that accompanies sex with prostitutes. It emerges quite clearly from research carried out in Cairo by Sami Ali and ‘Abdelmonem al-Melīgī that ‘qua psycho-social behaviour, prostitution rests on a disturbed image of one’s own body’.72 Indeed there is a remarkable concordance in the clinical analyses carried out by the Cairo team, which insists on the disturbance of the vision of the biological human being. Prostitutes display an ‘unhealthy interest’ about their own bodies, and al-Melīgī adds: ‘The results obtained have convinced us that prostitutes feel an intense aggression, which they direct in turn towards their own bodies and towards the outside world.’73
This research was carried out, of course, in a modern, under-developed context and we would be wrong to extrapolate general conclusions from it. The results of this research, which are extremely interesting in themselves, concur sufficiently with research that I have myself carried out to lead to the conclusion that prostitution represents not a positive initiation into sexuality, but, as much by the maternalism that it involves as by the promiscuity that is inherent in it, a systematic infantilization. Sharing as it does a context with the hammam-complex and the traumata aroused by circumcision and excision, prostitution cannot but be regarded as regressive.
4 Folklore: puritanical and obscene
Nothing is more curious than the organization of a society based on strict sexual division – and nothing could be more fascinating to study. The strict hierarchy of the sexes of Arabo-Muslim society gives rise to a strict sociological dualism: two worlds, two empires, two antagonistic views of things. Life in the harem, the enclosure for women, the veil, the notion of ‘aura, etc., institutionalize the separation of the sexes and tend to reinforce still further the divisions. In many social strata, encounters between the sexes are limited to the strict minimum indispensable to life and survival. From birth to death a woman sees only those males whom she is supposed to see canonically: the men of her own family and, of course, her husband. The ḥazzār, the ‘jealous puritan’, obsessed with keeping his wife and daughters protected from any temptation, is a stereotype still widespread today. ‘He’s so jealous,’ a Tunisian saying has it, ‘that he won’t tolerate the presence in his home of any male, even a cockerel or a fly!’
The treatises of ḥisba meticulously regulate the hours, places and manner in which women may go out of the house. A woman who is not at home is a priori suspect. This is the impression that clearly emerges from ‘Uqbāni’s ḥisba treatise.74 This strict authoritarian prohibits even visits to the hammam or to cemeteries.
We ought to forbid . . . meeetings of women in the cemetery and public places where they find themselves side by side with young men, for a large number of libertines might also meet them and be attracted to them, on account of the intentions attributed to them and of the motives that are theirs. Some women set up tents between the graves and stay there a long time, pretending to avoid indiscreet looks. But this merely encourages desire and evil all the more. . . .75
One must also mistrust women who frequent the souks to buy or sell wool, for example, This is only a pretext, ‘Uqbāni declares, to, stop on the way in front of the shops, to exchange a few flirtatious words, abominable looks and who knows what?76
The prudent man, who cares about his reputation (‘arḍ), should be just as suspicious of expeditions to fetch water or bread. For there ‘women stand around for any other reason than the purpose of their expedition. On the contrary they stand and converse freely with debauched slaves and with a few libertines of free condition’, which, ‘Uqbāni adds, ‘has resulted in innumerable little mulattos’.77
Women’s festivities are even more suspect. How dreadful are such meetings, which are so frequent nowadays, ‘Uqbāni goes on: ‘Women, dressed up in their finest attire, meet one another, unveiled, around some singer, who is of course unmarried, who enchants and entertains them’.78
The most one can tolerate is a schoolmaster, preferably blind, who will confine his teaching to a few verses of the Quran and prayers. There must be no poetry, no correspondence. ‘Indeed it would be better not to teach women to write.’79
‘Uqbāni’s suspicions are highly significant: they are evidence of the inanity of ‘those useless precautions’. The social history of the traditional Arabo-Muslim world is a constant search for compensations, flights, subterfuges, to circumvent, to bypass the Manicheism of the sexes. Practices in the hammam and prostitutional maternalism are only two types of compensatory behaviour. If folklore is merely a tradition that has lost its meaning, if there is no practice that does not have a very precise function, then we should pay some attention to the sexual, artistic or obscene ‘folklore’. This folklore contains an immense wealth of meaning. It is a veritable battery of safety valves in a rather enclosed social system,
a permanent determination to correct sclerosis and to circumvent prohibitions in one way or another.
Indeed can a social system function in a vacuum?
Are not the two categories ‘closed’ and ‘social’ antithetical? Hence those innumerable ‘flights’ by which female and male energies each tried to escape, to free themselves, not without some measure of success. And even the feeling of liberation and the pleasure thus felt were merely increased by so many attempts that were doomed to failure. Indeed not all husbands paid as much attention to protecting their women as ‘Uqbāni recommends. And the adjacent terraces of Arab houses made many escapades possible, when the doors of the streets were heavily guarded. The terrace was a convenient and discreet means of penetration into an Arab house. Even the veil was a two-edged weapon and men were quite capable of donning it by way of disguise. It provided an excellent mode of anonymity both for men and women. Indeed the veil was more of an aid to intrigue than a protection against it!
The promiscuity of the large family had a similar effect. A haven for so many unsatisfied aunts and repressed youths, a paradise for lonely cousins burning with desire, the large Arab household was a hotbed of unsatisfied desire. Supervision was relaxed and was difficult to implement in those houses where, as the eternal puritans put it, ‘the rams are all mixed up with the ewes’.
Marriages between cousins were not only tolerated, but were, as we have seen, the only thing to hope for. What could be more natural than that the young would fall in love very early and have pre-marital sex long before the official consummation of the marriage? Were they not, so to speak, facilitated, encouraged by their environment? Was it not a common practice to match future couples as soon as a boy was born? Throughout childhood and adolescence, a boy and a girl were brought up with the idea that they were promised to one another. They saw each other in anticipation as future husband and wife. One can speak of a veritable ‘cousinage’ encouraged by the large household and the ancestral mode of life. Behind so much austerity there was so much laxity, and behind so much intransigence, so much facility and self-inflicted blindness! Even if it is very difficult to produce an objective account of facts of this kind, we do know that flirtation with cousins, neighbours, a friend’s daughter or sister was far from exceptional.
Sexuality in Islam Page 24