Everyday life abounds with instances in which obscene words, spoken and repeated obsessively, end up as a substitute. The theme of mujūn discussed above is only the noble register of a veritable institutionalization of the obscene. It is as if obscenity concealed within itself a cathartic virtue. After all why should not obscenity also have the mytho-therapeutic or logotherapeutic effect that we have tried to examine in the case of tales? In pronouncing obscene words, one provokes, catalyses, drains the libidinous. One expresses it, tames it, diffuses it. One also provokes others; with it one creates a veritable relationship or complicity; by conjuring up obscene situations, one frees oneself and frees it. By gargling obscene words one finally masters, in a symbolic and temporary way, all one’s anxiety-inducing fantasies – and there is no shortage of them in the Arabo-Muslim societies! Curiously, but understandably enough, it is perhaps the most puritanical societies that produce the most verbal – and obsessional – obscenity.
In fact the obscene word acts almost at the level of the breath, the wind that it frees. It is the mystery of the flatus vocis. But the other liberations of wind operate on the same principle. The fart, the belch, the yawn, the sneeze111 have no other significations and one can hardly be surprised at the important place they hold in popular obscene folklore. Claude Gaignebet rightly remarks:
The problem is clearly posed by Aristotle: ‘Why do such other winds as the fart and the belch have nothing sacred about them, while the sneeze is regarded as being so? . . . The fart is the wind that emerges from the end of the intestines and the belch comes from the upper belly, while the sneeze comes from the head. It is because this last region is the most sacred that we venerate as sacred the wind that comes from it.’112
This is certainly the case, for the sneeze is always received in Islam by ritual formulas, which is not the case with the other winds. At the opposite extreme the yawn is regarded as an act of the devil, who causes it in order to distract people from prayer or thoughts of God.
The fart has an undeniably liberating function. In our tales we have tried to show how it plays the role of that which symbolically resolves all problems.113 There is even a certain musical value in the fart, especially when it is imitated by a series of obscene movements of the right hand against the left armpit. Not very long ago I even knew of a company of amateurs for whom the fart took the place of music. And the people of Kairwan are regarded as so expert in the art of farting that in Tunisia a fart is quite simply called ‘the Kairwanese’. Lastly the fiqh gives some idea of the canonical importance attached to the fart by making it a break in minor purity.
The belch (jushā) – and this has not failed to shock westerners – forms part of a veritable ars vitae. A good belch is regarded as the sign that one is full and that a good digestion is likely to follow. It indicates well-being and health – God should be thanked warmly for so many benefits! Psychoanalysis, of course, has tended to see it as the symptom of an anal erotic fixation accompanied in certain pathological cases by an aggressive sadistic signification.114 In Arabo-Muslim societies it certainly has a signification of well-being, but, of course, the two interpretations are not necessarily exclusive of one another.
Indeed systematically, consciously, one provokes belching by drinking all sorts of gassy drinks containing magnesium citrate or carbonic gas. The secret charms of gazūza (lemonade) are sung in the Egyptian counting rhyme: ‘Away with tea, I prefer gazūza’ (ma shrabshi shay na ashrab azūza).
The froth that bubbles out of a bottle of gazūza, the bubbles that twinkle in the glass, symbolize spermatic fecundity. A good gazūza sets one dreaming and prepares one for liberation upwards. One cannot but admire the symbolic displacement of the low to the high and from dense liquid into airy gas.
Gazūza is the Islamic equivalent of wine. In its own way it is a water of youth. Refreshing, pleasant, it is valued above all for causing belching. There are civilizations based on wine and civilizations based on lemonade. Tell me what you drink and I will tell you what you are! The prohibition of alchoholic beverages may merely be a trick! Undeniably liberation through belching belongs, though in what seems to be a more innocent mode, to the same continuous line of compensatory practices as obscenity. Sonorous exhibitionism, autistic indifference and promiscuity belong in each case to the same networks of signification.
Sometimes these significations themselves are travestied by the subterfuges of art and religion. For a long time at Tunis, one could visit a living saint, Sidi Amor el Fayyash, now dead. The peculiarity of the saint was to be stark naked when he received his female visitors and, in his fits of dementia, he would give them ‘sublime words’, which were then interpreted by the naqība, or female attendant, who was permanently beside him. Travellers who over the centuries have visited and explored the Arabo-Muslim world have left innumerable testimonies of saints of this kind who use nakedness and obscenity as essential elements.115 Ziyara and obscenity refer back to one another and it is well known that the cult of a saint was, and is still, a pretext for the unburdening of passionate and libidinous feelings.116
Obscenity is often institutionalized in a more ‘public’ way, so to speak. The village idiot, for example, played this role. Not long ago, at Kairwan, there was a holy man, curiously, but significantly, called ‘El ‘Aura’ – that is to say, both ‘one-eyed’ and ‘the indecent one’. A cohort of boys continually followed him, clapping their hands and calling on him to exhibit his ‘watch’. And the holy man – for he was regarded as such – would lift his tunic and exhibit his nakedness to the great joy of the men and women passing by.
In Egypt there was Sidi Ali Kākā. This is how Ahmed Amīn describes him:
He was a strange character and one who demonstrated the extent to which Egyptians are obsessed by their sexuality. He wore sandals and a belt, from which hung an object in the shape of an enormous penis. When women and children saw him pass by, he invariably brought on attacks of the giggles. On the occasion of a birth, sweets are made that have that [phallic] shape. They are made of caramelized sugar, transformed into sorbet. They are also called sharbet [sorbet]. And the vendors used to cry their wares in the street: ‘Sharbet dolls, sharbet husbands, sharbet mothers-in-law, sharbet Ali Kākās’.117
Sidi Amor el Fayyash, El ‘Aura or Ali Kākā are pale figures compared with Karakūz, a character believed to be of Turkish origin.118 The French ‘Karagheuze’ derives from the Turkish word qaraqush, which means ‘black bird’. It is a marionette some eight to twenty inches high. But there are bigger Karakuz still. Karakuz is the hero of short plays performed throughout the Arabo-Muslim world especially during the month of Ramadhan to enliven the long nocturnal vigils. The words and situations are left to the inspiration of the marionette master. But obscenity is the rule, for Karakuz has the speciality of being endowed with an enormous, Rabelaisian membrum virile. He is the epitome of virile, triumphant pride arriving to conquer the world, thanks to his well-tried member. No one escapes his virility: the manageress of the Moorish baths, the zaptie (a policeman under the Ottoman Empire), the meddeb, the prostitute, the general, the local shopkeeper, the bedouin, the virgin sitting at home, the policeman and the Frenchman, too, all are subjected to the victorious effects of his sexual frenzy. Nature itself is not spared: the palm trees and olive trees are undermined at their roots and the wadis are diverted or stopped. Nothing can resist the furious blows of Karakuz’s rod. Each feat was accompanied by obscene verses, indecent repartee, vulgar proverbs and the mixed audience, men, women and children, would laugh uproariously.
In Tunisia political protest was slipped in behind the character who in memorable performances attacked the bust of the beautiful Marianne and a stylized map representing France. René Millet, French resident general in Tunisia at the time, forbade the performances. But Karakuz is still alive and well and nourishing in the East.
Such a systematic use of obscenity cannot be fortuitous. One may speak of a ludic, but collective use of obscenity that seems to correspond
to a very precise function. Collective obsessions are thus institutionalized and in a sense appeased. A sexually divided society limits to the rninimum opportunities of meetings between the sexes. Sexual relations are limited to those permitted by the nature of nikāḥ. Essentially authoritarian, Arabo-Muslim society is castrating not only from the sexual point of view, but also from the point of view of individual autonomy in the political, economic, ethical and cultural spheres. Despite the intolerably stifling atmosphere that reigns in these societies, they have had sufficient genius to place enough safety valves at the right moments and the right places.
Hence that mechanism of compensation by which every possible opportunity is used: cousinage, homosexuality, voyeurism, verbal outpourings, obscene gestures and words. Indeed, very often, poetry and even the casuistics of the fiqh itself are little more than magical processes substituting a gesture charged with meaning for the complete sexual act and often a mere word for the gesture. Obscenity, of course, is only a game, but a most revealing one. It compensates through fiction. It liberates by symbolic realization. It releases passions and is the most potent, most effective safety-valve. Unfortunately, it is not effective enough.
As such the various manifestations of obscene folklore examined in this chapter represent an important and not ineffective defence mechanism. At the risk of repetition, I will say that it is of the utmost importance to understand the institutionalized character of these various mechanisms. Obscenity is not marginal; on the contrary, it is profoundly rooted in the collective life and sometimes manifests itself in an excessive way. It is, I believe, like prostitution and pederasty, a cause of psychological immaturity. Being essentially externalizing, formal and exhibitionistic, it soon loses all freshness, all spontaneity. Nothing is more frozen, so heavy and difficult to manipulate than the stereotypes of obscenity, which, by their nature, do not lend themselves to renewal. Obscenity is mere lack, a fragile persona, an external façade that ill conceals the true ego. The most obscene people are perhaps the most impotent. In this overcompensation, the personality runs the risk of losing its plasticity, its overflowing naivety, in short, its force. Obscenity is not always authentic liberation of the libidinous. On the contrary it is perhaps a supreme ruse on the part of society, which tolerates it precisely because it is castrating, because it lures the individual into the way of facility and because it drives him to adopt collective forms of behaviour. Nothing is so destructive of the creative spontaneity of the loving self than obscenity. In the final analysis, nothing is so orthodox. From puritanism to obscenity there is continuity and unity.
Ultimately if obscenity were merely a temporary fantasy it would be of little consequence. On the contrary, as we have just shown, it is integrated in the system. From the outset it is an element of conformism, of systematic infantilization, of collective cretinization. In this ‘anti-conformist conformism’ the meaning of sexuality is lost. Love itself sinks into the ridiculous: love without joy, sexuality without pleasure. The tension of the sacral and the sexual is to be found at the very heart of a contradiction that we find over and over again: as a religion Islam makes possible a lyrical vision of life, but the Arabo-Muslim societies have almost succeeded in denying this lyricism by refusing it all foundation and by refusing it even to the point of denying self-determination.
CHAPTER 13
In the kingdom of the mothers
What aporias, then, and what contradictions! As a religion and as a view of the world Islam strives to be and presents itself as an exaltation of life. It sings of the fulfillment of being, of gharīza (innate tendency). Unity is attained by the affirmation of Eros, not by its negation. In various ways all the instruments of social control – art, literature, folklore – take up these ideals, which inform them in the sense that they are bound to obey the rigorous, but agreeable, requirements of the unity of life through love. A veritable ‘pan-sexualism’ runs through the Islamic ethic. Love is one, from bestiality to the vision of God. It does not even begin with the animals: even the trees are in love. The very stones sing of love. God himself is a being in love with his own creatures. From the thing to the Supreme Being love exists as a guarantee of unity. It weaves tight, indissociable links within earthly creation and beyond. Being is one, because love is one. And in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing is required: love. So love is a prayer, an ever-renewed miracle by which one gives oneself in order to receive the better, that is to say, to assimilate oneself the better. To give oneself up to be seen and to see in order to give.
But one must probably be a prophet oneself, animated by the Revelation and the breath of the hereafter, if one is to grasp, conceive of and above all achieve this essential unity! To live carnal love, to live it to the limit, to assume its plenitude is to forge a safe way for oneself to the Absolute. Mysticism and eroticism complement one another.
Orgasm, that ‘little death’, is continuous rebirth. True enough, but unfortunately such an intuition does not seem to be very widespread. Nor does the valorization of love in the mode of unity seem to have found a practical means of becoming concrete at the level of everyday life. The organization of collective life is ultimately no more than the fragmentation of what Islam originally conceived as unified. Does this represent a failure on the part of Muslim societies to unify themselves and to conform to the spirit of Islam? Perhaps, but it is certainly also a nostalgia for unity when faced with the contradiction of the diverse.
The unitary ideal, rarely realized in fact, permits us to see ethics and the fiqh as an antinomy. In sexual matters it can be said that the fiqh opposes ethics, since it organizes communal life not in terms of the profound complementarity of the sexes, but in terms of their dissociation. The passage from the Quran and the sunna to the fiqh is a passage from the harmonious unity of the sexes to their duality. The fiqh organizes Muslim society in terms of sexual division. It is at the level of the fiqh, much more than at the level of ethics, that social bimorphism was to be structured, organized, institutionalized.
But the spontaneous structures were to go even beyond the structures organized by the fiqh. And although the fiqh speaks of bimorphism, the spontaneous structures were to set up a de facto sexual bimorphism even more rigid and even more serious for the evolution of the Arabo-Muslim societies. The Quran speaks of a gap ‘of a single degree between the sexes, in favour of men’. The fiqh speaks of a natural disparity. The de facto groupings institutionalize the repression, derealization and negation of women. Of course everything is expressed in subtle terms and the status of women is certainly ambiguous, even in the Quran itself. Nevertheless there is a progressive decline of the Muhammadan ethic of marital tenderness. It is as if the continuous training and domestication of love led to a negation of love; that is to say, in a male-worshipping society, to the negation of women. It is as if the redistribution of the male and female roles to which Muhammadan ethics addressed itself had remained a dead letter – or almost. Hence so many subterfuges, so many safety-valves, so many more or less illusory compensations. At best infatuation, anti-love, ended up as no more than substitutes, which, robbed of their mythical halo, often turned out to be disappointing. In the socialization of love one can imagine what a terrible price is paid by society as a whole. The burden borne by women continues to be an exorbitant one. For it is nothing less than the sacralization of the masculine and the trivialization of the feminine.
The study of sexuality in the Arabo-Muslim societies reveals that, in practice, the derealization of the status of women has invariably led to the enclosure of women in a double role as objects of pleasure and as producers of children. In either case we are dealing with women-as-objects. A cruel contradiction! On the one hand there is a persistent tendency to sing the praises of sexuality, to celebrate love, to encourage a lyrical view of life. The libidinous forces are exalted, liberated, even unleashed. ‘Couple’ (tanākaḥu), the Prophet ordered. But, on the other hand, sexual dimorphism tends ultimately to place all positivity on the sid
e of masculinity and to empty femininity of all value. To be more precise, femininity is reduced to being no more than the obverse of masculinity. Woman is the shadow of man, in the literal as well as the figurative sense. Everywhere denied, femininity hides itself and seeks refuge: woman becomes a creature of the home and of night. So it is hidden deep within the individual and collective personality that woman must be found. And it is in the depths of inferiority that essential femininity is hidden.
By confining woman to pleasure, one turns her into a plaything, a doll. By doing so one limits love to the ludic and one reduces the wife to the rank of woman-object, whose sole function is the satisfaction of her husband’s sexual pleasure. Marital affection is reduced to mere pleasure, whereas in principle pleasure is only one element of it among others. Thus the wife is devalued. But by stressing the child-bearing role of women, one valorizes the mother. In fact misogyny represses woman into her maternal role and by that very fact sets up a veritable ‘kingdom of the mothers’. For nikāḥ, in itself, is merely a consensual act that juridically regulates the relations between public and private. In fact social life actually goes well beyond the fiqh. Love may be seen only as an erotic manipulation. Nevertheless one cannot deprive the woman of her formidable power of producing life. And she alone holds the key to procreation. This represents an incontrovertible fact that imposes, at the biological level, the irreducible, undeniable complementarity of the sexes. However possessive love may be, it cannot but be oblative and the possessive instinct cannot be completely dissociated from the nest-building instinct.
Sexuality in Islam Page 26