Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  Hence the cult of the mother that seems to me to constitute one of the keys to an understanding of the basic personality of the Arabo-Muslim societies. The physical mother/child relationship is transformed into an extended psycho-sociological unity. Let us say that privileged relationships are grounded in ‘the psychic umbilical cord’,1 to use Helene Deutsch’s felicitous expression. In fact the mother-child relationship has precedence over the mother-wife and the mother-father relationships. An exemplary virtue of the umbilical cord that links the adult to his uṣūl, his authentic roots, the ‘vaginal bond’ (ṣilat al-raḥim) is an exemplary bond, or, in the Prophet’s phrase, ‘an extension of existence’.2

  Of course it is quite understandable that, frustrated of so many joys, enduring such a painful condition, burdened by so much misery, a woman should transfer all her affections to her children. If so many Muslim mothers are possessive, even to an abusive degree, the reason is not to be sought elsewhere than in a system that denies them their most elementary rights. We should not forget that in a society in which repudiation is so widespread and so easy, husbands change, but children stay. Children very often constitute therefore the only factor of stability. They alone give the ṣilat al-raḥim its true meaning and value – especially as custody of the children is almost always given to the mother.3 Indeed the fiqh admits that in the interest of the child the relationships that bind him to his mother are stronger than those that bind him to the father. And one is quite right to stress that ‘motherhood confers more solicitude for the child’.4 When the mother dies custody passes to the mother’s mother before passing to the father’s mother, then to her before the sisters. In the absence of grand-mothers, sisters have precedence over aunts, but maternal aunts have precedence over paternal ones.5

  The equipollence of the affective and uterine is even accepted by the fiqh itself. Of course it expresses the permanence of a universal, widely observed human fact. Nevertheless the projection on to the child of all maternal affectivity conceals in the male-worshipping Arabo-Muslim environment a crucial significance if only in the economic, social and cultural consequences that it brings with it.

  Children are loved for other than practical and immediate reasons. For the mother they constitute a veritable system of insurance for old age and illness, a guarantee against destiny that is all the more effective in the case of repudiation. What could the fate of a woman be who did not have the good fortune to become a mother? A sterile woman has scarcely any other prospects than that of being an unwanted, inopportune burden on her father or brothers. Married without children, she can hardly aspire to be anything but the servant of her younger, more beautiful or more fruitful co-wives. On the other hand, a mother is guaranteed that at least her children will not ‘drop’ her and that everywhere she will be protected from poverty and need. Not to mention the prestige, honour and ‘presence’ conferred on a woman by children, especially male children. Besides every mother hopes to become in turn a venerated, ‘protective’ (ḥamā) mother-in-law. By reigning over her daughters-in-law she will reach the summit of glory before dying, respected and surrounded by her grandchildren. Having children in the traditional Arabo-Muslim society is the fundamental element of security for a woman. Woe betide the sterile woman! On her weighs the threat of repudiation. The best she can hope for will be to be lucky enough to have a rich and ‘charitable’ husband and to share his bed with other co-wives. But if one of these wives gives birth to a son, she will be forgotten and sent home!

  There are problems, too, concerning inheritance. Sons inherit most of the patrimony. Mothers are given a mere eighth. In view of this the son’s mother will prepare a better ‘retirement’ for herself. But the situation can be worse still: Muslim inheritance law lays it down that in the absence of male descendants the collaterals of the first or second degree have a right to the inheritance. So it is understandable how fear of the ghāṣib (intruder) could be the source of so much conflict and transform the situation of a sterile wife into tragedy. For her brothers-in-law will scarcely entertain such tender feelings towards her as she might expect from her own male children.

  Motherhood, then, was a protection. It was the only security for a woman – there was practically no other. The Quran may affirm that ‘wealth and children are not essential to earthly life’, but children are certainly the way to material happiness and a sense of security. So, given the ‘system’ and the structures of the environment, the Arab woman tries to increase her chances by having as many pregnancies as possible. Hence that obsession with children – have children, more children and still more children!

  And, after all, did Princess Shahrazād in The Thousand and One Nights really owe her ‘success’ to anything other than the fact that she had wasted no time in giving her master three male children in thirty-three months? ‘One of them walked, and one crawled, and one was at the breast.’6 Every traditional Arab woman dreams of just that. And, in the popular expression, ‘the month must not be broken’, by the arrival of menstrua, always tantamount to disaster. Fear of an empty womb, terror at a miscarriage, obsession with repeated female births and the misfortunes of infantile mortality – this is the fourfold fear that haunts the Arab mother. The social status of the Arabo-Muslim wife owes much more in fact to her performance as a mother than to her physical charms. In the final analysis the anti-wife, the concubine or the temporary mistress count for little. Faded roses, illusions of freshness, the indelible marks of time. No, for our parents, unfortunately, beauty was not always the most important thing. One accepts beauty, but one seeks motherhood. Beauty will pass, but the child will remain. The fruitful mother (al-walūd) is well aware that the future belongs to her. The rivalry between our mothers was settled by the number of male children they had; even if deceived, even if abandoned, a fruitful mother has infinitely more prestige and social presence than a beautiful, unfruitful woman. Motherhood is equivalent to usefulness, sterility to uselessness. This is because motherhood is equivalent to function and sterility to marginality. There is practically no other institutionalized social role accorded to women than that of mother.

  Hence the search of motherhood at all costs and the importance given to magico-religious practices and traditional pharmacopoeia, a good part of which is directed against sterility and towards increased fertility. In one of his ephemeral literary reviews, Mouloud Feraoun has an admirable account of the dramatic consequences of sterility in Maghreb society.

  They dreamt of having many children, especially boys. When, at the beginning of their marriage, someone expressed the wish that they would have seven sons, the wish was received with a beatific smile: that was the intention. They began to worry by the end of the first year. Was it a matter of fate or had a curse been put on them? They would have to take precautions: they would have to obtain the forgiveness of those they had wronged, even those they had forgotten until then, visit the dead, distribute sweetmeats on their graves to solicit their good will, go to reputable kubas, leaving offerings and promising still greater ones. Each of these rites was carried out with the greatest humility. All month Sliman said his prayers, Shabba purified herself night and morning, their love-making, in the dark, of course, was as vigorous and as hopeful as ever. On the morning of the twenty-ninth day, the young woman could no longer be in any doubt when she felt a warm trickle between her thighs. She ran to the back of the house, to the small reed hut and lifted her gandura to examine her shame: her mortification was given vent to in a flood of insults addressed to anyone or anything: the chicken scratching around in the ditch, the chipped pot that she had carelessly knocked, a door that wouldn’t stay open. Sliman guessed at once. He got up without a word and took himself off to the café.7

  This cult of motherhood has its roots deep in the mists of time. Nevertheless it is an essential feature of the Arabo-Muslim societies. ‘Paradise,’ says one hadith, ‘is under the heels of the mothers’ (al-jannat taḥta aqdāmal ummahāt).8 Women who die in childbirth are regarded as witnesse
s to the faith (shahīdāt), in the same way as men who fall in a Holy War.

  This attitude to motherhood is ultimately the basis of the relationship between spouses. When, speaking of his wife, a husband says umm aulādī, he is showing infinite respect, boundless esteem, eternal gratitude. And, conversely, the wife accepts whatever treatment her husband chooses to mete out to her because ‘he is the father of my children’, abu aulādī. The interpersonal bond created between spouses through the mediation of children is so strong that the mother-child relationship has far greater importance than the direct mother-father relationship. The latter is based on the former, and not the other way around.

  But this is done only at the cost of a double decline, physical and psychological, that has always threatened our mothers. In a profound and well-argued analysis, a Tunisian psychiatrist, Sleim Ammar, noted as long ago as 1962:

  Abundant procreation, itself deriving from continual promiscuity, from the scarcity of leisure activities, from ignorance of contraception and often from men’s indifference to and unawareness of the matter, creates not only an extremely heavy burden for the family and for society, but also helps to undermine and weaken the very organism of the woman, who is the pillar of the home and family cell.9

  It is at the price of her physical and psychological health, and often to the extent of actually shortening her life, that the Arab woman pays for a security that turns out in the end to be illusory.

  The traumata of imposed marriage and semi-public deflowering, and the fear of sterility, the phariseeism of the patriarchate have long combined to bring about the systematic cretinization and alienation of women. Arab woman pays dearly for her dominion over the unconscious.

  From the children’s point of view, one can equally well declare that the relationship with the mother is, paradoxically perhaps, far more important than the relationship with the father.

  Precisely because of its excessive masculinity the social world is inevitably perceived by the child as castrating. Paternal authoritarianism cannot fail to devalue childhood in the same way that it devalues femininity. The child is a miniature adult, capable at most of childishness. His value lies in what he will be, not in what he is. The same type of barriers that separate male from female separate the adult from the ‘little ones’ (ṣighār). Childhood is derealized to such an extent that it is deliberately ignored by the fathers, who willingly hand over to the mothers responsibility for their sons for a large part of their childhood. The only valid models of experience are those of the adult. It is up to children to conform to them, to approach them. Just as one can in no sense speak of the autonomy of women, so the autonomy of children is unthinkable.

  Indeed, in terms of socio-economic status it can be said that children have quite simply been exploited by the patriarchal socio-economic structures to a relatively advanced age. In agriculture, in the crafts, in commerce, the child joins the family firm in which he works without being able to claim a wage. The firm belongs to the parents, the working relationship is virtually indistinguishable from the father-son relationship. In the strict sense, such relationships cannot really be distinguished from relationships of ‘proletarianization’. Hence that stereotype of the son who waits endlessly for his father’s death in order to inherit, that is to say, in order to reach economic autonomy – which he then establishes on the exploitation of his own children. One can hardly turn on Radio Tunis, Radio Algiers or Radio Cairo without finding one of the innumerable radio plays dealing with the theme of inheritance!

  There is a terrible image of the father: Ab. This all-powerful, all-serious colossus cannot but represent an impenetrable wall between the child and his father. Jacques Lacan, in one of those densely written texts that he has made his own, has a passage that seems to me to sum up a permanent feature of the collective Arabo-Muslim personality:

  A function at once of power and temperament, an imperative that is not blind, but ‘categorical’, an individual who dominates and arbitrates the greedy laceration and jealous ambivalence that forms the basis of the child’s first relationships with his mother and with the fraternal rival, that is what the father represents and, it seems, all the more so in that he is at some remove from the first affective apprehensions. The effects of this appearance are expressed in various ways by psycho-analytic theory: but quite obviously they appear in it warped by the traumatizing effects in which experience first allows them to be perceived. They do not seem able to find expression in their most general form: the new image ‘floculates’ in the subject a world of individuals who, in so far as they represent nucleii of autonomy, alter completely the structure of reality for him.10

  A Muslim upbringing was, of course, authoritarian. As such it was no different from many other things. The authority relationship has deep roots in our traditional society. It binds not only man to woman and parents to children but also teacher to pupil, master to disciple, employer to employee, ruler to ruled, the dead to the living and God to man. It is not only the father who is castrating; society as a whole emasculates.

  However, in the midst of this universal emasculation there is one haven: the mother. By a subtle, but very natural strategy, mothers and children have decided since time immemorial to combine their efforts to hold in check if possible, in any case to circumvent and to compensate for, whatever is abusive in patriarchal power. We have seen how a mother expects that her children will provide for her future. In addition to that they also act as valuable ‘antennae’ for her. Our children are certainly expert at ‘keeping their ears open’ in male circles, lying in wait in the street, keeping an eye on the father or the family-in-law, serving as messengers, carrying secret presents, buying forbidden articles, selling tiny objects that ‘disappear’ from patriarchal view. In short everyday life leaves innumerable bonds of complicity between mother and child. The child is aware that he is performing a service for his mother. He is not unwilling to do this, for he knows that his work will be rewarded with gratitude. But above all what pleasure there is in outwitting the father, or taking revenge, with such delicious and relatively safe complicity! Our children are certainly skilled at making themselves agreeable to their mothers and proving that the rule of the male adults is all a sham. A fine revenge for so much humiliation! A just compensation in a life in which chastisement is an everyday occurrence!

  What mother has not had, one day or another, to establish with her own children a complicity such that the uterine relation is extended, fortified and consecrated by the sweet bonds forged during a common victory against the heavy threats of derealization? Here complicity is tantamount to positivity and, in the dialectic of intra-familial relations, it proves an effective negation of the negation. So in an Arabo-Muslim setting the mother appears even more as a font of affection, all the more precious in that it is a restful oasis in the arid social desert. How pleasant her water is to drink under the hot midday sun! And these private bonds between mother and child are reinforced by the fact that the fathers hand out so parsimoniously the external marks of their own affection. ‘Where is my mother?’ clamoured the Iraqi poet Zahāwi. ‘Give me back my mother. I don’t want anything to replace her. . . . I need my mother’s love.’11

  Indeed the mother often plays the role of buffer between the father and his children. She comes between them whenever a threat appears. She knows how to mediate. And often she manages to make the father give in. There is a whole comic dimension, in the form of shared jokes, between mothers and sons. It is quite normal for licentious, indecent words and phrases, which more or less run counter to the sexual taboos, to pass between them. A very important, very subtle relationship is established between them which I have tried to analyse in terms of the storyteller-listener relationship.12 It is not unusual to see the mother pushing understanding ‘a little too far’ in view of current customs and accepted morality. She would encourage a secret meeting or arrange to be absent from a certain place. She would defend some misdemeanour and encourage uncanonical practices. In any
case it was she who would choose the ‘daughter-in-law’ and then take charge of her.

  We have seen how, in the case of the hammam and in the case of prostitution, the uterine relationship, extended, into the mother-child relationship, tended to reappear at the slightest opportunity. Men brought up in this way would miss no opportunity to create, to re-create, to rediscover the uterine environment through memory, imitation, dream or fantasy. Side by side with the real world one forges for oneself an exquisite private world of compensations. One establishes the kingdom of the mothers. The Arab woman is the queen of the unconscious even more than she is queen of the home or of night.

  Rachid Boujedra’s novel, La Répudiation, exhibitionistic as it sometimes is, gives us the most telling examples of this truth.

  Solitude, my mother! Under the shadow of a heart cooled by the ultimate announcement [of repudiation], she continued to busy herself with us. A hodge-podge of wrinkled bruises! Scowling sex. Yet, gentleness. The deep furrows made by her tears became deeper. Dumbfounded, we witnessed a final attack. In fact we understood nothing. My mother could neither read nor write, but she sensed the existence of something that was breaking down the framework of her own unhappiness and splashing all other women who had been or could be repudiated, women eternally dismissed, running backwards and forwards between a capricious husband and a hostile father who saw his peace disturbed and did not know what to do with such an encumbrance.13

  Over and above its intrinsically literary value as a novel, La Répudiation is invaluable as a document. It supports the views that I have been trying to develop: on the foundations of a castrating, patriarchal society is built the kingdom of the mothers. What Boujedra recently said about Algeria is still broadly valid for the Arabo-Muslim world as a whole: ‘A castrating society with regard to the sons, but at the same time one doomed to incest. The revolt of the sons against the father takes the form of debauchery. When sexuality is repressed it is a political act to claim, to declare sexual freedom. Patriarchy holds economic power.’14