Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
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The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. Stereotypes depict Islamic societies as economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But in fact, the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and a great deal of variation within those cultures in terms of gender roles and sexuality. The first collection on this topic from a historical and anthropological perspective, Homosexuality in the Muslim World reveals that patterns of male and female homosexuality have existed and often flourished within the Islamic world. Indeed, same-sex relations have, until quite recently, been much more tolerated under Islam than in the Christian West. Based on the latest theoretical perspectives in gender studies, feminism, and gay studies, Homosexuality in the Muslim World includes cultural and historical analyses of the entire Islamic world, not just the so-called Middle East. Essays show both age-stratified patterns of homosexuality, as revealed in the erotic and romantic poetry of medieval poets, and gender-based patterns, in which both men and women might, to varying degrees, choose to live as members of the opposite sex. The contributors draw on historical documents, literary texts, ethnographic observation and direct observation by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors to show the considerable diversity of Islamic societies and the existence of tolerated gender and sexual variances.
1Introduction32The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexuality143Precursors of Islamic Male Homosexualities554Muhammad and Male Homosexuality875Woman-Woman Love in Islamic Societies976Vision and Passion: The Symbolism of Male Love in Islamic Mystical Literature1077Corporealizing Medieval Persian and Turkish Tropes1328Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain1429Male Homosexuality, Inheritance Rules, and the Status of Women in Medieval Egypt: The Case of the Mamluks16110Homosexuality among Slave Elites in Ottoman Turkey17411Male Homosexuality in Ottoman Albania18712The Balkan Sworn Virgin: A Cross-Gendered Female Role19713Some Nineteenth-Century Reports of Islamic Homosexualities20414Gender-Defined Homosexual Roles in Sub-Saharan African Islamic Cultures22215Institutionalized Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq23316The Sohari Khanith24417Male Actresses in Islamic Parts of Indonesia and the Southern Philippines25618Two Baluchi Buggas, a Sindhi Zenana, and the Status of Hijras in Contemporary Pakistan26219The Other Side of Midnight: Pakistani Male Prostitutes26720Not-So-Gay Life in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s27521Two Islamic AIDS Education Organizations29722Conclusion302Appendix321Authors323Index325
