Philip Purchase: Philip Purchase is a graduate student in the Classics Department at the University of Southern California, and is particularly interested in questions of gender and self-definition in Latin love poetry.
The eight authors who have contributed papers to HOMOEROTICISM IN CLASSICAL ARABIC LITERATURE cast their nets wide in selecting texts for discussion. Pre-Islamic literature, the Quran, invective poetry and narrative prose are discussed in the contexts of cultures from Andalusia to Mamluk Egypt, with an eye to the function of homoerotic motifs. The techniques of literary criticism employed are as diverse as the texts themselves. J. W. Wright, in “Masculine Allusion and the Structure of Satire in Early Abbasid Poetry”, proposes a reading of wine poetry to “illustrate how Arabic poets used illicit symbolism contained in sacred texts . . . to create parody and satire”(p.2). This reading is offered in terms of the so-called “Chicago School” of criticism, identifying a specific “Arabic Hermeneutical Terminology”. Another writer explicitly indebted to a critical school is Richard Serrano, whose stimulating paper “Al Sharif al-Tariq, Jacques Lacan, and the Poetics of Abbreviation” applies several tropes of Lacanian analysis to attempt a reading of a highly fragmented and imagistic poem. Steven M. Oberhelman, a Classicist, brings a rigorous reading of gender and power relationships to Greek and Arab dream literature, while James T. Monroe's more traditional close reading effectively highlights the alien literary culture within which homoerotic motifs function.
The selection above points to the emphasis of the book, which tends to avoid social or political readings of gay Arab history (and, moreover, avoids the debate over whether such a gay history exists). The editors state in the preface “We neither study how sexual minorities may have been treated in medieval Arab society nor regard homoeroticism as expressed by the Arab scriptors as in any way resembling modern conceptions of homosexuality”.(p.xiv) Yet the readings of texts offered here necessarily require an interpretation of the social background against which they operate, and while the main focus of the book lies in its application of different critical lenses to various texts, the reader gleans much valuable information about medieval Arabic attitudes to same-sex love along the way. Two articles address directly the question of contemporary tolerance, or otherwise, indeed touching upon theoretical discussions of homosexuality: James T. Monroe's elegant article “The Striptease That Was Blamed On Abu Bakr's Naughty Son” reads a poem by Ibn Quzman in which the poet longs for the beautiful son of the Berber prince Abu Bakr. His rigorous reading, placing the poem in the context of Mediterranean shame culture in which love poems addressed to a man's women constitute an insult to the man himself, is followed by a section entitled “The Poet as Pederast”, in which Monroe considers Islamic reactions to homosexuality in the Medieval period. Pointing to the fact that there is no word for “homosexual” in Classical Arabic, Monroe says “we can state categorically that there were no homosexuals in premodern Arabic civilization”(p.116); while Islamic law views attraction to members of one's own sex as normal and natural, it outlaws sodomy, concentrating on acts rather than character inclination. A recurrent motif throughout the book is the linkage of homoerotic motifs with other transgressions, namely fornication and wine-drinking: “natural temptation cannot make the individual abnormal- merely sinful”. Thus pederasty becomes part of a poetic code of rebellion, requiring caution in any attempt on our part to extrapolate social reality.
It is striking how mores familiar from Classical Greece recur in the discussion of this book, specifically the role of sex between older men and beardless boys. The second article mentioned above is “Hierarchies of Gender, Ideology, and Power in Ancient and Medieval Greek and Arabic Dream Literature” by Steven M. Oberhelman. After giving a brief account of the essentialist/social-constructionist debate, he criticizes the lack of gendering involved in such phallocentric argument: he argues that we must see “sexual activity enacting gendered hierarchies of power”.(p.56) Like Monroe, he stresses the importance of the role of penetration in ancient sexuality, and finds in books of dream-criticism that it is important, in terms of a propitious dream, for the dreamer to be the penetrator: “the dream is a good sign if the dreamer is the penetrator. Submissive partners are males of a lower social class, eunuchs, young boys, or slaves. Sex between males of equal social rank is not even mentioned”(p.70). Oberhelman's use of non-literatry sources is impressive, locating in dream-criticism a mirror of contemporary patriarchal sexual attitudes. He reminds us that we cannot take a society's elite formulations at face value: “divine curses are laid on male and female homoeroticism, bestiality, and autoeroticism, and on female assumption of masculine dress or behavior. Theory is not practice, however.”
Oberhelman's article is rare in addressing feminist concerns. Indeed, female homoeroticism is conspicuous by its absence throughout the whole volume. One comes away from the book enlightened about the codes of a society and literature obsessed by male beauty. “Male and Female: Described and Compared” by Franz Rosenthal enages the tradition of literary duels over the comparative merits of the sexes; “Two Homoerotic Narratives from Mamluk Literature” by Everett K. Rowson compares two prose works, one bawdy, the other elevated, on same-sex love; Paul Sprachman's “Le beau Garcon sans Merci” examines the relations between Arabic and Persian treatments of a tale in which a Muslim man falls in love with a Christian boy; and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, in “Intoxication and Immortality” examines imagery surrounding wine and cup-bearers, drawing connections with the figure of Ganymede in Greek, Roman and Renaissance cultures. The strength of this volume lies in the diversity of the texts read and the readings offered. It provokes thought both in the literary critic and the reader interested in the reality of same-sex love in other cultures: the reader is left sifting the evidence, wondering to what extent medieval Arabic society was tolerant of homosexual behavior.
For the non-specialist, all works are translated, and while the text can be rather daunting (“The Andalusi poet Ibn Quzman's Zajal No. 133 is, strictly speaking, a zajal-like muwashshaha”, for example) the copious notes are generally illuminating.
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