Abstract: From Belgrade to Baghdad, from Algiers
to Aleppo, sexual discourse in the pre-modern
Ottoman world was rich and variegated. Its
manifestations were to be found in literature and
poetry, in medicine and physiognomy, in religious
writings and popular culture. During the nineteenth
century, much of this panoply of discussions about
sex disappeared or was attenuated to such an extent
that it became virtually non-existent. A similar
phenomenon can be perceived in Western European
attitudes toward sex several decades earlier. Yet while
in Europe the old sexual discursive world was replaced
with a new one in short order, the Ottoman Middle East
did not produce a new sexual discourse to replace the
one that vanished. This article presents some of the
premises of the old Ottoman sexual discourse,
describes the process of their demise, and suggests
an explanation for the failure to produce a new (textual)
discourse of sex.
In his novel The Sand Child, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a girl born after seven other girls to a Moroccan family. Unable to bear the leering faces of relatives and friends any longer, her father decides to raise the girl as a boy. The story slowly undulates from this point as the child, later man, later woman, seeks his-her identity. Sitting in a sidewalk café mid-way through the story, the narrator laments the elusive nature of sexual discourse in Arab society:
People like to talk about others. Here they like sexual
gossip. They spread it all the time. Among those who
were making fun of an English homosexual a little while
ago, I know some who would be quite willing to make
love with him. They find it easier to do than to talk or
write about it. Books that deal with prostitution in this
country are forbidden, but nothing is done to give work
to the girls who arrive from the country, nor is anything
done about their pimps. So people talk about it in the
cafes. They let their imagination loose on the sights
that cross the boulevard. In the evening they watch an
interminable Egyptian soap opera on television. "The
Call of Love" depicts men and women loving one another,
hating one another, tearing one another apart, and never
touching one another. I tell you, my friends, we live in a
hypocritical society. (Ben Jelloun 2000: 112–113)
These observations are echoed outside the literary sphere. The May 2001 "Queen Boat" incident in Cairo, in which police cracked down on a bar frequented by homosexuals, arrested them, and put them on public trial, initiated a spate of journalistic articles on the absence of serious discussion on sexuality in Egyptian society (Bahgat 2001). In recent years, a handful of scholars in the Middle East and beyond have dealt with such topics through academic research, most of them in line with Ben Jelloun's depiction (Abu Khalil 1993: 32–34; Dunne 1996; Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb 2000). One of the best-known historical explanations for this pervasive silence in contemporary Arabo-Muslim society was suggested by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisian sociologist, in the conclusion of his Sexuality in Islam. In Bouhdiba's view, two distinct phases led to this discursive silence. First, it was a result of "slow political, social, and cultural decline" (Bouhdiba 1985: 231) ever since the early days of Islam, as society misinterpreted the teachings of the Prophet and the Koran, distorting the message of sacred sexuality. But this repression, bad as it was already, was greatly reinforced with the arrival of colonization.
This [colonialist] violation of the collective personality,
this seizure of the environment, of institutions and even
of language, [was] to reinforce still more the tendency
to closedness and sclerosis. Arab society was to set up
structures of passive defense around zones rightly
regarded as essential: the family, women, the home.
The strategy invented by Arabo-Muslim collective experience
was to limit the extent of the alienations of modern times,
to limit the colonial impact to externals, while fiercely
defending the essential values of private life. (ibid.)
Colonialism, claims Bouhdiba, exacerbated inner processes of decline and ended up destroying the remains of what had initially begun as "an open sexuality, practiced in joy with a view to the fulfillment of being" (ibid.).
This article raises questions concerning both parts of Bouhdiba's contention. First, was sexual discourse really repressed in the pre-colonial era?1 Second, what exactly was the effect of European encroachment on the production of sexual discourse? I begin by examining the assumption that pre-modern Middle Eastern Islamic discourse was already 'repressed' sexually before the nineteenth century, and then question the further assumption that this repression was aggravated by the colonial experience. These questions have a bearing on the history of sexuality in the world of Islam, as opposed to that of Europe or India, and also have direct relevance regarding the state of sexual freedom, gender relations, and AIDS patients in contemporary Islamicate societies.
The following discussion will focus on the center of the Ottoman empire for two reasons. Firstly, for four centuries almost the entire Middle East and North Africa were governed from Istanbul. Many of the major discourses were elaborated and distributed to the provinces from this imperial center. Literate elites in the provinces were often bilingual, especially from the late seventeenth century onwards, and Ottoman Turkish, rather than Arabic, became the main cultural language (Toledano 1997: 145–162). The second consideration has to do with Bouhdiba's claim of colonial intrusion. Many of the Ottoman provinces were colonized by European powers during the nineteenth century, but the center remained sovereign until World War I. If sexual discourse was silenced in Istanbul (and Tehran, for that matter), as well as in the Arab provinces, Bouhdiba's assumption (1985: 231) that it was a physical presence—the "violation of the collective personality, this seizure of the environment, of institutions and even of language, [which reinforced] still more the tendency to closedness and sclerosis"—needs to be revised.
One cannot discuss sexual discourse and repression without alluding to Foucault's famous statement in his History of Sexuality about the trajectory of Western society's discourse. Moving the focus of debate from practices of sex to discourses of desire, Foucault claims that rather than repression of a previously more open sexual system, the nineteenth century brings in its wings an explosion of writing and talking about sex. Ostensibly secretive, furtive, controlling, and repressing, these new discourses in fact opened the door to a new and ubiquitous world of sex. They reshaped and reinvented sex and, in the process, created the modalities that today we refer to as sexuality (Foucault 1990: 3–10).
If one accepts the analysis that Foucault suggests as well as that of Bouhdiba, we are faced with two opposing trajectories. While in Western (or, to be more precise, English and French) society a façade of sexual repression in the early nineteenth century conceals an explosion of rich sexual discourse, in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa the direction of change was almost opposite. A long and continuous repression of sexual discourse, mainly in the Ottoman period, turned into a dark abyss of sexual silence as a result of colonialism. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century do we begin to perceive significant change. If true, this must be a crucial factor in explaining differences between these societies and cultures, even in the early twenty-first century.
In order to retrace the trajectory and evaluate the narratives of Middle Eastern sexual discourse, we must first turn to the pre-nineteenth-century era and to the arenas in which sex was discussed. At the time, there were many such discursive clusters, including, among others, mystical Sufi texts, popular dream interpretation manuals, poetry, and law. In this article I propose to look at three major loci of Middle Eastern cultural production that have had a deep impact on society: medical texts, theater plays, and erotic literature. My examples will be drawn mainly from the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman world.
-- Yoshie