http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/bray-medievalsamesex.html
Alan Bray
Summary
This note consists of some reflections on John Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, with an eye to the relevance they might have today: to the current debate over the blessing of homosexual friendship. It is for this reason that these reflections focus on what John Boswell had to say on the Catholic west - where the debate now has its sharpest edge. These reflections are also a response to the perceptive arguments put forward by Elizabeth A R Brown and Claudia Rapp in ‘Ritual Brotherhood in Ancient and Medieval Europe: A Symposium’ Traditio Volume 52 (1997) pp. 261-381. What I have attempted here is to revisit the documents these historians employed and to apply a reading in different terms.
The argument I make below for the form of the rite that appears in latin europe to have corresponded to the adelphopoiesis edited by John Boswell was put forward in a BBC Radio programme a few days ago: ‘The Kiss of the Crusaders’ BBC Radio 4, 12 June 2.30pm produced by Tessa Watt and Helen Weinstein and introduced by Eamon Duffy. It anticipated some of the conclusions of my book on friendship in traditional society in england. The historians John Bossy and Maurice Keen joined in the discussion. The programme was designed as a popular presentation - there was an audience of approaching half a million listeners - and centred on a tomb monument to two english knights who died in Constantinople in 1391 and were buried there together. This monument is one of a number from medieval england that appear to show the traces of this rite.
Giraldus’s Topographica Hibernica
The implications of the material discussed in John Boswell’s book have I think been dismissed too easily and in particular the account he quotes from Giraldus de Barri’s Topographica Hibernica. This is not a sober and objective work but a piece of propaganda, intended to justify to its audience in catholic europe the invasion of Ireland by the Anglo-Norman army under Henry II in 1171. As evidence for Irish society a work of propaganda such as this is hardly reliable. Its value as historical evidence is rather I would suggest its indirect ability to preserve evidence of the values and prejudices of the audience that Giraldus was seeking to manipulate. In the course of this work, Giraldus describes a ritual confirming friendship which its audience could be expected in this way to recognise and value. Or rather to recognise as here debased by the blood that according to Giraldus among the Irish follows its treacherously pious beginning:
Inter alia multa artis iniquae figmenta, hoc unum habent tanquam praecipuum argumentum. Sub religionis et pacis obtentu ad sacrum aliquem locum conveniunt, cum eo quem oppetere cupiunt. Primo compaternitatis foedera jungunt: deinde ter circa ecclesiam se invicem portant: postmodum ecclesiam intrantes, coram altari reliquiis sanctorum appositis, sacramentis mulitfarie praestitis, demum missae celebratione, et orationibus sacerdotum, tanquam desponsatione quadam indissolubiliter foederantur. Ad ultimum vero, ad majorem amicitiae confirmationem, et quasi negotii consumationem, sanguinem sponte ad hoc fusum uterque alterius bibit. Hoc autem de ritu gentilium adhuc habent, qui sanguine in firmandis foederibus uti solent. O quoties in ipso desponsationis hujus articulo, a viris sanguinum et dolosis tam dolose et inique funditur sanguis, ut alteruter penitus maneat exsanguis! O quoties eadem hora et incontinenti vel sequitur vel praevenit, vel etiam inaudito more sanguinolentum divortium ipsam interrumpit desponsationem.
(Among the many other deceits of their perverse ways, this one is particularly instructive. Under the appearance of piety and peace, they come together in some holy place with the man with whom they are eager to be united. First they join in covenants of spiritual brotherhood. Then they carry each other three times around the church. Then going into the church, before the altar and in the presence of relics of the saints, many oaths are made. Finally with a celebration of the mass and the prayers of priests they are joined indissolubly as if by a betrothal.
But at the end as greater confirmation of their friendship and to conclude the proceedings each drinks the other’s blood: this they retain from the custom of the pagans, who use blood in the sealing of oaths. How often, at this very moment of a betrothal, blood is shed by these violent and deceitful men so deceitfully and perversely that one or the other remains drained of blood! How often in that very improper hour does a bloody divorce follow, precede or even in an unheard-of-way interrupt the betrothal.) - Bodleian Library/ Laud Manuscripts/ 720/ folio 224v. I have given the collated transcription in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed James F. Dimock, vol. 5 (London, 1867) p.167. Rubric: ‘De argumento nequitiae et novo desponsationis genere’.
What Giraldus is doing here I think is this. Giraldus’s satire first attributes to this ritual all the proprieties to hand that could confirm the friendship created by ritual kinship; and he does this so comprehensively that each of the forms of ritual kinship that he knew his audience would value find their place. The first is that established by baptism. These vows, he tells his audience, are vows of compaternitas. Compaternitas was the spiritual brotherhood established at baptism between, among others, the sponsors of a child and its natural parents, relations which figured more significantly as the specifically social consequences of baptism than any subsequent tie to the child. The second that he invokes is that established by a betrothal. The vows, he goes on to assure his soon to be scandalised audience, are moreover given the force of a desponsatio: an agreement to a marriage. In the twelfth century a betrothal - a desponsatio - might precede the marriage itself by several years; but when it was solemnised at the church door, where the rite of baptism also began, its binding terms established kinship relations that stood with those created by marriage or a baptism. But in Giraldus’s awesome composite there is no baby and no bride, for the third form of ritual kinship implied by Giraldus that leaves its trace in this account is the ritual brotherhood of the kind that K. B. McFarlane pointed to some years ago (K. B. McFarlane ‘A business-partnership in war and administration, 1421-1445’ English Historical Review, vol 78 (1963) pp. 290-310): ritual brotherhood created directly by vows of sworn brotherhood and without the symbolic instrumentality of the child or the marriage. The heady mix in Giraldus’s description invokes the spiritual brotherhood of compaternitas, the binding force of a betrothal and the liturgical form of sworn brotherhood - a form whose culmination in this account is the eucharist.
Giraldus then aims his blow. After a beginning that could not have confirmed friendship in more solemn terms the pagan addition proves disastrous. The blood of the pagan rite stimulates the blood-lust of the participants, and the ritual ends not in friendship but in violence and murder. The drawing at the opening in the Bodleian manuscript of two men fighting to the death makes Giraldus’s point. But the historical evidence the passage contains lies not in what he has to say about the Irish but in the evidence he indirectly preserves of the form of a ritual that he knew his readers in catholic europe would recognise and value. The force of Giraldus’s satire depends on familiarity with the rituals he is invoking and his audience’s acceptance of their legitimacy. The implication of Giraldus’s Topographica Hibernica is that his readers in latin catholic europe knew that the ceremony of ‘sworn’ brotherhood ended with a celebration of the mass, and this knowledge prepares them to be all the more scandalised by the blood that (according to Giraldus) all too often then follows among the Irish.
Juvénal des Ursins
That this is the right way to read the historical evidence in this account is supported by the direct evidence of a letter addressed on 14 July 1411 to the King of France, Charles VI, by the sons of Duke Louis of Orléans, which the fifteenth-century historian Juvénal des Ursins included in his Histoire de Charles VI. It fills out the terse phrase ‘en leglise de Saint Martin’ (‘in the church of St Martin at Harfleur’) used in the document that McFarlane edited recording the compact of brotherhood in arms between Nicholas Molyneux and John Winter also made in France, in the church at Harfleur, almost to the day just ten years earlier on 12 July 1421. This letter (In Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires, eds. MM. Michaud and Poujoulat, series I, vol. 2 (1851), pp. 456-464) gives a detailed description of the rite by which their father had become the ritual ‘brother’ of his cousin Duke Jean of Burgundy on 20 November 1407 when, as in the ritual indirectly implied by Giraldus’s account, they had made their communions together before witnesses in a votive mass for this purpose.
The ritual as Juvénal des Ursins summarises it is that
le dimanche vingtiesme jour de novembre monseigneur de Berry, et autres seigneurs assemblerent lesdits seigneurs d’Orleans et de Bourgongne, ils oüyrent tous la messe ensemble, et receurent le corps de Nostre Seigneur. Et prealablement jurerent bon amour et fraternité par ensemble...
(on Sunday the 20 November the Lord de Berry and other lords assembled together, and the said Lords of Orléans and of Burgundy heard the mass together and received the Body of Our Lord; and before doing this they swore true love and brotherhood together...)
The unusual value of this letter lies in the stress it places on the customary and familiar nature of the rite followed in 1407, a point its writers press in their letter because of the infamy of the subsequent murder of their father by the servants of Duke Jean. As they put it, their father and Duke Jean during the ritual in 1407 had made
plusieurs grandes et solemnelles promesses, en tel cas accoustumées ... par especiales convenances sur ce faites
(many grand and solemn promises of the kind as are customary in such a situation ... by the special conventions recognised in such a matter).
Both of these pieces of evidence point, in the first case indirectly and in the second directly, to the same conclusion: that in the churches of catholic europe from at least the end of the twelfth century until the beginning of the fifteenth, the mass provided a familiar culmination for the creation of ritual ‘brothers’, a ritual completed in their taking holy communion together. Such a liturgical practice should not surprise us. In her classic study Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991) Miri Rubin has described how, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the eucharist was refigured as a symbol at the centre of the secular world about it, becoming incorporated into its forms of life, shaping them and in turn being shaped by them. The ritual evident in these accounts was part of that process.
Edward II and Piers Gaveston
The rite I believe we can see in these documents seems very probably to have been the form in which Edward II became the ritual brother of his friend Piers Gaveston. I accept here the arguments for a ritual brotherhood between them put forward by Pierre Chaplais in Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother (Oxford, 1994). These are based on the chronicle of the civil war years of Edward’s reign in the Cottonian manuscripts. This is how it describes Edward and Gaveston’s first meeting (I have given Chaplais’s transcription at p. 13, rather than that of George L. Haskins in ‘A Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II’ Speculum vol 14 (1939), p. 75).
... filius regis intuens, in eum tantum protinus amorem iniccit quod cum eo fraternitatis fedus iniit, et pre ceteris mortalibus indissolubile dileccionis vinculum secum elegit et firm[i]ter disposuit innodare.
(... when the king’s son gazed upon him, he straight away felt so much love that he entered into a covenant of brotherhood with him and chose and firmly resolved to bind himself to him, in an unbreakable bond of love before all men).
The precision of the term ‘fraternitatis fedus’ (‘covenant of brotherhood’) in this account corresponds to the ‘compaternitatis foedera’ (the ‘covenants of spiritual brotherhood’) that Giraldus invokes, and the Vita Edwardi Secundi is equally explicit about the formal character of their friendship and characterises it in the language of fraternal adoption (Vita Edwardi Secundi ed. N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957) pp. 7, 17, 28). This is taken from the passage that follows its account of Gaveston’s murder by Edward’s opponents.
Occiderunt enim magnum comitem quem rex adoptauerat in fratrem, quem rex dilexit ut filium, quem rex habuit in socium et amicum.
(For they put to death a great earl whom the king had adopted as brother, whom the king loved as a son, whom the king regarded as friend and ally).
The Annales Paulini composed among the cathedral clergy at St Pauls uses the same term (Annales Paulini in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. ed. William Stubbs vol. 1 (London, 1882) p.263).
‘Rex quidem adoptivi fratris sui Petri de Gavastone personam exulare seu honorem ejus minuendum non potuit sustinere’.
(Indeed the King could not bring himself to send his adoptive brother into exile or diminish his honour).
The chronicles do not describe the form in which Edward and Gaveston swore their fraternitatis fedus, but that of their oaths together in 1307 at the time of Gaveston’s first exile (at Edward I’s command) is described in the memorandum in the close rolls (Calendar of the Close Rolls Edward I, vol. 5, 1302-1307 (London, 1908) p. 526) as having been taken ‘upon God’s body and upon the other relics’ and makes it probable that their earlier oaths also took the eucharistic form that Juvénal des Ursins was later to regard as customary. This phrase in the close rolls follows closely the ‘oath sworn on the precious blood of Jesus Christ’ of Juvénal des Ursins and Giraldus’s ‘in the presence of relics of the saints’.
Ending Disputes?
It is not I think persuasive to characterise in narrowly defined terms the motives for the relationships being created by this rite. For example, an intriguing possibility is that the ritual I have described was employed to force men to make peace with each other, when their violent conflict was disrupting good order; and in some instances this seems to have been the case. The circumstances of the sworn brotherhood of the Dukes of Burgundy and Orléans would fit that description; but the details elsewhere belie so neat a generalisation. The most obvious of these is that the agreement between Nicholas Molyneux and John Winter was entered into in the church of St Martin at Harfleur and clearly was not the resolution of a dispute of this kind: in their agreement they recorded that they were prompted to become brothers in arms by the desire to augment the love and fraternity already growing between them (‘Premierement pour acroistre et augmenter lamour et fraternite qui est piera en commencee entre ledit Molyneux & Winter’) and through their agreement formed a working relationship that was to last throughout their lives. An ecclesiastical setting was apparently as appropriate for creating a brotherhood of this kind as one settling a dispute. If Edward II had been seeking a sworn brotherhood to resolve a dispute he would have sought it among the magnates who were threatening him and not in an intimate who could act for him like Piers Gaveston. A reading of the use of the rite solely to settle disputes would also require one to disregard the terms used by both Giraldus and the sons of the murdered Duke Louis of Orléans: in the one case the ritual being described takes place when the two men desire to come together in it - ‘they come together in some holy place with the man with whom they are eager to be united’ (‘ad sacrum aliquem locum conveniunt, cum eo quem oppetere cupiunt’) - and in the other the term they employ is ‘vraye fraternité et comgagnée d’armes’: substantially the same term as the ‘freres darmes’(‘brothers in arms’) used in the agreement of Nicholas Molyneux and John Winter.
jurerent et promirent solemnellement vraye fraternité et compagnée d’armes ensemble, par especiales convenances sur ce faites.
(they swore and solemnly promised true brotherhood and company of arms together, by the special conventions recognised in such a matter) - p. 457 of the above reference.
Defining the Family
A characterisation like this - essentially in terms of violence - imposes a coherence on the material that is achieved only by taking one part and discarding another; and the same inevitably happens when any other broad characterisation is applied: such as an equally universal motive if not of violence then of profit or of love. These are solutions imposed from outside. The guide I think is rather the manner in which different kinds of kinship terminology can overlap and shade into each other in Giraldus’s awesome composite. For the later historian to attempt with determined pedantry to undo the connections being made is to miss the point that that confusion corresponds with precision to the texture of the social life in which they figured - although from a modern viewpoint this is by no means self evident.
That the ‘family’ can be defined in several different ways - in terms of blood relations for example, but also as a common household, or in terms of marriage - tends now to be a technical point of interest only to sociologists and anthropologists, as in modern society these different definitions coincide closely. The family living together in the same household is conventionally the group of parents and their children linked by blood or marriage. In the past (as J.-L. Flandrin has pointed out so well) these definitions often did not coincide so nearly. One major cause of this mismatch was the many forms of what one might call ‘voluntary’ kinship, kinship created not by blood but by ritual or a promise. The difficulty for the modern viewer lies in that modern society recognises only one such ‘voluntary’ kinship, in marriage: in the past others have subsisted alongside side it; and their aggregate effect was that (in England at least until well into the seventeenth-century) an individual lived in effect in a potential plurality of families. He or she could be part of one family in terms of blood relations and simultaneously part of another in terms of the ritual kinship created by betrothal or marriage, by baptism, or as here by ‘sworn’ brotherhood. The relations this created did not obliterate the boundaries of families; spiritual’ kinship remained distinct from that created by birth or marriage, and there is no evidence that sworn brotherhood extended to others beyond those who made the promise that created it. But the cumulative effect of such a multiplicity of forms of ‘voluntary’ kinship was to embed the family within a wider and encompassing network of friendship; and when friendship is given a formal and objective character by ritual and oath - as it was in sworn brotherhood - it is indistinguishable in its workings from kinship. Fostering and adoption further extended that interlocking network between households, and within it was placed the family in our contemporary and more limited sense of a group of parents and their children. Sworn brotherhood was one of the threads out of which that fabric was made. That network is peculiarly difficult to see from the vantage point of a modern historian. Its presence was created by those very mismatches that modern society lacks; where all definitions of the family are perceived to delineate the same group and no kinship is perceived to be, in the strict sense of the word, artificial.
The Theology of the Rite
There is though a ‘but’ to be added. If I am reading these sources correctly the rite does not then appear as an unreserved endorsement of the relationship being created. Neither Giraldus nor Juvénal des Ursins imply that the vows of sworn brotherhood were part of the mass: in both of these pieces of evidence, the mass rather follows the vows. No doubt Juvénal des Ursins was voicing a widely held view when he describes the ritual brotherhood of the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy as ‘sermentées et jurées sur le precieux corps de Jesus-Christ’ (‘an oath sworn on the precious blood of Jesus Christ’) (p. 456), but that is to gloss in a broad expression the insistent detail that the vows were not made within the mass. ‘The Lords of Orléans and of Burgundy heard the mass together and received the Body of Our Lord; and before doing this they swore true love and brotherhood together.’ The same detail appears again in Giraldus’s account: ‘Finally with a celebration of the mass and the prayers of priests they are joined indissolubly as if by a betrothal’. In the evidence provided by Juvénal des Ursins and Giraldus alike, the mass is not the setting for the vows of sworn brotherhood but rather follows, as their culmination. In the careful proprieties of Giraldus’s indirect account, the separation in time is accompanied by a symbolic separation in space, between door and altar. ‘Postmodum ecclesiam intrantes ... ’ (‘Then going into the church ...’). Giraldus’s tell-tale phrase indicates what would have been self-evident to his audience. A betrothal was made at the church door. It was there that the rites of baptism began. It was there also, at the church door, that the vows of sworn brotherhood were exchanged, with the two sworn brothers only then receiving holy communion together in the mass within that followed. It is not difficult to see the reason why traditional christianity should have had reservations about such a rite. The mutual fidelity being promised was unreserved and indissoluble. But to what end might that friendship be put? Such friendship was significant in a public sphere, and unreserved fidelity in that context easily gave rise to suspicions that lay close to hand of potential collusion and self-advancement.
The point is that the church in the latin west did not attempt to legislate for the diverse motives that could prompt sworn friendship. The solution of traditional christianity rather lay I would suggest in the shape of a eucharistic rite which allowed it to respond to the potential for good in the vows being exchanged without being compromised by the potential for misuse that accompanied them: in its transformation through the eucharistic action of the sacrifice for friends offered at the altar into the universal sacramental sign that it then offered in communion. That implicit theology emerges most clearly from the comparison one can make with the adelphopoiesis edited by John Boswell, which represented a response to the same dilemma but from within its own distinctively byzantine milieu. Westerners had no difficulty in recognising it as the sworn brotherhood of the latin west (Elizabeth A. R. Brown in the Traditio symposium p. 361), and in the troubled history of its canon law one can see in explicit terms the same reservation with which catholic europe regarded its western counterpart. Ritual brotherhood, warned a twelfth-century greek ecclesiastic, could lead to ‘many sins’, and greek canon law has variously attempted to restrict the rite or to preclude its use altogether: although apparently with limited success judging by its continuing inclusion in the liturgical collections and its surviving use (Claudia Rapp in Traditio symposium) pp. 319-326, quotation at p. 323).
The adelphopoiesis is a characteristic product of its theological milieu, although it addressed the same fundamental dilemma as the eucharistic rite developed in the West. Both the adelphopoiesis and its latin counterpart were alike designed to negotiate the dangers of mutual appropriation present when church and world come together, and both did so by recognising the good in the vows exchanged as something still incomplete, as a potential. But while the latin rite expressed this in a theology of grace, the adelphopoiesis employed a distinctively greek theology of praise. Characteristically the prayers of the adelphopoiesis open with the praise of God as creator, as ruler, and as saviour and place the blessing of the participants that follows in that context.
Lord God almighty who created man in his own image and likeness and gave him eternal life ...
Lord our God, who has granted our petitions for our salvation ...
Lord our God, you are the perfecter of love and teacher of the world and saviour of all ...
(From the slavonic Euchologion Sinaiticum translated by Constance Woods Communio 22 (Summer, 1995) p. 316ff. Comparable passages from Boswell’s translation of the adelphopoiesis (p. 295 and 296): ‘Forasmuch as Thou, O Lord and Ruler, art merciful and loving, who didst establish humankind after thine image and likeness ...’, ‘O Lord Our God, who didst grant unto us all those things necessary for salvation ...’)
Such a blessing - strictly a ‘blessing’ of God - places the adelphopoiesis with the rites for a betrothal, for the cutting of a boy’s hair or beard, the prayers for rain, first fruits, or the blessing of seed corn that are also found in the manuscripts that contain the adelphopoiesis or its slavonic equivalent: things that have a natural integrity and potential of their own, to which the believer responds in praise of their Creator (for example in Barberini Ms 336 in the Vatican Library: Anselm Strittmatter ‘The ‘Barberinum S. Marci’ of Jacques Goar: Barberinianus graecus 336’ Ephemerides Liturgicae Anno 47 (novae seriei 7) (1933) pp. 329-67 and the Euchologion Sinaiticum which Archimandrite Ephrem discusses in his review of John Boswell’s book in Sourozh Number 59 (February 1995) p. 52). The one views the potential good in the promises of ritual brothers, as it were from below, in a world of defective human relations: the other from above, from the viewpoint of the integrity of creation. This distinction is akin to that detected by historical liturgists in the differing rites for marriage in greek and latin christianity, a latin rite shaped from the eleventh century by the exchange of promises and a greek liturgy preserving an older liturgical tradition that locates the liturgical action in a prayer of praise. In the one case this has been described as the support and clothing of a promise, whereas in the other it is the celebration and receiving of a gift (Michael Vasey ‘The Family and the Liturgy’ in The Family in Theological Perspective pp. 169-185. ed. Stephen C. Barton, Edinburgh, 1996).
The differing response created a different trajectory. The point I think is this. Praise must be spoken, and a distinctive office emerged in greek christianity for the creation of ritual brotherhood - and with it a canon law that sought to legislate explicitly for its ambiguities. In the west that development was eluded by the incorporation of sworn brotherhood within the existing structures of the eucharist. The indirect effect has been to make the friendship created by the ritual brotherhood of the latin west far less visible to the historian than its byzantine counterpart.
John Boswell
I am inclined to think that this view of this liturgical practice addresses some of the questions raised by John Boswell’s book and his thesis that the adelphopoiesis - literally a rite for the ‘making of brothers’ or ‘sisters’ - had functioned in the past as what in contemporary terms we would today recognise as a homosexual marriage. Two major objections to the way Boswell handled his evidence stand out clearly, both of which are right. One is that the expected ideals of the rite he edited would not have comprehended sexual intercourse. The other is that his thesis disguises the fact that the rite did not preclude the individuals involved also being married. Yet I think that the matter will not rest confidently there, for the problem that remains is that an unqualified rejection of John Boswell’s thesis in these terms is itself open to the same kind of criticism as the thesis itself. It reduces the range of what we recognise today as being sexual to the narrow question of sexual intercourse and it glosses over the historical disparity that in the past marriage has been one, as it is not in modern society, among several forms of voluntary kinship. The claim that the relationships blessed by this rite were sexual and akin to marriage and the claim that they were not both involve an unsettling degree of anachronism.
Here I have rather attempted to define how the liturgical practice I have followed in the medieval latin west might be understood in historical rather than contemporary terms and then - from that vantage point outside contemporary culture - one can consider how that understanding might or might not illuminate the possible liturgical recognition of friendship today, to the point I turn to in conclusion
The Debate over Homosexual Friendship Today
There is of course then no simple passage from the one to the other, but the recovery of this history does provide arguably a possible new agenda on which both sides might be able to move forward together - if the will is there. The value in recovering its history lies rather, I would suggest, at a more fundamental level: in its ability to raise radical questions about the terms in which this debate is being conducted, and it arguably does so in at least two fundamental respects.
The first is about the kind of ethical question at issue. Are sexual ethics an adequate framework in which to consider the ethical issues involved? I have argued that the historical context for this past eucharistic rite was a society in which the individual lived in effect in a potential plurality of ‘families’, one in terms of blood relations but others also in terms of the kinship established through baptism or the eucharist and that their effect was to embed the family within a wider and encompassing network of formal friendship. The ethical question at issue in this rite lay in the role the relationships being blessed could then play more widely, beyond the individuals immediately involved. The past social context for the rite is irrecoverable, but that kind of ethical question is of more universal application, and the contemporary question it raises is whether homosexual friendships today could also be considered within a framework of that kind.
There are reasons for believing that this may be possible. It is as a result of defining the question in terms such as these that the Evangelical Church in Germany (with which the episcopal Church of England is linked through the Meissen Agreement) authorised a service of blessing addressed not to the homosexual partnership as a life-style but to its ethical role. It is also of course in these terms that civil governments are viewing the recognition of single-sex partnerships, where what is at issue is the burden of social welfare they are recognised to assume - not questions of sexuality. A framework of this kind would raise questions such as the following. What kind of role do homosexual friendships play in bearing the responsibilities of society more widely? In what sense are they - or could they be - drawn into the existing families of the two friends, as a loving uncle or aunt or as a support to the old? To address the question in these terms is to ask genuine questions that are not as yet easily answered, nor are they addressed exclusively either to the church or to homosexual couples, but they could provide a coherent framework in which this debate as a whole could be viewed.
Such a debate would be within traditional language and would not tacitly put at stake wider issues. It is that fear that I believe has fuelled the opposition to recognising friendship within the liturgical assembly. It has also allowed the issue to be seized by the authoritarian right as a rallying point for an agenda of social conservatism that goes far beyond issues of housing rights and pension funds and it would deny its use to them. But if the first question raised by the history of ritual friendship is about ethics, the second is about prayer - and liturgy. Would the church be compromised by a service of blessing, even if one directed to the responsibilities carried by homosexual friendships within society more widely? The form that question takes is distinctively modern, but the question itself is not. One cannot directly translate the reservations in traditional christianity about ritual friendship into modern terms, but they touched on the dangers of mutual appropriation that are always present when church and world meet. I have argued that the shape of the rite I have described was a form that allowed the church to recognise the potential for good in the relationships being blessed while confounding those dangers: it was a distinctively liturgical solution that was arguably achievable in any other form. Could this be the case also today with homosexual friendships? The question raised by the history of ritual friendship is less, to my mind, the possible revival of an ancient liturgical practice than whether a solution of the same kind may be possible in response to the questions raised by homosexual friendship today.
Alan Bray
Birkbeck College, London
27 June 1999
e-mail at: alanbray@hinre.demon.co.uk [Alan died recently: prayer is te only way to reach him]
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
A Good Martini
A Martini is the perfect drink. It's not messy. It does not involve coconut milk. You can order it in Harry's Bar (Venice).
Here is how to make one.
Get Vermouth (Martini and Rossi: Dry). Pour it over the Ice. Then pour the Martini away. That is what is meant by a dry Martini. Do not order Martinis in England: you will get 1/3 vermouth, 1/3rd Lemonade (i.e. Sprite), and 1/3rd Gin. Avoid at all costs. [If you are in a British Pub, drink beer - everything else is awful beyond belief. If you need a Martini, say you want an American Martini.]
Add the Gin. There are three types - Bombay Sapphire (the best); Tanquery (stronger, but still second best) Gordon's (you are slumming). Add nothing else. There is no such thing as an "Apple Martini." To enjoy a Martini you to be able to take hard liquor straight.
If you add olives there must be 1 or 3. Even numbered olives are bad luck. A twist is better: the twist is to add citrus oil to the drink. You do not want a wedge of lemon (This can be a problem in Indian restaurents).
Killing can be Fun
There is an extremely interesting article on the pleasure of warfare
in an old edition of the Guardian.
Wednesday May 26, 1999
The Guardian
How many did you enjoy killing in the war, grandad?
The day I killed an enemy soldier, by Falklands veteran Ken Lukowiak :
'Gorgeously satisfying', 'the happiest moment of my life', 'like the
best sex ever'. A controversial new book claims that, far from hating
war, soldiers thrive on the thrill of dispatching the enemy. Peter
Kingston reports
Since the end of conscription, the British army has tried a variety of
tricks to lure young men and women to take the queen's fivepence. See
the world, get yourself a trade, drive vehicles with big wheels, do
exciting outdoor stuff with ropes . . . Lately, army advertising
campaigns have developed along more humanitarian lines. On guard duty
in a convoy, the truck full of refugees in front of you hits a
landmine. How will you get over to them to help? Or your squad is
stuck in a snowstorm for the night, and you only have one blanket. Who
will you give it to?
What the recruitment ads don't emphasise is that, however much the
role of the military may have changed, armies go to war and soldiers
kill people. And whereas a fast-jet pilot or sailor can have
long-range contact with the enemy, the soldier must be ready to fight
hand to hand, eyeball to eyeball.
Combat is terrible work, certainly. Horrific, dehumanising, one would
think, and that is perhaps why the recruitment ads avoid it. But an
extraordinary new book, collating the correspondence of hundreds of
ordinary soldiers from the 20th-century's greatest wars, purports to
have proved the opposite. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face
Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare rips the subject open. The
unspoken truth about this legalised, state-sanctioned taking of lives,
the book says, is that many soldiers have found it thrilling and
highly pleasurable.
As its author, Dr Joanna Bourke, expected, the book has already
attracted fierce criticism from some reviewers, notably Anthony
Beevor, author of Stalingrad. And although she is getting support from
individual old soldiers, veterans' associations have reacted with
outrage.
Bourke is an apparently unlikely stirrer of the stuffy world of
military history. In her cramped office at Birkbeck College, she wears
a chic trouser suit and platform heels. Despite the lever arch box
file next to her foot labelled "bayonets, snipers, atrocities", she is
not a military historian, she says, but a cultural historian of the
military: one of her earlier books was an economic history of
housework in Ireland.
She began digging into military matters with her last book,
Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, which
examines the different compensation rates paid to men who lost bodily
bits in world war one: so much for an arm, so much for a leg, so much
for the genitalia. While searching the voluminous collections of
letters and diaries held by the Imperial War Museum, she was surprised
to read recurrent accounts by soldiers of their intense enjoyment of
killing.
Time and again, in the hundreds of letters written to loved ones back
home by frontline troops in both world wars and in Vietnam, Bourke
read an unequivocal message. For sheer excitement, the writers
confessed, there is little to beat ramming your bayonet into another
man's body.
"One day I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or
parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of
the wounded or the runaways," wrote an officer commanding a trench
mortar in world war one. "I had to confess to myself that it was one
of the happiest moments of my life."
Another soldier admitted that the first time he stuck a German with a
bayonet was "gorgeously satisfying". From Vietnam, a soldier wrote of
the "sense of power, of looking down the barrel of a rifle at somebody
and saying, 'Wow, I can drill this guy'."
The willingness to confess to this ecstasy of killing in letters to
mothers, wives and girlfriends invariably vanished by the time
soldiers returned home, says Bourke. "How many did you kill in the
war, dad?" rarely got a ready answer, the earlier confessional
eagerness having been replaced in some cases by shame.
Many of the histories of modern warfare have focused on the terror,
squalor, deprivation and hardship, despite overwhelming evidence
(Bourke says it is "as good as it gets" in her subject) that men
derived pleasure from it.
Few sources are richer for historians than military archives. Bourke
has picked diaries and letters by 300 men from each war, a "fabulous
sample", she enthuses. "It's really difficult to get letters and
diaries from the past from outside the upper middle classes. The only
time working class people wrote letters was in war."
If the thrill factor is so obvious, why hasn't it been publicised
before, let alone been written about by academics? There are many
reasons, she says. "Clearly we don't want to encourage war. It's
actually disturbing for us to acknowledge that ordinary people have
this ability to get pleasure from acts of extreme violence against
fellow human beings.
"There's also this notion that somehow it does discredit to the
combatants that they get pleasure. It puts a question mark over our
motives for war and killing."
Bourke knows she is raking a hornets' nest. Members of veterans'
associations have stood up to denounce her thesis at pre-publication
lectures and talks. She spent Easter at the Australian Defence Force
Academy in Canberra, talking about her work. "I got the clear message
that they'd rather I wasn't saying these things." But from the handful
of letters she has so far received from individual ex-servicemen who
have got to hear about her work comes confirmation and support for
what she is saying. One of her postcards, from a former army captain
who fought in the Korean war, said her research had got it just right:
he recalled how "super" it was to wipe out the enemy, and added: "Big
masturbations afterwards!"
An Intimate History of Killing has already won one award - the
Fraenkel Prize in contemporary history - but the verdicts of several
military historians have been less glowing. Anthony Beevor suggests
Bourke's thesis was shaped to fit "a pretty extreme feminist agenda".
Her analysis is ultimately inadequate, he argues, because it fails to
take into account the effect of the most powerful of wartime
instincts - fear. "Most wars have shown that it is self-preservation
and the suppression of fear that create the biggest explosions of
violence. [Bourke's] book is a polemic, not an objective work of
history."
So why stir up such dark forces? What benefits can come from sending
up flares to light up issues that people have instinctively avoided
during peace time normality?
"It is a taboo," says Bourke. "It's not pleasant to think about and it
was surprising for me when I came across it.
"But I do think there is a value in bringing it out into the open.
Firstly, being a historian, I think there's a value in trying to
understand what happened in the past and how people responded to major
events."
She also wanted to redress some of the attitudes fostered in conflict.
"I find it frankly disturbing that we do talk about how they killed
us, the nasty Huns, and this notion that we were there to be killed,
not to kill."
She believes that civilians on the home front often showed more
bloodthirsty feelings about the enemy than did the men in the
frontline, who tended to be quite sympathetic to soldiers in a similar
predicament to themselves. Her chapter on women at war shows they
could be equally eager to kill the enemy, particularly in
anti-aircraft gunnery.
Even darker is the evidence of British and American atrocities. "We
committed lots and lots of atrocities in both world wars," says
Bourke, "particularly in the killing of prisoners." And rape, too,
though this is harder to document. In letters and diaries from both
world wars men talk of comrades committing rape, always in terms of
disapproval. In Vietnam, some GIs admitted committing rape themselves.
Everyone else was doing it and they risked being ostracised if they
didn't follow.
The Vietnam accounts were again invariably disapproving of rape. Some
men blamed the enemy for brutalising them. They described the act in
violent terms, never orgasmic, unlike killing.
In trying to describe the intense thrill of killing, men in world war
two and Vietnam often resorted to sexual metaphor. "It was like the
best sex ever", or "I had a hard on" were common variations on a
theme.
Bourke is wary of reading too much into the comparisons between sex
and killing. "So many men say it that it must be the case that they
got a sexual thrill, but we must be cautious," she says. "These are
people trying to convey a very powerful experience and there are
inadequate terms for doing it. One way of describing it to a wife or a
girlfriend is to sexualise it."
"I went into this much more judgemental than I've come out," says
Bourke. "I went in thinking I was dealing with an aberrant group of
people somehow different from me and my friends and that's patently
not the case.
"To see war and see ourselves in war as we really are - pretty nasty
creatures - is a good thing."
The day I killed an enemy soldier,
by Falklands veteran Ken Lukowiak
Naive, I know, but when I joined the army in 1979, I didn't believe
for one minute that I'd actually end up in a war, never mind find
myself in a situation where I had to kill someone.
It was June 14 1982, a gloriously crisp blue-skied morning, and we
were on Wireless Ridge. For the first time we held high ground above
Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, and in the distance we could
see Argentines retreating. Over the radio a ceasefire came through and
the order was given to make safe our weapons and only to use them
again in self-defence. It was over.
Shortly after this good news a comrade and I walked through a
now-defeated Argentine defensive position. Despite the various twisted
and mutilated corpses that littered the ground we were happy. It was
over and we were still walking and talking.
We came upon a trench which was covered at the bottom with a dirty
green blanket. It moved and we both jumped back and re-cocked our
weapons. From under the blanket appeared an Argentine sergeant, who,
judging by his yawn and the fact he hadn't noticed us yet, had just
woken. When he did see us he put his hands up and we gestured for him
to climb from the trench. Once out, he was searched and then led away
to a prisoner holding area by my friend. Having nothing better to do,
I carried on searching the rest of the position. I approached another
trench from the side. Crouched in it was a figure dressed in
grey, shouldering a rifle. I saw him. He saw me. And without a thought
I moved the first finger on my right hand. Bullets left the end of my
machine gun. They impacted into his chest and threw him back against
the side of his trench. He slid to the ground. His soul left him.
Before I could even begin to think about what had just occurred, I
sensed movement to my right. Across the plateau, scurrying between the
rocks and heading my way were three fellow paras. In a fraction of a
second I became concerned for my own safety and quickly shouted: "It's
all right, it's all right. I'm 2 Para, one of them was still alive, he
had a gun."
When I came down off the plateau and rejoined the rest of my comrades
I, and I don't know why, told no one of the life I had just taken on
Wireless Ridge. Eight years passed before I talked about it.
Since those days I have dreamed of the war many times and even been
pulled from my sleep sweating and breathless and in a panic. Yet I
have never once given myself a bad time over the man I killed on
Wireless Ridge. If I had not killed him he may have killed me.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
in an old edition of the Guardian.
Wednesday May 26, 1999
The Guardian
How many did you enjoy killing in the war, grandad?
The day I killed an enemy soldier, by Falklands veteran Ken Lukowiak :
'Gorgeously satisfying', 'the happiest moment of my life', 'like the
best sex ever'. A controversial new book claims that, far from hating
war, soldiers thrive on the thrill of dispatching the enemy. Peter
Kingston reports
Since the end of conscription, the British army has tried a variety of
tricks to lure young men and women to take the queen's fivepence. See
the world, get yourself a trade, drive vehicles with big wheels, do
exciting outdoor stuff with ropes . . . Lately, army advertising
campaigns have developed along more humanitarian lines. On guard duty
in a convoy, the truck full of refugees in front of you hits a
landmine. How will you get over to them to help? Or your squad is
stuck in a snowstorm for the night, and you only have one blanket. Who
will you give it to?
What the recruitment ads don't emphasise is that, however much the
role of the military may have changed, armies go to war and soldiers
kill people. And whereas a fast-jet pilot or sailor can have
long-range contact with the enemy, the soldier must be ready to fight
hand to hand, eyeball to eyeball.
Combat is terrible work, certainly. Horrific, dehumanising, one would
think, and that is perhaps why the recruitment ads avoid it. But an
extraordinary new book, collating the correspondence of hundreds of
ordinary soldiers from the 20th-century's greatest wars, purports to
have proved the opposite. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face
Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare rips the subject open. The
unspoken truth about this legalised, state-sanctioned taking of lives,
the book says, is that many soldiers have found it thrilling and
highly pleasurable.
As its author, Dr Joanna Bourke, expected, the book has already
attracted fierce criticism from some reviewers, notably Anthony
Beevor, author of Stalingrad. And although she is getting support from
individual old soldiers, veterans' associations have reacted with
outrage.
Bourke is an apparently unlikely stirrer of the stuffy world of
military history. In her cramped office at Birkbeck College, she wears
a chic trouser suit and platform heels. Despite the lever arch box
file next to her foot labelled "bayonets, snipers, atrocities", she is
not a military historian, she says, but a cultural historian of the
military: one of her earlier books was an economic history of
housework in Ireland.
She began digging into military matters with her last book,
Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, which
examines the different compensation rates paid to men who lost bodily
bits in world war one: so much for an arm, so much for a leg, so much
for the genitalia. While searching the voluminous collections of
letters and diaries held by the Imperial War Museum, she was surprised
to read recurrent accounts by soldiers of their intense enjoyment of
killing.
Time and again, in the hundreds of letters written to loved ones back
home by frontline troops in both world wars and in Vietnam, Bourke
read an unequivocal message. For sheer excitement, the writers
confessed, there is little to beat ramming your bayonet into another
man's body.
"One day I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or
parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of
the wounded or the runaways," wrote an officer commanding a trench
mortar in world war one. "I had to confess to myself that it was one
of the happiest moments of my life."
Another soldier admitted that the first time he stuck a German with a
bayonet was "gorgeously satisfying". From Vietnam, a soldier wrote of
the "sense of power, of looking down the barrel of a rifle at somebody
and saying, 'Wow, I can drill this guy'."
The willingness to confess to this ecstasy of killing in letters to
mothers, wives and girlfriends invariably vanished by the time
soldiers returned home, says Bourke. "How many did you kill in the
war, dad?" rarely got a ready answer, the earlier confessional
eagerness having been replaced in some cases by shame.
Many of the histories of modern warfare have focused on the terror,
squalor, deprivation and hardship, despite overwhelming evidence
(Bourke says it is "as good as it gets" in her subject) that men
derived pleasure from it.
Few sources are richer for historians than military archives. Bourke
has picked diaries and letters by 300 men from each war, a "fabulous
sample", she enthuses. "It's really difficult to get letters and
diaries from the past from outside the upper middle classes. The only
time working class people wrote letters was in war."
If the thrill factor is so obvious, why hasn't it been publicised
before, let alone been written about by academics? There are many
reasons, she says. "Clearly we don't want to encourage war. It's
actually disturbing for us to acknowledge that ordinary people have
this ability to get pleasure from acts of extreme violence against
fellow human beings.
"There's also this notion that somehow it does discredit to the
combatants that they get pleasure. It puts a question mark over our
motives for war and killing."
Bourke knows she is raking a hornets' nest. Members of veterans'
associations have stood up to denounce her thesis at pre-publication
lectures and talks. She spent Easter at the Australian Defence Force
Academy in Canberra, talking about her work. "I got the clear message
that they'd rather I wasn't saying these things." But from the handful
of letters she has so far received from individual ex-servicemen who
have got to hear about her work comes confirmation and support for
what she is saying. One of her postcards, from a former army captain
who fought in the Korean war, said her research had got it just right:
he recalled how "super" it was to wipe out the enemy, and added: "Big
masturbations afterwards!"
An Intimate History of Killing has already won one award - the
Fraenkel Prize in contemporary history - but the verdicts of several
military historians have been less glowing. Anthony Beevor suggests
Bourke's thesis was shaped to fit "a pretty extreme feminist agenda".
Her analysis is ultimately inadequate, he argues, because it fails to
take into account the effect of the most powerful of wartime
instincts - fear. "Most wars have shown that it is self-preservation
and the suppression of fear that create the biggest explosions of
violence. [Bourke's] book is a polemic, not an objective work of
history."
So why stir up such dark forces? What benefits can come from sending
up flares to light up issues that people have instinctively avoided
during peace time normality?
"It is a taboo," says Bourke. "It's not pleasant to think about and it
was surprising for me when I came across it.
"But I do think there is a value in bringing it out into the open.
Firstly, being a historian, I think there's a value in trying to
understand what happened in the past and how people responded to major
events."
She also wanted to redress some of the attitudes fostered in conflict.
"I find it frankly disturbing that we do talk about how they killed
us, the nasty Huns, and this notion that we were there to be killed,
not to kill."
She believes that civilians on the home front often showed more
bloodthirsty feelings about the enemy than did the men in the
frontline, who tended to be quite sympathetic to soldiers in a similar
predicament to themselves. Her chapter on women at war shows they
could be equally eager to kill the enemy, particularly in
anti-aircraft gunnery.
Even darker is the evidence of British and American atrocities. "We
committed lots and lots of atrocities in both world wars," says
Bourke, "particularly in the killing of prisoners." And rape, too,
though this is harder to document. In letters and diaries from both
world wars men talk of comrades committing rape, always in terms of
disapproval. In Vietnam, some GIs admitted committing rape themselves.
Everyone else was doing it and they risked being ostracised if they
didn't follow.
The Vietnam accounts were again invariably disapproving of rape. Some
men blamed the enemy for brutalising them. They described the act in
violent terms, never orgasmic, unlike killing.
In trying to describe the intense thrill of killing, men in world war
two and Vietnam often resorted to sexual metaphor. "It was like the
best sex ever", or "I had a hard on" were common variations on a
theme.
Bourke is wary of reading too much into the comparisons between sex
and killing. "So many men say it that it must be the case that they
got a sexual thrill, but we must be cautious," she says. "These are
people trying to convey a very powerful experience and there are
inadequate terms for doing it. One way of describing it to a wife or a
girlfriend is to sexualise it."
"I went into this much more judgemental than I've come out," says
Bourke. "I went in thinking I was dealing with an aberrant group of
people somehow different from me and my friends and that's patently
not the case.
"To see war and see ourselves in war as we really are - pretty nasty
creatures - is a good thing."
The day I killed an enemy soldier,
by Falklands veteran Ken Lukowiak
Naive, I know, but when I joined the army in 1979, I didn't believe
for one minute that I'd actually end up in a war, never mind find
myself in a situation where I had to kill someone.
It was June 14 1982, a gloriously crisp blue-skied morning, and we
were on Wireless Ridge. For the first time we held high ground above
Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, and in the distance we could
see Argentines retreating. Over the radio a ceasefire came through and
the order was given to make safe our weapons and only to use them
again in self-defence. It was over.
Shortly after this good news a comrade and I walked through a
now-defeated Argentine defensive position. Despite the various twisted
and mutilated corpses that littered the ground we were happy. It was
over and we were still walking and talking.
We came upon a trench which was covered at the bottom with a dirty
green blanket. It moved and we both jumped back and re-cocked our
weapons. From under the blanket appeared an Argentine sergeant, who,
judging by his yawn and the fact he hadn't noticed us yet, had just
woken. When he did see us he put his hands up and we gestured for him
to climb from the trench. Once out, he was searched and then led away
to a prisoner holding area by my friend. Having nothing better to do,
I carried on searching the rest of the position. I approached another
trench from the side. Crouched in it was a figure dressed in
grey, shouldering a rifle. I saw him. He saw me. And without a thought
I moved the first finger on my right hand. Bullets left the end of my
machine gun. They impacted into his chest and threw him back against
the side of his trench. He slid to the ground. His soul left him.
Before I could even begin to think about what had just occurred, I
sensed movement to my right. Across the plateau, scurrying between the
rocks and heading my way were three fellow paras. In a fraction of a
second I became concerned for my own safety and quickly shouted: "It's
all right, it's all right. I'm 2 Para, one of them was still alive, he
had a gun."
When I came down off the plateau and rejoined the rest of my comrades
I, and I don't know why, told no one of the life I had just taken on
Wireless Ridge. Eight years passed before I talked about it.
Since those days I have dreamed of the war many times and even been
pulled from my sleep sweating and breathless and in a panic. Yet I
have never once given myself a bad time over the man I killed on
Wireless Ridge. If I had not killed him he may have killed me.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
Monday, May 29, 2006
My Dad
Brian Slater was my father. He died of Huntington's diesease and, although I went to see him I felt racked by guilty every time. If I ever have kids * ( at 45 and HIV POZ not likely) they would bear his name. I loved my dad, and still do.
But (in case he ever reads this) Wiliam Halsall has been my father since 1969. I am older than him now when he became my dad, and I cannot imagine what love (for my Mum) it most have taken for Him to take on at 30 years old two bolshy kids, expecially me.
Somtimes step-families are dismissed. Thinking back on what an asshole I was, I can scarcely imagine what heroism it must have taken to take on my Mum (a gtreat person, but who I now recognise as bipolar) - What courage; what love - he is still the only person I will call in the middle of the night when despair hits.
I am queer. But the best man in my life has been Bill (about whom I have no sexual fantasies). He is simply my father, even if I call him "Bill."
I do not know if those in "birth families" ever recognise this - but let me state that I have no stepfather. I have a biological father (dead) and I love him. I have the man who has treated me as a son for 35 years. I Do not call him "Dad": "Bill" carries all the love I am capable of holding.
PBH
[Oh, and I hate the word "Stepbrother". David is as dear to me as anyone can be. He may ot know I spent 3 monthes whem he was from 9 to 13 motnths, praying all night, every night against cot death.
I dismissed my family from when I was 27 to 35 years old. Now they have no idea how much I care for them.
But (in case he ever reads this) Wiliam Halsall has been my father since 1969. I am older than him now when he became my dad, and I cannot imagine what love (for my Mum) it most have taken for Him to take on at 30 years old two bolshy kids, expecially me.
Somtimes step-families are dismissed. Thinking back on what an asshole I was, I can scarcely imagine what heroism it must have taken to take on my Mum (a gtreat person, but who I now recognise as bipolar) - What courage; what love - he is still the only person I will call in the middle of the night when despair hits.
I am queer. But the best man in my life has been Bill (about whom I have no sexual fantasies). He is simply my father, even if I call him "Bill."
I do not know if those in "birth families" ever recognise this - but let me state that I have no stepfather. I have a biological father (dead) and I love him. I have the man who has treated me as a son for 35 years. I Do not call him "Dad": "Bill" carries all the love I am capable of holding.
PBH
[Oh, and I hate the word "Stepbrother". David is as dear to me as anyone can be. He may ot know I spent 3 monthes whem he was from 9 to 13 motnths, praying all night, every night against cot death.
I dismissed my family from when I was 27 to 35 years old. Now they have no idea how much I care for them.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
A German Pope at Auschwitz
I hated Cardinal Ratzinger. Every time I thought I could reconcile being Gay and Catholic, his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would say something horrible and untrue about gay people.
But EWTN is showing Benedict XVI at Auschwitz. Perhaps he is just acting, but he looks stunned, almost unable to cope with what his nation did to Jews and Poles. [Forget his ear;ly Hitler Youth membersship - he was too young to blame for that.]
Perhaps I am being too optimistic here, but great power often leads to new insight (that's why Republican presidents keep ending up with liberal Supreme Court Justices). Will Benedict realize that gays, JWs, and communists also got destroyed by totalitarianism. Will he realize the "unity of life" (an OPUS DEI mantra) is not a goal for individuals or society. That variety and difference is what makes people creative. He looks shocked enough, that I hope so.
Would it not be odd if Ratzinger turns out to be a new John XXIII.
But EWTN is showing Benedict XVI at Auschwitz. Perhaps he is just acting, but he looks stunned, almost unable to cope with what his nation did to Jews and Poles. [Forget his ear;ly Hitler Youth membersship - he was too young to blame for that.]
Perhaps I am being too optimistic here, but great power often leads to new insight (that's why Republican presidents keep ending up with liberal Supreme Court Justices). Will Benedict realize that gays, JWs, and communists also got destroyed by totalitarianism. Will he realize the "unity of life" (an OPUS DEI mantra) is not a goal for individuals or society. That variety and difference is what makes people creative. He looks shocked enough, that I hope so.
Would it not be odd if Ratzinger turns out to be a new John XXIII.
Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
If you get this poem, you get poetry. If you don't, try to get a better education.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
[1867]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
[1867]
The Best Poet Ever: The Windover
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
The Windhover
To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
The Windhover
To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Homosexuality and Islam: Oppression and Tolerance in a Medieval Civilization
Sample News Story [This from 1998]
--" Islamic fundamentalists tried to beat up a gay man and threatened
to kill him at a London conference on "Islamophobia", designed to
promote understanding and tolerance of Muslim values, and attended by
Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders. "The conference declaration
claimed that "Islam is wrongly and unjustly portrayed as barbaric,
irrational, primitive, sexist, violent and aggressive". Some gay
activists went on the attack, basically, to claim that this statement
is wrong, and noting the dreadful treatment of a gay activist at the
conference.--
The issue is not quite so simple, however. Although today Islam is
presented as a Monolithic religion and culture, this has little
relation to Islam's past, and much to to do with a mutally beneficial
collaboration by Western media *and* legalistic elements within the
Islamic world.
The Islam that we hear of - both Shia and Sunni - is presented as a
form of legalistic religious totalitarianism. But this represents only
one aspect of Islam's past and present culture [an aspect which can be
seen in certain historical manifestations of Christianity, Judaism,
"Hinduism", and Buddhism]. In practice, Islamic culture has exhibited
many periods of tolerance, including tolerance of homosexuality -
indeed the poetry of Islamic Spain is full of such references.
The history of homosexuality in Islamic culture is not reducible to
such periods of "tolerance". The form of Islam known as Sufism - a
form which emphasizes love and faith [iman] over submission [islam]
[and iman is used much more frequently in the Qu'ran than "islam"] -
has always been much more open. Sufism is *not* an obscure mystical
movement, but was a dominating force in the religious life of much of
the Muslim world.
Outside Saudi Arabia [which was "cleaned" by anti-Sufi Wahabists in
the 19th century], Islam is still awash in Sufi religiosity -
especially the importance given to saint's tombs and pilgrimages to
them. In South Asia [India, Pakistan and Bangladesh contain by far the
world's largest number of Muslims], Sufism has proved especially
important. The Sunni religious authorities do not "own" Islam, any
more than the Vatican "owns" the Catholicism of Mexican women devoted
to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Unfortunately the modern western commentators buy into this conflation
of legalistic Islamic authoritarianism with Islam as a whole. [They
also fail to analyze why immigrant communities often end up under the
control of conservative religious authorities, and embroiled in the
practice of the most conservative elements of a religious tradition.
There has been a lot of sociological study of this common phenomenon:
it seems clear that in immigrant subcultures, especially when the
immigrant group is subject to discrimination, the complexity of the
home society is reduced to much harsher lines. Homeland political,
regional and clam relationships come to have little role in the new
land, but religious affiliation remains clear. In these circumstances,
immigrant religious leaders acquire a new level of power.]
So let's summarize what Islamic culture has actually said and done
about Homosexuality.
M U H A M M A D A N D T H E Q U' R A N
The Qur'an actually says very little
The following Qur'anic are often seen verses as relevant to
homosexuality: [texts are from the Qur'an edition at Virginia Tech's
etext collection.]
SURA IV: 19-21
19. But whoso rebels against God and His Apostle, and transgresses His
bounds, He will make him enter into fire, and dwell therein for aye;
and for him is shameful woe. 20. Against those of your women who
commit adultery, call witnesses four in number from among yourselves;
and if these bear witness, then keep the women in houses until death
release them, or God shall make for them a way. 21. And if two (men)
of you commit it, then hurt them both; but if they turn again and
amend, leave them alone, verily, God is easily turned, compassionate.
-Note: if Surah 4:21 is about homosexuality, the Qu'ran is notably
less aggressive than the comparable verses in the Book of Leviticus.
SURA VII: 78-84 [On Lot at Sodom] 78. Then the earthquake took them,
and in the morning they lay prone in their dwellings; 79. and he
turned away from them and said, 'O my people! I did preach to you the
message of my Lord, and I gave you good advice; but ye love not
sincere advisers.' 80. And Lot, when he said to his people, 'Do ye
approach an abomination which no one in all the world ever anticipated
you in? 81. verily, ye approach men with lust rather than women- nay,
ye are a people who exceed.' 82.But his people's answer only was to
say, 'Turn them out of your village, verily, they are a people who
pretend to purity.' 83. But we saved him and his people, except his
wife, who was of those who lingered; 84. and we rained down upon them
a rain;- see then how was the end of the sinners!
See also SURA XI: 77-84 [On Lot at Sodom] SURA XXVI: 160-174 [On Lot
and Sodom] SURA XXIX: 28-35 [On Lot and Sodom]
-Note. To western readers the Qur'an is notably repetitive. Muhammad
(or, in Muslim eyes, God, the author of the "Qu'ran), in delivering
the various recitations, had some knowledge of the Five Books of
Moses. The same story gets repeated and repeated. The Sodom story was
clearly seen in homosexual terms [Sura 7:81], but the focus of the
story seems to be simply an attack on wickedness and turning away from
God in general.
ON THE OTHER HAND
Although the Qu'ran does not have verse explicitly in favor of
homosexuality, it does have verses which show awareness of male
beauty. These are promises made to Muslim men who make it to Heaven.
SURA LII:24 "And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys
of their own, as fair as virgin pearls."
SURA LXXVI:19 "They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal
youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders."
H A D I T H A N D T R A D I T I O N
There were varying traditions about homosexuality in Islamic
tradition. What follows is from an old post by Kamran Hakim
[khakim@asdg.enet.dec.com] to soc.religion.bahai [in which he is
seeking to show tha Bahai's are unequivocal in their condemnation of
homosexuality, while Muslims were lax.]
"References to effeminacy can be found in Islamic Hadith which is, in
a sense, a verification of the account of the New Testament.
Narrated Ibn 'Abbas:
"The Prophet cursed the effeminate men and those women who assume the
similitude (manners) of men. He also said, "Turn them out of your
houses." He turned such-and-such person out, and 'Umar also turned out
such-and- such person.
Sahih Bukhari 8.820
There doesn't appear to be too much room for effeminate men within the
Muslim community. However, effeminacy might not exactly equate with
sexual tendencies toward another man. Furthermore, both the Qur'an and
the Hadith deal with male-male sexual relationship in particular.
"The mentioning of the story of Lot, the nephew of Abraham and the
people of Sodom in the Qur'an appear to imply that Arabs of the time
of Muhammad must have also had similar social norms regarding sodomy.
Else there was no reason for Prophet Muhammad to repeat, by the virtue
of inspiration, the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah in the
Qur'an.
"The Qur'an does not directly refer to "lavaat", "sodomy" or the
homosexual act. On the contrary the Qur'an treats this issue in a
peripheral manner. The following verses of that Book describe the
story of "Lot" and the people of Sodom and hint at sodomy by
implication: "For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to
women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bonds." Qur'an 7:81
Moreover;
"-Would ye really approach men in your lust rather than women? Nay ye
are a people grossly ignorant." Qur'an 27:55
-Surih Sho'ara:105 of the Qur'an reiterates further on this same theme.
Imam Ali describes the reason behind the injunction of the Qur'an
against sodomy in a rather practical manner:
"Amir al-mu'menin, peace be upon him, said: Allah has laid
down...abstinence from sodomy for increase of progeny..."
Nahj-ul-Balagha, selection from the preachings of Ali, # 253, p. 621
Regardless of such admonishment and unlike the severe approach of the
Torah in punishing those guilty of sodomy, the Qur'an appear to treat
this issue in a far more lenient manner than the Torah:
"And as for the two of you [i.e. The sentence structure refers
exclusively to two men and not a man and a woman. KH] who are guilty
thereof [guilty of sexual relationship. KH], punish them both. And if
they repent and improve, then let them be. Lo! Allah is Relenting,
Merciful." Qur'an 4:16
Qur'an while speaking of "punish them both", does not prescribe any
form of punishment, as in the case of adultery, for sexual
relationship between two men and prescribes acceptance of their
repentance. However, there are some Ahadith (i.e. Traditions, saying
of Prophet Muhammad) that prescribe the severe punishment of the Torah
for those guilty of this charge. For example the following two Ahadith
are from Sunan of Abu Dawood vol 4, chapter on the people of Lot. The
Arabic text reads as follows:
"man laata beh ghulaam faqtaloo al-fa'il val-maf'ool." Which
translates to: "When a man commits sodomy with a boy: kill the doer
and the one done to."
Also;
"qala an-nabi man vajde tamooh ya'mala 'amale qawme Lot fa-aqtaloo
al-fa'il val-maf'ool." Which translates to: "Prophet said: He who
commits that which the people of Lot committed [i.e. People of Lot
committed Sodomy. KH]: kill the doer and the one done to."
Since the Qur'an has not clearly prescribed a punishment for sodomy,
some Schools of Thought in Islam have considered sodomy as "mobaah"
[i.e. meaning allowable in an impunible and indifferent sense.] while
others have considered it "jaa'iz" [i.e. meaning allowable,
permissible and lawful.]. For example Maleki, the founder of the
Maleki School of Thought within Sunni Islam says:
"Having sex with a young man (without beard) is fine for a man who is
not married and who is on a trip." cit. Hesaam Noqaba'i, Hoquq-i Zan,
pp. 126-127 (section on "lavaat"/"sodomy")
The Shi'ah books of law also leave the door unlocked for the cases of
"Oops, I forgot! sodomization of boys. The following Shi'ah ruling
hints at this:
"If he has had sexual intercourse with a boy according to
precautionary rule, it becomes unlawful for him forever to marry the
boy's mother, his sister, or his daughters even if they are boys not
adults. If one is married to one of such ladies before such act, it
does not affect the already existing marriage, although it is a
precautionary rule to avoid such marriage. Extending this rule to the
case wherein one doing the act is a minor the one letting it done to
him is an adult, is objectionable, according to a clear view it does
not apply. The daughter or brothers and sisters of the one letting it
done to him do not become unlawful to one who has done the act."
Islamic Laws of Worship and Contracts, p. 614, CR #1259 Ayatullah
Al-'Uzma Al-Sayyid Muhammad Al-Husayni Shirazi
In the Ottoman Empire the Sultans use to keep youths in the Harem for
satisfying their sexual appetites [Such reference may be found in
books such as: "The Spirit of Laws" by Montesquieu and "Chronichles of
Shirly Brothers"]. Within the Iranian society "bache-bazi" or "sexual
play with young boys" has been an under the carpet social norm for
many centuries and the ambiguous nature of the Qur'anic prescription
has not been able to bring halt to this social illness.
Will Durant refers to this issue in his book "History of
Civilization". He writes: "Sexual indulgence was apparently more
abundant and enervating in Islam than in Christiandom, though it was
usually kept within the orderly limits of polygamy. Turkish society
was almost exclusively male, and since there was no permitted
association of men with women outside the home, the Moslems found
companionship in homosexual relationships, Platonic or physical.
Lesbianism flourished in the zenana." -Will & Ariel Durant, History
of Civilization vol 7 (The Age of Reason Begins) p. 520 Also;
"The women were 'very richly habited,'wrote Tavernier, and 'little
otherwise than the men...They wear breeches like the men.' The women
lived in the privacy of the zenana, and seldom stirring from their
homes, and then rarely on foot. There were three sexes. Much of the
love poetry was addressed by men to boys, and Thomas Herbert, and
Englishman at Abbas' [i.e Shah Abbas of the Saffavid Dynasty. Their
court, saw 'Ganymade boys in vests of gold, rich bespangled turbans,
and choice sandals, their curled hair dangling about their shoulders,
with rolling eyes and vermilion cheeks.'
Chardin noted a decrease in population in his time and ascribed it to
First, the unhappy inclination which the Persians have, to commit that
abominable sin against nature, with both sexes [Here he is referring
to sodomy. KH].
Secondly, the immoderate luxury [sexual freedom] of the country. The
women begin there to have children betimes, and continue fruitful but
a little while; and as soon as they get on the wrong side of thirty
they are looked upon as old and superannuated, The men likewise begin
to visit women too young, and to such an excess, that though they
enjoy several, they have never the more children for it. There are
also a great many women who make themselves abortive, and take
remedies against growing pregnant, because [when] they have been three
or four months gone with the child, their husbands take to other
women, holding it ... indecency to lie with a woman so far in her
time. Despite polygamy there were many prostitutes. Drunkenness was
widespread, though Muhammadan law forbade wine."
Will & Ariel Durant, History of Civilization vol 7 (The Age of Reason
Begins) p. 532
It is important to point out that Durant's observation is not far from
the truth. Perhaps the following quotes from the Shi'ah compilations
offers a certain measure of validity to Durant's view:
"The woman becomes the owner of the dowry by the contract and it is
reduced by one half by divorce before sex, also because of death of
one party, according to a more clear reason if sex is performed by the
front or back the dowry becomes an established right and the same rule
applies if he tears her virginity by his finger and without her
permission."
Islamic Laws of Worship and Contracts, p. 626, CR #1350 Ayatullah
Al-'Uzma Al-Sayyid Muhammad Al-Husayni Shirazi
H O M O S E X U A L I T Y I N T H E I S L A M I C W O R L D
[Most of this is from Edward Carpenter's Iolaus, in which he hides
homosexual culture under the guise of "male friendship".]
The honor paid to male love in Persia, Arabia, Syria and other
Oriental lands has always been great, and the tradition of this
attachment there should be especially interesting to us, as having
arisen independently of classic or Christian ideals.
The Sufi poets of Persia, Saadi and Jalalu-ddin Rumi [100] (13th
cent.), Hafiz (14th cent.), Jami (15th cent.), and others, drew much
of their inspiration from homosexual love and male beauty. The
extraordinary way in which, following the method of the Sufis, and of
Plato, they identify the mortal and the divine love, and see in their
male beloved an image or revelation of God himself, makes their poems
difficult of comprehension to the Western mind. Apostrophes to Love,
Wine, and Beauty often, with them, bear a frankly twofold sense,
material and spiritual. To these poets of the mid-region of the earth,
the bitter antagonism between matter and spirit, which like an evil
dream has haunted so long both the extreme Western and the extreme
Eastern mind, scarcely exists; and even the body " which is a portion
of the dustpit " has become perfect and divine.
All the texts that follow address homosexual love:-
Jalalu-ddin Rumi
" Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world....
From the moment you came into the world of being
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape ( ascend ) .
First you were mineral, later you turned to plant,
[101]Then you became an animal: how should this be a secret to you ?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith;
Behold the body, which is a portion of the dust pit, how perfect
it has growing
When you have travelled on from man, you will doubtless become an angel;
After that you are done with earth: your station is in heaven.
Pass again even from angelhood: enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea which is a hundred seas of ' Oman.' "
From the Divani Shamsi Tabriz of Jalalu-ddin Rumi, trans. by
R. H. Nicholson.
'Twere better that the spirit which wears not true love as a garment
Had not been: its being is but shame.
Be drunken in love, for love is all that exists.
Dismiss cares and be utterly clear of heart,
Like the face of a mirror, without image or picture.
When it becomes clear of images, all images are contained in it."
Ibid.
Happy the moment when we are seated in the palace, thou and I,
With two forms and with two figures, but with one soul, thou and I."
Ibid.
HAFIZ and SAADI
SOME short quotations here following are taken from Flowers culled
from Persian Gardens (Manchester, 1872):
"Everyone, whether he be abstemious or self indulgent is searching
after the Friend. Every place may be the abode of love, whether it be
a mosque or a synagogue.... On thy last day, though the cup be in thy
hand, thou may'st be borne away to Paradise evenfrom the corner of the
tavern."
Hafiz.
"I have heard a sweet word which was spoken by the old man of
Canaan (Jacob)-' No tongue can express what means the separation of
friends."
Hafiz.
"Neither of my own free will cast I myself into the fire; for the
chain of affection was laid upon my neck. I was still at a distance
when the fire began to glow, nor is this the moment that it was
lighted up within me. Who shall impute it to me as a fault, that I am
enchanted by my friend, that I am content in casting myself at his
feet? "
Saadi
SAADI'S ROSE GARDEN
"A youth there was of golden heart and nature,
Who loved a friend, his like in every feature;
[102] Once, as upon the ocean sailed the pair,
They chanced into a whirlpool unaware.
A fisherman made haste the first to save,
Ere his young life should meet a watery grave;
But crying from the raging surf, he said:
' Leave me, and seize my comrade's hand instead.'
E'en as he spoke the mortal swoon o'ertook him,
With that last utterance life and sense forsook him.
Learn not love's temper from that shallow pate
Who in the hour of fear forsakes his mate
True friends will ever act like him above
(Trust one who is experienced in love);
For Sadi knows full well the lover's part,
And Bagdad understands the Arab heart.
More than all else thy loved one shalt thou prize,
Else is the whole world hidden from thine eyes."
Lov'st thou a being formed of dust like thee
Peace and contentment from thy heart shall flee -
Waking, fair limbs and features shall torment thee;
Sleeping, thy love in dreams shall hold and haunt thee.
Under his feet thy head is bowed to earth;
Compared with him the world's a paltry crust;
If to thy loved one gold is nothing worth,
Why, then to thee is gold no more than dust
[105] Hardly a word for others canst thou find,
For no room's left for others in thy mind."
" Dear Friend, since thou hast passed the whole
Of one sweet night, till dawn, with me,
I were scarce mortal, could I spend
Another hour apart from thee.
The fear of death, for all of time
Hath left me since my soul partook
The water of true Life, that wells
In sweet abundance from thy brook."
Hahn in his Albanesische Studien, already quoted (p. 20), gives some
of the verses of Necin or Nesim Bey, a Turco-Albanian poet, of which
the following is an example:
"Whate'er, my friend, or false or true,
The world may tell thee, give no ear,
For to separate us, dear,
The world will say that one is two.
Who should seek to separate us
May he never cease to weep.
The rain at times may cease; but he
In Summer's warmth or Winter's sleep
May he never cease to weep."
R I C H A R D B U R T O N O N H O M O S E X U A L I T Y I N M U
S L I M C U L T U R E
The 19th century translator of the 1001 Nights, Richard Burton
commented on the Qu'ranic passages:
"These circumstantial unfacts are repeated at full length in the other
two chapters; but rather as an instance of Allah's power than as a
warning against pederasty, which Mohammed seems to have regarded with
philosophic indifference. The general opinion of his followers is that
it should be punished like fornication unless the offenders made a
public act of penitence. But here, as in adultery, the law is somewhat
too clement and will not convict unless four credible witnesses swear
to have seen rem in re. I have noticed (vol. i. 211) the vicious
opinion that the Ghilman or Wuldan, the beautiful boys of Paradise,
the counterparts of the Houris, will be lawful catamites to the True
Believers in a future state of happiness: the idea is nowhere
countenanced in Al-Islam; and, although I have often heard debauchees
refer to it, the learned look upon the assertion as scandalous. "
Burton later addressed the issue of homosexuality, which came up
repeatedly in the 1001 Nights.
"We must not forget that the love of boys has its noble sentimental
side. The Platonists and pupils of the Academy, followed by the Sufis
or Moslem Gnostics held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the beau
id al which united in man's soul the creature with the Creator.
Professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and beautiful objects
in this phenomenal world, they declared that by loving and extolling
the chef-d'^ uvre, corporeal and intellectual, of the Demiurgus,
disinterestedly and without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they
are paying the most fervent adoration to the Causa causans. They add
that such affection, passing as it does the love of women, is far less
selfish than fondness for and admiration of the other sex which,
however innocent, always suggest sexuality; and Easterns add that the
devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the
Bulbul's love for the Rose. "
[Burton also mentions the history of lesbianism in the Muslim world,
but does not pursue it - "The Arabic Sahh kah, the Tractatrix of
Subigitatrix, who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to
Lesbianise (lesbizein) and tribassare (tr besthai) the former applied
to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its m canique: this
is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the
clitoris when unusually developed; or artificial by means of the
fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian 'May jang'); the patte de
chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this
feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly
enlarge upon the subject."]
Of his own period, Burton notes:
"In old Mauritania, now Morocco, the Moors proper are notable
sodomites; Moslems, even of saintly houses, are permitted openly to
keep catamites, nor do their disciples think worse of their sanctity
for such license: in one case the English wife failed to banish from
the home 'that horrid boy'."
"..when Sonnini travelled (A.D. 1717). The French officer, who is
thoroughly trustworthy, draws the darkest picture of the widely-spread
criminality especially of the bestiality and the sodomy (chapt. xv.)
which formed the 'delight of the Egyptians.' During the Napoleonic
conquest Jaubert in his letter to General Bruix (p. 19) says, 'Les
Arabes et les Mamelouks ont trait quelques-uns de nos prisonniers
comme Socrate traitait, dit-on, Alcibiade. Il fallait p rir ou y
passer.' Old Anglo-Egyptians still chuckle over the tale of Sa'id
Pasha and M. de Ruyssenaer, the highdried and highly respectable
Consul-General for the Netherlands, who was solemnly advised to make
the experiment, active and passive, before offering his opinion upon
the subject. In the present age extensive intercourse with Europeans
has produced not a reformation but a certain reticence amongst the
upper classes: they are as vicious as ever, but they do not care for
displaying their vices to the eyes of mocking strangers."
"Syria has not forgotten her old 'praxis.' At Damascus I found some
noteworthy cases amongst the religious of the great Amawi Mosque. As
for the Druses we have Burckhardt's authority (Travels in Syria, etc.,
p. 202) 'unnatural propensities are very common amongst them.'
The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia now
occupied by the 'unspeakable Turk,' a race of born pederasts; and in
the former region we first notice a peculiarity of the feminine
figure, the mammae inclinatae, jacentes et pannosae, which prevails
over all this part of the belt. Whilst the women to the North and
South have, with local exceptions, the mammae stantes of the European
virgin,[39] those of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and Kashmir lose all
the fine curves of the bosom, sometimes even before the first child;
and after it the hemispheres take the form of bags. This cannot result
from climate only; the women of Maratha-land, inhabiting a damper and
hotter region than Kashmir, are noted for fine firm breasts even after
parturition. Le Vice of course prevails more in the cities and towns
of Asiatic Turkey than in the villages; yet even these are infected;
while the nomad Turcomans contrast badly in this point with the
Gypsies, those- Badawin of India. The Kurd population is of Iranian
origin, which` means that the evil is deeply rooted: I have noted in
The Nights that the great and glorious Saladin was a habitual
pederast. The Armenians, as their national character is, will
prostitute themselves for gain but prefer women to boys: Georgia
supplied Turkey with catamites whilst Circassia sent concubines. In
Mesopotamia the barbarous invader has almost obliterated the ancient
civilization which is antedated only by the Nilotic: the mysteries of
old Babylon nowhere survive save in certain obscure tribes like the
Mandaeans, the Devil-worshippers and the Ali-ilahi. Entering Persia we
find the reverse of Armenia; and, despite Herodotus, I believe that
Iran borrowed her pathologic love from the peoples of the
Tigris-Euphrates Valley and not from the then insignificant Greeks.
But whatever may be its origin, the corruption is now bred in the
bone. It begins in boyhood and many Persians account for it by
paternal severity. Youths arrived at puberty find none of the
facilities with which Europe supplies fornication. Onanism [40] is to
a certain extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with the
father's slave-girls and concubines would be risking cruel punishment
if not death. Hence they use each other by turns, a 'puerile practice'
known as Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere
Temperament, media, and atavism recommend the custom to the general;
and after marrying and begetting heirs, Paterfamilias returns to the
Ganymede. Hence all the odes of Hafiz are addressed to youths as
proved by such Arabic exclamations as 'Afaka 'llah = Allah assain thee
(masculine) [4l]: the object is often fanciful but it would be held
coarse and immodest to address an imaginary girl.[42] An illustration
of the penchant is told at Shiraz concerning a certain Mujtahid, the
head of the Shi'ah creed, corresponding with a prince-archbishop in
Europe. A friend once said to him, 'There is a question I would fain
address to your Eminence but I lack the daring to do so.' 'Ask and
fear not,' replied the Divine. 'It is this, O Mujtahid! Figure thee in
a garden of roses and hyacinths with the evening breeze waving the
cypress-heads, a fair youth of twenty sitting by thy side and the
assurance of perfect privacy. What, prithee, would be the result?' The
holy man bowed the chin of doubt upon the collar of meditation; and,
too honest to lie presently whispered, 'Allah defend me from such
temptation of Satan!' Yet even in Persia men have not been wanting who
have done their utmost to uproot the Vice: in the same Shiraz they
speak of a father who, finding his son in flagrant delict, put him to
death like Brutus or Lynch of Galway. Such isolated cases, however,
can effect nothing.
Chardin tells us that houses of male prostitution were common in
Persia whilst those of women were unknown: the same is the case in the
present day and the boys are prepared with extreme care by diet,
baths, depilation, unguents and a host of artists in cosmetics. [43]
Le Vice is looked upon at most as a peccadillo and its mention crops
up in every jest-book. When the Isfahan man mocked Shaykh Sa'adi, by
comparing the bald pates of Shirazian elders to the bottom of a lota,
a brass cup with a wide-necked opening used in the Hammam, the witty
poet turned its aperture upwards and thereto likened the well-abused
podex of an Isfahani youth. Another favourite piece of Shirazian
'chaff' is to declare that when an Isfahan father would set up his son
in business he provides him with a pound of rice, meaning that he can
sell the result as compost for the kitchen-garden, and with the price
buy another meal: hence the saying Khakh-i-pai kahu = the soil at the
lettuce-root. The Isfahanis retort with the name of a station or
halting-place between the two cities where, under pretence of making
travellers stow away their riding-gear, many a Shirazi had been raped:
hence 'Zin o takaltu tu bi-bar' = carry within saddle and
saddle-cloth! A favourite Persian punishment for strangers caught in
the Harem or Gynaeceum is to strip and throw them and expose them to
the embraces of the grooms and negro slaves. I once asked a Shirazi
how penetration was possible if the patient resisted with all the
force of the sphincter muscle: he smiled and said, 'Ah, we Persians
know a trick to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent-peg to the
crupper-bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens.' A well-known
missionary to the East during the last generation was subjected to
this gross insult by one ofthe Persian Prince-governors, whom he had
infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by
mentioning his 'dishonoured person;' but English readers cannot
comprehend the full significance of the confession. About the same
time Skaykh Nasr, Governor of Bushire, a man famed for facetious
blackguardism, used to invite European youngsters serving in the
Bombay Marine and ply them with liquor till they were insensible. Next
morning the middies mostly complained that the champagne had caused a
curious irritation and soreness in la parte-poste. The same Eastern
'Scrogin' would ask his guests if they had ever seen a mancannon
(Adami-top); and, on their replying in the negative, a greybeard slave
was dragged in blaspheming and struggling with all his strength. He
was presently placed on all fours and firmly held by the extremities;
his bag-trousers were let down and a dozen peppercorns were inserted
ano suo: the target was a sheet of paper held at a reasonable
distance; the match was applied by a pinch of cayenne in the nostrils;
the sneeze started the grapeshot and the number of hits on the butt
decided the bets. We can hardly wonder at the loose conduct of Persian
women perpetually mortified by marital pederasty. During the unhappy
campaign of 1856-7 in which, with the exception of a few brilliant
skirmishes, we gained no glory, Sir James Outram and the Bombay army
showing how badly they could work, there was a formal outburst of the
Harems; and even women of princely birth could not be kept out of the
officers' quarters.
The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with
Persian vice, and the people sing
Kadr-i-kus Aughan danad, kadr-i-kunra Kabuli:
The worth of coynte the Afghan knows: Cabul prefers the other chose![44]
The Afghans are commercial travellers on a large scale and each
caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in woman's
attire with kohl'd eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses and henna'd
fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or camel-panniers:
they are called Kuch-i safari, or travelling wives, and the husbands
trudge patiently by their sides. In Afghanistan also a frantic
debauchery broke out amongst the women when they found incubi who were
not pederasts; and the scandal was not the most insignificant cause of
the general rising at Cabul (Nov. 1841), and the slaughter of
Macnaghten, Burnes and other British officers.
Resuming our way Eastward we find the Sikhs and the Moslems of the
Panjab much addicted to Le Vice, although the Himalayan tribes to the
north and those lying south, the Rajputs and Marathas, ignore it. The
same may be said of the Kashmirians who add another Kappa to the tria
Kakista, Kappadocians, Kretans, and Kilicians: the proverb says,
Agar kaht-i-mardum uftad, az in sih jins kam giri;
Eki Afghan, dowum Sindi,[45] siyyum badjins-i-Kashmiri:
Though of men there be famine yet shun these three
Afghan, Sindi and rascally Kashmiri.
M. Louis Daville describes the infamies of lajore and Lakhanu where he
found men dressed as women, with flowing locks under crowns of
flowers, imitating the feminine walk and gestures, voice and fashion
of speech, and ogling their admirers with all the coquetry of bayad
res. Victor Jacquemont's Journal de Voyage describes the pederasty of
Ranjit Singh, the 'Lion of the Panjab,' and his pathic Gulab Singh
whom the English inflicted upon Cashmir as ruler by way of paying for
his treason. Yet the Hindus, I repeat, hold pederasty in abhorrence
and are as much scandalized by being called Gand-mara (anus-beater) or
Gandu (anuser) as Englishmen would be. During the years 1843-4 my
regiment, almost all Hindu Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was
stationed at a purgatory called Bandar Gharra,[46] a sandy flat with a
scatter of verdigris-green milk-bush some forty miles north of Karachi
the headquarters. The dirty heap of mud-and-mat hovels, which
represented the adjacent native village, could not supply a single
woman; yet only one case of pederasty came to light and that after a
tragical fashion some years afterwards. A young Brahman had connection
with a soldier comrade of low caste and this had continued till, in an
unhappy hour, the Pariah patient ventured to become the agent. The
latter, in Arab Al-Fa'il = the 'doer,' is not an object of contempt
like Al-Maful = the 'done'; and the high-caste sepoy, stung by remorse
and revenge, loaded his musket and deliberately shot his paramour. He
was hanged by court martial at Hyderabad and, when his last wishes
were asked he begged in vain to be suspended by the feet; the idea
being that his soul, polluted by exiting 'below the waist,' would be
doomed to endless transmigrations through the lowest forms of life.
H O M O S E X U A L M U S L I M L E A D E R S
As well as poets and philosophers, a number of the the great heros of
Sunni Islam saw no great problem with homosexuality. Again adapted
from Carpenter, the following quotations may afford some glimpses of
interest.
Suleyman the Magnificent was the greatest leader of the Ottoman Empire
- by far the longest lasting of all Muslim states, and for centuries
the leading Bulwark of Sunni Islam. The Story of Suleyman's attachment
to his Vezir Ibrahim is told as follows by Stanley Lane-Poole:
"Suleyman, great as he was, shared his greatness with a second
mind, to which his reign owed much of its brilliance. The Grand Vezir
Ibrahim was the counterpart of the Grand Monarch Suleyman. He was the
son of a sailor at Parga, and had been captured by corsairs, by whom
he was sold to be the slave of a widow at Magnesia. Here he passed
into the hands of the young prince Suleyman, then Governor of
Magnesia, and soon his extraordinary talents and address brought him
promotion.... From being Grand Falconer on the accession of Suleyman,
he rose to be first minister and almost co-Sultan in 1523.
"He was the object of the Sultan's tender regard: an emperor knows
better than most men how solitary is life without friendship and love,
and Suleyman loved this man more than a brother. Ibrahim was not only
a friend, he was an entertaining and instructive companion. He read
Persian, Greek and Italian; he knew how to open unknown worlds to the
Sultan's mind, and Sulevman drank in his Vezir's wisdom with
assiduity. They lived together: their meals were shared in common;
even their beds were in the same room. The Sultan gave his sister in
marriage to the sailor's [107] son, and Ibrahim was at the summit of
power."
Turkey, Story of Nations series, p. 174.
It was not only the emperors and religious leaders who were open to
homosexuality. T. S. BUCKINGHAM, in his "Travels in Assyria, Media
and Persia," speaking of his guide whom he had engaged at Bagdad, and
who was supposed to have left his heart behind him in that city, says
[The word "dervish" here refers to a member of a Sufi sect]:
" Amidst all this I was at a loss to conceive how the Dervish could
find much enjoyment [in the expedition] while laboring under the
strong passion which I supposed he must then be feeling for the object
of his affections at Bagdad, whom he had quitted with so much
reluctance. What was my surprise, however, on seeking an explanation
of this seeming inconsistency, to find it was the son, and not the
daughter, of his friend Elias who held so powerful a hold on his
heart. I shrank back from the confession as a man would recoil from a
serpent on which he had unexpectedly trodden . . . but in answer to
enquiries naturally suggested by the subject he declared he would
rather suffer death than do the slightest harm to so pure, so
innocent, so heavenly a creature as this....
" I took the greatest pains to ascertain by a severe and minute
investigation, how far it might be possible to doubt of the purity of
the passion by which this Affgan Dervish was possessed, and whether
it deserved ta be classed with that [108] described as prevailing
among the ancient Greeks; and the result fully satisfied me that both
were the same. Ismael was, however, surprised beyond measure when I
assured him that such a feeling was not known at all among the peoples
of Europe."
Travels, Etc., 2nd edition, vol. I, p 159.
" The Dervish added a striking instance of the force of these
attachments, and the sympathy which was felt in the sorrows to which
they led, by the following fact from his own history. The place of his
residence, and of his usual labor, was near the bridge of the Tigris,
at the gate of the Mosque of the Vizier. While he sat here, about five
or six years since, surrounded by several of his friends who came
often to enjoy his conversation and beguile the tedium of his work, he
observed, passing among the crowd, a young and beautiful Turkish boy,
whose eyes met his, as if by destiny, and they remained fixedly gazing
on each other for some time. The boy, after ' blushing like the first
hue of a summer morning,' passed on, frequently turning back to look
on the person who had regarded him so ardently. The Dervish felt his
heart ' revolve within him,' for such was his expression, and a cold
sweat came across his brow. He hung his head upon his graving-tool in
dejection, and excused himself to those about him by saying he felt
suddenly ill. Shortly afterwards the boy returned, and after walking
to and fro several times, drawing nearer and nearer, as if [109] under
the influence of some attracting charm, he came up to his observer and
said, ' Is it really true, then, that youlove me? ' ' This,' said
Ismael, ' was a dagger in my heart; I could make no reply.' The
friends who were near him, and now saw all explained, asked him if
there had been any previous acquaintance existing between them. He
assured them that they had never seen each other before. ' Then,' they
replied, ' such an event must be from God.'
" The boy continued to remain for a while with this party, told
with great frankness the name and rank of his parents, as well as the
place of his residence, and promised to repeat his visit on the
following day. He did this regularly for several months in succession,
sitting for hours by the Dervish, and either singing to him or asking
him interesting questions, to beguile his labors, until as Ismael
expressed himself, ' though they were still two bodies they became one
soul.' The youth at length fell sick, and was confined to his bed,
during which time his lover, Ismael, discontinued entirely his usual
occupations and abandoned himself completely to the care of his
beloved. He watched the changes of his disease with more than the
anxiety of a parent, and never quitted his bedside, night or day.
Death at length separated them; but even when the stroke came the
Dervish could not be prevailed on to quit the corpse. He constantly
visited the grave that contained the remains of all he held dear on
[110] earth, and planting myrtles and flowers there after the manner
of the East, bedewed them daily with his tears. His friends
sympathized powerfully in his distress, which he said ' continued to
feed his grief ' until he pined away to absolute illness, and was near
following the fate of him whom he deplored."
Ibid, p. 160.
"From all this, added to many other examples of a similar kind,
related as happening between persons who had often been pointed out to
me in Arabia and Persia, I could no longer doubt the existence in the
East of an affection for male youths, of as pure and honorable a kind
as that which is felt in Europe for those of the other sex . . . and
it would be as unjust to suppose that this necessarily implied
impurity of desire as to contend that no one could admire a lovely
countenance and a beautiful form in the other sex, and still be
inspired with sentiments of the most Dure and honorable nature towards
the object of his admiration."
Ibid, p. 163.
"One powerful reason why this passion may exist in the East,
while it is quite unknown in the West, is probably the seclusion of
women in the former, and the freedom of access to them in the
latter.... Had they [the Asiatics] the unrestrained intercourse which
we enjoy with such superior beings as the virtuous and accomplished
females of our own country they would find nothing in nature so
deserving of their love as these."
Ibid, p. 165.
C O N C L U S I O N
Some modern Muslim leaders may be very anti-gay, but there is
particular no more reason to agree with these leaders that *they* are
the owners of Islam. Indeed, when one reads attacks on homosexuality
by some modern Mulisms [eg see
http://www.utexas.edu/students/amso/homo.html ] what is most striking
is how *little* they can rely on their own tradition, and how much
they have to rely on general anti-homosexual propaganda.
Paul Halsall
Bibliography, initially posted by ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk
A starting-point for research into Arabic traditions of male-male
erotic/sensual/sexual relationships.
Version 1, May 1995.
@nticopyright - please freely distribute this text
This is just a compilation of information I've had lying around. I
put some of it together in a letter for a fellow scholar, then thought
it should be worked up into a short resource guide.
It reflects my interests in literature and poetry. I'm not an
Arabist, so this isn't comprehensive, and is just meant as a
'launch-pad' for those unfamiliar with the subject and who can't
read arabic... Contact: ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
**The work of NORMAN ROTH is well worth following...
Roth, Norman.
Deal Gently With The Young Man - love of boys in Medieval
Hebrew Poetry of Spain.
SPECULUM, 57, 1982. pp.20-51
Roth, Norman.
"My Beloved is Like a Gazelle" - imagery of the beloved boy
in Hebrew Religious Poetry.
HEBREW ANNUAL REVIEW, 8, 1984. pp.143-165
Roth, Norman. "The Care and Feeding of Gazelles" - medieval
Hebrew and Arabic Love Poetry. IN: Lazar, M. and Lacy, N.
(Eds)
Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages, Fairfax, VA, 1989.
Roth, Norman.
Fawn of My Delights - boy-love in Hebrew and Arabic Verse.
IN:
Sex in the Middle Ages, New York, 1991. pp.157-172.
Roth, Norman.
Boy-love in Medieval Arabic Verse
PAIDIKA - Journal of Paedophilia, Vol 3, No.3, Winter 1994.
pp.12-17
'Paidika', even though it is a scholarly journal, may be hard to
obtain through normal academic library channels in the USA, what with
politically-correct library stock policies. The subscription address
is...
Paidika - journal of paedophilia
Postbus 15463
1001 ML Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Single copies 17 dollars to the USA, subscription 68
dollars
for four issues. Well worth subscribing to.
**See also a recent article in 'perversions - the
international
journal of lesbian and gay studies...
Sikand, Yoginder.
A Martyr for Love - Hazrat Sayed Sarmad, a Sufi gay mystic.
PERVERSIONS, Spring 1995, Issue 4, pp. 149-157
perversions - international journal of lesbian and gay
studies.
BM perversions
LONDON
WC1N 3XX
England
United Kingdom
More material on sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition can
be
found in:
Wilson, Peter Lamborn. Scandal : essays in Islamic
heresy.
Brooklyn, New York, Autonomedia, c1988. 224 p. Biblio.
the address of the publisher is (was?)...
Autonomedia
Box 568
Brooklyn, New York
NY 11211
Anarchist and similar radical mail-order booksellers usually
carry Autonomedia books - enquire at the Spunk Press WWW
page if you have trouble finding it. It is also in some
large
University libraries in the USA (eg Washington)
**Hakim Bey translated a selection of the poetry of Abu
Nuwas...
Bey, Hakim (Ed and Trans.) Nuwas, Abu. O Tribe The
Loves
Boys - adaptations by Hakim Bey. Gay Men's Press,
London, 1993. (Also published in USA I think.)
Bey has also written many anarchist pamphlets, so he may
know
where to purchase 'Scandal', or know the new Autonomedia
address
if they've moved. He has his own Web-page (lucky him!)
at...
http://www.uio.no:80/~mwatz/bey/
**An ABU NUWAS SOCIETY has existed since 1990, to cover all
aspects
of sexual culture in the Middle East (inc. the Maghreb), and
concentrates on homosexuality.
Abu Nuwas Society - for the study of sexual culture in
the
Middle-East. (The Advisory Board looks pretty
heavyweight...)
Abu Nuwas Society
PO Box 85394
3508 AK Utrecht
The Netherlands
**Some anthologies...
Christman, Henry. M. (Ed.) Gay Tales and Verses from the
Arabian Nights. Edward-William Publishing Company/Banned
Books,
USA 1989. 104pp 0-934411-27-1 Trade Paper $7.95
Lacey, E. A. (Translator) The Delight of Hearts: Or,
What You Will Not Find in Any Book. Gay Sunshine Press,
1988.
240pp, illus. ISBN/Price: 0-940567-08-3 Library Binding
$25.00 0-940567-09-1 Trade Paper $14.95
[Al-Tifashi, Ahmad (Compiled by, Preface by); Lacey, E.
A.
(Introduction by, ); Khawam, Rene R. (Introduction by).
An anthology of Arabic gay literature - is a translation
of a
translation of a translation, so has probably lost
something
in the process...]
Reid, Anthony. (Ed.) The Eternal Flame -
a world anthology of homosexual verse,
2000 B.C.- 2000 A.D. Volume 1 - Greece,
Italy, Islam, France. New York, Dyanthus Press, 1992.
[Available mail-order in the EC from Prinz
Eisenhart, Berlin - ask for the poetry list. In USA
try Ariel's Pages mail-order. New translations]
**Richard Burton's 1850's Arabian Nights can be had from
Project Gutenburg,
though in the copy I have, the Terminal Essay is missing.
As Burton
is hard to find in paper form, you can find lengthy sections
of 'Terminal
Essay' reprinted in:
Reade, Brian. (Ed.) Sexual Heretics; Male
Homosexuality in English literature from 1850-1900 -
an anthology. London, Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1970.
A paper "Beyond the Sotadic Zone: Colonization and Sexuality
in Richard Burton's Terminal Essay" was presented Society
for
the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) meeting, Aug. 1993, by
John Hollister: e-mail bb05246@bingsuns.cc.binghamton.edu
(John Hollister)
****************************************
A couple of examples of Arabic poetry...
Anon (9th Century Arabic)
SURPRISE, SURPRISE (Trans. Derek Parker)
Nizam the pederast, whose delight in boys
Was known throughout Bagdad, one afternoon
In a secluded place saw in a clearing
The flash of limbs behind a nearby bush,
And looking closer came upon a youth
Who seemed more lovely than his dreams had promised,
Lying asleep in shade, his head pressed deep
Into crossed arms, his long slim body
Quite naked, the firm buttocks firmly offered.
Quick as a jackal pouncing, Nizam jumped
Upon the lad, his robe about his waist,
The startled boy pierced by his lusty cock
Before you could say knife. Not until later,
When boy lay panting on the flattened grass,
Did Nizam, pausing to embrace his love,
Discover him a her, surprised but pleased
At having been given such pleasure at a source
No previous lover seemed to know about.
Nizam converted ? Never. But the girl
Now gives her lovers strange instruction.
Abu Nuwas
94
I said as the narcissus-boy came ambling by,
a peach twirled in his hand:
'What a pity to wait until we offer cash!
Give love its proper due!'
'More pitiful still,' he replied, and chuckled,
'is a penniless flop at the door.'
98
Make many deletions, Jinan, when you write,
and delete the word, when you do, with your tongue
and, passing deletingly over a word,
draw it close to your beautiful lips;
for I hold, when running over the lines,
the cancelled somethings for a lick:
That - is a kiss from you from afar
which I steal while keeping here to my room.
99
A boy at blush of dawn
silver in the absolute
in whom the eye beholds
beauty in infinite
poised perfection, eclipsed
in re-creation launching -
so beauty moves in orbits
reborn and unregenerate.
--
Paul Halsall
drhalsall@gmail.com
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall Internet History Sourcebooks Project
--" Islamic fundamentalists tried to beat up a gay man and threatened
to kill him at a London conference on "Islamophobia", designed to
promote understanding and tolerance of Muslim values, and attended by
Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders. "The conference declaration
claimed that "Islam is wrongly and unjustly portrayed as barbaric,
irrational, primitive, sexist, violent and aggressive". Some gay
activists went on the attack, basically, to claim that this statement
is wrong, and noting the dreadful treatment of a gay activist at the
conference.--
The issue is not quite so simple, however. Although today Islam is
presented as a Monolithic religion and culture, this has little
relation to Islam's past, and much to to do with a mutally beneficial
collaboration by Western media *and* legalistic elements within the
Islamic world.
The Islam that we hear of - both Shia and Sunni - is presented as a
form of legalistic religious totalitarianism. But this represents only
one aspect of Islam's past and present culture [an aspect which can be
seen in certain historical manifestations of Christianity, Judaism,
"Hinduism", and Buddhism]. In practice, Islamic culture has exhibited
many periods of tolerance, including tolerance of homosexuality -
indeed the poetry of Islamic Spain is full of such references.
The history of homosexuality in Islamic culture is not reducible to
such periods of "tolerance". The form of Islam known as Sufism - a
form which emphasizes love and faith [iman] over submission [islam]
[and iman is used much more frequently in the Qu'ran than "islam"] -
has always been much more open. Sufism is *not* an obscure mystical
movement, but was a dominating force in the religious life of much of
the Muslim world.
Outside Saudi Arabia [which was "cleaned" by anti-Sufi Wahabists in
the 19th century], Islam is still awash in Sufi religiosity -
especially the importance given to saint's tombs and pilgrimages to
them. In South Asia [India, Pakistan and Bangladesh contain by far the
world's largest number of Muslims], Sufism has proved especially
important. The Sunni religious authorities do not "own" Islam, any
more than the Vatican "owns" the Catholicism of Mexican women devoted
to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Unfortunately the modern western commentators buy into this conflation
of legalistic Islamic authoritarianism with Islam as a whole. [They
also fail to analyze why immigrant communities often end up under the
control of conservative religious authorities, and embroiled in the
practice of the most conservative elements of a religious tradition.
There has been a lot of sociological study of this common phenomenon:
it seems clear that in immigrant subcultures, especially when the
immigrant group is subject to discrimination, the complexity of the
home society is reduced to much harsher lines. Homeland political,
regional and clam relationships come to have little role in the new
land, but religious affiliation remains clear. In these circumstances,
immigrant religious leaders acquire a new level of power.]
So let's summarize what Islamic culture has actually said and done
about Homosexuality.
M U H A M M A D A N D T H E Q U' R A N
The Qur'an actually says very little
The following Qur'anic are often seen verses as relevant to
homosexuality: [texts are from the Qur'an edition at Virginia Tech's
etext collection.]
SURA IV: 19-21
19. But whoso rebels against God and His Apostle, and transgresses His
bounds, He will make him enter into fire, and dwell therein for aye;
and for him is shameful woe. 20. Against those of your women who
commit adultery, call witnesses four in number from among yourselves;
and if these bear witness, then keep the women in houses until death
release them, or God shall make for them a way. 21. And if two (men)
of you commit it, then hurt them both; but if they turn again and
amend, leave them alone, verily, God is easily turned, compassionate.
-Note: if Surah 4:21 is about homosexuality, the Qu'ran is notably
less aggressive than the comparable verses in the Book of Leviticus.
SURA VII: 78-84 [On Lot at Sodom] 78. Then the earthquake took them,
and in the morning they lay prone in their dwellings; 79. and he
turned away from them and said, 'O my people! I did preach to you the
message of my Lord, and I gave you good advice; but ye love not
sincere advisers.' 80. And Lot, when he said to his people, 'Do ye
approach an abomination which no one in all the world ever anticipated
you in? 81. verily, ye approach men with lust rather than women- nay,
ye are a people who exceed.' 82.But his people's answer only was to
say, 'Turn them out of your village, verily, they are a people who
pretend to purity.' 83. But we saved him and his people, except his
wife, who was of those who lingered; 84. and we rained down upon them
a rain;- see then how was the end of the sinners!
See also SURA XI: 77-84 [On Lot at Sodom] SURA XXVI: 160-174 [On Lot
and Sodom] SURA XXIX: 28-35 [On Lot and Sodom]
-Note. To western readers the Qur'an is notably repetitive. Muhammad
(or, in Muslim eyes, God, the author of the "Qu'ran), in delivering
the various recitations, had some knowledge of the Five Books of
Moses. The same story gets repeated and repeated. The Sodom story was
clearly seen in homosexual terms [Sura 7:81], but the focus of the
story seems to be simply an attack on wickedness and turning away from
God in general.
ON THE OTHER HAND
Although the Qu'ran does not have verse explicitly in favor of
homosexuality, it does have verses which show awareness of male
beauty. These are promises made to Muslim men who make it to Heaven.
SURA LII:24 "And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys
of their own, as fair as virgin pearls."
SURA LXXVI:19 "They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal
youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders."
H A D I T H A N D T R A D I T I O N
There were varying traditions about homosexuality in Islamic
tradition. What follows is from an old post by Kamran Hakim
[khakim@asdg.enet.dec.com] to soc.religion.bahai [in which he is
seeking to show tha Bahai's are unequivocal in their condemnation of
homosexuality, while Muslims were lax.]
"References to effeminacy can be found in Islamic Hadith which is, in
a sense, a verification of the account of the New Testament.
Narrated Ibn 'Abbas:
"The Prophet cursed the effeminate men and those women who assume the
similitude (manners) of men. He also said, "Turn them out of your
houses." He turned such-and-such person out, and 'Umar also turned out
such-and- such person.
Sahih Bukhari 8.820
There doesn't appear to be too much room for effeminate men within the
Muslim community. However, effeminacy might not exactly equate with
sexual tendencies toward another man. Furthermore, both the Qur'an and
the Hadith deal with male-male sexual relationship in particular.
"The mentioning of the story of Lot, the nephew of Abraham and the
people of Sodom in the Qur'an appear to imply that Arabs of the time
of Muhammad must have also had similar social norms regarding sodomy.
Else there was no reason for Prophet Muhammad to repeat, by the virtue
of inspiration, the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah in the
Qur'an.
"The Qur'an does not directly refer to "lavaat", "sodomy" or the
homosexual act. On the contrary the Qur'an treats this issue in a
peripheral manner. The following verses of that Book describe the
story of "Lot" and the people of Sodom and hint at sodomy by
implication: "For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to
women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bonds." Qur'an 7:81
Moreover;
"-Would ye really approach men in your lust rather than women? Nay ye
are a people grossly ignorant." Qur'an 27:55
-Surih Sho'ara:105 of the Qur'an reiterates further on this same theme.
Imam Ali describes the reason behind the injunction of the Qur'an
against sodomy in a rather practical manner:
"Amir al-mu'menin, peace be upon him, said: Allah has laid
down...abstinence from sodomy for increase of progeny..."
Nahj-ul-Balagha, selection from the preachings of Ali, # 253, p. 621
Regardless of such admonishment and unlike the severe approach of the
Torah in punishing those guilty of sodomy, the Qur'an appear to treat
this issue in a far more lenient manner than the Torah:
"And as for the two of you [i.e. The sentence structure refers
exclusively to two men and not a man and a woman. KH] who are guilty
thereof [guilty of sexual relationship. KH], punish them both. And if
they repent and improve, then let them be. Lo! Allah is Relenting,
Merciful." Qur'an 4:16
Qur'an while speaking of "punish them both", does not prescribe any
form of punishment, as in the case of adultery, for sexual
relationship between two men and prescribes acceptance of their
repentance. However, there are some Ahadith (i.e. Traditions, saying
of Prophet Muhammad) that prescribe the severe punishment of the Torah
for those guilty of this charge. For example the following two Ahadith
are from Sunan of Abu Dawood vol 4, chapter on the people of Lot. The
Arabic text reads as follows:
"man laata beh ghulaam faqtaloo al-fa'il val-maf'ool." Which
translates to: "When a man commits sodomy with a boy: kill the doer
and the one done to."
Also;
"qala an-nabi man vajde tamooh ya'mala 'amale qawme Lot fa-aqtaloo
al-fa'il val-maf'ool." Which translates to: "Prophet said: He who
commits that which the people of Lot committed [i.e. People of Lot
committed Sodomy. KH]: kill the doer and the one done to."
Since the Qur'an has not clearly prescribed a punishment for sodomy,
some Schools of Thought in Islam have considered sodomy as "mobaah"
[i.e. meaning allowable in an impunible and indifferent sense.] while
others have considered it "jaa'iz" [i.e. meaning allowable,
permissible and lawful.]. For example Maleki, the founder of the
Maleki School of Thought within Sunni Islam says:
"Having sex with a young man (without beard) is fine for a man who is
not married and who is on a trip." cit. Hesaam Noqaba'i, Hoquq-i Zan,
pp. 126-127 (section on "lavaat"/"sodomy")
The Shi'ah books of law also leave the door unlocked for the cases of
"Oops, I forgot! sodomization of boys. The following Shi'ah ruling
hints at this:
"If he has had sexual intercourse with a boy according to
precautionary rule, it becomes unlawful for him forever to marry the
boy's mother, his sister, or his daughters even if they are boys not
adults. If one is married to one of such ladies before such act, it
does not affect the already existing marriage, although it is a
precautionary rule to avoid such marriage. Extending this rule to the
case wherein one doing the act is a minor the one letting it done to
him is an adult, is objectionable, according to a clear view it does
not apply. The daughter or brothers and sisters of the one letting it
done to him do not become unlawful to one who has done the act."
Islamic Laws of Worship and Contracts, p. 614, CR #1259 Ayatullah
Al-'Uzma Al-Sayyid Muhammad Al-Husayni Shirazi
In the Ottoman Empire the Sultans use to keep youths in the Harem for
satisfying their sexual appetites [Such reference may be found in
books such as: "The Spirit of Laws" by Montesquieu and "Chronichles of
Shirly Brothers"]. Within the Iranian society "bache-bazi" or "sexual
play with young boys" has been an under the carpet social norm for
many centuries and the ambiguous nature of the Qur'anic prescription
has not been able to bring halt to this social illness.
Will Durant refers to this issue in his book "History of
Civilization". He writes: "Sexual indulgence was apparently more
abundant and enervating in Islam than in Christiandom, though it was
usually kept within the orderly limits of polygamy. Turkish society
was almost exclusively male, and since there was no permitted
association of men with women outside the home, the Moslems found
companionship in homosexual relationships, Platonic or physical.
Lesbianism flourished in the zenana." -Will & Ariel Durant, History
of Civilization vol 7 (The Age of Reason Begins) p. 520 Also;
"The women were 'very richly habited,'wrote Tavernier, and 'little
otherwise than the men...They wear breeches like the men.' The women
lived in the privacy of the zenana, and seldom stirring from their
homes, and then rarely on foot. There were three sexes. Much of the
love poetry was addressed by men to boys, and Thomas Herbert, and
Englishman at Abbas' [i.e Shah Abbas of the Saffavid Dynasty. Their
court, saw 'Ganymade boys in vests of gold, rich bespangled turbans,
and choice sandals, their curled hair dangling about their shoulders,
with rolling eyes and vermilion cheeks.'
Chardin noted a decrease in population in his time and ascribed it to
First, the unhappy inclination which the Persians have, to commit that
abominable sin against nature, with both sexes [Here he is referring
to sodomy. KH].
Secondly, the immoderate luxury [sexual freedom] of the country. The
women begin there to have children betimes, and continue fruitful but
a little while; and as soon as they get on the wrong side of thirty
they are looked upon as old and superannuated, The men likewise begin
to visit women too young, and to such an excess, that though they
enjoy several, they have never the more children for it. There are
also a great many women who make themselves abortive, and take
remedies against growing pregnant, because [when] they have been three
or four months gone with the child, their husbands take to other
women, holding it ... indecency to lie with a woman so far in her
time. Despite polygamy there were many prostitutes. Drunkenness was
widespread, though Muhammadan law forbade wine."
Will & Ariel Durant, History of Civilization vol 7 (The Age of Reason
Begins) p. 532
It is important to point out that Durant's observation is not far from
the truth. Perhaps the following quotes from the Shi'ah compilations
offers a certain measure of validity to Durant's view:
"The woman becomes the owner of the dowry by the contract and it is
reduced by one half by divorce before sex, also because of death of
one party, according to a more clear reason if sex is performed by the
front or back the dowry becomes an established right and the same rule
applies if he tears her virginity by his finger and without her
permission."
Islamic Laws of Worship and Contracts, p. 626, CR #1350 Ayatullah
Al-'Uzma Al-Sayyid Muhammad Al-Husayni Shirazi
H O M O S E X U A L I T Y I N T H E I S L A M I C W O R L D
[Most of this is from Edward Carpenter's Iolaus, in which he hides
homosexual culture under the guise of "male friendship".]
The honor paid to male love in Persia, Arabia, Syria and other
Oriental lands has always been great, and the tradition of this
attachment there should be especially interesting to us, as having
arisen independently of classic or Christian ideals.
The Sufi poets of Persia, Saadi and Jalalu-ddin Rumi [100] (13th
cent.), Hafiz (14th cent.), Jami (15th cent.), and others, drew much
of their inspiration from homosexual love and male beauty. The
extraordinary way in which, following the method of the Sufis, and of
Plato, they identify the mortal and the divine love, and see in their
male beloved an image or revelation of God himself, makes their poems
difficult of comprehension to the Western mind. Apostrophes to Love,
Wine, and Beauty often, with them, bear a frankly twofold sense,
material and spiritual. To these poets of the mid-region of the earth,
the bitter antagonism between matter and spirit, which like an evil
dream has haunted so long both the extreme Western and the extreme
Eastern mind, scarcely exists; and even the body " which is a portion
of the dustpit " has become perfect and divine.
All the texts that follow address homosexual love:-
Jalalu-ddin Rumi
" Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world....
From the moment you came into the world of being
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape ( ascend ) .
First you were mineral, later you turned to plant,
[101]Then you became an animal: how should this be a secret to you ?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith;
Behold the body, which is a portion of the dust pit, how perfect
it has growing
When you have travelled on from man, you will doubtless become an angel;
After that you are done with earth: your station is in heaven.
Pass again even from angelhood: enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea which is a hundred seas of ' Oman.' "
From the Divani Shamsi Tabriz of Jalalu-ddin Rumi, trans. by
R. H. Nicholson.
'Twere better that the spirit which wears not true love as a garment
Had not been: its being is but shame.
Be drunken in love, for love is all that exists.
Dismiss cares and be utterly clear of heart,
Like the face of a mirror, without image or picture.
When it becomes clear of images, all images are contained in it."
Ibid.
Happy the moment when we are seated in the palace, thou and I,
With two forms and with two figures, but with one soul, thou and I."
Ibid.
HAFIZ and SAADI
SOME short quotations here following are taken from Flowers culled
from Persian Gardens (Manchester, 1872):
"Everyone, whether he be abstemious or self indulgent is searching
after the Friend. Every place may be the abode of love, whether it be
a mosque or a synagogue.... On thy last day, though the cup be in thy
hand, thou may'st be borne away to Paradise evenfrom the corner of the
tavern."
Hafiz.
"I have heard a sweet word which was spoken by the old man of
Canaan (Jacob)-' No tongue can express what means the separation of
friends."
Hafiz.
"Neither of my own free will cast I myself into the fire; for the
chain of affection was laid upon my neck. I was still at a distance
when the fire began to glow, nor is this the moment that it was
lighted up within me. Who shall impute it to me as a fault, that I am
enchanted by my friend, that I am content in casting myself at his
feet? "
Saadi
SAADI'S ROSE GARDEN
"A youth there was of golden heart and nature,
Who loved a friend, his like in every feature;
[102] Once, as upon the ocean sailed the pair,
They chanced into a whirlpool unaware.
A fisherman made haste the first to save,
Ere his young life should meet a watery grave;
But crying from the raging surf, he said:
' Leave me, and seize my comrade's hand instead.'
E'en as he spoke the mortal swoon o'ertook him,
With that last utterance life and sense forsook him.
Learn not love's temper from that shallow pate
Who in the hour of fear forsakes his mate
True friends will ever act like him above
(Trust one who is experienced in love);
For Sadi knows full well the lover's part,
And Bagdad understands the Arab heart.
More than all else thy loved one shalt thou prize,
Else is the whole world hidden from thine eyes."
Lov'st thou a being formed of dust like thee
Peace and contentment from thy heart shall flee -
Waking, fair limbs and features shall torment thee;
Sleeping, thy love in dreams shall hold and haunt thee.
Under his feet thy head is bowed to earth;
Compared with him the world's a paltry crust;
If to thy loved one gold is nothing worth,
Why, then to thee is gold no more than dust
[105] Hardly a word for others canst thou find,
For no room's left for others in thy mind."
" Dear Friend, since thou hast passed the whole
Of one sweet night, till dawn, with me,
I were scarce mortal, could I spend
Another hour apart from thee.
The fear of death, for all of time
Hath left me since my soul partook
The water of true Life, that wells
In sweet abundance from thy brook."
Hahn in his Albanesische Studien, already quoted (p. 20), gives some
of the verses of Necin or Nesim Bey, a Turco-Albanian poet, of which
the following is an example:
"Whate'er, my friend, or false or true,
The world may tell thee, give no ear,
For to separate us, dear,
The world will say that one is two.
Who should seek to separate us
May he never cease to weep.
The rain at times may cease; but he
In Summer's warmth or Winter's sleep
May he never cease to weep."
R I C H A R D B U R T O N O N H O M O S E X U A L I T Y I N M U
S L I M C U L T U R E
The 19th century translator of the 1001 Nights, Richard Burton
commented on the Qu'ranic passages:
"These circumstantial unfacts are repeated at full length in the other
two chapters; but rather as an instance of Allah's power than as a
warning against pederasty, which Mohammed seems to have regarded with
philosophic indifference. The general opinion of his followers is that
it should be punished like fornication unless the offenders made a
public act of penitence. But here, as in adultery, the law is somewhat
too clement and will not convict unless four credible witnesses swear
to have seen rem in re. I have noticed (vol. i. 211) the vicious
opinion that the Ghilman or Wuldan, the beautiful boys of Paradise,
the counterparts of the Houris, will be lawful catamites to the True
Believers in a future state of happiness: the idea is nowhere
countenanced in Al-Islam; and, although I have often heard debauchees
refer to it, the learned look upon the assertion as scandalous. "
Burton later addressed the issue of homosexuality, which came up
repeatedly in the 1001 Nights.
"We must not forget that the love of boys has its noble sentimental
side. The Platonists and pupils of the Academy, followed by the Sufis
or Moslem Gnostics held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the beau
id al which united in man's soul the creature with the Creator.
Professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and beautiful objects
in this phenomenal world, they declared that by loving and extolling
the chef-d'^ uvre, corporeal and intellectual, of the Demiurgus,
disinterestedly and without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they
are paying the most fervent adoration to the Causa causans. They add
that such affection, passing as it does the love of women, is far less
selfish than fondness for and admiration of the other sex which,
however innocent, always suggest sexuality; and Easterns add that the
devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the
Bulbul's love for the Rose. "
[Burton also mentions the history of lesbianism in the Muslim world,
but does not pursue it - "The Arabic Sahh kah, the Tractatrix of
Subigitatrix, who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to
Lesbianise (lesbizein) and tribassare (tr besthai) the former applied
to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its m canique: this
is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the
clitoris when unusually developed; or artificial by means of the
fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian 'May jang'); the patte de
chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this
feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly
enlarge upon the subject."]
Of his own period, Burton notes:
"In old Mauritania, now Morocco, the Moors proper are notable
sodomites; Moslems, even of saintly houses, are permitted openly to
keep catamites, nor do their disciples think worse of their sanctity
for such license: in one case the English wife failed to banish from
the home 'that horrid boy'."
"..when Sonnini travelled (A.D. 1717). The French officer, who is
thoroughly trustworthy, draws the darkest picture of the widely-spread
criminality especially of the bestiality and the sodomy (chapt. xv.)
which formed the 'delight of the Egyptians.' During the Napoleonic
conquest Jaubert in his letter to General Bruix (p. 19) says, 'Les
Arabes et les Mamelouks ont trait quelques-uns de nos prisonniers
comme Socrate traitait, dit-on, Alcibiade. Il fallait p rir ou y
passer.' Old Anglo-Egyptians still chuckle over the tale of Sa'id
Pasha and M. de Ruyssenaer, the highdried and highly respectable
Consul-General for the Netherlands, who was solemnly advised to make
the experiment, active and passive, before offering his opinion upon
the subject. In the present age extensive intercourse with Europeans
has produced not a reformation but a certain reticence amongst the
upper classes: they are as vicious as ever, but they do not care for
displaying their vices to the eyes of mocking strangers."
"Syria has not forgotten her old 'praxis.' At Damascus I found some
noteworthy cases amongst the religious of the great Amawi Mosque. As
for the Druses we have Burckhardt's authority (Travels in Syria, etc.,
p. 202) 'unnatural propensities are very common amongst them.'
The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia now
occupied by the 'unspeakable Turk,' a race of born pederasts; and in
the former region we first notice a peculiarity of the feminine
figure, the mammae inclinatae, jacentes et pannosae, which prevails
over all this part of the belt. Whilst the women to the North and
South have, with local exceptions, the mammae stantes of the European
virgin,[39] those of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and Kashmir lose all
the fine curves of the bosom, sometimes even before the first child;
and after it the hemispheres take the form of bags. This cannot result
from climate only; the women of Maratha-land, inhabiting a damper and
hotter region than Kashmir, are noted for fine firm breasts even after
parturition. Le Vice of course prevails more in the cities and towns
of Asiatic Turkey than in the villages; yet even these are infected;
while the nomad Turcomans contrast badly in this point with the
Gypsies, those- Badawin of India. The Kurd population is of Iranian
origin, which` means that the evil is deeply rooted: I have noted in
The Nights that the great and glorious Saladin was a habitual
pederast. The Armenians, as their national character is, will
prostitute themselves for gain but prefer women to boys: Georgia
supplied Turkey with catamites whilst Circassia sent concubines. In
Mesopotamia the barbarous invader has almost obliterated the ancient
civilization which is antedated only by the Nilotic: the mysteries of
old Babylon nowhere survive save in certain obscure tribes like the
Mandaeans, the Devil-worshippers and the Ali-ilahi. Entering Persia we
find the reverse of Armenia; and, despite Herodotus, I believe that
Iran borrowed her pathologic love from the peoples of the
Tigris-Euphrates Valley and not from the then insignificant Greeks.
But whatever may be its origin, the corruption is now bred in the
bone. It begins in boyhood and many Persians account for it by
paternal severity. Youths arrived at puberty find none of the
facilities with which Europe supplies fornication. Onanism [40] is to
a certain extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with the
father's slave-girls and concubines would be risking cruel punishment
if not death. Hence they use each other by turns, a 'puerile practice'
known as Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere
Temperament, media, and atavism recommend the custom to the general;
and after marrying and begetting heirs, Paterfamilias returns to the
Ganymede. Hence all the odes of Hafiz are addressed to youths as
proved by such Arabic exclamations as 'Afaka 'llah = Allah assain thee
(masculine) [4l]: the object is often fanciful but it would be held
coarse and immodest to address an imaginary girl.[42] An illustration
of the penchant is told at Shiraz concerning a certain Mujtahid, the
head of the Shi'ah creed, corresponding with a prince-archbishop in
Europe. A friend once said to him, 'There is a question I would fain
address to your Eminence but I lack the daring to do so.' 'Ask and
fear not,' replied the Divine. 'It is this, O Mujtahid! Figure thee in
a garden of roses and hyacinths with the evening breeze waving the
cypress-heads, a fair youth of twenty sitting by thy side and the
assurance of perfect privacy. What, prithee, would be the result?' The
holy man bowed the chin of doubt upon the collar of meditation; and,
too honest to lie presently whispered, 'Allah defend me from such
temptation of Satan!' Yet even in Persia men have not been wanting who
have done their utmost to uproot the Vice: in the same Shiraz they
speak of a father who, finding his son in flagrant delict, put him to
death like Brutus or Lynch of Galway. Such isolated cases, however,
can effect nothing.
Chardin tells us that houses of male prostitution were common in
Persia whilst those of women were unknown: the same is the case in the
present day and the boys are prepared with extreme care by diet,
baths, depilation, unguents and a host of artists in cosmetics. [43]
Le Vice is looked upon at most as a peccadillo and its mention crops
up in every jest-book. When the Isfahan man mocked Shaykh Sa'adi, by
comparing the bald pates of Shirazian elders to the bottom of a lota,
a brass cup with a wide-necked opening used in the Hammam, the witty
poet turned its aperture upwards and thereto likened the well-abused
podex of an Isfahani youth. Another favourite piece of Shirazian
'chaff' is to declare that when an Isfahan father would set up his son
in business he provides him with a pound of rice, meaning that he can
sell the result as compost for the kitchen-garden, and with the price
buy another meal: hence the saying Khakh-i-pai kahu = the soil at the
lettuce-root. The Isfahanis retort with the name of a station or
halting-place between the two cities where, under pretence of making
travellers stow away their riding-gear, many a Shirazi had been raped:
hence 'Zin o takaltu tu bi-bar' = carry within saddle and
saddle-cloth! A favourite Persian punishment for strangers caught in
the Harem or Gynaeceum is to strip and throw them and expose them to
the embraces of the grooms and negro slaves. I once asked a Shirazi
how penetration was possible if the patient resisted with all the
force of the sphincter muscle: he smiled and said, 'Ah, we Persians
know a trick to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent-peg to the
crupper-bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens.' A well-known
missionary to the East during the last generation was subjected to
this gross insult by one ofthe Persian Prince-governors, whom he had
infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by
mentioning his 'dishonoured person;' but English readers cannot
comprehend the full significance of the confession. About the same
time Skaykh Nasr, Governor of Bushire, a man famed for facetious
blackguardism, used to invite European youngsters serving in the
Bombay Marine and ply them with liquor till they were insensible. Next
morning the middies mostly complained that the champagne had caused a
curious irritation and soreness in la parte-poste. The same Eastern
'Scrogin' would ask his guests if they had ever seen a mancannon
(Adami-top); and, on their replying in the negative, a greybeard slave
was dragged in blaspheming and struggling with all his strength. He
was presently placed on all fours and firmly held by the extremities;
his bag-trousers were let down and a dozen peppercorns were inserted
ano suo: the target was a sheet of paper held at a reasonable
distance; the match was applied by a pinch of cayenne in the nostrils;
the sneeze started the grapeshot and the number of hits on the butt
decided the bets. We can hardly wonder at the loose conduct of Persian
women perpetually mortified by marital pederasty. During the unhappy
campaign of 1856-7 in which, with the exception of a few brilliant
skirmishes, we gained no glory, Sir James Outram and the Bombay army
showing how badly they could work, there was a formal outburst of the
Harems; and even women of princely birth could not be kept out of the
officers' quarters.
The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with
Persian vice, and the people sing
Kadr-i-kus Aughan danad, kadr-i-kunra Kabuli:
The worth of coynte the Afghan knows: Cabul prefers the other chose![44]
The Afghans are commercial travellers on a large scale and each
caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in woman's
attire with kohl'd eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses and henna'd
fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or camel-panniers:
they are called Kuch-i safari, or travelling wives, and the husbands
trudge patiently by their sides. In Afghanistan also a frantic
debauchery broke out amongst the women when they found incubi who were
not pederasts; and the scandal was not the most insignificant cause of
the general rising at Cabul (Nov. 1841), and the slaughter of
Macnaghten, Burnes and other British officers.
Resuming our way Eastward we find the Sikhs and the Moslems of the
Panjab much addicted to Le Vice, although the Himalayan tribes to the
north and those lying south, the Rajputs and Marathas, ignore it. The
same may be said of the Kashmirians who add another Kappa to the tria
Kakista, Kappadocians, Kretans, and Kilicians: the proverb says,
Agar kaht-i-mardum uftad, az in sih jins kam giri;
Eki Afghan, dowum Sindi,[45] siyyum badjins-i-Kashmiri:
Though of men there be famine yet shun these three
Afghan, Sindi and rascally Kashmiri.
M. Louis Daville describes the infamies of lajore and Lakhanu where he
found men dressed as women, with flowing locks under crowns of
flowers, imitating the feminine walk and gestures, voice and fashion
of speech, and ogling their admirers with all the coquetry of bayad
res. Victor Jacquemont's Journal de Voyage describes the pederasty of
Ranjit Singh, the 'Lion of the Panjab,' and his pathic Gulab Singh
whom the English inflicted upon Cashmir as ruler by way of paying for
his treason. Yet the Hindus, I repeat, hold pederasty in abhorrence
and are as much scandalized by being called Gand-mara (anus-beater) or
Gandu (anuser) as Englishmen would be. During the years 1843-4 my
regiment, almost all Hindu Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was
stationed at a purgatory called Bandar Gharra,[46] a sandy flat with a
scatter of verdigris-green milk-bush some forty miles north of Karachi
the headquarters. The dirty heap of mud-and-mat hovels, which
represented the adjacent native village, could not supply a single
woman; yet only one case of pederasty came to light and that after a
tragical fashion some years afterwards. A young Brahman had connection
with a soldier comrade of low caste and this had continued till, in an
unhappy hour, the Pariah patient ventured to become the agent. The
latter, in Arab Al-Fa'il = the 'doer,' is not an object of contempt
like Al-Maful = the 'done'; and the high-caste sepoy, stung by remorse
and revenge, loaded his musket and deliberately shot his paramour. He
was hanged by court martial at Hyderabad and, when his last wishes
were asked he begged in vain to be suspended by the feet; the idea
being that his soul, polluted by exiting 'below the waist,' would be
doomed to endless transmigrations through the lowest forms of life.
H O M O S E X U A L M U S L I M L E A D E R S
As well as poets and philosophers, a number of the the great heros of
Sunni Islam saw no great problem with homosexuality. Again adapted
from Carpenter, the following quotations may afford some glimpses of
interest.
Suleyman the Magnificent was the greatest leader of the Ottoman Empire
- by far the longest lasting of all Muslim states, and for centuries
the leading Bulwark of Sunni Islam. The Story of Suleyman's attachment
to his Vezir Ibrahim is told as follows by Stanley Lane-Poole:
"Suleyman, great as he was, shared his greatness with a second
mind, to which his reign owed much of its brilliance. The Grand Vezir
Ibrahim was the counterpart of the Grand Monarch Suleyman. He was the
son of a sailor at Parga, and had been captured by corsairs, by whom
he was sold to be the slave of a widow at Magnesia. Here he passed
into the hands of the young prince Suleyman, then Governor of
Magnesia, and soon his extraordinary talents and address brought him
promotion.... From being Grand Falconer on the accession of Suleyman,
he rose to be first minister and almost co-Sultan in 1523.
"He was the object of the Sultan's tender regard: an emperor knows
better than most men how solitary is life without friendship and love,
and Suleyman loved this man more than a brother. Ibrahim was not only
a friend, he was an entertaining and instructive companion. He read
Persian, Greek and Italian; he knew how to open unknown worlds to the
Sultan's mind, and Sulevman drank in his Vezir's wisdom with
assiduity. They lived together: their meals were shared in common;
even their beds were in the same room. The Sultan gave his sister in
marriage to the sailor's [107] son, and Ibrahim was at the summit of
power."
Turkey, Story of Nations series, p. 174.
It was not only the emperors and religious leaders who were open to
homosexuality. T. S. BUCKINGHAM, in his "Travels in Assyria, Media
and Persia," speaking of his guide whom he had engaged at Bagdad, and
who was supposed to have left his heart behind him in that city, says
[The word "dervish" here refers to a member of a Sufi sect]:
" Amidst all this I was at a loss to conceive how the Dervish could
find much enjoyment [in the expedition] while laboring under the
strong passion which I supposed he must then be feeling for the object
of his affections at Bagdad, whom he had quitted with so much
reluctance. What was my surprise, however, on seeking an explanation
of this seeming inconsistency, to find it was the son, and not the
daughter, of his friend Elias who held so powerful a hold on his
heart. I shrank back from the confession as a man would recoil from a
serpent on which he had unexpectedly trodden . . . but in answer to
enquiries naturally suggested by the subject he declared he would
rather suffer death than do the slightest harm to so pure, so
innocent, so heavenly a creature as this....
" I took the greatest pains to ascertain by a severe and minute
investigation, how far it might be possible to doubt of the purity of
the passion by which this Affgan Dervish was possessed, and whether
it deserved ta be classed with that [108] described as prevailing
among the ancient Greeks; and the result fully satisfied me that both
were the same. Ismael was, however, surprised beyond measure when I
assured him that such a feeling was not known at all among the peoples
of Europe."
Travels, Etc., 2nd edition, vol. I, p 159.
" The Dervish added a striking instance of the force of these
attachments, and the sympathy which was felt in the sorrows to which
they led, by the following fact from his own history. The place of his
residence, and of his usual labor, was near the bridge of the Tigris,
at the gate of the Mosque of the Vizier. While he sat here, about five
or six years since, surrounded by several of his friends who came
often to enjoy his conversation and beguile the tedium of his work, he
observed, passing among the crowd, a young and beautiful Turkish boy,
whose eyes met his, as if by destiny, and they remained fixedly gazing
on each other for some time. The boy, after ' blushing like the first
hue of a summer morning,' passed on, frequently turning back to look
on the person who had regarded him so ardently. The Dervish felt his
heart ' revolve within him,' for such was his expression, and a cold
sweat came across his brow. He hung his head upon his graving-tool in
dejection, and excused himself to those about him by saying he felt
suddenly ill. Shortly afterwards the boy returned, and after walking
to and fro several times, drawing nearer and nearer, as if [109] under
the influence of some attracting charm, he came up to his observer and
said, ' Is it really true, then, that youlove me? ' ' This,' said
Ismael, ' was a dagger in my heart; I could make no reply.' The
friends who were near him, and now saw all explained, asked him if
there had been any previous acquaintance existing between them. He
assured them that they had never seen each other before. ' Then,' they
replied, ' such an event must be from God.'
" The boy continued to remain for a while with this party, told
with great frankness the name and rank of his parents, as well as the
place of his residence, and promised to repeat his visit on the
following day. He did this regularly for several months in succession,
sitting for hours by the Dervish, and either singing to him or asking
him interesting questions, to beguile his labors, until as Ismael
expressed himself, ' though they were still two bodies they became one
soul.' The youth at length fell sick, and was confined to his bed,
during which time his lover, Ismael, discontinued entirely his usual
occupations and abandoned himself completely to the care of his
beloved. He watched the changes of his disease with more than the
anxiety of a parent, and never quitted his bedside, night or day.
Death at length separated them; but even when the stroke came the
Dervish could not be prevailed on to quit the corpse. He constantly
visited the grave that contained the remains of all he held dear on
[110] earth, and planting myrtles and flowers there after the manner
of the East, bedewed them daily with his tears. His friends
sympathized powerfully in his distress, which he said ' continued to
feed his grief ' until he pined away to absolute illness, and was near
following the fate of him whom he deplored."
Ibid, p. 160.
"From all this, added to many other examples of a similar kind,
related as happening between persons who had often been pointed out to
me in Arabia and Persia, I could no longer doubt the existence in the
East of an affection for male youths, of as pure and honorable a kind
as that which is felt in Europe for those of the other sex . . . and
it would be as unjust to suppose that this necessarily implied
impurity of desire as to contend that no one could admire a lovely
countenance and a beautiful form in the other sex, and still be
inspired with sentiments of the most Dure and honorable nature towards
the object of his admiration."
Ibid, p. 163.
"One powerful reason why this passion may exist in the East,
while it is quite unknown in the West, is probably the seclusion of
women in the former, and the freedom of access to them in the
latter.... Had they [the Asiatics] the unrestrained intercourse which
we enjoy with such superior beings as the virtuous and accomplished
females of our own country they would find nothing in nature so
deserving of their love as these."
Ibid, p. 165.
C O N C L U S I O N
Some modern Muslim leaders may be very anti-gay, but there is
particular no more reason to agree with these leaders that *they* are
the owners of Islam. Indeed, when one reads attacks on homosexuality
by some modern Mulisms [eg see
http://www.utexas.edu/students
is how *little* they can rely on their own tradition, and how much
they have to rely on general anti-homosexual propaganda.
Paul Halsall
Bibliography, initially posted by ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk
A starting-point for research into Arabic traditions of male-male
erotic/sensual/sexual relationships.
Version 1, May 1995.
@nticopyright - please freely distribute this text
This is just a compilation of information I've had lying around. I
put some of it together in a letter for a fellow scholar, then thought
it should be worked up into a short resource guide.
It reflects my interests in literature and poetry. I'm not an
Arabist, so this isn't comprehensive, and is just meant as a
'launch-pad' for those unfamiliar with the subject and who can't
read arabic... Contact: ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
**The work of NORMAN ROTH is well worth following...
Roth, Norman.
Deal Gently With The Young Man - love of boys in Medieval
Hebrew Poetry of Spain.
SPECULUM, 57, 1982. pp.20-51
Roth, Norman.
"My Beloved is Like a Gazelle" - imagery of the beloved boy
in Hebrew Religious Poetry.
HEBREW ANNUAL REVIEW, 8, 1984. pp.143-165
Roth, Norman. "The Care and Feeding of Gazelles" - medieval
Hebrew and Arabic Love Poetry. IN: Lazar, M. and Lacy, N.
(Eds)
Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages, Fairfax, VA, 1989.
Roth, Norman.
Fawn of My Delights - boy-love in Hebrew and Arabic Verse.
IN:
Sex in the Middle Ages, New York, 1991. pp.157-172.
Roth, Norman.
Boy-love in Medieval Arabic Verse
PAIDIKA - Journal of Paedophilia, Vol 3, No.3, Winter 1994.
pp.12-17
'Paidika', even though it is a scholarly journal, may be hard to
obtain through normal academic library channels in the USA, what with
politically-correct library stock policies. The subscription address
is...
Paidika - journal of paedophilia
Postbus 15463
1001 ML Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Single copies 17 dollars to the USA, subscription 68
dollars
for four issues. Well worth subscribing to.
**See also a recent article in 'perversions - the
international
journal of lesbian and gay studies...
Sikand, Yoginder.
A Martyr for Love - Hazrat Sayed Sarmad, a Sufi gay mystic.
PERVERSIONS, Spring 1995, Issue 4, pp. 149-157
perversions - international journal of lesbian and gay
studies.
BM perversions
LONDON
WC1N 3XX
England
United Kingdom
More material on sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition can
be
found in:
Wilson, Peter Lamborn. Scandal : essays in Islamic
heresy.
Brooklyn, New York, Autonomedia, c1988. 224 p. Biblio.
the address of the publisher is (was?)...
Autonomedia
Box 568
Brooklyn, New York
NY 11211
Anarchist and similar radical mail-order booksellers usually
carry Autonomedia books - enquire at the Spunk Press WWW
page if you have trouble finding it. It is also in some
large
University libraries in the USA (eg Washington)
**Hakim Bey translated a selection of the poetry of Abu
Nuwas...
Bey, Hakim (Ed and Trans.) Nuwas, Abu. O Tribe The
Loves
Boys - adaptations by Hakim Bey. Gay Men's Press,
London, 1993. (Also published in USA I think.)
Bey has also written many anarchist pamphlets, so he may
know
where to purchase 'Scandal', or know the new Autonomedia
address
if they've moved. He has his own Web-page (lucky him!)
at...
http://www.uio.no:80/~mwatz
**An ABU NUWAS SOCIETY has existed since 1990, to cover all
aspects
of sexual culture in the Middle East (inc. the Maghreb), and
concentrates on homosexuality.
Abu Nuwas Society - for the study of sexual culture in
the
Middle-East. (The Advisory Board looks pretty
heavyweight...)
Abu Nuwas Society
PO Box 85394
3508 AK Utrecht
The Netherlands
**Some anthologies...
Christman, Henry. M. (Ed.) Gay Tales and Verses from the
Arabian Nights. Edward-William Publishing Company/Banned
Books,
USA 1989. 104pp 0-934411-27-1 Trade Paper $7.95
Lacey, E. A. (Translator) The Delight of Hearts: Or,
What You Will Not Find in Any Book. Gay Sunshine Press,
1988.
240pp, illus. ISBN/Price: 0-940567-08-3 Library Binding
$25.00 0-940567-09-1 Trade Paper $14.95
[Al-Tifashi, Ahmad (Compiled by, Preface by); Lacey, E.
A.
(Introduction by, ); Khawam, Rene R. (Introduction by).
An anthology of Arabic gay literature - is a translation
of a
translation of a translation, so has probably lost
something
in the process...]
Reid, Anthony. (Ed.) The Eternal Flame -
a world anthology of homosexual verse,
2000 B.C.- 2000 A.D. Volume 1 - Greece,
Italy, Islam, France. New York, Dyanthus Press, 1992.
[Available mail-order in the EC from Prinz
Eisenhart, Berlin - ask for the poetry list. In USA
try Ariel's Pages mail-order. New translations]
**Richard Burton's 1850's Arabian Nights can be had from
Project Gutenburg,
though in the copy I have, the Terminal Essay is missing.
As Burton
is hard to find in paper form, you can find lengthy sections
of 'Terminal
Essay' reprinted in:
Reade, Brian. (Ed.) Sexual Heretics; Male
Homosexuality in English literature from 1850-1900 -
an anthology. London, Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1970.
A paper "Beyond the Sotadic Zone: Colonization and Sexuality
in Richard Burton's Terminal Essay" was presented Society
for
the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) meeting, Aug. 1993, by
John Hollister: e-mail bb05246@bingsuns.cc.binghamton
(John Hollister)
******************************
A couple of examples of Arabic poetry...
Anon (9th Century Arabic)
SURPRISE, SURPRISE (Trans. Derek Parker)
Nizam the pederast, whose delight in boys
Was known throughout Bagdad, one afternoon
In a secluded place saw in a clearing
The flash of limbs behind a nearby bush,
And looking closer came upon a youth
Who seemed more lovely than his dreams had promised,
Lying asleep in shade, his head pressed deep
Into crossed arms, his long slim body
Quite naked, the firm buttocks firmly offered.
Quick as a jackal pouncing, Nizam jumped
Upon the lad, his robe about his waist,
The startled boy pierced by his lusty cock
Before you could say knife. Not until later,
When boy lay panting on the flattened grass,
Did Nizam, pausing to embrace his love,
Discover him a her, surprised but pleased
At having been given such pleasure at a source
No previous lover seemed to know about.
Nizam converted ? Never. But the girl
Now gives her lovers strange instruction.
Abu Nuwas
94
I said as the narcissus-boy came ambling by,
a peach twirled in his hand:
'What a pity to wait until we offer cash!
Give love its proper due!'
'More pitiful still,' he replied, and chuckled,
'is a penniless flop at the door.'
98
Make many deletions, Jinan, when you write,
and delete the word, when you do, with your tongue
and, passing deletingly over a word,
draw it close to your beautiful lips;
for I hold, when running over the lines,
the cancelled somethings for a lick:
That - is a kiss from you from afar
which I steal while keeping here to my room.
99
A boy at blush of dawn
silver in the absolute
in whom the eye beholds
beauty in infinite
poised perfection, eclipsed
in re-creation launching -
so beauty moves in orbits
reborn and unregenerate.
--
Paul Halsall
drhalsall@gmail.com
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall Internet History Sourcebooks Project
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