Reclaiming alterity: strangeness and the queering of Islam in medieval and early modern Spain

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the reclamation of radical alterity or the intentional embracing of difference/otherness/strangeness by Muslims as a location of solidarity with marginalized communities, who have been historically ostracized due to sexuality. As the initial social location of Islam vis-á-vis medieval and early modern Christendom, the rehabilitation of Muslim alterity/otherness today serves as a location for solidarity with other marginalized groups such as members of the LGBTQ community. The chosen historical timeframe of medieval and early modern Spain helps to situate this conversation both inside and on the fringes of European Christendom. This essay seeks to accomplish this by mining both Muslim and Christian sources in medieval and early modern Iberia with special attention being paid to discourses located at the intersections of Islamophobia and sexuality. The texts discussed allow for a more thorough investigation of Muslim alterity in the Iberian context, while serving as a launch point for deeper discussions of contemporary religious and sexual hierarchies.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical alterity
• Muslim alterity
• queer Islam
• strangeness
• Spain
• otherness
• Muslim Spain
• al-Andalus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr E. J. Hernández Peña is an educator and critical Muslim thinker hailing from Brooklyn, New York. He has worked in New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland and Philadelphia as an inner-city public school teacher. He completed his doctorate in Religion with a focus on Islamic Studies at Temple University. His research interests include Muslim identity formation, sexuality and gender, Morisco Studies, Islamophobia, the intellectual history of race/racism and Muslim minorities in Spain and Latin America.

ORCID

E. J. Hernández Peña http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3510-709X

Notes

1 Saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in Sahih Muslim, Hadith 145.

2 Saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 81, Hadith 5.

3 Daniel, Islam and the West, 158–85.

4 I am here using the Merriam Webster’s dictionary definition of alterity as “otherness; specifically: the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation.” The cultural orientation to which Islamicity and Queerness are “other” is the normative Christian one enforced by the “Modern/Colonial/Capitalist/Patriarchal World System” as defined by Ramon Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants in “The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism,” 1–12.

5 For a look at the competing narratives associated with St. Pelagius, see Jordan, “Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and Martyr,” 23–47.

6 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 17–18.

7 Carrasco Manchado, Isabel I de Castilla, Kindle locations 12797–9.

8 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 19–20.

9 Admittedly though, there is an anachronistic dimension to searching for the queer in the past, because of what the term has come to encompass and purposefully obfuscate. So, to avoid the pitfalls of falsely associating actions/events in the past with the queer identity politics of today, the word “strange” here serves the purpose of pointing out difference and marking it as outside the bounds of the “normal”. The term Queer, in its usage by LGBTIQA groups, falls into this same rubric of the peculiar and different in relation to dominant enforced sexual normativities. The dandies, the pretty boys, the girls playing the part of boys, the wearing of men’s clothes by those who do not quite fit the mold, the sodomy, the pederasty – all the queer ways to have sex have examples in contemporary history and in the history of al-Andalus and Christian Iberia.

10 Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus, 35.

11 Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State, 142.

12 Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus, 126.

13 Ibid., 130–1.

14 Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslims Minorities,” 153–4.

15 Stewart, “The Identity of ‘The Mufti of Oran’,” 299.

16 Harvey, Islamic Spain, 60.

17 Miller, “Muslim Minorities,” 270.

18 Ibid., 278.

19 Ibid., 284.

20 Carr, Blood and Faith, 116.

21 Ibid., 126.

22 Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 71–4.

23 Lapeyre, Geografia de la España Morisca, 219.

24 Soyer, “Faith, culture and fear,” 11.

25 Magnier, Pedro de Valencia, 153–6.

26

Vendio tambien por licito, y ordeno para bestial desorden (sin atendencia a los grados prohibidos por la espressa ley de Dios, so color de conferuacion de amistad y de linage) que se pudiessen casar, tios cons osbrinas, primos con primas, yernos con suegras, entenados con madrastras, & vice versa, pareientes muy cercanos, con cercanas, y afines con afines. (Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada des los moriscos Españoles, 162)

27 Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada des los moriscos Españoles, 163.

28 Mills, The Racial Contract, 22.

29 Perez de Chinchón, Antialcorano y Diálogos christianos, Kindle locations 5437–50.

30

Pues si mirays los turcos muy peores los hallareys gente sin fe, sin ley, sobervia, bárbara, luxuriosa, bestial, robadora, matadora, cruel: mal ataviada: sin arte ni orden de vida honesta, sin temor de dios: que ni bien guarda una ley ni otra: gente sin letras sin sciencias: amiga de sangre y guerra. (Ibid., Kindle locations 5446–9)

31 Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 27.

32 Mignolo, “Islamophobia/Hispanophobia,” 17.

33 Magnier, Pedro de Valencia, 121–3.

34

… las demas diligencias que se hizieron para instruyrlos en nuestra santa Fe, y lo poco que todo ello ha aprouechado, pues no se ha visto que alguno se aya conuertido, sino antes crecido de dia en dia su obstinacion, y el desseo, y voluntad que siempre han tenido de maquinar contra estos Reynos. (Fonseca, Relacion de la expulsion, 33)

35 “En todos estos grauissimos daños que resulta de tener en nuestra compañia enemigos domesticos, y desseosos de beuer de nuestra sangre, y de alsarse con España  … ” Ibid., 70.

36 “ … me dixeron los Christianos, que los Moriscos lleuauan a enterrar vna Morisca, y siguiendolos la gente del lugar, vieron que guardauan en el entierro todos los ritos de la secta de Mahoma” (ibid., 98).

37 Verdu, Engaños y desengaños del tiempo, 291.

38 Magnier, Pedro de Valencia, 51.

39 “También se repiten con insistencia las leyes que prohibían a los musulmanes tener en sus casas criados o poseer siervos cristianos.” Carrasco Manchado, De la Convivencia a la Exclusion, Kindle location 696.

40 As found/reproduced in the following website and texts: El Portal de Archivos Españoles; Garcia-Arenal, Los Moriscos; Carrasco Manchado, De la convivencia a la Exclusión; and Gallego y Burin and Gamir Sandoval, Los Moriscos del Reino de Granada.

41 Phelan, Sexual Strangers, 8–10.

42 Grosfoguel, “The Long-Durée Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism,” 93.