Before scientia sexualis in Islamic culture: ‘ilm al-bāh between erotology, medicine and pornography

Abstract

Although sexuality is a theoretical concept not invented until the nineteenth century, sexual matters have of course been discussed in premodern cultures, though under other labels. In the premodern Islamic world, traditional jurisprudence (fiqh) with its inclusion of the thematic fields of ‘marriage’ (nikāh) and ‘ritual purity’ (tahāra) offered an opportunity to speak about the details of sexual life. In addition, premodern Islamic culture had a separate science concerned with sexual intercourse. ‘Ilm al-bāh, as it was called (bāh being the Arabic word for coitus), was a hybrid discipline in which different scientific concepts and literary genres were intermingled. But since all available information on sexual matters has been accumulated under the umbrella of this discipline, it can be considered a precursor to modern sexual science. Whereas most of what has been published about ‘ilm al-bāh in the West until now is limited to mere bibliographical surveys, this paper shall offer a more theoretical appraisal of this field of knowledge which also takes into account the epistemological shifts over the last decades in the historiography of sexuality.

Keywords:

• Islam
• human sexuality
• history of science
• medicine
• human body
• health
• pornography

Notes

1. On the formation of the concept of ‘sexuality’ in late nineteenth-century European psychiatry, see Davidson (2001, pp. 30–65).

2. See Hājji Khalīfa (1941/1943, pp. 370, 729, 835, 850, 1241, 1401, 1877, 1885).

3. The book is preserved only in fragments in later Greek and Arabic works (see Ullmann, 1970, p. 75).

4. On the system of humoral theory in general and its adoption in medieval Islamic medicine, see Pormann and Savage-Smith (2007, pp. 43–45).

5. For the ambospermatic theory of Graeco-Arabic medicine, see Weisser (1983, pp. 119–140).

6. It is this preoccupation of ‘ilm al-bāh with potency, which in the modern era led to a semantic change of the term bāh itself, now mainly understood as a term to denote sexual prowess (see El-Rouayheb, 2005, p. 190).

7. See the Risāla fī l-bāh written in 1658 by Ibrāhīm ibn Muhammad al-Maghribī al-Mālikī. The book is mentioned by Brockelmann (1949, vol. 2, p. 617).

8. See his chapter ‘For every sexual question there is an answer’ (li-kull su'al jinsī jawāb, pp. 417–528).

9. For the two-sex-model and the premodern one-sex-model, see Laqueur (1990, p. 5).

10. For the introduction of the concept of shudhūdh jinsī and its implications, see El-Rouayheb (2005, p. 158).