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Abstract
How did the shari‘a courts treat cases of illicit intercourse between men? This study answers that question by examining a successful conviction of a youth named Muhammad accused of sexual liaisons with men resulting in his expulsion from his neighbourhood in 1735. Placing this unique case into its socio-legal context, two readings are possible. One argues that this case represents a form of neighbourhood policing of possible male prostitution. However, policing of same-sex intimacy was rare and, as this article shows, within the Hanafi tradition, jurists failed to achieve scholarly consensus on the status of sodomy. A second reading suggests that anxieties over the use of beardless boys (amrad) in Sufi boy gazing ceremonies (sama‘) spurred contemporary critics to charge Sufi mystics with both sexual deviance and heresy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank organizer of the ‘Islam and Sexualities’ conference, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, and participant Gul Ozyegin for their comments. Participant Patrick Franke's comments in particular led me to investigate some of the similarities between accusations of illicit sexuality among Sufis with those launched against Shi‘i sects. I would also like to thank colleagues from the Whitman College History Department and Moulouk Berry for offering their insights on this article prior to publication.
Notes
1. See Wright (1997, p. 11).
2. See Wilson (1993, p. 63).
3. This court case is taken from the archives of the Center for Historical Documents (Markaz al-watha'iq al-tarikhiyya) in Damascus, Syria, SMH (Sijillat al-Mahakam Shari‘iyya) 55:115:363 25 Dhu'l Qa ‘da 1147H/17–18 April, 1735.
4. The cases discussed in this article were obtained during a survey of Aleppo court registers, the details of which are located in Appendix A. The larger study sampled 33 court registers, approximately one volume per decade, covering about a 359 year period. Aleppo had five shari‘a courts in operation during the period studied, however, the collection is not complete. For instance, there are gaps in the records that made it necessary to look into other court collections for missing years. Some volumes combine records from various courts and are listed as mixed registers in the table in Appendix A. Sometimes a sijill contained several years of court records, other times a sijill was a compilation of several decades of records bound into one mixed volume.
5. I have documented zina-related cases as found in the shari‘a courts of Aleppo from 1507–1866 in my book entitled ‘Off the Straight Path’: Illicit Sex, Community, and Law in Ottoman Aleppo (Semerdjian, 2008). See Appendix A, pp. 172–183, for a complete listing of cases of illicit sex located in Aleppo's shari‘a courts.
6. Two extremes can be offered in this respect. Bouhdiba, considered required reading for any study of Islam and sexuality, falls into gross generalizations in his often cited manual of sexual attitudes. Another study by Raphael Patai (Citation1983) discusses sexuality in Chapter 8 ‘The Realm of Sex’. Arab sexuality is portrayed with racist overtones as Patai generalizes the sexual attitudes of all Arabs across time and space. Ironically, this text was used for years in the State Department and now in the Army and Marines as a field manual. Direct connections have been made between poses suggestive of homoeroticism at Abu Ghraib and the homophobia described in the manual as an essentially Arab trait. See Patai (1983) and Abdelwahab Bouhdiba (1985).
7. SMH 55:115:363 25 Dhu'l Qa‘da 1147H/17–18 April, 1735. Parentheses are used to highlight the original language in transliteration at key points in the document. The brackets are used to include information not quoted, including a long list of witnesses at the beginning of the court case which I did not include for the sake of brevity.
8. The Ottoman penal code combined a system of flogging and fines, monetary penalties were measured per stroke during flogging see Zarinebaf (2010, pp. 163–164).
9. See Bon (Citation1996, p. 57), and Rana Kabbani (1986) lists other objects as forbidden in the harem that included bananas and candles, see pp. 30–31, 54. Two features of Orientalist painting portray the common connection in European discourse between the harem and lesbianism. The first is the caressing suggestive of sexual relations among the women residing there. See Ingre's Turkish Bath (1862). The second is the reoccurring representations of harem women wearing men's pants in order to presumably cater to the fancy of the Sultan through an androgynous appearance, see Matisse's Odalisque in Red Trousers (1922). The wearing of men's pants is also mentioned in travel descriptions of Edward Lane detailed in Kabbani (1986, p. 40).
10. Although the court registers do not always reference the form punishments took, data suggests that the most dominant form of punishment for zina-related crimes was banishment from city quarters. From 78 cases collected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 31 records did not specify the form of punishment; however, 40 cases specified neighbourhood expulsion. This data is found in Appendix A in Semerdjian (2008).
11. The information in this table is based upon the archive catalogue compiled by Brigitte Marino and Tomoki Okawara (Citation1999). The asterisk mark sijills where cases involving charges of illicit sex among men highlighted in this article were located.