At the height of the Islamic Golden Age – a period from the mid-8th century to the mid-13th century when Islamic civilisation is believed to have reached its intellectual and cultural zenith – homosexuality was openly spoken and written about. Abu Nuwas (756-814), one of the great Arab classical poets during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, wrote publicly about his homosexual desires and relations. His homoerotic poetry was openly circulated right up until the 20th century.
Nuwas was an important historical figure – he even made a couple of appearances in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (known in Urdu as Alif Laila). It was only as late as 2001 that Arabs started to blush at Nuwas’ homoerotism. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists, burnt 6,000 volumes of his poetry.
Most modern Muslims, therefore, have little knowledge of what the Islamic Golden Age was really about, even though they keep on wanting to go back to it.
“ISIS have no idea what restoring the Caliphate actually means,” a tweet by Belgian-Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab said. “In Baghdad, it’d involve booze, odes to wine, science… and a gay court poet.”
Baghdad was, till the time the Mongols invaded and destroyed it, the cultural capital of much of the world – the New York City of its time. If Nuwas and his homoerotic poetry could represent the height of Baghdadi culture, it is natural that other Muslim societies would also be quite open to homosexuality. As historian Saleem Kidwai puts in the fabulous bookSame-Sex Love in India, “Homoerotically inclined men are continuously visible in Muslim medieval histories and are generally described without pejorative comment.”
“Mahmud of Ghazni, a towering sultan of his time (971-1030), was actually held up as an ideal for, among other things, deeply loving another man, Malik Ayaz.
Mughal Emperor Babur wrote of his attraction to a boy in the camp bazaar in his 16th-century autobiography – a celebrated work of literature in the medieval Muslim world.”
“Sadi’s classic Gulistan, containing stories of attraction between men, was considered essential reading for Persian students. Ghanimat’s Nau rang-i ishq, a seventeenth century masnavi describing the love affair between the poet’s patron’s son and his beloved Shahid, was a prescribed text in schools.”
posted by f.sheikh
Quite an interesting post. My question though is, if Muslims during Islam’s earlier years were much more religious than today’s Muslims, why did they accept, and even in certain cases embrace homosexuality, when it is clearly outlawed in the Koran?
Position on homosexuality as a sin is not exclusive to any one religion. We know from the Biblical stories like Noah’s Ark and that of Lot, this sexual orientation was fit to invite the wrath of God, such wrath, that collateral damage of innocent masses was of no consideration. Golden age of Muslims or the Dark age doesn’t highlight anything, homosexuality is nothing new.
I simply don’t get the suggestion that Mateen might have been a gay himself. If he was gay and repented then the logical line of action would have been begging God for forgiveness and becoming a born again Muslim. His thirst for bloodbath indicates his mental sickness and him being gay and having frequented that particular place must have made him familiar with the security lapses and hence he chose that place – this is the only connection that I can make of the relevance of his orientation.
I also couldn’t make a connection of some countries that were not under British rule to the sexual orientation that has been recorded in all parts of the world since the dawn of man kind. British laws are irrelevant.
Babar
Homosexuality is one of the hypocricies facing the Muslim world. It is a humn condition that has existed since the earliest days. The harems of old were centers of sexual depravity including homosexuality. The house of Saud are a den of private iniquity where the old king seems to have sired enough children to last for the next century. One wonders when he had time for his other official duties. Of curse the the Wahabi It has been both accepted and marginalized through contorted rationale. Iran is an example. Homosexuality between members of the same gender is a crime but if one of the pair undergoes sex change surgey the state pays for the medical expense and approve the union. Afghanistan aned the tribal is famous for buggery. Every Afghan warlord hashis harem of boy toys. While I was stationed in Pakistan I often ran into US marines on forlough from Afghanistan many of whom were propositioned. Mateen may well have gay tendencies which he tried to suppress because his father was openy homophobic. Obviously his mental makeup was screwed up in other ways; the sexual conflict only added to his turmoil.
Sexual orientation is a condition one is born with and cannot be faulted for it.
An All-knowing God would have known that the biological make-up of a homo-sexual and the sexual orientation he manifests, is not based on his own conscious decision or choice. This homophobia is a direct result of ‘God’ and His clerics not having any knowledge of natural sciences. Once you know the facts, you have no appetite for whimsical fantasies dispensed by the ignoramus sages, saints or prophets 1500, 2000 or 3800 years ago.
That said, it is common among sex-starved youth of tribes in the middle East to either coax young boys with money, or threaten them with dire consequences, to sodomize them. After couple of times, those boys get used to the experience and learn to cope with it. Over time it became a pass-time of the rich and resourceful who named the boys “Bach’um’ or the trend as ‘Bach’cha-bazi’.
There are other societal pressures that come into play. Grown up single girls in the middle East are brought up to safeguard their virginity with their life. They know that if the husband finds her NOT to be a virgin, then she brings utter disgrace to herself and her clan. The influence of modern education and co-education leads to intermingling with young men, leading to romantic interludes called Dating. The girl, in most cases, agrees to anal sex, and clitoral orgasm for herself through oral sex, just to protect her hymen as proof of virginity.
In my opinion the resolution lies in licensing the activity of a “Mufti’. No one with a certification from “Darul Ifta’ should be allowed to either give a religious sermon, or issue a ‘Fatwa’ on any religious inquiry, unless he also has a Master’s in Biology, plus Bachelor’s in Physics, Chem & Math.