Article - Hiding Sexuality - The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse in the Late Ottoman Middle East -...

7/27/2019 Article - Hiding Sexuality - The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse in the Late Ottoman Middle East - by Dror Zeevi

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H IDING S EXUALITYThe Disappearance of Sexual Discoursein the Late Ottoman Middle East

ror Zeevi

A stract : From Be gra e to Bag a , rom A giers to A eppo, sexuadiscourse in the pre-modern Ottoman world was rich and variegated.Its mani estations were to e oun in iterature an poetry, in me i-cine and physiognomy, in religious writings and popular culture. Dur-ing the nineteenth century, much of this panoply of discussions aboutsex disappeared or was attenuated to such an extent that it became vir-tua y non-existent. A simi ar p enomenon can e perceive in West-ern European attitudes toward sex several decades earlier. Yet while inEurope t e o sexua iscursive wor was rep ace wit a new onein short order, the Ottoman Middle East did not produce a new sexual

iscourse to rep ace t e one t at vanis e . T is artic e presents someof the premises of the old Ottoman sexual discourse, describes theprocess of their demise, and suggests an explanation for the failure toproduce a new (textual) discourse of sex.

Key words Arab, discourse, gender, Middle East, Ottoman, sexuality,Tur is

In his novel The Sand Child, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of a girl bornafter seven other girls to a Moroccan family. Unable to bear the leering facesof relatives and friends any longer, her father decides to raise the girl as aboy. The story slowly undulates from this point as the child, later man, laterwoman, seeks his-her identity. Sitting in a sidewalk caf mid-way throughthe story, the narrator laments the elusive nature of sexual discourse inArab society:

Peop e i e to ta a out ot ers. Here t ey i e sexua gossip. T ey sprea itall the time. Among those who were making fun of an English homosexual a

Social Analysis, Volume 49, Issue 2, Summer 2005, 3453


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Hiding Sexuality | 35

itt e w i e ago, I now some w o wou e quite wi ing to ma e ove witim. T ey n it easier to o t an to ta or write a out it. Boo s t at ea

wit prostitution in t is country are or i en, ut not ing is one to give

wor to t e gir s w o arrive rom t e country, nor is anyt ing one a out t eirpimps. So peop e ta a out it in t e ca es. T ey et t eir imagination oose ont e sig ts t at cross t e ou evar . In t e evening t ey watc an intermina eEgyptian soap opera on te evision. T e Ca o Love epicts men an womenoving one anot er, ating one anot er, tearing one anot er apart, an never

touching one another. I tell you, my friends, we live in a hypocritical society.(Ben Jelloun 2000: 112113)

These observations are echoed outside the literary sphere. The May 2001Queen Boat incident in Cairo, in which police cracked down on a bar fre-

quented by homosexuals, arrested them, and put them on public trial, initiateda spate of journalistic articles on the absence of serious discussion on sexualityin Egyptian society (Bahgat 2001). In recent years, a handful of scholars in theMiddle East and beyond have dealt with such topics through academic research,most of them in line with Ben Jellouns depiction (Abu Khalil 1993: 3234;Dunne 1996; Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb 2000). One of the best-known his-torical explanations for this pervasive silence in contemporary Arabo-Muslimsociety was suggested by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisian sociologist, in theconclusion of his Sexuality in Islam. In Bouhdibas view, two distinct phases

led to this discursive silence. First, it was a result of slow political, social, andcultural decline (Bouhdiba 1985: 231) ever since the early days of Islam, associety misinterpreted the teachings of the Prophet and the Koran, distortingthe message of sacred sexuality. But this repression, bad as it was already, wasgreatly reinforced with the arrival of colonization.

This [colonialist] violation of the collective personality, this seizure of the envi-ronment, of institutions and even of language, [was] to reinforce still more thetendency to closedness and sclerosis. Arab society was to set up structures of passive defense around zones rightly regarded as essential: the family, women,the home. The strategy invented by Arabo-Muslim collective experience was tolimit the extent of the alienations of modern times, to limit the colonial impact toexterna s, w i e erce y e en ing t e essentia va ues o private i e. i i .

Colonialism, claims Bouhdiba, exacerbated inner processes of decline andended up destroying the remains of what had initially begun as an open sexu-ality, practiced in joy with a view to the fulllment of being (ibid.).

This article raises questions concerning both parts of Bouhdibas conten-tion. First, was sexual discourse really repressed in the pre-colonial era? Sec-ond, what exactly was the effect of European encroachment on the productionof sexual discourse? I begin by examining the assumption that pre-modernMiddle Eastern Islamic discourse was already repressed sexually before thenineteenth century, and then question the further assumption that this repres-sion was aggravated by the colonial experience. These questions have a bearingon the history of sexuality in the world of Islam, as opposed to that of Europe


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36 | Dror Zeevi

or India, and also have direct relevance regarding the state of sexual freedom,gender relations, and AIDS patients in contemporary Islamicate societies.

The following discussion will focus on the center of the Ottoman empire

for two reasons. Firstly, for four centuries almost the entire Middle East andNorth Africa were governed from Istanbul. Many of the major discourses wereelaborated and distributed to the provinces from this imperial center. Literateelites in the provinces were often bilingual, especially from the late seventeenthcentury onwards, and Ottoman Turkish, rather than Arabic, became the maincultural language (Toledano 1997: 145162). The second consideration has todo with Bouhdibas claim of colonial intrusion. Many of the Ottoman provinceswere colonized by European powers during the nineteenth century, but thecenter remained sovereign until World War I. If sexual discourse was silenced

in Istanbul (and Tehran, for that matter), as well as in the Arab provinces,Bouhdibas assumption (1985: 231) that it was a physical presencethe viola-tion of the collective personality, this seizure of the environment, of institutionsand even of language, [which reinforced] still more the tendency to closednessand sclerosisneeds to be revised.

One cannot discuss sexual discourse and repression without alluding toFoucaults famous statement in his History of Sexualityabout the trajectoryof Western societys discourse. Moving the focus of debate from practicesof sex to discourses of desire, Foucault claims that rather than repression of a previously more open sexual system, the nineteenth century brings in itswings an explosion of writing and talking about sex. Ostensibly secretive,furtive, controlling, and repressing, these new discourses in fact opened thedoor to a new and ubiquitous world of sex. They reshaped and reinvented sexand, in the process, created the modalities that today we refer to as sexuality(Foucault 1990: 310).

If one accepts the analysis that Foucault suggests as well as that of Bouhdiba,we are faced with two opposing trajectories. While in Western (or, to be moreprecise, English and French) society a faade of sexual repression in the earlynineteenth century conceals an explosion of rich sexual discourse, in the IslamicMiddle East and North Africa the direction of change was almost opposite. Along and continuous repression of sexual discourse, mainly in the Ottomanperiod, turned into a dark abyss of sexual silence as a result of colonialism. Onlyin the last decades of the twentieth century do we begin to perceive signicantchange. If true, this must be a crucial factor in explaining differences betweenthese societies and cultures, even in the early twenty-rst century.

In order to retrace the trajectory and evaluate the narratives of MiddleEastern sexual discourse, we must rst turn to the pre-nineteenth-century eraand to the arenas in which sex was discussed. At the time, there were manysuch discursive clusters, including, among others, mystical Su texts, populardream interpretation manuals, poetry, and law. In this article I propose tolook at three major loci of Middle Eastern cultural production that have had adeep impact on society: medical texts, theater plays, and erotic literature. Myexamples will be drawn mainly from the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking partsof the Ottoman world.


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Medical-Sexual Discourse in the Pre-modern Middle East

Taking their cue from pre-Islamic medical systems, paramount among which

was Greco-Roman humoral medicine, Middle Eastern medical texts in thesixteenth century were replete with discussions of sex and sexuality. Numer-ous texts discuss issues such as erection, formation of semen, the physiologyof the body during intercourse, sexual attraction, and impotence. Discussionswere detailed and unabashed. Most medical descriptions were also laced withadvice: What is the right way to have intercourse? What is the correct amountof sexual relations that a man or a woman should have? Who is the right sexualpartner at every stage of ones life? How can one prolong pleasure? Can impo-tence be prevented? There were few qualms about discussing masturbation,and male-male sex was treated on a par with other sexual practices. Here isone slightly shortened medical description of heterosexual intercourse from afteenth-century medical treatise on hygiene:

This is how it is done: The man and the woman play around for a while. Theman touches the womans breasts and presses them several times and then putshis hand on her loins and strikes her vulva with it. Then he rubs together hismember and hers, until the woman gets sexually excited, the pace of her breathquickens, and the woman, desirous, starts to embrace the man. When on bothsides there is real passion, then the result of the intercourse is sure to be a boy.

In order to instill desire for intercourse, one could either tell stories which pro-duce lust, or have intercourse performed in front of ones eyes, even by animals;or one can wash the woman, or shave her.

When one does not have intercourse for a while, passion is forgotten. Mastur-bation brings anxiety, and makes one forgetful. It weakens the penis, the eyes getweary, and the mind is blunted. Know this also, that the lust for copulation is amatter of the animal soul, and when one plays with it, that is, uses it unnecessar-ily, it is destroyed. That one is his own enemy. It is like a person who, by beinggreedy, takes out his money and buys any food that appears before his eyes, evenwhen it is not tasty, then leaves it and tries another. Having bought it, he leaves

it with regret because his greed forces him to. Until one day, his purse is empty.W en e is ungry e sees many goo oo s, ut w en e comes to ta e t e rst,t ere is not ing in is purse. T is time e un ortunate y stays ungry. He cannot

up t e gree in is eyes. Having spent is property, not ing is e t in is purseo strengt . Because w en t e oa o wea ness a s on a person, no one can save

im at any time. T e roa is ong. It is necessary not to waste t e provisions opower. And God knows best. (Bin Muhammed 1960: 54)

Such clear and frank sexual discussions were bolstered by explicit imagery.Contrary to the belief that Islamic cultures were reticent about drawing thehuman form, medical compendia include a large array of schemas and drawingsreferring to the human body, and specically to sexual organs. There are manyexamples throughout the Ottoman period. Figure 1 is just one example, takenfrom a general medical compendium and borrowing some of its insight from con-temporary European medical treatises. Note the ambiguous gender of the maleand female gures, which shall be referred to later on. ( cItqi 1990: 165166).


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IGURE Resem ance etween Ma e an Fema e Genita s, as r a -a n,Seventeent Century


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Medicines ancillary sciences, physiognomy and pharmacology, contributedtheir share to the discussion. One of pharmacologys main themes was theconcoction of aphrodisiacs, some intended for men, others for women, some

supposed to restore sexual prowess, others to reduce anxiety or prolong plea-sure. Physiognomy, for its part, analyzed peoples humoral make-up, whichmanifested itself in the shape of the body, and provided a set of external signsto determine a potential mates suitability for love and intercourse. Here is anexcerpt from the sixteenth-century guide K busname:

If, for example, you need a slave to be with for friendship purposes, someone whowill serve you in friendship and love games, this must be a person of mediumheight, and also medium build. He should not be too fat or too thin, nor shouldhis waist be thick. He should rather be tall than short. His hair should be soft, notstiff, but its color may be black or yellow as you wish. His palms should be roundand soft, his skin delicate, his bones straight and his lips the color of wine. Hishair should be black, his eyes hazel colored and his brows and eyelids black, butnot connected to each other. He should have a double chin. His chin should bewhite spotted red like the fuzz on a quince. His teeth should be white and straightan is im s o t e rig t proportion. Any s ave t at matc es t ese escriptionswill be gentle, of good temperament, loyal and docile. (Keykavus 1974: 220)

Middle Eastern medicine was never isolated from medical knowledge inother areas of the world, and new developments in Renaissance Italy andFrance soon found their way into the discourse, as the drawings in gure 1demonstrate. Sixteenth-century Paracelsian medicine had its inuence, and sodid novel conceptions of the body emerging from new methods of dissectionand description. The great change, however, began in the nineteenth centurywith the gradual abandonment of humoral medicine. Some of the emphasesin medical discourse changed, but quite a few remained. For example, the oldidea that women and men were basically of the same sex, and that their petitedifferencemanifested the fact that woman was an imperfect version of man,remained prominent. As manifest in Mehmet Ataullah anizades famous medi-cal compendium, which came to acquire the title Hamse- anizade (anizadesFive [Volumes]), the Ottomans held on to this concept of woman-as-imperfect-man even when medical knowledge in European treatises suggested otherwise(anizade 1820: 139140; see also Laqueur 1990). In discussions of things sex-ual, we can perceive a slow and uneven pace of change as well. Medical com-pendia become much less explicit from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.This can be seen both in the matters discussedthe emphasis is on treatmentof venereal disease and pregnancy problems, much less on potency and inter-courseand in the kind of language used. Sexual organs and their functionsare referred to in a circumspect way, and a new terminology, clinical, aloof,asexual, is used to discuss sexual matters. New books on medicine seemed todeny the existence of a sexual drive and to ignore the possible implications of sexual intercourse (Clot Bey 1829; Niemeyer 1882; Osman Saib Effendi 1836).Thus, as we move into the beginning of the twentieth century, the medicaldiscourse shifts into an almost sexless mode.


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40 | Dror Zeevi

Shadow Theater

Karagz, the form of shadow theater that was so popular in the Ottoman cen-

ter and some of the provinces, was always outrageous. Legend claims it wasbrought over from Egypt by a sultan, Selim the Grim, after the conquest of Egypt in 1517. Other inuences may have arrived from South-East Asia, andperhaps also from Spain, through Jewish immigrants in the late fteenth cen-tury (And 1977: 3166; Kudret 1992: 1:711; Martinovitch [1933] 1968: 3132;Siyavu gil 1961: 412; Tietze 1977: 18). Some Egyptian and Syrian theaterplays from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are well known. They, too,are lewd and bawdy, mostly describing homoerotic practices and sentiments(Kahle 1992; Rowson 1997: 159191).

The Ottomans seem to have taken their plays a step further. Unlike earlierMamluk versions, these plays had two regular protagonists, Karagz and Haci-vat, a pair of mischief-makers who never rest, wreaking havoc in their littlequarter of Istanbul (or some other place), and always getting screwed in theprocess. Other permanent characters on stage were the woman (Zenne), anaudacious and openly sexual lady whose favors Karagz seeks, usually failingmiserably, and elebi, half-gentleman, half-gigolo, sometimes referred to asmiras yedi (the inheritance eater), who spends his money on stylish clothesand seduces women. All types of sexual activities were presented on stage,with a marked preference for what we would now call the heterosexual predi-lections of the main protagonists.

In the sixteenth century, Ottoman ulema were asked for their opinion aboutthe plays and their supposed sacrilegious nature. Ebssuud, Sultan Sleymansfamous Grand Mufti ( eyh lislam), was asked, for instance, whether a memberof the ulema who attended one of these plays should be removed from ofce.Knowing how popular the plays were, the broad-minded mufti suggested a for-mula: It is forbidden [to dismiss him], he replied, if he watched the play inorder to learn its moral lesson [ ibret ], and thought about it with a tame mind[ehli hal kri ile tefekkr etti] (Nzhet 1930: 6364). In following decades,some shadow plays seemed to have incurred the outrage of orthodox groupssuch as the Kadizadelis, but in general their contents and graphic displaysremained unchallenged.

During the nineteenth century, all open presentations of sex on stage andmost sexually oriented language were carefully purged from Karagz plays.Unfortunately, there are hardly any remnants of pre-nineteenth-century plays;we can reconstruct a few only from passing references in historical treatisesand chronicles. One can get a sense of the kind of scene popular before thegreat purge from travel literature. European travelers, particularly French writ-

ers, were drawn to Karagz plays and wrote extensively about them. One suchwriter, Nerval, was invited to a performance in Istanbul in the early 1840s. Ina state of shock, he describes a scene dune excentricit quil serait difcilede faire supporter chez nous (so eccentric that it would be difcult to stagein France). In this scene, Karagz, who was asked to watch over the wife of a friend in his absence, stands embarrassed near her house and tries to make


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himself scarce. Pretending to be an errant Su, he lies down on the pavement,but his penis juts out as a lamp post. Then several incidents occur. Horsementie their horses to the pole, women use it to hang their washing from, and so

on. Finally, the woman he is watching over leaves the house and tries to seducehim. When in a superhuman act of will he refuses, she goes to the public bath,invites all her lady friends, and takes them back with her to see the nice manshe had met. Running for his life, Karagz nally nds refuge in an ambassa-dors carriage passing by (Nerval [1843] 1998: 622).

Other scenes, even some parts of old plays that were left intact, for somereason, contain sexual obscenities and references to pederasty, to female homo-erotic love, and to other licentious practices. In one scene of the famous play TheGreat Wedding ( Buyk Evlenme), performed at the beginning of the twentieth

century but going back at least a couple of centuries, Karagz meets a posseof women who, as he nds out to his dismay, are on their way to his house toattend a wedding in which he is to be the prospective bridegroom. Not knowingthat their interlocutor is Karagz, the women ask him about the groom. Hes athief and a scoundrel, says Karagz, trying to dissuade them from participatingin the wedding he was lured into. Well, so are we, they reply. He roams thearea of Beyo lu every night in search of [sexual] action, he says. Wonderful,so do we, they reply. He hardly leaves the hamam (a symbol of debaucheryin Ottoman literature). Oh, so he must be very clean. Fine, says exasper-ated Karagz nally. Hes also a pederast [ mahbub dosttur ]! So what? Weare women lovers [ en dost ], too, they answer, leaving him open-mouthed andspeechless (Kudret 1992: 1:323324).

This exchange of sexual banter, however, is a meager residue of the rich the-ater heritage that has all but disappeared. Another French traveler witnessedthe change. Theophile Gautier was invited to attend a play at which, to hisdismay, women and children were among the spectators watching the incred-ibly rude performance. Still, he says, this performance is much milder than itused to be.

It ought to be mentioned, that, among other consequences of the reform, the per-formances of Karagheuz have been submitted to the censorship and that muchwhich was rather extreme in action has been reduced to words, and the wordsthemselves very freely excised; for, in truth, in its original form, the representationcould hardly have been described to European readers; although, as performedbefore an audience consisting entirely of men, and those men Turks, it used to beconsidered quite proper, and in no way censurable. (Gautier 1875: 170)

By the early twentieth century, when the famous German ethnologist Helmut

Ritter worked with the last court puppeteer, Nazif Bey, to compile his multi-vol-ume work, Karag s, T rkische Schattenspiele, the transformation was complete.The dozens of plays presented by Ritter and added to by Cevdet Kudret, whoreintroduced them to the Turkish public, though by no means devoid of sexualallusions, seem to share a sense of propriety and modesty that did not character-ize the earlier versions (Ritter 1924; see also Kudret 1992: 1:323324).


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Erotic Literature

Erotic literature in the Islamic Middle East contains many varieties of prose

and poetry. The roots of this type of literature were probably pre-Islamic aswell, and it was inuenced by Indian and Persian traditions. In the Islamicheartland, it ourished in the Abbasid period with the adab literature, some of which was later integrated into the Thousand and One Nights. In the thirteenthcentury, a certain Shih b al-D n al-Tif shi of Tunisia wrote a well-known andvery detailed book, Nuzhat al-alb b ma la y jad kit b (translated into Eng-lish as The Delight of Hearts), which included chapters on prostitution, forni-cation, male-to-male intercourse of various kinds, anal sex, and so on (Tif shi1992). Tif shis book became a standard for other authors, who copied and

changed it throughout the centuries.Another famous book, written two centuries later, is Shaykh Nafz is Al-rawd. al- t r (The Perfumed Garden) which was translated into English severaltimes and became the quintessential Islamic erotic book in the West. Not asbold, perhaps, as Tif shis, Nafz is compilation also deals with modes of love-making, dabbles in same-sex intercourse, and gives a series of recipes forenlarging the penis, enhancing the chances of pregnancy, and preparing aphro-disiacs (Nafz i 1993; see also Bouhdiba 1985: 40147). 3

Bouhdiba, who mentions these compilations, claims that after The PerfumedGarden, erotic literature seems to have dried up, and he found only one laterexample, published in Istanbul in 1878 by Sadiq Khan. We will return to thisbook shortly, but I believe Bouhdiba missed something on the way. The Otto-man period produced quite a number of erotic works in prose and poetry,among them many pornographic poems, and several complete books (Schmidt1993: 39, 235236). One of the most interesting works in this period is DeliBiraders Da l gumum ve ra l humum( Relieving Worries and Defeating Sorrows), written in the sixteenth century, which presents the same type of erotic descriptions as above in their specic Ottoman setting (Kuru 2000, 2001).Another is K busname, a book of guidance to choosing sexual partners (Key-kavus). Most prominent among these books of the period is Kemalpa azades

Rujuc al-shaykh ila sib h al-quwwa c ala al-b h (translated by Burton as The Book of Age-Rejuvenescence in the Power of Concupiscence) (Ibn Kamal 1890).The book, ascribed to a well-known scholar, c lim, and historian, is claimedto have been translated from an unknown book by Tif shi. Translated or com-piled, this exemplar of erotic literature in the mid-sixteenth century was sincecopied and used by quite a few Ottoman authors until the nineteenth century.Kemalpa azades book does not deal with homoeroticism but describes com-prehensively all forms of man-to-woman sex, aphrodisiacs, contraception, andsimilar issues. These books may have originated in the sixteenth century, butthey were copied and recompiled numerous times since.

They offered their readers more or less the same menu of sexual aestheticsand erotic fantasies, basically unchanged since Tif shis masterpiece of thethirteenth century. Clearly written for a male audience, they include chaptersemphasizing womens unrestrained sexual urge and their deviousness; the


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importance of foreplay, technique, and etiquette; the various types of women;and the importance of size compatibility. Other chapters discuss pederasty andwhat we may best describe as homosexual and lesbian practices, that is, the

urge of men and women (rather than young boys and girls) to have intercoursewith other adult persons of their own sex. Some dedicate chapters to masturba-tion, bestiality, aphrodisiacs, and penis enlargement medications. When thereare differences between these compilations, they are found mostly in the levelof detail, as well as in the imagined location of stories. Ottoman Turkish writersoften relocate to a new Istanbul setting the same stories told before of Baghdad,Cairo, or Tunis.

Finally, as mentioned above, there is a later example of erotic literatureby Muhammad Sadiq Khan, Nashwat al-sakr n min sabba tidhk r al-ghizl n

([1878] 1920). Bouhdiba mentions this book, one of the few to appear in print,as the swan song of Middle Eastern erotology. Sadiq Khans book, however, isdifferent from previous erotic books. Bouhdiba ascribes this to its being com-piled from an Indian text, but it seems that the difference lies elsewhere. This isnot a book on intercourse and its various facets, but rather an early research of erotic poetry and lore, written in academic style, using oblique and distancedlanguage. Rather than a swan song, it should be seen as an imaginary linkbetween the old style of erotica and the sanitized, scientic studies on sex andsexuality that could have been undertaken in the twentieth century to study Isl-amicate erotica. Since that date, no other books of erotica were written, almostnone were published in Arabic- or Turkish-speaking countries, and those thatwere published were carefully cleansed of what was perceived as offensive orirreligious material.

The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse

The discourses in the three types of cultural production described abovemedical treatises, shadow theater plays, and erotic booksare bound togetherby a similar attitude toward sex and sexuality. This is an attitude that could becharacterized as pleasure-bound, male-oriented, and practically uninhibitedby religion or morality. It also seeks to establish equilibrium between sexualneeds, the harmful effects of wasted sexual energy, and the need to maintainlaw and order in society. The same type of discussion appears in other dis-cursive spheres not elaborated here, such as manuals of dream interpretationand Su poetry (Zeevi forthcoming). Other textual genres, including jurispru-dence and moral literature, often offer a critique of some practices consideredtransgressions of religious boundaries, but they too share this basic commonview of sex and sexuality. Certain sexual practices may be prohibited bydivine sanction or man-made law in order to preserve social order, and shouldeven be punished harshly in some cases, but that does not make them devi-ant, abnormal, or unnatural in any way. This is made clear even by the factthat most authors and compilers of erotica were themselves members of thereligious establishment.


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During the nineteenth century, and mainly as it drew to a close, these sexu-ally oriented discourses begin to fade away, one by one, like shadows at dusk.Medical tracts devote much more space to the treatment of venereal disease

than to the circumstances contributing to their appearance. The entire worldof sex has been carefully pruned out of such texts. Sex-laced dialogues, not tomention graphic phallic displays, were warily excised from Karagz plays aswe have seen, and these were gradually turned into childrens Punch and Judystyle performances. Authors no longer wrote erotic guidebooks, or, if they did,dare not publish them. Anecdotes and descriptions from The Perfumed Gardenand The Delight of Heartswere whispered from mouth to earmainly in theintellectual elite, or in the circles of ulema ho may have had access to oldlibrariesbut were almost never printed.

Similar processes were evident in other discursive spheres. Explicit descrip-tions of homoerotic or incestuous dreams disappeared from dream interpreta-tion manuals or were replaced by watered-down versions. Even the law, whichpreviously referred explicitly to sexual offenses while condemning them, nowbegan to discuss them in vague, oblique terms, using words such as harass-ment or violation of honor ( Kanunname- Ceza1858). Su lore and poetry,in which love for beardless boys previously played a prominent part, fell silenton such matters. In short, an all-pervading and conscious silencing operationcan be perceived throughout.

In Europe, new textual forms emerged andthrough their seemingly desex-ualizing treatment of school, hospital, prison, home, and familyended upestablishing new norms of sex, freezing the picture of deviance and sexuality,at least in the emerging middle classes. But the Ottoman world and its inheri-tors did not produce alternative written discourses. Few, if any, programs forcurbing passion in schools or prisons were elaborated. Nascent psychologyand its antecedents, such as the work of Charcot at the Salptrire on femalehysteria, were not discussed or emulated, and nothing of similar magnitudeemerged to replace the vanishing world of rich sexual discourse.

Returning to the questions posed at the beginning of this article, it could nowbe claimed that Bouhdiba was wrong about one thing, right about another. Priorto what he refers to as the colonial period, sexual discourse was very much alivein the Ottoman realm. Contrary to his claims, there was very little degradationor gradual decline of sex, at least from the point of view of open, frank discus-sion. However, Bouhdibas claims are more substantiated as we approach thelatter part of the nineteenth century. The nal curtain falls on sexual discourseat the apex of the colonial period, in the late nineteenth century. Other ques-tions now need to be asked: How does colonialism relate to this process? Dowe have any proof of its inuence beyond correlation? If so, in what way didcolonialism affect sexual discourse? Where were the points of interaction?

Not everything, even in the nineteenth century, can be attributed to theencroachment of colonialism. Some factors affecting sexual discourse hadobviously been at play even before the days of colonial expansion, transform-ing various discursive spheres. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,Su spiritual exercises involving contemplation of handsome beardless boys


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to attain insight on godly love were echoed in prose and poetry as well asin texts extolling the virtues of dance rituals ( dhikr, sam c , devran), whichincluded highly stylized physical erotic contact. This type of ritual became so

popular that for many orthodox ulema it endangered the very basis of Islamicdogma. The practice was challenged during the seventeenth century by theKadizadelis, a movement of religious scholars in the imperial center and theprovinces, which opposed a series of innovative tendencies. Labeling theseSu notions as heretical, the Kadizadelis demanded that a stop be put to themimmediately. After several rounds of struggle in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, no clear victor emerged, but the Sus, facing mounting pressure, hadto attenuate their open erotic practices. We see far less of this type of literaturein the nineteenth century (Terzio lu 1999: 214219; Zil 1988: 136149).

The same is true to a certain extent in the realm of the law. As Ottoman of-cials codied the free-owing discussion-style books of shar a jurisprudenceinto legal compendia and anun regulations in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, some of the more brazen discussions about sex gradually disap-peared, even from pure qh. Legal treatises were transformed from an ongoingdebate between jurists into rigid code, curtailing the ability of intellectuals toexpress thoughts about sexuality and morality.

There is reason to suspect, however, that these were not actual harbingers of a process of decline. Looked at from the vantage point of the end of the process,they may seem to have been part of a chain of events. But the fact that otherdiscursive spheres still ourished at the same time, and that some even seemto have developed a more licentious attitude toward sexuality, may suggestthat the meta-discourse was still very lively until the nineteenth century. What,then, was the process at work here? How did the colonial era affect the change,especially at the center of an empire that was not under direct colonial rule untilthe end of World War I? What was it in the modern period that created the mindshift? In the following pages I would like to offer a tentative answer.

T e European Ot er, Trave , an Sex

In the nineteenth century, local governments initiated a series of reforms thatchanged the contours of Middle Eastern society. In the realm of textual dis-course, one major development was the introduction of the printing press.Until the late eighteenth century, print in the region was either conned tominority groups such as Armenians, Greeks, or Jews, or used for very shortperiods by Muslims. Only in the early nineteenth century were printing pressesestablished in urban centers to print manuscripts in Arabic and Ottoman Turk-ish (Gek 1987: 108115; Shaw 1987: 794b). This development initiated, ina short span of time, a serious expansion of the reading public. Books, up tillnow accessible only to a small minority, reached sectors that previously hadhad only random access to them. For governments and elites, this meant thepotential loss of control over distribution and consumption, in particular fortexts dealing with delicate subjects such as sexuality. One of the reasons for


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the initial attenuation of sexual discourse was self-censorship initiated by thefear of chaos that might result when the larger public was exposed to sensi-tive topics. But we should bear in mind that even prior to the introduction of

the printing press, non-elites were privy to some of these discourses in theaterplays and in popular versions of physiognomy and poetry. The advent of print-ing, therefore, supplies only a partial answer. The sense that this material wasdangerous and should be censored must have rst emerged from a recognitionof its inherent danger.

Printing presses had another role to play in this series of developments. Itseems that the major source of discomfort with Ottoman sexual discourse cameabout through encounters with agents of Europe, such as missionaries, trad-ers, and other travelers. But while daily contact with missionaries and traders

had a circumscribed effect on small communities, the impact of traveloguespublished by these agents was more widespread and far-reaching. Modernresearch focuses on their role in changing European society and creating thebackdrop for the emergence of modern Orientalism. I would like to suggest adifferent perspective herethe impact of Western and Ottoman published trav-elogues on Middle Eastern Ottoman society. Some of these European accounts,it appears, found their way back into the Ottoman discursive world and had amajor impact on discourses of sex. These were supplemented by the works of Ottomans (Turkish and Arabic speakers) who visited Europe during the nine-teenth century, and whose impressions also contributed to the change.

Prior to the nineteenth century, European descriptions of Ottoman moral-ity, though by no means neutral, were often merely descriptive. Thus, OgierGhiselin de Busbeq, the Habsburg ambassador to the Porte from 1554 to 1662,who left one of the most penetrating descriptions of the Ottoman empire of thesixteenth century, describes the Ottoman society as chaste and moral.

I will now pass to another topic and tell you about the high standard of moralitywhich obtains among the Turkish women. The Turks set greater store than anyother nation on the chastity of their wives. Hence they keep them shut up at

home, and so hide them that they hardly see the light of day. If they are obligedto go out, they send them forth so covered and wrapped up that they seem topassers-by to be mere ghosts and specters. They themselves can look upon man-kind through their linen or silken veils, but no part of their persons is exposed tomans gaze. The Turks are convinced that no woman who possesses the slightestattractions of beauty or youth can be seen by a man without exciting his desiresand consequently being contaminated by his thoughts. Hence all women arekept in seclusion. (Forster 1968: 117)

These descriptions, seemingly praising high moral standards but usually

dwelling more on segregation and veiling of women as a means to securepublic morality, appear in most other travel descriptions from the sixteenthto the eighteenth centuries (Bent 1893; DArvieux 1718: 221; De Kay 1833:263269; Roger 1664: 296308; Smith 1854: 2426; Smyth 1854: 234235;Zeevi 1995: 158161). While the majority of travelogues follow this trajectoryto the eighteenth century and later, another can be seen developing alongside.


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This new trend, much more critical of Ottoman moral codes, has to do withthe emergence, in the seventeenth century, of a sense of heteronormalcy. InEurope, new categories dividing sexual practices into natural and unnatural,

and later normal and abnormal, brought into focus various moral sensibili-ties and tagged them as deviant. Paul Rycaut, several times ambassador andemissary to the Sublime Porte in the mid-seventeenth century, is perhaps onestarting point for this emerging critical discourse. So rampant are same-sexpractices among the servants of the Porte, he says, that banishment and deathhave not been examples sufcient to deter them (Rycaut [1668] 1995: 31, 33).We should note that whatever their contents, at this point texts were seldomtranslated into local languages, and the few that were translated reached onlythe higher echelons, sometimes the sultan and his entourage alone, having no

impact on public morality.In Rycauts work, and in that of his contemporaries, a clear differentiationstill exists between the perpetrators of indecent sex and a government thattries but fails to deter them. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeanpolitics blurred the distinctions and presented the perceived sexual deviationas a trait of the government itself. One of the clearest manifestations of thislater trend is Adolphus Slades mid-nineteenth-century travelogue. In thisvery popular book, as in those of many other visitors to the Ottoman worldat the time, the derisive tone and unconcealed condemnation are in sharpfocus and taken a step further from earlier travel accounts. This is no longeran ethnographic account of strange customs among the heathen but rathera closely knit discussion that makes a clear connection between deviant sexand failure of government. Slade makes his point clearly in numerous ways.In his travelogue, sodomy is not only widespread, it is the underpinning of political culture: Or, if there be a man in the empire qualied to undertakethe task [of reforming it], is it likely that he will be found among the ministersof Mahmoud II, who are, four-fths of them, bought slaves from Circassia,or from Georgiawhose recommendation was a pretty facewhose chief merit, a prostitution of the worst of vices, whose schedule of services, suc-cessful agency in forwarding their masters treacherous schemes against hissubjects? (Slade 1832: 1:231).

Sodomy is rampant, Slade tells us. No longer a personal predilection of individuals, in this vitriolic description it has become much morea disease of the state, a corrupt form of government. Four-fths of the states ministers areslaves bought for the depraved pleasure of the sultan. These descriptions, veryfar from the truth, of course, are echoed by many other travelers, includingthose French visitors to the empire shocked by bawdy Karagz plays (Colton1860: 159160; DAubignosc 1839: 319330; Nerval [1843] 1998: 202204;Roland 1854: 146147; Walsh 1838: 9). They were given a graphic dimensionby Orientalist painters including Gerome, Rosati, Ingres, and others. It was notonly a changing morality that stood at the base of such assertions. As Neu-mann and Welsh (1991: 343344) point out, it was also part of the emergenceof the European standard of civilization and the need to clearly dene itagainst an uncivilized Other.


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Western Europes biased view has been the subject of quite a few stud-ies, not least among them Edward Saids Orientalism (published in 1978; seeSchick 1999). The point I would like to make, though, is different. It has to

do with the inroads of these texts into the area itself. The impact of travelerson the way Ottomans thought about their sexuality began even before thetraveler wrote his or her book. Leering at Ottoman customs and making funof unorthodox practices were common even during the trip. Several travelersdescribe events in which they were present while other Westerners mockedthe warped sexual tendencies of local Turks and Arabs (Enisi 1911: 116118;Grelot 1683: 9, 190196).

Slade, so incisive about the immorality of Ottoman practices, also reportsOttoman self-consciousness as such practices unfold. Reporting on a party he

attended, in which distinguished men of state preyed on younger ones, tryingto seduce them, he scoffs: One grey-beard actually seized a handsome ladbelonging to the cadi with felonious intent. The struggle was sharp betweenthem, and the company stied with laughter at beholding the grimaces of thedrunken old satyr. But at the end of the party, the bey in charge, self-con-scious and ashamed of his societys hideous sexual mores, prudently tellsSlade that this behavior takes place only once in a way and pleads with himnot to remark on it (Slade 1832: 2:395).

We also know that the travel books themselves reached elite circles in theOttoman world and inuenced them. French was spoken by the elite around theMediterranean, from Istanbul to Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers, and quite a few alsoread and spoke English. Bernard Lewis (2001: 144, 173)remarks that Sladesbooks were known at the center of the empire. A number of other travelogueswere translated, and even if in many cases the sexual aspects were toned downor censored, enough was left to convey the European condescension towardlocal sexual practices. Ottoman readers were appalled when they looked in themirror set up for them by this genre. Their state and their society were depictedas a nest of sexual corruption, with a clear link established between homo-erotic practices, the failure of modernity, and political weakness.

Mehmet Enisi, an Ottoman ofcer who traveled to Europe on a militarymission in the late nineteenth century, describes a fascinating discussion hehad with a French ofcer on the trip. Strolling on the deck of a ship bound forEurope, the French ofcer leers at Ottoman morality and derides the segrega-tion of women in the East. Enisi responds to the charges and makes some of his own. In the course of their discussion, they bring up descriptions fromtravel literature as well as from the type of Orientalist pulp ction written byPierre Loti about Istanbul. The main point to note here is Enisis excellentacquaintance with European travel literature and with its arguments, to whichhe already had ready answers (1911: 116118).

During the nineteenth century, the Ottomans discovered Europe. Elite circlesin the Ottoman state were not alien to the world that lay to the west of theirborders, and visits of dignitaries and travelers are known from the sixteenthcentury onwards. In the Tanzimat period, however, the rate of visits to Europeincreased considerably. Dozens of books were published by these travelers,


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who, wherever they went, encountered very common misconceptions abouttheir morality and sexuality, on the one hand, and were afforded glimpses of a very different attitude toward sex and morals, on the other. While praising

the liberties afforded to European women, most of them perceived Euro-pean morality as inferior to their own and pointed out its deciencies. Theculmination of this process can be perceived in the writings of Ahmed Mid-hat, a famous author, playwright, and traveler, who visited Western Europelate in the century. In his book Avrupa da bir Cevelan, Midhat (1892) looksincessantly for the dividing line between European superiority in science,technology, and material achievement and its moral inferiority. Although hisdescriptions of European social and sexual morality are often self-contradic-tory, he focuses on the corruptibility of Western women as ultimate proof of

Ottoman Muslim superiority. In Vienna one night he listens to a coffee shopowner describe the plight of numerous young fallen women. Some of them,says the kahveci, come from respectable families. These girls, educated andwell mannered, leave their houses devoid of any means of earning a living.They become musicians, singers, and even play in theaters and casinos, onlyto nally fall to the street, where their only option is prostitution. Now Iunderstand says Midhat, in a tone that does not fall short of Slades cynicism,why all these female singers and musicians come in multitudes to Istanbuland then move on to Izmir, Thessalonica, and even to Syria (Midhat 1892:1017; see Findley 1998: 1, 15). His views about the dangers of westernizationand the evils of Europe are vindicated.

Other travelers, including Mehmet Enisi, Celal Nuri, and Jurji Zayd ,repeated the same stories, insisting that while the West may have achievedhigher material standards and may have succeeded in righting some wrongsof the old patriarchal system, Eastern morality was still superior to that of Europe (Enisi 1911: 116118; Sadk Rfat Pa a 1874: 2:212; Sami 1840: 40;Seyahatnme-i Londra1853: 92; Yared 1996: 52; Zayd n 1923: 4146). Themain point to be emphasized here is not their praise for Ottoman moralityor derision of European sex mores. It is that in so doing, travelers from theOttoman world were actively reifying and remaking their own sexual world.What had been a transparent universe of norms, views, and mores had sud-denly become opaque and set at center stage. The sexual differences betweenEurope and the Ottoman world had become apparent, and the attempt to pres-ent morality back home as superior was much more than an effort to countera Western offensive. It was in fact a re-creation of the Ottoman sexual worldas an improved version of the European one, an idealized parody of bourgeoismonogamous heteronormalcy (see Chattergee 1989: 622633).

The end result of this counter-attack was a pendulum movement strikingback at the Ottoman world and shutting down entire sexual discursive elds.On the one hand, the Occidentalist reaction drove home the claim about thesuperiority of local morality. Readers of Turkish and Arab travelogues wereconvinced that their sexual and moral conduct was a source of pride, in con-trast to Western decadence. On the other, molding morality at home to t thenew standard presented as superior necessitated far-reaching changes in the


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Ottoman attitude toward sex and sexuality. In other words, while reassuringthemselves that their culture was still superior, at least in that crucial respect,the travelers, as well as the entire book-reading population, needed not only

to nd fault with Europe but also to redene their own moral code to t thesenew standards, or to create an ethics of sex that heretofore had been absentfrom the discourse.

Older sexual discourses (to the extent that they were, in some deep sense,unied previously) were now being hastily dismembered, but not because anew meta-discourse emerged in their stead. As Laqueur and Foucault rightlypoint out, changes in sexual discourse came about in Europe only as a resultof sweeping social, cultural, and political changes, including a new role forwomen in the public sphere, the need to increase control over the population,

new denitions of masculinity and femininity, and new conceptions of pri-vate space. In the Ottoman world, the process was reversed. Prompted by anencounter with a different sexual paradigm, changes in sexual discourse pre-ceded transformations in society and politics. One could assume that there wereseveral pre-existing notions of morality and sexuality within Ottoman MiddleEastern society, one being pushed more at a contingent moment and perhapsinected in its contact with a politically superior society able to persuade thatits superiority drew on its ethical norms, including normative behaviors. Asolder familiar sexual scripts collapsed under the onslaught of the travelogue,almost no alternative ones rose to take their place.

Ottoman and Arab lands experienced unprecedented transformation: sex-ual discourse moved out of the textual sphere and into the arena of male andfemale intimate circles, while a curtain of silence descended on the text-boundsexual stage. Tahar Ben Jellouns sand child, Ahmad-Leyla, is, at base, ametaphor for the post-Ottoman Middle East and North Africa, with its never-ending quest for sexual identity. It is a bleak world for those whose orienta-tion remains on the wide margins and, most of all, a place of deep silence inwhich there are no ready-made scripts for sexual conduct. Such is the resultof this century-long process that began with the old fatal encounter. Unxed,shifting, and hesitant, an oral discourse now wafts where an entire discursiveedice once stood.

ror eevi is Senior Lecturer at Ben Gurion University. His pu is e tit es inc u e An Ottoman Century: T e District o Jerusa em in t e 1600s1996 an Pro ucing Desire: C anging Sexua Discourse in t e Ottoman Mi e East, 150019002006 .


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Notes

1. It is important to note in this respect that Bouhdiba s discussion originates in the assump-tion that true original Islamic sex is heterosexual and monogamous, and therefore allother kinds of sexual tendencies are to some extent a distortion of the divine message.For Bouhdiba, therefore, there may well have been a sexual decline from the time of theProphet to its immediate aftermath.

2 I have also consulted several manuscripts, among them mainly Bibliothque Nationale(Paris), Manuscrits Arabes, 5943. Ahmad al-Tif shi, he Delight of Hearts: Or What ou Will Not Find in Any Book, trans. E. A. Lacey (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press,

1988), is a partial English translation. I would like to thank my student Dafna Porembafor this information.

3. Manuscripts are numerous, among them Bibliothque Nationale (Paris), Manuscritsrabes, 3069, 3070.

4. Following is a small sample of manuscripts copying and elaborating previous eroticbooks in Istanbuls S leymaniye Library. Ebul Hasan Ali b. Nasr al-Katib, Cevami al-lezze (Ayasofya O.3836, Ayasofya O.3837, Fatih 3729, Laleli 1616, Ibrahim Ef. 575m,Haci Mahmud Ef. 5536/1, Kadizade Mehmed Ef. 342, Lala Ismail 389/2, Bagdatli Vehbief. 1408). Al-Samawal al-Maghribi, Nuzhat al-ashab (also called Kitab al-bah, ehid

li Paa 2068/1). Kamal Pa azade, Rucu al-ayh ila Sabah (Matbaat-I ereyye, Cairo,1298h, Izmirli I. Hakki 1894). Hasan b. Abd ar-Rahman, Bahname (H. Hsn Pa a1360/2). Shams al-Din al-Vasiti, Macma al-ahbab va tazkirat uli-lalbab(Kara Celebi

ade 281, Kl Ali Pa a 762, Laleli 2096 2097). Ak Hakknda bir risale (Bagdatli VehbiEf. 2023/29). There are many others.

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