Guest post by Jabrail Gadgiev
In an attempt to portray the Islamic world as a profoundly “heathen” society where moral norms are dramatically inverted, Christian authors had for hundreds of years caricatured the Muslim man as both relentlessly bloodthirsty and unboundedly lustful.
Polygamy and concubinage, institutions widely recognized by classical Islamic scholars as significantly reducing the crimes of prostitution and fornication in society, were instead railed by countless priests and bishops as the greatest example of Muslim moral decadence.
Despite these accusations, the historical record seems to flip the narrative on its head. Gary Leiser in Prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean World states candidly:
“I have not found any literary references to prostitution in Syria during the early centuries of Muslim rule … The earliest … is found in the geography of al-Muqaddasī (d. ca. 381/990) … In describing Jerusalem under Fatimid control, he states “there are no people more respectable than those of Jerusalem […] there you will find no brothel (dur fisq), either secret or public.”[1]
This lack of prostitution as a visible phenomenon in the regions surrounding al-Quds and al-Sham in general would continue until, as one could guess, the arrival of the Catholic Crusaders:
“During this period (the Crusades) I have found more references to prostitution in the Christian-controlled territories of Syria than in those parts that were under Muslim control. This is because prostitutes arrived from Europe in large numbers…”[2]
This was not incidental. Leiser elsewhere describes that kings across medieval Europe would send in shiploads of prostitutes to occupied Syria in order to fornicate with the Crusading soldiers, to the degree where the proliferation of “army prostitutes” was a distinguishing feature of Christian armies noted by both Christian and Muslim authors.
As a result of this:
“In contrast to the Christian chroniclers of the Crusades, their Muslim counterparts never attributed their tribulations in the field or defeats in battle to the sexual turpitude of their troops … the Muslims simply attributed it to the inscrutable will of God (Qadr)…”[3]
It is quite telling that Christian institutions held such a stance towards abject immoralities.
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On one hand, you had kings and bishops actively institutionalizing prostitution as a “necessary evil”, especially for unmarried men. On the other hand, the very same religious establishment would place the blame on these practices when they faced defeat at the hands of Muslims.
This purported incompleteness of moral enforcement (perfect but unachievable divine law vs flawed but necessary human law) arguably paved the way for the secularism and liberalization of Christianity that we see today.
The trend of “military prostitutes” and Christian importation of sexual vice into conquered territories progressed well into the colonial and modern era. And the subsequent anxiety (if not outright envy) that they would face when coming into contact with Muslims, who enshrine no such moral ambivalences and desire the enforcement of divine law in all areas of human conduct, no doubt contributed to the venomous denunciation of Islam and the Sharī’ah.
This translates into fabrications charging entire Muslim populations with certain practices that would make the religion appear as unrelatable and demonic as possible. This includes “pedophiles” (not used until modernity), “terrorists” or the more historically common label of “sodomites”.
Nabil Matar in Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery notes that by the mid-to-late Ottoman era, one of the most oft-repeated accusation that Christians levied against the Muslim population was that of sodomy:
“By repeating the reference to sodomy in every context associated with Muslims … English writers transformed sodomy into a structural transgressiveness that defined the character, religion and dominion of Muslims…”[4]
In reality, sodomy was a deeply stigmatized and a punishable abomination by the consensus of Islamic jurists both within and without the Ottoman domain (see Khaled el-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World). Describing the case of elites having forbidden relations with their male slaves, Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ) states:
“The community (ijma’) has reached a consensus that he of the criminal, depraved and accursed sodomites who commits sodomy with his male slave, upon him is the curse of God … So may the most severe, everlasting and manifest curse befall them, and the great shame, ruin, and torment be their lot in this world and the next, as long as they persist in these vile, repugnant and abominable acts.”[5]
This is not to say that pederasty did not occur whatsoever in the late Ottoman period; a combined result of Greco-Roman philosophical notions of “Platonic beauty” and certain extreme innovative practices led to a certain segment of elite urban dwellers to fall into the practice. But it was certainly not characteristic of Muslim populations nor tolerated whatsoever, as Matar further elucidates:
“…it is evident that the allusions to homosexuality stemmed not from direct observations but from the desire to denigrate the religious adversary.”[6]
A study by the historian Noel Malcolm titled Forbidden Love in Istanbul: Patterns of Male–Male Sexual Relations in the Early-Modern Mediterranean World essentially shatters the notion that Ottoman Muslim territories had any greater prevelance of pederasty compared to Christian Europe:
“Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships (1996) presented the most striking example, Florence in the late fifteenth century, where a special magistrature, the ‘Office of the Night’, processed the accusations. Its archive revealed that in the period 1459–1502 … by the time they reached the age of forty, an absolute majority of Florentine men had been named in these processes … Essentially the same picture has emerged from Sicily, several parts of Spain, and Portugal.”[7]
The study goes on to mention how the situation was so severe aboard Christian Mediterranean vessels that the Pope himself forbade beardless boys from boarding papal vessels categorically, and the poor reputation that both Italian and Spanish soldiers had in that regard. Malcolm concludes with the assertion that the cultural phenomenon of pederasty was more common among Greco-Roman Mediterranean heritage nations.
Notably, the results of this study also discredit two popular claims made by both premodern and modern Westerners: that the practice of gender segregation is correlated with a tendency towards homosexuality, or that polygyny and the abundance of women leads to it.
In fact, the renowned (yet somewhat controversial) Sayyid Qutb is quoted as alluding to this exact inconsistency when describing the rise of homosexuality after visiting America in the early 1950s:
“For in Europe and America, there was no longer a single obstacle to total sexual mixing between every male and every female—just like in the world of beasts!—and the rate of this deviant abomination (homosexuality) increases, rather than decreases, as a result of mixing!”[8]
Western academics of recent decades continue the trend of presenting the Muslim populations of premodern caliphates as sexual libertines for seemingly opposite reasons, compared to their missionary counterparts. That is to say, modern iterations of orientalists intend to transform the image of historical Islamic establishments in the minds of millions of traditional Muslims, in order to normalize the sins of fornication, freemixing, homosexuality, et cetera within society.
The goal of this article has been to refute this narrative and defend the honor of the Muslim ummah against the fabrications of the enemy. And Allah knows best.
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Notes
[1] Gary Leiser, Prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean World: The Economics of Sex in the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), p. 168-171.
[2] Ibid., p. 175.
[3] Ibid., p. 177.
[4] Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 127.
[5] Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 39.
[6] Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, p. 126.
[7] Noel Malcolm, “Forbidden Love in Istanbul: Patterns of Male–Male Sexual Relations in the Early-Modern Mediterranean World,” Past & Present 257, no. 1 (November 2022): 55–88, at p. 69.
[8] Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 126.
