[A-List] The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse in the Late Ottoman Middle East

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

<http://www.historyschool.tau.ac.il/2006-7%20Events/Zeevi.Article.pdf>
Social Analysis, Volume 49, Issue 2, Summer 2005, 34â53
HIDING SEXUALITY
The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse in the Late Ottoman Middle East
Dror Ze'evi

Abstract: From Belgrade to Baghdad, from Algiers to Aleppo, sexual
discourse in the pre-modern Ottoman world was rich and variegated. Its
manifestations were to be found in literature and poetry, in medicine
and physiognomy, in religious writings and popular culture. During the
nineteenth century, much of this panoply of discussions about sex
disappeared or was attenuated to such an extent that it became
virtually non-existent. A similar phenomenon can be perceived in
Western European attitudes toward sex several decades earlier. Yet
while in Europe the old sexual discursive world was replaced with a
new one in short order, the Ottoman Middle East did not produce a new
sexual discourse to replace the one that vanished. This article
presents some of the premises of the old Ottoman sexual discourse,
describes the process of their demise, and suggests an explanation for
the failure to produce a new (textual) discourse of sex.

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

    People like to talk about others. Here they like sexual
    gossip. They spread it all the time. Among those who
    were making fun of an English homosexual a little while
    ago, I know some who would be quite willing to make
    love with him. They find it easier to do than to talk or
    write about it. Books that deal with prostitution in this
    country are forbidden, but nothing is done to give work
    to the girls who arrive from the country, nor is anything
    done about their pimps. So people talk about it in the
    cafes. They let their imagination loose on the sights
    that cross the boulevard. In the evening they watch an
    interminable Egyptian soap opera on television. "The
    Call of Love" depicts men and women loving one another,
    hating one another, tearing one another apart, and never
    touching one another. I tell you, my friends, we live in a
    hypocritical society. (Ben Jelloun 2000: 112â113)

These observations are echoed outside the literary sphere. The May
2001 "Queen Boat" incident in Cairo, in which police cracked down on a
bar frequented by homosexuals, arrested them, and put them on public
trial, initiated a spate of journalistic articles on the absence of
serious discussion on sexuality in Egyptian society (Bahgat 2001). In
recent years, a handful of scholars in the Middle East and beyond have
dealt with such topics through academic research, most of them in line
with Ben Jelloun's depiction (Abu Khalil 1993: 32â34; Dunne 1996;
Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb 2000). One of the best-known historical
explanations for this pervasive silence in contemporary Arabo-Muslim
society was suggested by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisian sociologist,
in the conclusion of his Sexuality in Islam. In Bouhdiba's view, two
distinct phases led to this discursive silence. First, it was a result
of "slow political, social, and cultural decline" (Bouhdiba 1985: 231)
ever since the early days of Islam, as society misinterpreted the
teachings of the Prophet and the Koran, distorting the message of
sacred sexuality. But this repression, bad as it was already, was
greatly reinforced with the arrival of colonization.

    This [colonialist] violation of the collective personality,
    this seizure of the environment, of institutions and even
    of language, [was] to reinforce still more the tendency
    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 to limit the extent of the alienations of modern times,
    to limit the colonial impact to externals, while fiercely
    defending the essential values of private life. (ibid.)

Colonialism, claims Bouhdiba, exacerbated inner processes of decline
and ended up destroying the remains of what had initially begun as "an
open sexuality, practiced in joy with a view to the fulfillment of
being" (ibid.).

This article raises questions concerning both parts of Bouhdiba's
contention. First, was sexual discourse really repressed in the
pre-colonial era?1  Second, what exactly was the effect of European
encroachment on the production of sexual discourse? I begin by
examining the assumption that pre-modern Middle Eastern Islamic
discourse was already 'repressed' sexually before the nineteenth
century, and then question the further assumption that this repression
was aggravated by the colonial experience. These questions have a
bearing on the history of sexuality in the world of Islam, as opposed
to that of Europe 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 and North Africa were governed from Istanbul. Many of the
major discourses were elaborated and distributed to the provinces from
this imperial center. Literate elites in the provinces were often
bilingual, especially from the late seventeenth century onwards, and
Ottoman Turkish, rather than Arabic, became the main cultural language
(Toledano 1997: 145â162). The second consideration has to do with
Bouhdiba's claim of colonial intrusion. Many of the Ottoman provinces
were colonized by European powers during the nineteenth century, but
the center 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, Bouhdiba's assumption (1985: 231) that it was a
physical presenceâthe "violation of the collective personality, this
seizure of the environment, of institutions and even of language,
[which reinforced] still more the tendency to closedness and
sclerosis"âneeds to be revised.

One cannot discuss sexual discourse and repression without alluding to
Foucault's famous statement in his History of Sexuality about the
trajectory of Western society's discourse. Moving the focus of debate
from practices of sex to discourses of desire, Foucault claims that
rather than repression of a previously more open sexual system, the
nineteenth century brings in its wings an explosion of writing and
talking about sex. Ostensibly secretive, furtive, controlling, and
repressing, these new discourses in fact opened the door to a new and
ubiquitous world of sex. They reshaped and reinvented sex and, in the
process, created the modalities that today we refer to as sexuality
(Foucault 1990: 3â10).

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 more precise, English and French) society a faÃade
of sexual repression in the early nineteenth century conceals an
explosion of rich sexual discourse, in the Islamic Middle East and
North Africa the direction of change was almost opposite. A long and
continuous repression of sexual discourse, mainly in the Ottoman
period, turned into a dark abyss of sexual silence as a result of
colonialism. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century do we
begin to perceive significant change. If true, this must be a crucial
factor in explaining differences between these societies and cultures,
even in the early twenty-first century.

In order to retrace the trajectory and evaluate the narratives of
Middle Eastern sexual discourse, we must first turn to the
pre-nineteenth-century era and to the arenas in which sex was
discussed. At the time, there were many such discursive clusters,
including, among others, mystical Sufi texts, popular dream
interpretation manuals, poetry, and law. In this article I propose to
look at three major loci of Middle Eastern cultural production that
have had a deep impact on society: medical texts, theater plays, and
erotic literature. My examples will be drawn mainly from the Turkish-
and Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman world.

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 the sixteenth century were replete with discussions of sex and
sexuality. Numerous texts discuss issues such as erection, formation
of semen, the physiology of the body during intercourse, sexual
attraction, and impotence. Discussions were detailed and unabashed.
Most medical descriptions were also laced with advice: What is the
right way to have intercourse? What is the correct amount of sexual
relations that a man or a woman should have? Who is the right sexual
partner at every stage of one's life? How can one prolong pleasure?
Can impotence be prevented? There were few qualms about discussing
masturbation, and male-male sex was treated on a par with other sexual
practices. Here is one slightly shortened medical description of
heterosexual intercourse from a fifteenth-century medical treatise on
hygiene:

    This is how it is done: The man and the woman play
    around for a while. The man touches the woman's breasts
    and presses them several times and then puts his hand on
    her loins and strikes her vulva with it. Then he rubs together
    his member and hers, until the woman gets sexually excited,
    the pace of her breath quickens, and the woman, desirous,
    starts to embrace the man. When on both sides 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 produce lust, or have intercourse performed in
    front of one's 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. Masturbation brings anxiety, and makes one
    forgetful. It weakens the penis, the eyes get weary, and the
    mind is blunted. Know this also, that the lust for copulation is a
    matter of the animal soul, and when one plays with it, that is,
    uses it unnecessarily, it is destroyed. That one is his own
    enemy. It is like a person who, by being greedy, takes out his
    money and buys any food that appears before his eyes, even
    when 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. When he is hungry he sees
    many good foods, but when he comes to take the first, there is
    nothing in his purse. This time he unfortunately stays hungry.
    He cannot fill up the greed in his eyes. Having spent his property,
    nothing is left in his purse of strength. Because when the load of
    weakness falls on a person, no one can save him at any time.
    The road is long. It is necessary not to waste the provisions of
    power. 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 the human form, medical compendia include a large array
of schemas and drawings referring to the human body, and specifically
to sexual organs. There are many examples throughout the Ottoman
period. Figure 1 is just one example, taken from a general medical
compendium and borrowing some of its insight from contemporary
European medical treatises. Note the ambiguous gender of the male and
female figures, which shall be referred to later on. (cItÄqi 1990:
165â166).

FIGURE
1 Resemblance between Male and Female Genitals, TashrÄh al-abdÄn,
Seventeenth Century

Medicine's ancillary sciences, physiognomy and pharmacology,
contributed their share to the discussion. One of pharmacology's main
themes was the concoction of aphrodisiacs, some intended for men,
others for women, some supposed to restore sexual prowess, others to
reduce anxiety or prolong pleasure. Physiognomy, for its part,
analyzed people's humoral make-up, which manifested itself in the
shape of the body, and provided a set of external signs to determine a
potential mate's suitability for love and intercourse. Here is an
excerpt from the sixteenth-century guide KÄK busname:

    If, for example, you need a slave to be with for friendship
    purposes, someone who will serve you in friendship and
    love games, this must be a person of medium height, and
    also medium build. He should not be too fat or too thin, nor
    should his waist be thick. He should rather be tall than short.
    His hair should be soft, not stiff, but its color may be black
    or yellow as you wish. His palms should be round and soft,
    his skin delicate, his bones straight and his lips the color of
    wine. His hair should be black, his eyes hazel colored and
    his brows and eyelids black, but not connected to each other.
    He should have a double chin. His chin should be white
    spotted red like the fuzz on a quince. His teeth should be
    white and straight and his limbs of the right proportion. Any
    slave that matches these descriptions will be gentle, of good
    temperament, loyal and docile. (Keykavus 1974: 220)

Middle Eastern medicine was never isolated from medical knowledge in
other areas of the world, and new developments in Renaissance Italy
and France soon found their way into the discourse, as the drawings in
figure 1 demonstrate. Sixteenth-century Paracelsian medicine had its
influence, and so did novel conceptions of the body emerging from new
methods of dissection and description. The great change, however,
began in the nineteenth century with the gradual abandonment of
humoral medicine. Some of the emphases in medical discourse changed,
but quite a few remained. For example, the old idea that women and men
were basically of the same sex, and that their petite difference
manifested the fact that woman was an imperfect version of man,
remained prominent. As manifest in Mehmet Ataullah Åanizade's famous
medical compendium, which came to acquire the title Hamse-i Åanizade
(Åanizade's Five [Volumes]), the Ottomans held on to this concept of
woman-as-imperfect-man even when medical knowledge in European
treatises suggested otherwise (Åanizade 1820: 139â140; see also
Laqueur 1990). In discussions of things sexual, we can perceive a slow
and uneven pace of change as well. Medical compendia become much less
explicit from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This can be seen
both in the matters discussedâthe emphasis is on treatment of venereal
disease and pregnancy problems, much less on potency and
intercourseâand in the kind of language used. Sexual organs and their
functions are referred to in a circumspect way, and a new terminology,
clinical, aloof, asexual, is used to discuss sexual matters. New books
on medicine seemed to deny 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 medical discourse shifts into
an almost sexless mode.

Shadow Theater

KaragÃz, the form of shadow theater that was so popular in the Ottoman
center and some of the provinces, was always outrageous. Legend claims
it was brought over from Egypt by a sultan, Selim the Grim, after the
conquest of Egypt in 1517. Other influences may have arrived from
South-East Asia, and perhaps also from Spain, through Jewish
immigrants in the late fifteenth century (And 1977: 31â66; Kudret
1992: 1:7â11; Martinovitch [1933] 1968: 31â32; SiyavuÅgil 1961: 4â12;
Tietze 1977: 18). Some Egyptian and Syrian theater plays 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: 159â191).

The Ottomans seem to have taken their plays a step further. Unlike
earlier Mamluk versions, these plays had two regular protagonists,
KaragÃz and Hacivat, a pair of mischief-makers who never rest,
wreaking havoc in their little quarter of Istanbul (or some other
place), and always getting screwed in the process. Other permanent
characters on stage were "the woman" (Zenne), an audacious and openly
sexual lady whose favors KaragÃz seeks, usually failing miserably, and
Ãelebi, half-gentleman, half-gigolo, sometimes referred to as "miras
yedi" (the inheritance eater), who spends his money on stylish clothes
and seduces women. All types of sexual activities were presented on
stage, with a marked preference for what we would now call the
heterosexual predilections of the main protagonists.

In the sixteenth century, Ottoman ulema were asked for their opinion
about the plays and their supposed sacrilegious nature. EbÃssuud,
Sultan SÃleyman's famous Grand Mufti (ÅeyhÃlislam), was asked, for
instance, whether a member of the ulema who attended one of these
plays should be removed from office. Knowing how popular the plays
were, the broad-minded mufti suggested a formula: "It is forbidden [to
dismiss him]," he replied, "if he watched the play in order to learn
its moral lesson [ibret], and thought about it with a tame mind [ehli
hal fikri ile tefekkÃr etti]" (NÃzhet 1930: 63â64). In following
decades, some shadow plays seemed to have incurred the outrage of
orthodox groups such as the Kadizadelis, but in general their contents
and graphic displays remained unchallenged.

During the nineteenth century, all open presentations of sex on stage
and most sexually oriented language were carefully purged from KaragÃz
plays. Unfortunately, there are hardly any remnants of
pre-nineteenth-century plays; we can reconstruct a few only from
passing references in historical treatises and chronicles. One can get
a sense of the kind of scene popular before the great purge from
travel literature. European travelers, particularly French writers,
were drawn to KaragÃz plays and wrote extensively about them. One such
writer, Nerval, was invited to a performance in Istanbul in the early
1840s. In a state of shock, he describes a scene "d'une excentricitÃ
qu'il serait difficile de faire supporter chez nous" (so eccentric
that it would be difficult to stage in France). In this scene,
KaragÃz, who was asked to watch over the wife of a friend in his
absence, stands embarrassed near her house and tries to make himself
scarce. Pretending to be an errant Sufi, he lies down on the pavement,
but his penis juts out as a lamp post. Then several incidents occur.
Horsemen tie 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 seduce him. 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 man she had met. Running
for his life, KaragÃz finally finds refuge in an ambassador's carriage
passing by (Nerval [1843] 1998: 622).

Other scenes, even some parts of old plays that were left intact, for
some reason, contain sexual obscenities and references to pederasty,
to female homoerotic love, and to other licentious practices. In one
scene of the famous play The Great Wedding (BuyÃk Evlenme), performed
at the beginning of the twentieth century but going back at least a
couple of centuries, KaragÃz meets a posse of women who, as he finds
out to his dismay, are on their way to his house to attend a wedding
in which he is to be the prospective bridegroom. Not knowing that
their interlocutor is KaragÃz, the women ask him about the groom.
"He's a thief and a scoundrel," says KaragÃz, trying to dissuade them
from participating in the wedding he was lured into. "Well, so are
we," they reply. "He roams the area of BeyoÄlu every night in search
of [sexual] action," he says. "Wonderful, so do we," they reply. "He
hardly leaves the hamam" (a symbol of debauchery in Ottoman
literature). "Oh, so he must be very clean." "Fine," says exasperated
KaragÃz finally. "He's also a pederast [mahbub dosttur]!" "So what? We
are women lovers [zen dost], too," they answer, leaving him
open-mouthed and speechless (Kudret 1992: 1:323â324).

This exchange of sexual banter, however, is a meager residue of the
rich theater heritage that has all but disappeared. Another French
traveler witnessed the change. Theophile Gautier was invited to attend
a play at which, to his dismay, women and children were among the
spectators watching the incredibly rude performance. Still, he says,
this performance is much milder than it used to be.

    It ought to be mentioned, that, among other consequences
    of the reform, the performances of Karagheuz have been
    submitted to "the censorship" and that much which was
    rather extreme in action has been reduced to words, and the
    words themselves very freely excised; for, in truth, in its
    original form, the representation could hardly have been
    described to European readers; although, as performed
    before an audience consisting entirely of men, and those
    men Turks, it used to be considered 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-volume work, KaragÃs, TÃrkische Schattenspiele, the
transformation was complete. The dozens of plays presented by Ritter
and added to by Cevdet Kudret, who reintroduced them to the Turkish
public, though by no means devoid of sexual allusions, seem to share a
sense of propriety and modesty that did not characterize the earlier
versions (Ritter 1924; see also Kudret 1992: 1:323â324).

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 as well, and it was influenced by Indian and
Persian traditions. In the Islamic heartland, it flourished in the
Abbasid period with the adab literature, some of which was later
integrated into the Thousand and One Nights. In the thirteenth
century, ShihÄb al-DÄn al-TifÄshi of Tunisia wrote a well-known and
very detailed book, Nuzhat al-albÄb fi ma la yÅjad fifi kitÄb
(translated into English as The Delight of Hearts), which included
chapters on prostitution, fornication, male-to-male intercourse of
various kinds, anal sex, and so on (TifÄshi 1992).2  TifÄshi's book
became a standard for other authors, who copied and changed it
throughout the centuries.

Another famous book, written two centuries later, is Shaykh NafzÄwi's
Al-rawd al-cÄtir (The Perfumed Garden) which was translated into
English several times and became the quintessential Islamic erotic
book in the West. Not as bold, perhaps, as TifÄshi's, NafzÄwi's
compilation also deals with modes of love-making, dabbles in same-sex
intercourse, and gives a series of recipes for enlarging the penis,
enhancing the chances of pregnancy, and preparing aphrodisiacs
(NafzÄwi 1993; see also Bouhdiba 1985: 40â147).3

Bouhdiba, who mentions these compilations, claims that after The
Perfumed Garden, erotic literature seems to have dried up, and he
found only one later example, published in Istanbul in 1878 by Sadiq
Khan. We will return to this book shortly, but I believe Bouhdiba
missed something on the way. The Ottoman period produced quite a
number of erotic works in prose and poetry, among them many
pornographic poems, and several complete books (Schmidt 1993: 3â9,
235â236). One of the most interesting works in this period is Deli
Birader's Dafi'u'l gumum ve rafi'u'l humum (Relieving Worries and
Defeating Sorrows), written in the sixteenth century, which presents
the same type of erotic descriptions as above in their specific
Ottoman setting (Kuru 2000, 2001). Another is KÄbusname, a book of
guidance to choosing sexual partners (Keykavus). Most prominent among
these books of the period is KemalpaÅazade's Rujuc al-shaykh ila sibÄh
fi al-quwwa cala al-bÄh (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, cÄlim, and historian, is
claimed to have been translated from an unknown book by TifÄshi.
Translated or compiled, this exemplar of erotic literature in the
mid-sixteenth century was since copied and used by quite a few Ottoman
authors until the nineteenth century.4  KemalpaÅazade's book does not
deal with homoeroticism but describes comprehensively all forms of
man-to-woman sex, aphrodisiacs, contraception, and similar issues.
These books may have originated in the sixteenth century, but they
were copied and recompiled numerous times since.

They offered their readers more or less the same menu of sexual
aesthetics and erotic fantasies, basically unchanged since TifÄshi's
masterpiece of the thirteenth century. Clearly written for a male
audience, they include chapters emphasizing women's unrestrained
sexual urge and their deviousness; the importance of foreplay,
technique, and etiquette; the various types of women; and the
importance of size compatibility. Other chapters discuss pederasty and
what 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 intercourse with other adult persons of their own sex. Some
dedicate chapters to masturbation, bestiality, aphrodisiacs, and penis
enlargement medications. When there are differences between these
compilations, they are found mostly in the level of detail, as well as
in the imagined location of stories. Ottoman Turkish writers often
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
literature by Muhammad Sadiq Khan, Nashwat al-sakrÄn min sabba tidhkÄr
al-ghizlÄn ([1878] 1920). Bouhdiba mentions this book, one of the few
to appear in print, as the swan song of Middle Eastern erotology.
Sadiq Khan's book, however, is different from previous erotic books.
Bouhdiba ascribes this to its being compiled from an Indian text, but
it seems that the difference lies elsewhere. This is not 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
distanced language. Rather than a swan song, it should be seen as an
imaginary link between the old style of erotica and the sanitized,
scientific studies on sex and sexuality that could have been
undertaken in the twentieth century to study Islamicate erotica. Since
that date, no other books of erotica were written, almost none were
published in Arabic- or Turkish-speaking countries, and those that
were published were carefully cleansed of what was perceived as
offensive or irreligious material.

The Disappearance of Sexual Discourse

The discourses in the three types of cultural production described
aboveâmedical treatises, shadow theater plays, and erotic booksâare
bound together by a similar attitude toward sex and sexuality. This is
an attitude that could be characterized as pleasure-bound,
male-oriented, and practically uninhibited by religion or morality. It
also seeks to establish equilibrium between sexual needs, the harmful
effects of wasted sexual energy, and the need to maintain law and
order in society. The same type of discussion appears in other
discursive spheres not elaborated here, such as manuals of dream
interpretation and Sufi poetry (Ze'evi forthcoming). Other textual
genres, including jurisprudence and moral literature, often offer a
critique of some practices considered transgressions of religious
boundaries, but they too share this basic common view of sex and
sexuality. Certain sexual practices may be prohibited by divine
sanction or man-made law in order to preserve social order, and should
even be punished harshly in some cases, but that does not make them
deviant, abnormal, or unnatural in any way. This is made clear even by
the fact that most authors and compilers of erotica were themselves
members of the religious establishment.

During the nineteenth century, and mainly as it drew to a close, these
sexually 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 world of sex has been carefully pruned
out of such texts. Sex-laced dialogues, not to mention graphic phallic
displays, were warily excised from KaragÃz plays as we have seen, and
these were gradually turned into children's Punch and Judy style
performances. Authors no longer wrote erotic guidebooks, or, if they
did, dare not publish them. Anecdotes and descriptions from The
Perfumed Garden and The Delight of Hearts were whispered from mouth to
earâmainly in the intellectual elite, or in the circles of ulema who
may have had access to old librariesâbut were almost never printed.

Similar processes were evident in other discursive spheres. Explicit
descriptions of homoerotic or incestuous dreams disappeared from dream
interpretation manuals or were replaced by watered-down versions. Even
the law, which previously referred explicitly to sexual offenses while
condemning them, now began to discuss them in vague, oblique terms,
using words such as "harassment" or "violation of honor" (Kanunname-i
Ceza 1858). Sufi lore and poetry, in which love for beardless boys
previously played a prominent part, fell silent on such matters. In
short, an all-pervading and conscious silencing operation can be
perceived throughout.

In Europe, new textual forms emerged andâthrough their seemingly
desexualizing treatment of school, hospital, prison, home, and
familyâended up establishing new norms of sex, freezing the picture of
deviance and sexuality, at least in the emerging middle classes. But
the Ottoman world and its inheritors did not produce alternative
written discourses. Few, if any, programs for curbing passion in
schools or prisons were elaborated. Nascent psychology and its
antecedents, such as the work of Charcot at the SalpÃtriÃre on female
hysteria, were not discussed or emulated, and nothing of similar
magnitude emerged to replace the vanishing world of rich sexual
discourse.

Returning to the questions posed at the beginning of this article, it
could now be claimed that Bouhdiba was wrong about one thing, right
about another. Prior to what he refers to as the colonial period,
sexual discourse was very much alive in the Ottoman realm. Contrary to
his claims, there was very little 'degradation' or gradual decline of
sex, at least from the point of view of open, frank discussion.
However, Bouhdiba's claims are more substantiated as we approach the
latter part of the nineteenth century. The final curtain falls on
sexual discourse at the apex of the colonial period, in the late
nineteenth century. Other questions now need to be asked: How does
colonialism relate to this process? Do we have any proof of its
influence beyond correlation? If so, in what way did colonialism
affect sexual discourse? Where were the points of interaction?

Not everything, even in the nineteenth century, can be attributed to
the encroachment of colonialism. Some factors affecting sexual
discourse had obviously been at play even before the days of colonial
expansion, transforming various discursive spheres. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Sufi spiritual exercises involving
contemplation of handsome beardless boys to attain insight on godly
love were echoed in prose and poetry as well as in texts extolling the
virtues of dance rituals (dhikr, samÄc, devran), which included highly
stylized physical erotic contact. This type of ritual became so
popular that for many orthodox ulema it endangered the very basis of
Islamic dogma. The practice was challenged during the seventeenth
century by the Kadizadelis, a movement of religious scholars in the
imperial center and the provinces, which opposed a series of
innovative tendencies. Labeling these Sufi notions as heretical, the
Kadizadelis demanded that a stop be put to them immediately. After
several rounds of struggle in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, no clear victor emerged, but the Sufis, facing mounting
pressure, had to attenuate their open erotic practices. We see far
less of this type of literature in the nineteenth century (TerzioÄlu
1999: 214â219; Zilfi 1988: 136â149).

The same is true to a certain extent in the realm of the law. As
Ottoman officials codified the free-flowing discussion-style books of
sharÄca jurisprudence into legal compendia and kanun regulations in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of the more brazen
discussions about sex gradually disappeared, even from pure fiqh.
Legal treatises were transformed from an ongoing debate between
jurists into rigid code, curtailing the ability of intellectuals to
express 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 other discursive spheres still flourished
at the same time, and that some even seem to have developed a more
licentious attitude toward sexuality, may suggest that 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 until the end of World War I? What was it
in the modern period that created the mind shift? In the following
pages I would like to offer a tentative answer.

The European Other, Travel, and Sex

In the nineteenth century, local governments initiated a series of
reforms that changed the contours of Middle Eastern society. In the
realm of textual discourse, one major development was the introduction
of the printing press. Until the late eighteenth century, print in the
region was either confined to minority groups such as Armenians,
Greeks, or Jews, or used for very short periods by Muslims. Only in
the early nineteenth century were printing presses established in
urban centers to print manuscripts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish
(GÃÃek 1987: 108â115; Shaw 1987: 794b). This development initiated, in
a short span of time, a serious expansion of the reading public.
Books, up till now accessible only to a small minority, reached
sectors that previously had had only random access to them. For
governments and elites, this meant the potential loss of control over
distribution and consumption, in particular for texts dealing with
delicate subjects such as sexuality. One of the reasons for the
initial attenuation of sexual discourse was self-censorship initiated
by the fear of chaos that might result when the larger public was
exposed to sensitive 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 theater plays and in popular versions
of physiognomy and poetry. The advent of printing, therefore, supplies
only a partial answer. The sense that this material was dangerous and
should be censored must have first emerged from a recognition of its
inherent danger.

Printing presses had another role to play in this series of
developments. It seems that the major source of discomfort with
Ottoman sexual discourse came about through encounters with agents of
Europe, such as missionaries, traders, and other travelers. But while
daily contact with missionaries and traders had a circumscribed effect
on small communities, the impact of travelogues published by these
agents was more widespread and far-reaching. Modern research focuses
on their role in changing European society and creating the backdrop
for the emergence of modern Orientalism. I would like to suggest a
different perspective hereâthe impact of Western and Ottoman published
travelogues on Middle Eastern Ottoman society. Some of these European
accounts, it appears, found their way back into the Ottoman discursive
world and had a major impact on discourses of sex. These were
supplemented by the works of Ottomans (Turkish and Arabic speakers)
who visited Europe during the nineteenth century, and whose
impressions also contributed to the change.

Prior to the nineteenth century, European descriptions of Ottoman
morality, though by no means neutral, were often merely descriptive.
Thus, Ogier Ghiselin 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 the sixteenth century, describes the Ottoman
society as chaste and moral.

    I will now pass to another topic and tell you about the
    high standard of morality which obtains among the
    Turkish women. The Turks set greater store than any
    other 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 obliged to go out,
    they send them forth so covered and wrapped up that
    they seem to passers-by to be mere ghosts and specters.
    They themselves can look upon mankind through their
    linen or silken veils, but no part of their persons is
    exposed to man's gaze. The Turks are convinced that
    no woman who possesses the slightest attractions of
    beauty or youth can be seen by a man without exciting
    his desires and consequently being contaminated by his
    thoughts. Hence all women are kept 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 secure public morality, appear in most other travel descriptions
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (Bent 1893; D'Arvieux
1718: 221; De Kay 1833: 263â269; Roger 1664: 296â308; Smith 1854:
24â26; Smyth 1854: 234â235; Ze'evi 1995: 158â161). While the majority
of travelogues follow this trajectory to the eighteenth century and
later, another can be seen developing alongside. This new trend, much
more critical of Ottoman moral codes, has to do with the emergence, in
the seventeenth century, of a sense of 'heteronormalcy'. In Europe,
new categories dividing sexual practices into natural and unnatural,
and later normal and abnormal, brought into focus various moral
sensibilities and tagged them as deviant. Paul Rycaut, several times
ambassador and emissary to the Sublime Porte in the mid-seventeenth
century, is perhaps one starting point for this emerging critical
discourse. So rampant are same-sex practices among the servants of the
Porte, he says, that "banishment and death have not been examples
sufficient to deter them" (Rycaut [1668] 1995: 31, 33). We should note
that whatever their contents, at this point texts were seldom
translated into local languages, and the few that were translated
reached only the higher echelons, sometimes the sultan and his
entourage alone, having no impact on public morality.

In Rycaut's work, and in that of his contemporaries, a clear
differentiation still exists between the perpetrators of indecent sex
and a government that tries but fails to deter them. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century European politics blurred the distinctions and
presented the perceived sexual deviation as a trait of the government
itself. One of the clearest manifestations of this later trend is
Adolphus Slade's mid-nineteenth-century travelogue. In this very
popular book, as in those of many other visitors to the Ottoman world
at the time, the derisive tone and unconcealed condemnation are in
sharp focus and taken a step further from earlier travel accounts.
This is no longer an ethnographic account of strange customs among the
heathen but rather a closely knit discussion that makes a clear
connection between deviant sex and 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 â qualified to undertake the task [of
reforming it], is it likely that he will be found among the ministers
of Mahmoud II, who are, four-fifths of them, bought slaves from
Circassia, or from Georgiaâwhose recommendation was a pretty
faceâwhose chief merit, a prostitution of the worst of vices, whose
schedule of services, successful agency in forwarding their master's
treacherous schemes against his subjects?" (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
moreâa disease of the state, a corrupt form of government. Four-fifths
of the state's ministers are slaves bought for the depraved pleasure
of the sultan. These descriptions, very far from the truth, of course,
are echoed by many other travelers, including those French visitors to
the empire shocked by bawdy KaragÃz plays (Colton 1860: 159â160;
D'Aubignosc 1839: 319â330; Nerval [1843] 1998: 202â204; Roland 1854:
146â147; Walsh 1838: 9). They were given a graphic dimension by
Orientalist painters including Gerome, Rosati, Ingres, and others. It
was not only a changing morality that stood at the base of such
assertions. As Neumann and Welsh (1991: 343â344) point out, it was
also part of the emergence of the European 'standard of civilization'
and the need to clearly define it against an uncivilized Other.

Western Europe's biased view has been the subject of quite a few
studies, not least among them Edward Said's Orientalism (published in
1978; see Schick 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 travelers on the way Ottomans thought about
their sexuality began even before the traveler wrote his or her book.
Leering at Ottoman customs and making fun of unorthodox practices were
common even during the trip. Several travelers describe events in
which they were present while other Westerners mocked the 'warped'
sexual tendencies of local Turks and Arabs (Enisi 1911: 116â118;
Grelot 1683: 9, 190â196).

Slade, so incisive about the immorality of Ottoman practices, also
reports Ottoman self-consciousness as such practices unfold. Reporting
on a party he attended, in which distinguished men of state preyed on
younger ones, trying to seduce them, he scoffs: "One grey-beard
actually seized a handsome lad belonging to the cadi with felonious
intent. The struggle was sharp between them, and the company stifled
with laughter at beholding the grimaces of the drunken old satyr." But
at the end of the party, the bey in charge, self-conscious and ashamed
of his society's 'hideous' sexual mores, prudently tells Slade that
this behavior takes place "only once in a way" and pleads with him not
to remark on it (Slade 1832: 2:395).

We also know that the travel books themselves reached elite circles in
the Ottoman world and influenced them. French was spoken by the elite
around the Mediterranean, from Istanbul to Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers,
and quite a few also read and spoke English. Bernard Lewis (2001: 144,
173) remarks that Slade's books were known at the center of the
empire. A number of other travelogues were translated, and even if in
many cases the sexual aspects were toned down or censored, enough was
left to convey the European condescension toward local sexual
practices. Ottoman readers were appalled when they looked in the
mirror set up for them by this genre. Their state and their society
were depicted as a nest of sexual corruption, with a clear link
established between homoerotic practices, the failure of modernity,
and political weakness. Mehmet Enisi, an Ottoman officer who traveled
to Europe on a military mission in the late nineteenth century,
describes a fascinating discussion he had with a French officer on the
trip. Strolling on the deck of a ship bound for Europe, the French
officer leers at Ottoman morality and derides the segregation 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 from
travel literature as well as from the type of Orientalist pulp fiction
written by Pierre Loti about Istanbul. The main point to note here is
Enisi's excellent acquaintance with European travel literature and
with its arguments, to which he already had ready answers (1911:
116â118).

During the nineteenth century, the Ottomans discovered Europe. Elite
circles in the Ottoman state were not alien to the world that lay to
the west of their borders, and visits of dignitaries and travelers are
known from the sixteenth century onwards. In the Tanzimat period,
however, the rate of visits to Europe increased considerably. Dozens
of books were published by these travelers, who, wherever they went,
encountered very common misconceptions about their 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
European morality as inferior to their own and pointed out its
deficiencies. The culmination of this process can be perceived in the
writings of Ahmed Midhat, a famous author, playwright, and traveler,
who visited Western Europe late in the century. In his book Avrupa'da
bir Cevelan, Midhat (1892) looks incessantly for the dividing line
between European superiority in science, technology, and material
achievement and its moral inferiority. Although his descriptions of
European social and sexual morality are often self-contradictory, he
focuses on the corruptibility of Western women as ultimate proof of
Ottoman Muslim superiority. In Vienna one night he listens to a coffee
shop owner describe the plight of numerous young fallen women. Some of
them, says the kahveci, come from respectable families. These girls,
educated and well mannered, leave their houses devoid of any means of
earning a living. They become musicians, singers, and even play in
theaters and casinos, only to finally 'fall to the street', where
their only option is prostitution. "Now I understand" says Midhat, in
a tone that does not fall short of Slade's cynicism, "why all these
female singers and musicians come in multitudes to Istanbul and then
move on to Izmir, Thessalonica, and even to Syria" (Midhat 1892: 1017;
see Findley 1998: 1, 15). His views about the dangers of
westernization and the evils of Europe are vindicated.

Other travelers, including Mehmet Enisi, Celal Nuri, and Jurji ZaydÄn,
repeated the same stories, insisting that while the West may have
achieved higher material standards and may have succeeded in righting
some wrongs of the old patriarchal system, 'Eastern' morality was
still superior to that of Europe (Enisi 1911: 116â118; SadÄk RÄfat
PaÅa 1874: 2:2â12; Sami 1840: 40; SeyahatnÃme-i Londra 1853: 92; Yared
1996: 52; ZaydÄn 1923: 41â46). The main point to be emphasized here is
not their praise for Ottoman morality or derision of European sex
mores. It is that in so doing, travelers from the Ottoman world were
actively reifying and remaking their own sexual world. What had been a
transparent universe of norms, views, and mores had suddenly become
opaque and set at center stage. The sexual differences between Europe
and the Ottoman world had become apparent, and the attempt to present
morality back home as superior was much more than an effort to counter
a Western offensive. It was in fact a re-creation of the Ottoman
sexual world as an improved version of the European one, an idealized
parody of bourgeois monogamous heteronormalcy (see Chattergee 1989:
622â633).

The end result of this counter-attack was a pendulum movement striking
back at the Ottoman world and shutting down entire sexual discursive
fields. On the one hand, the Occidentalist reaction drove home the
claim about the superiority of local morality. Readers of Turkish and
Arab travelogues were convinced that their sexual and moral conduct
was a source of pride, in contrast to Western decadence. On the other,
molding morality at home to fit the new standard presented as superior
necessitated far-reaching changes in the Ottoman attitude toward sex
and sexuality. In other words, while reassuring themselves 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 find fault with Europe but also to redefine their own moral
code to fit these new standards, or to create an ethics of sex that
heretofore had been absent from the discourse.

Older sexual discourses (to the extent that they were, in some deep
sense, unified previously) were now being hastily dismembered, but not
because a new meta-discourse emerged in their stead. As Laqueur and
Foucault rightly point out, changes in sexual discourse came about in
Europe only as a result of sweeping social, cultural, and political
changes, including a new role for women in the public sphere, the need
to increase control over the population, new definitions of
masculinity and femininity, and new conceptions of private space. In
the Ottoman world, the process was reversed. Prompted by an encounter
with a different sexual paradigm, changes in sexual discourse preceded
transformations in society and politics. One could assume that there
were several pre-existing notions of morality and sexuality within
Ottoman Middle Eastern society, one being pushed more at a contingent
moment and perhaps inflected in its contact with a politically
superior society able to persuade that its superiority drew on its
ethical norms, including normative behaviors. As older 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:
sexual discourse moved out of the textual sphere and into the arena of
male and female intimate circles, while a curtain of silence descended
on the text-bound sexual stage. Tahar Ben Jelloun's 'sand child',
Ahmad-Leyla, is, at base, a metaphor 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 orientation remains on the wide
margins and, most of all, a place of deep silence in which there are
no ready-made scripts for sexual conduct. Such is the result of this
century-long process that began with the old fatal encounter. Unfixed,
shifting, and hesitant, an oral discourse now wafts where an entire
discursive edifice once stood.

Dror Ze'evi is Senior Lecturer at Ben Gurion University. His published
titles include An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the
1600s (1996) and Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the
Ottoman Middle East, 1500â1900 (2006).

Notes
1. It is important to note in this respect that Bouhdiba's discussion
originates in the assumption that "true" original Islamic sex is
heterosexual and monogamous, and therefore all other 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 the Prophet to its immediate aftermath.
2. I have also consulted several manuscripts, among them mainly
BibliothÃque Nationale (Paris), Manuscrits Arabes, 5943. Ahmad
al-TifÄshi, The Delight of Hearts: Or What You 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
Poremba for this information.
3. Manuscripts are numerous, among them BibliothÃque Nationale
(Paris), Manuscrits Arabes, 3069, 3070.
4. Following is a small sample of manuscripts copying and elaborating
previous erotic books in Istanbul's SÃleymaniye Library. Ebu'l 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 Vehbi ef.
1408). Al-Samaw'al al-Maghribi, Nuzhat al-ashab (also called Kitab
al-bah, Åehid Ali PaÅa 2068/1). Kamal PaÅazade, Rucuc al-Åayh ila
Sabah (Matbaat-I Åerefiyye, Cairo, 1298h, Izmirli I. Hakki 1894).
Hasan b. Abd ar-Rahman, Bahname (H. HÃsnà PaÅa 1360/2). Shams al-Din
al-Vasiti, Macmac al-ahbab va tazkirat uli-l c'albab (Kara Celebi Zade
281, KÄlÄÃ Ali PaÅa 762, Laleli 2096â2097). AÅk HakkÄnda bir risale
(Bagdatli Vehbi Ef. 2023/29). There are many others.

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Yoshie