HIDING SEXUALITYThe 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 medi-cine and physiognomy, in religious writings and popular culture. Dur-ing the nineteenth century, much of this panoply of discussions about sex disappeared or was attenuated to such an extent that it became vir-tually non-existent. A similar phenomenon can be perceived in West-ern 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.

Key words: Arab, discourse, gender, Middle East, Ottoman, sexuality, Turkish

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 café 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

Social Analysis, Volume 49, Issue 2, Summer 2005, Social Analysis, Volume 49, Issue 2, Summer 2005, 34–53

Hiding Sexuality | 35

little while ago, I know some who would be quite willing to make love with him. They fi nd 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: 112–113)

These observations are echoed outside the literary sphere. The May 2001 “Queen Boat” incident in Cairo, in which police cracked down on a bar fre-quented 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: 32–34; Dunne 1996; Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb 2000). One of the best-known his-torical 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 envi-ronment, 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 fi ercely 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 sexu-ality, practiced in joy with a view to the fulfi llment of being” (ibid.).

This article raises questions concerning both parts of Bouhdiba’s conten-tion. First, was sexual discourse really repressed in the pre-colonial era?1 Sec-ond, 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 repres-sion 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

36 | Dror Ze’evi

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: 145–162). 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 presence—the “viola-tion 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”—needs 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: 3–10).

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 façade 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 signifi cant change. If true, this must be a crucial factor in explaining differences between these societies and cultures, even in the early twenty-fi rst century.

In order to retrace the trajectory and evaluate the narratives of Middle Eastern sexual discourse, we must fi rst 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.

Hiding Sexuality | 37

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. Numer-ous 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 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 is one slightly shortened medical description of heterosexual intercourse from a fi fteenth-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 pro-duce 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. Mastur-bation 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 unnecessar-ily, 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 fi rst, there is nothing in his purse. This time he unfortunately stays hungry. He cannot fi ll 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 specifi cally 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 con-temporary European medical treatises. Note the ambiguous gender of the male and female fi gures, which shall be referred to later on. (cItāqi 1990: 165–166).

FIGURE 1 Resemblance between Male and Female Genitals, Tashrīh al-abdīh al-abdī ān, Seventeenth Century

Hiding Sexuality | 39

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 plea-sure. 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 KāKāK 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 fi gure 1 demonstrate. Sixteenth-century Paracelsian medicine had its infl uence, 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, difference manifested the fact that woman was an imperfect version of man, differenceremained prominent. As manifest in Mehmet Ataullah Şanizade’s famous medi-cal compendium, which came to acquire the title Hamse-i şanizade (anizade (anizade Şanizade’s Five [Volumes]), the Ottomans held on to this concept of woman-as-imperfect-man even when medical knowledge in European treatises suggested otherwise (Şanizade 1820: 139–140; 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 discussed—the emphasis is on treatment of venereal disease and pregnancy problems, much less on potency and inter-course—and 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.

40 | Dror Ze’evi

Shadow Theater

Karagöz, 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 was brought over from Egypt by a sultan, Selim the Grim, after the conquest of Egypt in 1517. Other infl uences may have arrived from South-East Asia, and perhaps also from Spain, through Jewish immigrants in the late fi fteenth cen-tury (And 1977: 31–66; Kudret 1992: 1:7–11; Martinovitch [1933] 1968: 31–32; Siyavuşgil 1961: 4–12; 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: 159–191).

The Ottomans seem to have taken their plays a step further. Unlike earlier Mamluk versions, these plays had two regular protagonists, Karagöz and Haci-vat, 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 Karagöz seeks, usually failing miserably, and Çelebi, 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 predi-lections of the main protagonists.

In the sixteenth century, Ottoman ulema were asked for their opinion about ulema were asked for their opinion about ulemathe plays and their supposed sacrilegious nature. Ebüssuud, Sultan Süleyman’s famous Grand Mufti (şeyhülislam), was asked, for instance, whether a member of the ulema who attended one of these plays should be removed from offi ce. ulema who attended one of these plays should be removed from offi ce. ulemaKnowing 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 in order to learn its moral lesson [ibret], and thought about it with a tame mind [ehli hal fi kri ile tefekkür etti]” (Nüzhet 1930: 63–64). 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 Karagöz 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 writ-ers, were drawn to Karagöz 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 excentricité qu’il serait diffi cile de faire supporter chez nous” (so eccentric that it would be diffi cult to stage in France). In this scene, Karagöz, who was asked to watch over the wife of a friend in his absence, stands embarrassed near her house and tries to make

Hiding Sexuality | 41

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, Karagöz fi nally fi nds refuge in an ambassa-dor’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 homo-erotic love, and to other licentious practices. In one scene of the famous play The Great Wedding (Great Wedding (Great Wedding Buyük Evlenme), performed at the beginning of the twentieth century but going back at least a couple of centuries, Karagöz meets a posse of women who, as he fi nds 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 Karagöz, the women ask him about the groom. “He’s a thief and a scoundrel,” says Karagöz, trying to dissuade them from participating in the wedding he was lured into. “Well, so are we,” they reply. “He roams the area of Beyoğlu 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 exasper-ated Karagöz fi nally. “He’s also a pederast [mahbub dosttur]!” “So what? We mahbub dosttur]!” “So what? We mahbub dostturare women lovers [zen dost], too,” they answer, leaving him open-mouthed and speechless (Kudret 1992: 1:323–324).

This exchange of sexual banter, however, is a meager residue of the rich the-ater 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 incred-ibly 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 per-formances 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-vol-ume work, KaragöKaragöKarag s, Tüs, Tüs, T rkische 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 character-ize the earlier versions (Ritter 1924; see also Kudret 1992: 1:323–324).

42 | Dror Ze’evi

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 infl uenced by Indian and Persian traditions. In the Islamic heartland, it fl ourished in the Abbasid period with the adab literature, some of which was later integrated into the Thousand and One Nights. In the thirteenth century, a certain Shihāb al-Dīn al-Tifāshi of Tunisia wrote a well-known and very detailed book, Nuzhat al-albāb fi ma la yūjad fi kitūjad fi kitū āb (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 (Tifāshi 1992).2 Tifāshi’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 Nafzāwi’s Al-rawd. al-d al-d cātir (tir (tir 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 Tifāshi’s, Nafzāwi’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 aphro-disiacs (Nafzāwi 1993; see also Bouhdiba 1985: 40–147).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 Otto-man period produced quite a number of erotic works in prose and poetry, among them many pornographic poems, and several complete books (Schmidt 1993: 3–9, 235–236). 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 specifi c Ottoman setting (Kuru 2000, 2001). Another is KāKāK busname, a book of guidance to choosing sexual partners (Key-kavus). Most prominent among these books of the period is Kemalpaşazade’s Rujuc al-shaykh ila sibc al-shaykh ila sibc āh fi al-quwwa cala al-bāh (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, cālim, and historian, is claimed to have been translated from an unknown book by Tifāshi. Translated or com-piled, 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

Kemalpaşazade’s book does not deal with homoeroticism but describes com-prehensively 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 Tifāshi’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

Hiding Sexuality | 43

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 masturba-adult persons of their own sex. Some dedicate chapters to masturba-adulttion, 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-sakrān min sabba tidhkār al-ghizlān([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 com-piled 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, scientifi c studies on sex and sexuality that could have been undertaken in the twentieth century to study Isl-amicate 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 above—medical treatises, shadow theater plays, and erotic books—are 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 dis-cursive spheres not elaborated here, such as manuals of dream interpretation and Sufi poetry (Ze’evi forthcoming). Other textual genres, including jurispru-dence 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 devi-ant, 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.

44 | Dror Ze’evi

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 world of sex has been carefully pruned out of such texts. Sex-laced dialogues, not to mention graphic phallic displays, were warily excised from Karagöz 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 Gardenand The Delight of Hearts were whispered from mouth to ear—mainly in the intellectual elite, or in the circles of ulema who may have had access to old libraries—but 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, which previously referred explicitly to sexual offenses while condemning them, now began to discuss them in vague, oblique terms, using words such as “harass-ment” or “violation of honor” (Kanunname-i Ceza 1858). Sufi lore and poetry, Kanunname-i Ceza 1858). Sufi lore and poetry, Kanunname-i Cezain 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 and—through their seemingly desex-ualizing treatment of school, hospital, prison, home, and family—ended 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 inheri-tors 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 Salpêtrière 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 discus-sion. However, Bouhdiba’s claims are more substantiated as we approach the latter part of the nineteenth century. The fi nal curtain falls on sexual discourse at 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? Do we have any proof of its infl uence 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, transform-ing various discursive spheres. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Sufi spiritual exercises involving contemplation of handsome beardless boys

Hiding Sexuality | 45

to attain insight on godly love were echoed in prose and poetry as well as in texts extolling the virtues of dance rituals (dhikr, samāc, 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 ulema it endangered the very basis of Islamic ulemadogma. 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 Sufi s, facing mounting pressure, had to attenuate their open erotic practices. We see far less of this type of literature in the nineteenth century (Terzioğlu 1999: 214–219; Zilfi 1988: 136–149).

The same is true to a certain extent in the realm of the law. As Ottoman offi -cials codifi ed the free-fl owing discussion-style books of sharīcīcī a jurisprudence a jurisprudence ainto legal compendia and kanun regulations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of the more brazen discussions about sex gradually disap-peared, even from pure fi qh. 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 fl ourished 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 dis-course, one major development was the introduction of the printing press. Until the late eighteenth century, print in the region was either confi ned 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 Turk-ish (Göçek 1987: 108–115; 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

46 | Dror Ze’evi

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 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 theater plays and in popular versions of physiognomy and poetry. The advent of print-ing, therefore, supplies only a partial answer. The sense that this material was dangerous and should be censored must have fi rst 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, trad-ers, 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 here—the 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 a major 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, 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 man-kind 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: 263–269; Roger 1664: 296–308; Smith 1854: 24–26; Smyth 1854: 234–235; Ze’evi 1995: 158–161). While the majority of travelogues follow this trajectory to the eighteenth century and later, another can be seen developing alongside.

Hiding Sexuality | 47

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 sensibili-ties 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 suffi cient 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 … qualifi ed to undertake the task [of reforming it], is it likely that he will be found among the ministers of Mahmoud II, who are, four-fi fths of them, bought slaves from Circassia, or from Georgia—whose recommendation was a pretty face—whose chief merit, a prostitution of the worst of vices, whose schedule of services, suc-cessful 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 more—a disease of the state, a corrupt form of government. Four-fi fths 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 Karagöz plays (Colton 1860: 159–160; D’Aubignosc 1839: 319–330; Nerval [1843] 1998: 202–204; Roland 1854: 146–147; 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 Neu-mann and Welsh (1991: 343–344) point out, it was also part of the emergence of the European ‘standard of civilization’ and the need to clearly defi ne it against an uncivilized Other.

48 | Dror Ze’evi

Western Europe’s biased view has been the subject of quite a few stud-ies, 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: 116–118; Grelot 1683: 9, 190–196).

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 stifl ed with laughter at beholding the grimaces of the drunken old satyr.” But at the end of the party, the bey in charge, self-con-scious 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 infl uenced 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 homo-erotic practices, the failure of modernity, and political weakness.

Mehmet Enisi, an Ottoman offi cer who traveled to Europe on a military mission in the late nineteenth century, describes a fascinating discussion he had with a French offi cer on the trip. Strolling on the deck of a ship bound for Europe, the French offi cer 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 from travel literature as well as from the type of Orientalist pulp fi ction 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: 116–118).

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,

Hiding Sexuality | 49

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 Euro-pean morality as inferior to their own and pointed out its defi ciencies. The culmination of this process can be perceived in the writings of Ahmed Mid-hat, 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-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 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 fi nally ‘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 Zaydān, 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: 116–118; Sadık Rıfat Paşa 1874: 2:2–12; Sami 1840: 40; Seyahatnâme-i Londra 1853: 92; Yared 1996: 52; ZaydLondra 1853: 92; Yared 1996: 52; ZaydLondra ān 1923: 41–46). 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 sud-denly become opaque and set at center stage. The sexual differences between Europe 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 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: 622–633).

The end result of this counter-attack was a pendulum movement striking back at the Ottoman world and shutting down entire sexual discursive fi elds. 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 con-trast to Western decadence. On the other, molding morality at home to fi t the new standard presented as superior necessitated far-reaching changes in the

50 | Dror Ze’evi

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 fi nd fault with Europe but also to redefi ne their own moral code to fi t 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, unifi ed 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 defi nitions of masculinity and femininity, and new conceptions of pri-vate space. In the Ottoman world, the process was reversed. Prompted by an encounter with a different sexual paradigm, changes in sexual discourse pre-ceded 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 infl ected 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: sex-ual 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 orienta-tion 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. Unfi xed, shifting, and hesitant, an oral discourse now wafts where an entire discursive edifi ce 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, 1500–1900 (2006).

Hiding Sexuality | 51

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 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 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Manuscrits Arabes, 5943. Ahmad al-Tifāshi, 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 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Manuscrits Arabes, 3069, 3070.

4. Following is a small sample of manuscripts copying and elaborating previous erotic books in Istanbul’s Süleymaniye 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, lezze (Ayasofya O.3836, Ayasofya O.3837, Fatih 3729, Laleli 1616, Ibrahim Ef. 575m, lezzeHaci 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, şehid Ali Paşa 2068/1). Kamal Paşazade, Rucuc al-c al-c şayh ila Sabah (Matbaat-I şerefi yye, Cairo, 1298h, Izmirli I. Hakki 1894). Hasan b. Abd ar-Rahman, Bahname (H. Hüsnü Paşa 1360/2). Shams al-Din al-Vasiti, Macmac al-ahbab va tazkirat uli-lc al-ahbab va tazkirat uli-lc ’albab (Kara Celebi Zade 281, Kılıç Ali Paşa 762, Laleli 2096–2097). Aşk Hakkında bir risale (Bagdatli Vehbi nda bir risale (Bagdatli Vehbi nda bir risaleEf. 2023/29). There are many others.

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