1
The full version of this text with notes and references was published in Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen:
Defining Islam for the Egyptian State. Muftis and Fatwas of Dar al-Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp 319-34
NEVER CHANGE YOUR SEX IN CAIRO
ISLAMIC REACTIONS TO SOME MODERN SURGERY
Ṭālib ad-dunya mu’annath, ṭālib al-ākhira mukhannath,
ṭālib al-mawlā mudhakkar
"The seeker of the world is feminine, the seeker of the otherworld
is a hermaphrodite, and the seeker of the Lord is masculine"
Medieval Sufi saying.
The event
In 1982 Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh, a 19-year-old student of medicine at al-Azhar
university, contacted a psychologist complaining that he was suffering from
extreme depression, and asked for psychological treatment. The psychologist,
Salwā Jirjis Labīb, examined him and discovered that he suffered from a
disturbance of his sexual identity, or more precisely, psychological
hermaphroditism (al-khunūtha an-nafsīya). She treated him for three years,
making all possible effort to restore a male sexual identity to him, but
eventually she had to give up. She explained the failure as inevitable in cases
like this where treatment is begun after puberty. Salwā Jirjis then referred him
to the surgeon ʿIzzat ʿAsham Allāh Jibrāʿīl, to have sex-change surgery
2
performed.
Given the seriousness of the operation, Jibrāʿīl referred Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh
to another psychologist, Hānī Najīb. Najīb soon reached the same diagnosis
and agreed that surgery would be the best course. He therefore set out to
prepare the patient for it. For a year Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh was treated with female
hormones, while experimenting with dressing up like a woman and living with
the other sex. This stage lasted for about a year, whereupon Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh
signed a request to have the surgery performed.
This was done on January 29, 1988. The surgeon ʿIzzat ʿAsham Allāh
Jibrāʿīl removed the penis and created a new urinal orifice and an artificial
vagina. This is the standard procedure in sex-change operations. The
operation went well; Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh soon recovered. According to his
psychologist Salwā Jirjis, he took the name Sally and today lives happily and
satisfied with her female identity.
The case
The story could end here, but it does not. What Sally soon found out was that
this operation was not just a personal matter, but involved a number of
authorities, apart from arousing a huge interest in the media and the
population at large. It could be most interesting to interview Sally about her
childhood, the time at the al-Azhar, and so forth. This is not what I am going
to do. This study will focus on the reactions in the media and among religious
authorities, primarily the Mufti of the Republic, Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī.
The phenomenon of sex-change operations is a rather complex one, and I
must confess that I am myself at a loss as to what to think of it. This study,
then, is not trying to depict the ulamā as adverse to a beneficial and in any
event inevitable modernization. It assumes, however, that responses to a
3
sex-change operation are bound to be strong in a society which has
traditionally been characterized by a clear separation of the sexes, an issue
which is again at the top of the agenda due to the Islamic awakening taking
place in these years.
The first thing that happened after the operation was that the Dean of the
Medical Faculty refused to admit Sally for the final exams. At the same time,
he refused to transfer her to the Medical Faculty for girls (absolutely separated
from that of the boys, and situated in another part of town). Realizing that she
would need official recognition of her new sex and name, Sally applied to the
Administration of Civil Matters to have her name changed from Sayyid
Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh to Sally Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh.
News about the operation broke on April 4, 1988. In an interview with
al-Ahrām Sally talked about her difficulties at al-Azhar which dated back long
before the operation, "it is strange that they still want to punish me, now that I
have actually become a woman, - as if I committed a crime at the moment I
entered the operating room." Responding to this remark, al-Azhar issued a
declaration stating that it had set up a special committee for the investigation
of the case, and when a couple of months before the operation the committee
had examined Sayyid (performing among other things an ultra-sound
examination of the prostata) it had come to the conclusion that he was one
hundred percent male, both outwardly and inwardly. After the operation Sally
had refused to be examined by the committee again. Sally herself, who looked
sexily out to the reader holding a pair of sunglasses to her mouth, saw no
reason why she should suffer yet another examination: she confirmed that
although she had known about her female identity for long, it was only now
she had become "a cheerful girl", and she was planning to marry soon and
would wear the veil.
4
Sally's provocative behaviour and the grave accusations of al-Azhar
together created a stir in the media which was to last for months. Clearly,
al-Azhar maintained that she had committed a crime, or rather, he had, for far
from changing a sex the doctor had in fact mutilated a man whose motives, it
was suggested, were of the basest sexual nature: by claiming himself a woman
Sayyid was trying to have legitimate sexual intercourse with another man.
Having received a number of complaints about the operation, the
representative of the Doctors' Syndicate (Niqābat al-Aṭbā) in Giza, Doctor
Ḥusām ad-Dīn Khaṭīb, examined the case and summoned the surgeon, Jabrā’īl,
the anaestetist, Ramzī Michel Jādd, and the psychologist to discuss the case
with three doctors appointed by the Syndicate. The Syndicate, it must be said,
has since 1984 been dominated by the Islamic movement. The three doctors
agreed that the surgeon had committed a serious medical error by not
confirming the presence of a disease before operating.
The Doctors' Syndicate found support in the declaration from the
committee of the Azhar University. Presumably aggrieved at the discovery that
such an operation had been performed on one of its students the Committee
handed over its findings to the Doctors' Syndicate in order that it examine the
case and hold the surgeon responsible. The Azhar Committee and the Doctor's
Syndicate were in agreement that a grave error had been committed; the right
procedure would have been to stop the hormonal treatment and continue with
a purely psychological cure.
On May 14, 1988 the Doctors' Syndicate sent a letter to the Mufti of the
Republic, Sayyid Ṭanṭāwī, asking him for a fatwa on the matter. His fatwa,
which is reproduced below, concluded that if the doctor testified that this was
the only cure against the disease, then this treatment was permissible. It
must, however, never be performed at the mere wish of a man to become a
woman, or vice versa. This fatwa was not quite to the point, since it evaded the
5
question of whether the diagnosis of psychological hermaphroditism was
acceptable from the point of view of Islamic law. Consequently, opponents of
the operation interpreted it as supporting their cause, because it condemned
sex-change operations performed simply at the wish of the patient. On the
other hand, Sally's party (and, eventually, the Public Prosecutor) saw it as
supportive to their position, because it placed the final decision with the
medical doctor.
On June 12, 1988, al-Azhar took the case to court, claiming that the
surgeon was liable to punishment for inflicting a permanent disease upon the
patient according to ʿ 240 in the penal code. The Public Prosecutor (an-Niyāba
al-ʿāmma) carried out an investigation.
The Public Prosecutor summoned Fakhrī Ṣāliā, the medical examiner.
Ṣāliā consulted the relevant scientific literature on the subject, as well as the
Medical Counselor for the Hospital Sector. They agreed that while from a
purely physical point of view Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh had been a man,
psychologically speaking he was not; the diagnosis of psychological
hermaphroditism had been accurate, and it was correct that after puberty this
disease is only curable by means of a surgical operation. The surgeon had
been following the rules of his profession, consulting relevant specialists, and
the operation had been performed properly. He had not inflicted any
permanent physical disablement on the patient. The patient could be regarded
(yuʿtabar) as a female, although lacking uterus, ovary and menstruation.
Finally, he examined Sally on September 12 and concluded that the anus had
not been recently nor continously used for sodomy (liwāṭan).
The Doctors' Syndicate did not accept the findings of the medical
examiner, but insisted that the surgeon had operated on a man who was as
much a man as any man. A meeting was held where they exchanged views on
the matter. Shortly before that, on November 11, the Doctors' Syndicate gave a
6
press conference where it stated that the operation was not a matter only for
specialists, but had been a case of public morals and therefore of public
interest. It was an assault on the principles, values, ethics and religion of
Egyptian society. Consequently, the Syndicate deleted ʿIzzat ʿAsham Allāh
Jibrāʿīl of its membership records, and the anaestetist Ramzī Jādd was fined
£E 300 for his participation in the operation.
On December 29, 1988, the Public Prosecutor acquitted the surgeon
ʿAsham Allāh Jibrāʿīl of the charge of inflicting a permanent disease. The final
report confirmed that the operation had been performed properly according to
the standards of these operations. Almost a year passed before he closed the
Sally case in October 1989, and in November Sally finally received the
certificate stating that she was a woman, almost two years after the operation.
Her grievances did not end here, however, for al-Azhar still would not recognize
her as a woman and admit her to the Medical Faculty for girls. It took another
charge and another one and a half year before the Administrative Court
repealed the Azhar decision of expelling Sally and allowed her to enter any
university she might wish in order to pass her final exams.
The press
This is the story of Sally. Let us now take a closer look at some of the themes
discussed in the Egyptian press. The first thing to be noted is that differences
in the press treatment did not strictly follow along political lines, and that I
have only come across one single comment on the case made by a woman.
Both governmental and oppositional newspapers made critical and supportive
comments; they were informative about the development of the case, but many
of them also became the vehicles of a heated debate between partisans and
opponents of the operation, even if the opponents were almost invariably in the
7
majority. I did not, however, find any positive evaluation of the operation in
any Islamic newspaper.
What we have seen in the debate and in the legal proceedings is a struggle over
Sally's sex. Everybody seems to agree that she cannot decide this on her own -
it is a public issue. The psychologists say that she is now a woman, but used
to suffer from psychological hermaphroditism, whereas al-Azhar and its
supporters maintain that she is a man, and has always been one. Al-Azhar
does not accept a psychological diagnosis and insists that the body cannot lie:
every individual has a true sex which can be discovered by close examination.
This is one of the basic dividing lines in the case, and it is by no means new;
from the Islamic camp, psychology is often suspected of being a Western
science bent on changing the mores of Egyptian society. As a professor of
psychology succinctly remarked, "the case is not a new one, but it highlights a
new concept [that of psychological hermaphroditism] and thus raises an
important issue: which should hold the primary position: the soul or the
body?"
To the Azhar professor of physiology it raises no such question, but
rather another, practical one: "which medical, moral or legal means may be
applied to prevent a repetition of a tragedy which has caused so much
confusion (balbala) in the population?" He goes on to state that there was
nothing 'transsexual' about the case, which was simply a question of
'sodomistic inclinations'. 'Transsexual' is the diagnosis used to legitimize
operations transforming men into artificial women in order to satisfy their
abominable sexual demands. Research has established, however, that their
mental state is due to failures in their upbringing, mainly caused by parents
who spoiled them too much and gave them little discipline, or even gave their
boy a girl's name, or their girl a boy's. This is all perverse, and will lead to
8
perverse results. The important thing, then, is to defend Egyptian values,
principles and religion against any deviation (inḥirāf) leading to perversity. To
sum up: Sayyid was a man and whatever inclinations he may have had were
not inborn, but acquired. By acquiescing in the operation, the doctors had
departed from medical grounds and had simply given in to Sayyid's
perversities.
According to the Azhar view, God has created mankind in pairs and His
Revelation makes it clear that the distinction between the sexes (as well as the
one between believer and unbeliever) is the fundamental distinction whereupon
society is founded. Their interaction may pose a threat to the social order, and
this threat (which mainly emanates from the woman) must be contained. In
this, the Azharis are to a large degree in accordance with earlier Muslim
societies, to whom the male-female distinction was so crucial that
hermaphrodites posed a dilemma of some seriousness, as can be witnessed
from the number of discussions on the status of the hermaphrodite found in
Medieval Muslim legal literature. Paula Sanders has recently analysed this
material and has dubbed the very elaborate legal prescriptions laid down for
the exact determination of a sex a form of gendering the ungendered body; that
is, attributing a sex to a body which did not possess only one sex, simply for
the sake of preserving a binary system:
If medieval Muslim jurists had an overriding anxiety, it was not any of
the particular concerns - incest taboos, modesty, segregation, or even
hierarchy - that organized their negotiation of gender, but maintaining
the gendered integrity of their world as a whole. Their received view of
the world was as a place with only two sexes, male and female...A person
with ambiguous genitalia or with no apparent sex might have been a
biological reality, but it had no gender and, therefore, no point of entry
into the social world: it was unsocialized.
9
One is reminded of the Azhar reaction to Sally: she could not continue
with the male students, nor could she be transferred to the girls'
department. Like the hermaphrodite, she is "gendered", and as we
saw, she cannot understand what could be the problem now that she
is clearly a woman: the way she sees it she "went from the world of
men to the world of women." To al-Azhar, however, she had already
been gendered as a man, according to a mixture of the old juridical
techniques and modern medical ones, both focusing on the body and
denying the possibility of a psychological hermaphroditism. She had
been a man, and was still a man, but now less so, because she had
been bereft of her male sexual organs and been attributed with
artificial (and imperfect) female ones. She was not a full man,
definitely not a woman, and not a true hermaphrodite. What was she
then? One or two people argued that she had become a eunuch, an
interesting idea, considering that eunuchs were in Medieval Islamic
societies precisely the persons who were permitted to travel between
the men's and the women's spheres and often were in charge of the
Harem. Consequently, if Sally was a eunuch she would be allowed to
enter both the male and the female Medical Faculty. Eunuchs were,
however, not supposed to dress up like women. The Azhar took a
much more negative stand: Sally was fundamentally a khawal, that is
an effeminate man who is willing to play a passive, female role in
sexual intercourse with other men, a well-known term of abuse in
Egypt denoting the lowest and most despicable kind of manliness.
The operation had turned this khawal (who was still a man) into an
artificial woman. This was the opposite of gendering: the surgeon
had ungendered a gendered body, and this new ungendered body was
of a new type altogether, betwixt and between, equally unacceptable in
10
the girls' and in the boys' Medical Faculty, because it really had no
point of re-entry into social life. In an article in Rose al-Yussuf, ʿAbd
Allāh Mabrūk an-Najjār, teacher of Islamic law at al-Azhar, sets out to
do what a medieval Islamic legal scholar (faqīh) would have done:
discussing the rules for this new case in relation to engagement,
marriage and so forth. Moreover, an-Najjār lists a number of reasons
why Sally (or rather: Sayyid) is liable to punishment from the point of
view of Islamic law: firstly, he made himself a hermaphrodite (and
hermaphroditism is punishable, because it leads to the abominable
crime of homosexuality, which is "the worst crime in which a society
can become entangled"). Secondly, he made a doctor of the type who
is craving for fame mutilate him so that he became a deformed man, -
and mutilation of oneself is a crime according to Islamic law. Finally,
this deformation was made not in order that he could beget children,
which is the proper context of sexual desire, - but solely in order to
indulge in sexual acts, and such a marriage for sexual pleasure (zawāj
mutāʿa) is also illegal. There are thus plenty of reasons why he should
be punished from an Islamic point of view.
It is my impression that the Sally case provided an opportunity for
so-called "moderates" on the Islamic wing to enhance their Islamic
credentials by opposing the operation in an agitated fashion. This is
most characteristic of the comments made by these teachers at
al-Azhar who fought to defend Azhar's position and wanted Sally
punished. This, I believe, is the main reason why the Sally case
became such a hot issue compared to other sex-change operations.
Another reason is Sally's age: she was no longer a minor. As argued
by the Public Prosecutor, Sayyid had been a grown-up student who
had made a decision for himself after a considerable period of
11
reflexion. To the Azhar conservatives, far from being an argument,
this was an aggravating circumstance: Sayyid had made a deliberate
choice on an issue where there ought to be no choice at all.
To the Islamic movement and its press, the case looked a little
different. First of all, there was nothing very surprising about it:
sex-change operations were bound to happen sooner or later, given
the direction in which Egyptian society was moving. The details of the
case were of relative minor interest, since there would be little point in
just blaming Sally or her doctor, blamable though they might be. To
the Islamists, Sally was but a symptom of all the evils of Egyptian
society today, a society which to the more radical Islamic wing is
simply anti-Islamic (jāhilī). The Islamic press was therefore much less
preoccupied with the Sally case as such, but occasionally it referred to
"the age of Sally" Why is Sally an apt symbol of the evils of society?
Because she literally embodies all its evils. Consider the case from an
Islamist point of view: a fundamental difference between Islamic
society and other, especially Western societies is the attitude to the
sexes. While Islamic society, in accordance with the Koran, maintains
the fundamental difference and complementarity of the sexes, this
natural difference is blurred and denied in the West. There, men have
become effeminate and women masculine, due to the mixing (ikhtilāṭ)
of the sexes in schools, work and society at large, not to mention in
the Western indulgence in illicit sex. By contrast, in the virtuous
Islamic society, men's and women's worlds are separate, and strict
rules regulate their co-existence. The most important contacts
between men and women take place inside the family, and the only
way of relating properly to a person of the other sex with whom one
12
does not share blood is through marriage. Outside these legal ways of
interrelation there are a number of illicit ways, the most grave of these
being fornication (zinā), a key concept of the Islamic movement's
diagnosis of Egyptian society, since it is not normally punished in
Egypt though being one of the five principal punishments (ḥudūd)
mentioned in the Koran.
Sally's body, then, becomes the perfect symbol of what is wrong in
our age, or even of what has happened to the body of believers, the
umma: here we have a Muslim youth studying at the venerable
Islamic Azhar university, who consults specialists of Western
psychology (one of them being a woman) and is told to follow his
perverse inclinations towards becoming a woman. Significantly, the
names of the psychologist, the surgeon and the anaestecist reveal that
they are Christians. The surgery (a technique imported from the
West) is performed, and Sayyid changes his Muslim male name into a
non-Muslim female one. And what comes out is neither male nor
female, but something in between the two, a mix. Indeed, we live in
"the age of Sally" (fī āṣr Sālī) where men and women are mixed in all
sorts of ways, due to the Western corruption of Egypt: Sally is the
literal embodiment of the Western castration of Muslim society and
culture. The "age of Sally"-reaction considers Sally less of a criminal
and more of a victim than does the Azhar reaction.
The fatwa
Immediately after news had broken about the operation, Egypt's
muftis were asked for fatwas on the question. As we know, apart from
the Mufti of the Republic there are the president of al-Azhar's Fatwa
13
Council (Lajnat al-Fatwā) and the mufti of the High Council for Islamic
Affairs (al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li 'sh-Shu'ūn al-Islāmīya), who publish their
fatwas in the periodicals of these two institutions. The two former
were immediately consulted by the journalists, at a time when few
details about Sally were known, and both answered that sex-change
surgery could be performed if the medical experts assured that this
was the only way whereby the patient might obtain his true sex. The
mufti of the High Council, however, did not publish a fatwa until
October 1988, when he denounced the operation because it had
transformed a man into something neither man nor woman, but much
akin to a hermaphrodite, which was ironic since this was precisely the
disease the doctor had purported to cure.
As mentioned above, the Mufti of the Republic was consulted by the
Doctors' Syndicate in May 1988 for a fatwa on the subject. Given the
official inquiry, this fatwa is much longer and better argued. It is
reproduced below from the records of the Mufti's Administration, the
Dar al-Ifta:
FATWA ON SEX-CHANGE OPERATION, JUNE 8, 1988
To the honoured general secretary of the Doctors' General Syndicate.
This is an answer to the Syndicate's letter number 483 of May 14, 1988,
asking for the opinion of religion on the matter of a student of medicine
at the al-Azhar university, who has been subjected to a surgical
operation (removing his male organs) in order to turn him into a girl.
We find
that it is transmitted from ʿUsāma ibn Shārik: "A bedouin came to the
Prophet and said, 'O, Messenger of God, can you cure?' And He said,
'Yes, for God did not send a disease without sending a cure for it,
knowing it from His knowledge... This [Hadith] is told by Aḥmad [ibn
14
Ḥanbal]. There is another version: "Some bedouins said, 'O, Messenger
of God, can you cure?' And He said, 'Yes, God's servants can cure
themselves, for God never gave a disease without providing a cure or a
medicine for it, except for one disease.' They asked, 'O, Prophet of God,
what disease is that?' He said, 'old age.' This version is related by ibn
Mājā, abū Dā’ūd, at-Tirmīdhī, and others. (Muntaqā 'l-Akhbār wa
Sharāuhu nayl al-Awṭār, v. 8, p. 200, and Fatḥ al-Bārī bi Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ
al-Bukhārī, by al-ʿAsqalānī, v. 9, p. 273, in the chapter on those who
imitate women).
As for the condemnation of those who by word and deed resemble
women, it must be confined to one who does it deliberately (tashahhada
dhalika), while one who is like this out of a natural disposition must be
ordered to abandon it, even if this can only be achieved step by step.
Should he then not comply, but persist [in his manners], the blame shall
include him, as well - especially if he displays any pleasure in doing so.
The person who is by nature a hermaphrodite (mukhannath khalqī) is
not to be blamed. This is based on [the consideration that] if he is not
capable of abandoning the female, swinging his hips in walking and
speaking in a feminine way, after having been subjected to treatment
against it, [he is at least willing to accept that] it is still possible for him
to abandon it, if only gradually. But if he gives up the cure with no good
excuse, then he deserves blame.
Aṭ-Ṭabārī took it as an example that the Prophet (God bless him and
grant him salvation) did not forbid the hermaphrodite from entering the
women's quarters until he heard him giving a description of the woman
in great detail. Then he prohibited it. This proves that no blame is on
the hermaphrodite for simply being created that way.
That being so, the rulings derived from these and other noble hadiths
on treatment grant permission to perform an operation changing a man
into a woman, or vice versa, as long as a reliable doctor concludes that
there are innate causes in the body itself, indicating a buried (maṭmūra)
female nature, or a covered (maghmūra) male nature, because the
operation will disclose these buried or covered organs, thereby curing a
corporal disease which cannot be removed, except by this operation.
This is also dealt with in a hadith about cutting a vein, which is
15
related through Jābir: "The Messenger of God sent a physician to abū
ibn Kaʿb. The physician cut a vein and burned it." This Hadith is
related by Aḥmad [ibn Ḥanbal] and Muslim. What supports this view is
what al-Qasṭallānī and al-ʿAsqalānī say in their commentaries on it:
"This means that it is incumbent upon the hermaphrodite to remove the
symptoms of femininity."
And this is further sustained by the author of Fatḥ al-Bārī who says
"..having given him treatment in order to abandon it..." This is a clear
proof that the duty prescribed for the hermaphrodite can take the form
of a treatment. The operation is such a treatment, perhaps even the best
treatment.
This operation cannot be granted at the mere wish to change sex with no
clear and convincing corporal motives. In that case it would fall under
that noble Hadith which al-Bukhārī relates through Anas: "The
Messenger of God cursed the hermaphrodites among the men and the
over-masculine women, saying 'expel them from their houses',
whereupon the Prophet himself (God bless him and grant him salvation)
expelled one, and ʿUmar expelled another one." This Hadith is related by
Aḥmad and al-Bukhārī.
To sum up: It is permissible to perform the operation in order to
reveal what was hidden of male or female organs. Indeed, it is obligatory
to do so on the grounds that it must be considered a treatment, when a
trustworthy doctor advises it. It is, however, not permissible to do it at
the mere wish to change sex from woman to man, or vice versa.
Praise be to He who created, who is mighty and guiding. From what
has been said, the answer to what was in the question will be known.
Praise be to God the most High.
This is a rather difficult fatwa, and so vague that both parties cited it
in support of their position, as we have seen. In order to make sense
of it, we shall divide it into sections.
The first part consists of various versions of a Hadith the meaning of
which amounts to the observation that there is a cure for every
16
disease, and consequently also for hermaphroditism. This is a
standard introduction in Ṭanṭāwī's medical fatwas; thus, for instance
in the fatwa from 1989 on organ transplantation. It reveals his
eagerness to support medical progress as long as it does not infringe
on Islamic moral principles.
Next, Ṭanṭāwī discusses those men who resemble women, that is
hermaphrodites. Here he has consulted the various Hadiths on the
subject, as they have been recorded and commented upon by the
famous Egyptian Hadith scholar ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1448). One
particular Hadith is commented upon; it tells how a hermaphrodite at
the conquest of Ta'if promised to lead one of the warriors to a lady
who had four tyres of fat under her stomach and eight over her hips.
When the Prophet heard about this offer, he forbade his wives ever to
let a hermaphrodite into their chambers. Following al-ʿAsqalānī and
aṭ-Ṭabārī (d. 923), Ṭanṭāwī deduces that since there was nothing
wrong with the hermaphrodite until it was discovered that he had
been spying on the women, a hermaphrodite cannot be blamed for
being created as such. There are two different types of
hermaphrodites, those who are so by birth, and those who have
acquired their manners. Both must be told to strive to free
themselves from the hermaphroditism, even if this will be a slow
process. They must not indulge in it.
Third, Ṭanṭāwī concludes that hermaphroditism is something which
must be cured, if possible, and if a doctor asserts that a surgical
operation is the only way to do it, then he must go ahead and perform
one, be it from man to woman, or vice versa. Here he makes an
interesting remark: what the doctor should be looking for are a
buried female or a covered male nature, which can then be brought to
17
light by means of the surgery. This amounts to saying that every
human being has one true sex which may be covered by limbs or
organs belonging to the other sex. The truth, however, is always
underneath. Ṭanṭāwā thus makes a distinction between an outward
appearance (ẓāhir), which may be deceptive, and an inward essence
(bāṭin), which is always true - a well-known and important theme in
Muslim culture.
Fourth, a Hadith about the Prophet sending a physician to a man to
cut a vein is taken as evidence that removing parts of the body
through surgery is permitted. Combining this with ibn Ḥajar
al-ʿAsqalānī's remark that the hermaphrodite must strive to abandon
his state, Ṭanṭāwī deduces that it is permissible to perform surgery to
remove limbs or organs which do not belong to the hermaphrodite's
true sex.
As the fifth point, Ṭanṭāwī finally relates the Hadith which seems to
be most to the point and according to which the Prophet cursed
hermaphrodites and overly masculine women and expelled one of
them from his house. This Hadith, however, is taken not to signify a
general curse on hermaphrodites, but rather a prohibition against
performing a sex-change operation for the fun of it. It must be a
treatment, curing hermaphrodites by revealing their true sex.
What is Ṭanṭāwī doing in this fatwa? Basically he is quoting a former
Mufti of the Republic, Jādd al-Ḥaqq ʿAlā Jādd al-Ḥaqq, who issued a
fatwa on sex-change operations in response to an enquiry from the
Malaysian Center for Islamic Research in 1981. What, then, are they
doing? They are not referring to the elaborate fiqh discussions of
hermaphrodites and the like, but they discuss some of the Hadiths of
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the Prophet on the issue in order to come up with a new ruling to this
new phenomenon, which means in legal terms that they are practicing
ijtihād. There are around a handful of Hadiths dealing with
hermaphroditism and transvestitism, all apparently quite hostile
towards them; in several of them the Prophet expells the
hermaphrodite to the desert. One of the first things to decide is which
of the Hadith gives the most general rule. Ṭanṭāwī and Jādd al-Ḥaqq
both focus on the one where a hermaphrodite is expelled as a
punishment for having revealed the secrets of the harem and conclude
that, inversely, if he had not done this he would not have been
expelled. From this they conclude that those who are hermaphrodites
by nature cannot be blamed for it, as long as they strive to rid
themselves of this ambiguity and move towards increased sexual
unambiguity. If they move in the other direction - that is towards
ambiguity, indulging in their hermaphroditism - then they are to
blame and must be banished from the social world.
Ṭanṭāwī thus stresses that the correct position for a hermaphrodite is
to be on the move away from the hermaphroditic state, that is under
treatment. Surgery is such a treatment. In order to sustain the idea
of the hermaphrodite being on the way either further into or out of his
state, - that is, hermaphroditism as a process - Ṭanṭāwī maintains the
dogma that every human being has only one sex, which is its true sex.
In this way, hermaphroditism is reduced to being corporal and
psychological movements and manifestations denying this true sex.
Consequently, the task of the doctor will be to identify which of the
ambivalent outward forms corresponds to the true inner sex, which he
describes as hidden, or covered. As mentioned, the task of identifying
the true, inward (bāṭin) essence behind misleading, outward (ẓāhir)
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manifestations, is well-known to the Islamic tradition; that is also the
concern of the mystic, the philosopher, and possibly even the
theologian. It is called ta’wīl, a key concept in the Islamic
understanding of the search for truth. The search for the true sex is a
search for the truth about a human being. This idea is not altogether
alien to western thought, either. In the preface to the book Herculine
Barbin dite Alexina B., Michel Foucault describes the shift in mentality
when, with the break-through of the medical sciences in the 18th
century, the possibility of a body having two sexes was abandoned
and the idea of a true sex gained ground. One of the casualties in this
new and more rigid understanding of the true sex - and indeed of an
intimate relationship between sex (or gender) and truth - were the
hermaphrodites who were now all taken to be "pseudo
hermaphrodites".
Mufti Ṭanṭāwī seems to be squarely on the side of medicine in this
matter. Defending a binary sexual system, he maintains that every
human being has one sex and only one. While to medieval Muslim
jurists gendering was a way of eliminating ungendered bodies, to
Ṭanṭāwī they simply cannot exist in the first place: the surgery
performed on Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh was no 'gendering of an ungendered
body', for such a thing as an ungendered body does not exist. Rather,
the surgery was a re-gendering of a body whose sex had been socially
and physically disguised but was nevertheless not changed in the
least by the operation: far from legalizing a sex-change operation,
Ṭanṭāwī's fatwa denied the possibility of performing one altogether.