Homoeroticisms and

Historiographical Backgrounds
of the Islamic World
One of the biographers of the Ottoman poet Azîzî, who lived in the
second half of the sixteenth century, had written of him that he
loved women. “Only God has no faults,” he commented, thereby
indicating his own preference for boys. [1] The issue of masculine
“homosensuality” in the Islamic world, more or less explicitly
referred to as a commonly widespread “homosexuality” or
“bisexuality,” and even socially accepted, was long evident. In
anthropological terms, it was seen as implicitly Mediterranean,
necessarily linking sexual segregation with homo-social
groupings leading to homoeroticism, or related in a nebulous and
little-explained way to Greco-Roman antiquity and the famous
coupling of Erastus and Eromenos. But this comparison, more
suggested than proven, was never developed.

An organic link between the confinement of women, the

separation of the sexes and homoeroticism has thus been taken
for granted for a long time in the social sciences of the Islamic
world. From a fundamentally heteronormative humanist and
activist perspective, men’s and boys’ lack of access to women,
the segregation of the masculine and feminine worlds, would have
been at the root of the reversion, “pathological” by definition, to
homosexuality. This analysis was in line with the general
interpretation of masculine homosexuality as being caused by
lack of access to women, common in armies and prisons.

This framework played a key role in a number of understandings

of the history of sexuality in Islam from the end of the nineteenth
century and at the beginning of the twentieth, and in particular in
the reference work by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam,
which appeared in 1975 and has been constantly republished ever
since. [2] Such an analysis has nonetheless been totally called
into question, for several years, by an outpouring of studies on
masculine homoeroticism in Islam—love and relationships
between women remaining clearly understudied. [3] This new
wave of research included primarily studies conducted in the field
of literature, but in history as well, the historical research
highlighting, specifically, the history of the homoerotic link in the
political history of the Islamic world. [4]

Among the most recent publications, four works appear to merit

particular attention, and not only for their readings of the
evolution of gender relationships in Islam and the question of
“sexuality”—not only in that it constitutes, in historical contexts, a
question unto itself—but because of the way in which the
contexts arrange and rework the periodization of Islamic history
as a whole, and in particular the question of “contacts” between
the Islamic world and Europe. [5] This question occupies a central
position in historiographical constructions in a rather paradoxical
manner given that it develops a priori from the intimate nature of
a society.

These works, with various titles and to varying degrees, question

the whole political and national history of the societies that they
analyze, as well as the overall relationship of Islam to Europe. In
spite of different, even divergent, approaches, they contribute to
the same theoretical framework, referenced with more or less
distance to the Foucauldian demonstration of a delayed
constitution of homosexuality in Europe in the nineteenth century,
as an identity category. [6] They also share an identification with a
history of representations rather than practices, and this less so
for establishing, in substance, a possible gap between them, than
for highlighting the idea of “scenarios,” of historical “canvasses”
in their potential competitions. [7]

Each of these studies, additionally, refuses to envision Islam as a

cultural entity endowed with transhistoric coherence—a
coherence that would originate in islam itself—from the religious
norm governing the definitions of gender. [8] Their authors, in this
respect, confer impressive importance on the dynamic of a
precise historical moment, and analyze in a more or less complex
way in its historical and social implications the debate over the
mystical contemplation of beauty, going back to the mysticism of
Ibn ‘Arabî (d. 1241) and Ibn al-Fârid (d. 1235). In fact, from this
mystique of the gaze, at a distance of several centuries, a defense
and a strong social legitimization of the contemplation of
masculine beauty, even more so than feminine beauty, are the
result, due to the superiority of man over woman, and woman’s
biological, mental and moral inadequacy. The question of
masculine homoeroticism would thus refer not only to the order of
society as a whole, but also to its internal tensions and to the
mirror of alterity that it could extend to the surrounding world.

A Binary Revolution
The work of Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and
Men without Beards, is certainly one of the most audacious and
innovative works that has been published in this field. [9] In it, the
author looks at the impact of gender in the production of
modernity in Iran, by highlighting the eminently retrospective
nature of our binary characterizations of gender. Her study in fact
centers on the process of gender binarization that was put in
place in the nineteenth century, after a Qajar period which, at the
end of the eighteenth century, would have been unaware of this
dual regime and which, in particular in its pictorial
representations, its paintings, attributed the same traits to the
beauty of a masculine or feminine face. Figurative art thus turned
out to be remarkably androgynous, or at least undifferentiated.
The same poetic tropes, the same metaphors of beauty also
applied to young men and young women—sugary lips, rosy
cheeks. . . . [10] Even better, and this justifies the title of the book,
a single attribute, the mustache, could characterize the beauty of
a young boy or a young girl, as Qajar art from the end of the
eighteenth century reveals. Each one, lacking a real mustache, or
the nascent shadow of one, could suggest it through the stroke of
a pencil (khatt): a full beard, and only a full beard, thus
constituted an attribute of virility. Severe prohibitions would
ensue against anyone who shaved the beard, because he was
trying to pass for a young beardless boy (amrad), or was playing
the role of a hot young Ephebe (ghilmân).

To be desired by other men would have thus been fully legitimate

and normal for an adolescent, abnormal for a grown man. This
observation deconstructs by the way, following the work of
Everett Rowson in particular, the thesis of “effeminizing”: a man
with clean-shaven cheeks, shaving his beard, is not trying to
identify as a woman, but as a young Ephebe, as an
adolescent. [11] Now, today, writes A. Najmabadi, “our binary
gender regime transposes all breakdowns within masculinity into
effeminization.” [12] The author reminds us also of the
evolutionary character of these transgenerational sexual
practices. All young people, assuredly, do not go through this
phase in which they receive amorous tributes from older men.
These relationships can even give rise to fierce oppositions from
their family, even leading to their protection, their monitoring, like
for women, but there is a social reality here that is at least
unremarkable and accepted.

A. Najmabadi then offers the hypothesis of the same homoerotic

model in effect among women, whose imprint would be in
particular these “vows of sorority” exchanged by women up until
the beginning of the nineteenth century, but about which it is not
known to what extent they were directed also to homosexual
relationships, to sexual practices beyond the emotional vows. She
stresses ultimately that she does not in any way idealize this
regime of “multiple sexualities,” but tries to understand how the
national culture of the nineteenth century was able to render
certain desires radically illicit, by pushing homoeroticism into
archaism and into the abjection of a rejected past, progressively
establishing strict heteronormativity.

“Another perspective,” that of the Europeans with whom

encounters and confrontations were established and intensified in
the nineteenth century, thus transformed the view that Iranians
had of themselves and created guilt around the worship of
Ephebes, as well as the cross-dressing of men into women, on
certain festive occasions, for example. Binarism of the sexes
became the rule; beauty became feminized. Qajar art from the
end of the nineteenth century attested to the magnitude of these
changes and put an end to the androgynous or significantly
undifferentiated representations that were the rule a century
earlier. The new miniatures represented even women with bare
breasts, or breasts that were clearly apparent under transparent
clothes, a motif that A. Najmabadi had interpreted, at the time of
her earlier research, as an effect of European influence, and that
she now links to a will to emphatically mark the binary
characteristic of gender: to prove that there are indeed women
before one’s eyes. [13]
Now, one of the major effects of this modernist and national
revolution would be releasing homosociality from homosexuality,
conducting what the author perceives as a heteronormative
“masquerade.” Masculine homoeroticism is thus perceived as
sublimated within national fraternity, within the link between
nationalist and brother citizens, so that it remains permissible for
two men to walk around hand in hand, because this refers to the
fiction of a homosociality detached from all sexuality. Any
homosexual practice is consequently hidden, kept secret, or loses
the least bit of public legitimacy; it survives under the mask of
homosociality. Within the framework of this same binarization of
genders, the homeland imposes itself, conversely, as a feminine
notion because it must be protected like a woman from any
intrusion or contamination. Marriage, designed in the past as a
simple contract for procreation, becomes the union of two
citizens, a man and a woman, and the model for the only
legitimate sexual relationships, sanctioning the single register of
heterosexuality.

The ephebe would thus be the great loser in this revolution of

national modernity, and caused the emergence—on the other
hand, as an incarnation of a passive and abject homosexuality—
of the figure of the ma’bûn. [14] Surrounding oneself with cute
young men, for example, now establishes the illegitimacy even of
a monarch or any political official. [15] As for women, by gaining
access much more easily to public spaces as citizens, they also
would renounce any form of homosociality; their speech and their
writings have to be a fortiori chaste and “neuter.” The headscarf,
finally, became not a sign of the segregation of women, but the
symbol of archaic homosocial practices; it became rejected as an
emblem of this separation of the two universes. The headscarf
leads to homosexuality, the reformist Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadah
affirms in 1865, and he interprets it also as a mark of “arab-
islamic backwardness.” The first Iranian feminism proved to be of
an inherently homophobic sort. [16] The modernist project of the
emancipation of women disavowed this homoerotic past and was
built on denial, so much so that A. Najmabadi deems it essential
that today, contemporary feminist currents acknowledge this
concealment, come back to this break and reconcile, on the
contrary, national history with the figure of the ephebe.

Regarding the question of the origins of this modern revolution, A.

Najmabadi responds to critics who reproach her for claiming that
the revolution is a consequence of contact with Europe, by
retorting that the internal and external causes are in any case
inextricable and linked. She also answers, but without justifying
her reasoning further, that these interactions are reciprocal in any
event, that they should always be envisioned in their symmetrical
effects, and not in such a unilateral manner, due to being bogged
down in a colonial or postcolonial concept. In the same way,
interactions with the western European world would not be
pertinent alone in the history of Iran. Nevertheless, relationships
with the Ottoman world, Russia or the Indian subcontinent are
most often quoted in the work.

Now, these constrictions of the territorial and periodic settings

are at the basis of interpretation itself. In concentrating on this
axis of modernity of the nineteenth century, that decisive
turnaround point, the work suffers at times from harmful
shortcuts. The Persian context tends, in fact, to include a national
context right from the start. Some rare phrasings suggest a
relevance of the analysis extended to other facets of the Islamic
world, if not to the Islamic world, without clarifying this in greater
detail. [17] This tightening is partially the reflection of a national
debate that affirms Iranian identity and that constructs its own
modernity against the “archaism” inherited from the surrounding
Muslim world (the Arabic world especially). Some modernists, as
has already been stressed, claim at the time of the reforms that
Iranian modernity is disassociating itself from this backwardness
of Arab-Islamic culture.

But, conversely, the author also contests that there is too strong
an accent placed on the modernists’ fascination with Europe, the
“euro-erotic” or “eurotic” view, as Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi put
it. [18] Certainly, the first Iranian travelers to Europe, in the
nineteenth century, were dazzled by the discovery in Great
Britain, for example, of ballrooms evoking Heaven, where men and
women who resembled houris danced together under the lights.
However, rather rapidly, A. Najmabadi emphasizes, the Iranian
observers felt complete shock, on the other hand, faced with
gender markers that were incompatible with those that they
themselves had implemented: beardless men, the stretched
buttocks of men under jackets that were too short and skin-tight
pants. The outrageous imitation of Westerners (mimicry) thus
became a shortcoming denounced by various nationalist currents
because it would lead to the disruption of gender boundaries and
thus to homosexuality. The strength, at that time, of Islamic
modernity would be clearly underestimated by M. Tavakoli-Targhi,
in particular.

Nevertheless, this confrontation with Europe remained expressed

in terms of perspectives, conflicting perspectives, rather than
social interactions. And even by admitting, as the author
emphasizes, that Iran’s relationships with Europe were much
more delayed than in the case of the neighboring Ottoman empire
and that the nineteenth was truly the century of “discovery” of
Europe and Europeans, it is not well understood through what
channels this contact was made, through what networks it
became meaningful bit by bit in society, and what sorts of players
were actually interacting. Strong emphasis on the construction of
global representations, in images, doubtlessly explains a reading
that prefers psychological notions and whose transposition would
merit an analysis of its own: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of
Iranian Modernity is the subtitle of this book, which summarizes
this principle of Iranian society’s “shock,” hit by this external,
intrusive gaze, but just as quick to regain its composure, to
assume a new “pose,” to pull itself together before its own eyes.

Certain points of the analysis also appear to be formulated a little

quickly and would merit a finer periodization. It also seems rather
oversimplistic to reduce the institution of marriage before the
nineteenth century to a simple “contract of procreation,” even if
Deniz Kandiyoti also takes into account, for the case of the
Ottoman empire, and at the same time, the new expression of a
request for love in marriage. [19] Enough Islamic sources exist,
including chronicles, which attest to various expressions of
conjugal love, that the question of love in marriage cannot be so
simply rejected before the nineteenth century. In the same way, it
is too quick, and therefore incorrect, to define Sufi love with a
stroke of the pen.

This demonstration of a revolution of political modernity, which

was intrinsically led and supported by a profound change in
gender categories, is thus fully convincing and innovative, but it
rests at its foundation on a chronological framework and a
periodization of the most conventional, even rigid, aspects
opposing the premodern world to the modernity of the nineteenth
century (in spite of the fine periodizations that the author also
establishes within the premodern period, with regard to
iconographic representations in particular). Can we thus envision
passing over this concept and its linearity? Do the studies that
focus conversely on the so-called premodern period succeed
better?

One of the strong positions of A. Najmabadi’s work consists of

refusing to detach homoeroticism from sexual practices, and to
argue against the hypocrisy of such a disassociation up to its
present implications. [20] The spotlight of the pertinence of such
a disassociation of homoerotic feelings or attractions is, on the
contrary, central to Khaled El-Rouayheb’s approach. He devotes
his own research to the period before the emergence of
homosexuality as an identity category and titles his study,
retrospectively, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World,
1500–1800. [21]

Chaste Inclinations

El-Rouayheb’s central thesis is that the religious scholars, the

lawyers of Muslim law, condemned, more or less severely, sexual
relationships between men, and especially sodomy (liwat), but
writing poetry for a young boy, generally or normally a beardless
one, and declaring affection for him in public or in private was a
perfectly acceptable practice and one in which the same number
of these religious scholars took part—the subject of feminine
homoeroticism not being developed in this study, even as a
question. [22] The author immediately compares this paradox to
the Western situation in the same time period, where it was
permitted to court a woman without being her husband, but
where sexuality outside of marriage was strictly forbidden. The
same contrast between a legitimate and public expression of love
and the illegitimacy of words becoming actions would have been
involved. Hence the idea of Islam’s “tolerance” of homosexuality
is rejected, as Marshall Hodgson or Bernard Lewis, in particular,
were able to express it. Speaking about tolerance or intolerance in
this context would be tantamount to holding homosexuality as an
evident reality, a transhistoric one, to which each society would
react with more or less latitude or repressive force.

K. El-Rouayheb thus includes the Foucauldian concept of a

belated incorporation of homosexuality in the second half of the
nineteenth century, founded on the determination of
“inclinations” of individuals. He bases his argument on a recent
trend in research, represented in particular by Arno Schmitt,
Everett Rowson, and Thomas Bauer, who emphasize the similarity
of the situation in the Islamic world in this respect with Greco-
Roman antiquity, which classified men sexually according to their
passive or active roles and not according to the gender of the
partners. [23] But he emphasizes the inadequacy of this factor or
criterion: an active adult partner can be blamed or prosecuted
depending on the type of action that he initiates; a kiss, albeit a
passionate kiss, or even an intercrural relationship is not treated
as harshly as an act involving sodomy.

He also cautions again the shortcoming of systematic

generalization, the equivalent of an essentialization of Muslim
culture (to bring it into opposition with Europe, as James T.
Monroe does in particular). [24] The scope of his study is thus
circumscribed by the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman
world, but—and this is an expression of uncertainty or structural
instability, and thus possibly heuristic, of the scales of the
analysis in research on the Muslim world—the author suggests
that his approach is undoubtedly valid also in Turkey and in Persia
or for the Mamluk and Abbasid periods. [25] He calls finally for
investigating sources belonging to different genres and for
moving away from always using the same types of texts: poetry,
legal texts, medical treatises. . . He reminds us finally that
attitudes to homoeroticism or homosexual practices transcended
social categories or social groups, and proved to be something
that evolved throughout the life of a man: what was allowed for a
young 20 year old man was no longer permissible beyond the age
of 30. . .

Nevertheless, one of the strengths of this book is emphasizing at

what point sodomy itself could be thought of merely as one
debauchery among others, like drinking wine or consuming
tobacco, as well as being synonymous with violent and criminal
practices. Soldiers, in particular, have a reputation for being
practicing sodomists, like the Sakbân Syrian mercenaries, at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, who carry off young people
and rape them. This form of sexuality, as “active” and virile as it is,
provokes stigma and calls for repression. It thus seems
impossible to confine the multiplicity of these practices and their
acceptance in the same category, and a fortiori in the unequivocal
category of homosexuality: this concept would simply have no
meaning and had no equivalent.

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the famous Egyptian

historian Jabarti wrote, for example, sympathetically that his
friend Ismail al Khashshâb had fallen in love with a young scribe
working for the French at the time of Egypt’s occupation by
Bonaparte, and that he was composing poetry for him. But the
same Jabarti condemned those people who pursued young men
on saints’ feast days. These chaste attractions or even these
homosexual practices would not in any way have been confused
with the pathology of the ma’bûn or the mukhannath (wrongly
called “effeminate”), the adult man who wants to be desired by
other men. For this adult man, he develops an important medical
discourse that is not far from constituting a categorization of
essence, prefiguring to some extent the birth of the homosexual
as such. [26] On this matter, the author approaches Alan Bray’s
theses, who dates this shift from the seventeenth century, in
Renaissance England, two centuries before Foucault’s
concept. [27] However, even in this respect, the matter remains
complex. In the oneiromantic tradition in particular, dreaming
about sexual penetration was not always a bad omen. Being
penetrated in dreams by a man of superior status, even by one’s
own father, turned out to be a good omen (its interpretation never
being, on the other hand, of a sexual nature, but rather a social
nature). [28]

El-Rouayheb raises a second important question, that of the

problematic relationship between the inflation of homoerotic
discourses and the effectiveness of sexual practices. The
question, truth be told, is not new, and various literary scholars
have rather continuously challenged the realism of love poems, in
particular, dedicated to men or rather to ephebes, by other men.
One of the primary arguments in favor of this “irrealist” thesis is
the matter of the writing conventions, which disguise the identity
of the loved person behind a fictional masculinity, particularly due
to the need to protect the loved woman. Certain masculine poetic
tropes accentuate this trait because the “moon,” for example, or
the “gazelle,” essential terms in the amorous lexicon, arise in the
Arabic language from the masculine gender. It should be noted
that the Persian and Turkish languages, unlike Arabic, ignore
gender distinctions, a fortiori accentuating the indeterminacy of
amorous address.

Ambiguity is thus structural and implemented aesthetically.

Better still, some literature scholars go so far as to affirm that
there was especially a formal, rhetorical game there, and that in
the debates or disputes that were so common between the lover
of women and the lover of ephebes, debates that are, in any
event, written by the same author, rhetoric took over from
content. [29] The argument is not far, again, from Alan Bray’s view
of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; the use or reproduction of
formal models would not reflect personal inclinations, the sexual
preferences of the poet. [30] Women would thus be much more
present in the love game than the state of this homoerotic
documentation reflects, in good part because of convention. To
these objections, K. El-Rouayheb replies that a minimal
appropriateness with regard to the expectations of the public was
necessary above all, and that it is necessary to suppose that in
asking for a kiss or a meeting with a young man openly, even in
verse, one should not invite public derision or disgust.

As an essential element of demonstrative behavior, the lines of

division and positioning are never religious or non-religious, but
rather, aesthetic or non-aesthetic, and a particular debate drives
these different relationships to homoeroticism: the debate over
the contemplation of beauty (briefly mentioned by A. Najmabadi).
He finds his roots, to remind the reader, in the mystical thought of
Ibn ‘Arabî (d. 1241) and his disciple Ibn al Fârid (d. 1235) and
provokes strong controversies. This aestheticism, in fact, goes
back to the idea that the created world is only a manifestation of
the attributes of God, it gives rise to the accusation of
incarnationism or atheism and provokes polemics over the course
of several centuries. And so the question of masculine
homosexuality is central to it. If Ibn ‘Arabî, in his Tarjumân al-
ashwâq, was inspired by his love for a young woman, Ibn al-Fârid,
for his part, declared his longing for a butcher boy in whom he
saw the reflection of the divine. And if this aestheticism actually
addresses theological issues, it also gives rise to more trivial
developments. Thus El-Rouayheb mentions the example of the
Damascene poet Abû Bakr (d. 1638), who was surprised in
flagrante with a young boy. He was led to the pillory in the
marketplace with his partner, but this infamous episode did not
result in charges against him by his biographer al-Muhibbî (d.
1699), who forgives him because he was “aesthete,” a lover of
beauty. Nevertheless, the debate is constant and a large number
of Sufis also recommend avoiding looking at beautiful boys.

This principle of contemplation is in fact the love of beauty rather

than of boys, but since men are held up as more perfect creatures
than women, the contemplation of the beauty of ephebes tends to
take precedence over the beauty of women (who are less
accessible, moreover). The weakness of this argument is that the
contemplation of an adult man would thus be recognized as
legitimate since he is more accomplished, more perfect than an
ephebe, K. El-Rouayheb notes, but such a perspective is
considered socially absurd. [31] It must be admitted that the
category of beauty no longer concerned men of honor who wore
beards (and mustaches, the author specifies). As for women, it
was accepted that they are themselves also naturally sensitive to
beauty, and thus to the beauty of boys.

The part of the work that is the most finely and rigorously
executed is without a doubt the conclusion, in its description of
the turn of the nineteenth century, a period of gradual
incorporation of Victorian moral values. This period saw the birth
of the unprecedented concept of shudhûdh jinsî, which denoted
sexual “inversion” and “perversion.” This part of the work relies
principally on Egyptian examples and, for example, on this
observation by Rifâ’ah al-Tahtâwî, the author of a famous Paris
travelogue, who was astonished, at the end of the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, that the French disapproved of the
pederastic themes of Arabic literature, and changed the poetic
genre in their translations by feminizing it. This same redaction of
pederastic motifs was freely practiced by Arab intellectuals
themselves, in the editing of these texts, one century later.
Certainly, works that praised the beauty of ephebes continued to
be published or copied until the beginning of the twentieth
century but, gradually, homoeroticism was banished from literary
and poetic anthologies. The famous poet Abû Nuwâs (d. ca 815),
who extolled love for boys, was especially censured and
considered a pathological case. In this reformist and nationalist
perspective, homoeroticism now appeared to be both a symptom
and cause of historical decline. [32]

Now, these same arguments justifying this denial reveal a

significant periodization of Islamic history, and not just a
retrospective projection of the national imperatives of the
nineteenth century. Various authors thus, in fact, make this
pertinent observation that pre-islamic Arab poetry and the love
poetry or literature from the first centuries of Islam reserved a
markedly more significant place for women, in the expression of
love. The figure of the beloved woman was even dominant in it. A
homoerotic evolution was thus significant, taking place at a
moment that is difficult to define precisely, and that some
twentieth-century authors relate to the influence or to the
growing place, in Islam, of non-Arabic elements (Khurasan,
Persian. . .). Thus, Bedouin poetry, originally Arabic, would be
devoted to women, as objects of love, homoerotic deviations
translating the corruption of the cities and the penetration of non-
Arabic influences (implying Persian mainly). More homoerotic
moments were created in fact during the Middle Ages and truly
experienced significant inflation or trivialization in the modern
era.

Beyond the stereotyping of these foreign “influences,” the

nationalist argument highlights a real, tangible evolution of
romance literature, but as in the case of A. Najmabadi’s study, the
emphasis in K. El-Rouayheb’s book on the very crucial transition
of the nineteenth century tends to obscure the importance of
these internal evolutions to the Islamic world or the nascent
empire. A periodization, and especially an internal analysis of the
meaning of this historical evolution towards a more important,
more visible masculine homoeroticism, thus remains to be
implemented. One can thus wonder whether the problem—as
unequal as it may be in terms of case-by-case illustrations and
texts, of the agreement or concomitance of the Islamic world and
Europe in the invention of homosexuality, in the birth of male and
female homosexuality in the nineteenth century, and according to
Foucauldian concepts—did not have the effect of lowering,
historiographically, the attention paid to internal dynamics and
prior evolutions.

Furthermore, how was the incorporation of this morality that the

author classifies as “Victorian” accomplished? In the introduction
to his work, he himself mentions a seventeenth century English
prisoner, Pitts, a young tailor, who explained that in Algiers, men
fell in love with boys like people in England did with women; this
indicates quite well that these forms of interaction took place
before the Victorian nineteenth century, and that “internalization”
effectively began to make sense much earlier. [33] There would
thus be a dual determination or over-determination of the
nineteenth century, both as a moment of confrontation with the
other (either directly colonial or not) and as a moment of transfer
of the values of western modernity and their new heteronormative
force, in terms of the construction of gender and sexuality.

Combinatorial Models
A third work by Dror Ze’evi brings periodization elements to these
matters. [34] It refers in an even more “dramatic” manner to the
historical framework of a revolution in the nineteenth century, and
to a jerky, even traumatic, transition between a period that the
author also defines as “premodern” and the modernity of the
Victorian era. The study thus clearly emphasizes the
disintegration of former models rather than the internalization of
new norms. The study focuses on a rather synchronic complexity,
and on the argument that “scenarios” (scripts), which differ
greatly in their concepts of “desire,” are either intertwined,
exclude one another, or respond to one another. The approach
thus refers back to John Gagnon and to Jeffrey Weeks and is
based on the idea, also held by K. El Rouayheb, that there is never
a unified, homogeneous vision of sexuality in any society. [35] The
spectrum of the work thus goes beyond the sole question of
homoeroticism even if, in its masculine form, it occupies an axial
space within it.

Various “scripts” can therefore be exposed, that allow

questioning into the common foundation of implicit bases of
“premodern society” with regard to sexuality and the orientation
of amorous desires; the substance of the demonstration is a
competition between these models and these discourses, some
of them central, even “orthodox,” i.e., official and dominant, and
others marginal. In a Middle East that is both Arab-speaking and
Turkish-speaking, the movement of men and writings, and the
movement of translation, would accentuate this complexity,
before ultimately culminating in traumatic silence and negative
reaction. These congruent or consistent models were in fact
“collapsed brutally” in the nineteenth century, still without being
replaced by a new scenario. The result was a situation of denial
and silence, pathological in nature. The concept of the global
collapse of these coherences attains its strongest demonstration
in literature and medical discourses.

Unlike a religious environment, the medical world and medical

culture in the Ottoman Empire would in fact be profoundly clear
and cohesive up until the nineteenth century. Certainly, D. Ze’evi
discusses the diverse influences that contributed to this
medicine: Byzantine, Iranian, Indian, and Far Eastern. But his
reference archive would remain in a relatively intangible way the
medicine of Galen’s humors, and although these same concepts
evolved in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, they
remained fundamentally unchanged in the Ottoman the world;
although the new Western theories, in the eighteenth century in
particular, while not ignored, were indeed rejected. That was a
world of immutable acquired knowledge in terms of medicine and
medical understanding. [36]

Women, in this context, were thought of biologically as imperfect

men, and the representation of women’s sexual organs, presented
in an incomplete and imperfect way as versions of masculine
organs, fully explains the “one-sex model” theory formulated by
Thomas Laqueur. [37] This weak physical differentiation of men
and women had the logical consequence of highlighting the
difference between “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”, since
men and women were biologically only variations of the same sex.
The weaker the differentiation between the sexes, the stronger
the gender differentiation. [38] The confrontation with the “two
sexes model” in the nineteenth century thus proved even more
brutal, dramatizing homosexuality into a completely different
proportion, and ultimately leading to sexuality being excluded as a
topic for discourse. [39] The author depicts an inability to
internalize this new model and deduces from it a major distortion,
from that point on, between society and medical knowledge.
This part of the work, as passionate, well documented and finely
carried out as it is, thus relies on a demonstration that is at the
very least oversimplistic, the notion of a fixed, static “premodern”
world, of a bulwark in intangible medical knowledge, that would
shatter with the intrusion of western modernity, and that is
transposed and imported, at the time of the wave of reforms
implemented by the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.
This authoritarian transfer of knowledge resulting in trauma, a
form of collective denial, does not in and of itself radically deserve
to be challenged, but it actually replicates a very conventional
vision of Islamic societies that are hardly receptive to European
science, in particular, which comes into relative contradiction with
the exposure, by the author, of a plasticity in Ottoman medical
knowledge and its borrowings from or references to surrounding
cultures (Byzantine, Persian, Indian, Far Eastern. . .). [40] And if a
form of “resistance” to European medical knowledge is proven,
dating from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, it is the
causes of this resistance that should be analyzed, thus pinning
the question of the confrontation back to a time well before the
nineteenth century, even though that century is critical and
crucial.

The other chapters also analyze in a very dynamic and

evolutionary way other discourses on sexuality in Ottoman
societies, breaking away from any static vision of them.
Developments comparing sharî’a and kanun, Sultanic law, are
enlightening in this context (but law perhaps is contemplated
within a more endogenous dynamic than medicine. . .). [41] The
Sulayman kanun of the sixteenth century, in particular, appears
less severe in its punishments regarding adultery than sharî’a, but
kanun establishes effective, applicable penalties, whereas sharî’a
prescribes very severe punishments for certain sexual offenses,
but by combining them with conditions in such a way that they
are, in fact, rarely applicable. Even better, on the basis of kanun,
D. Ze’evi emphasizes a relative equality between men and women
with regards to the sanctioning of adultery and penalties for it. In
a way that can seem surprising today, an adulterous woman can,
in certain cases, simply be forced to pay a fine and stay with her
husband. [42] This breaks sharply with the topos of adulterous
women thrown into the Bosphorus or who have their throats slit
by their husbands, and the author wonders about the origin of this
cliché (and about its foundations) in European travel literature.
This significantly marked egalitarianism reflected the appearance
of a new historical canvas in the middle of the sixteenth century,
with the emergence of the “house” as the basis of the Ottoman
State, with increased visibility and a larger role for the feminine
element in this social structure, which would explain a more equal
approach in matters of legal responsibility. This moment of kanun
would thus correspond to the setting up of a new elite class.

At the end of the seventeenth century, kanun declined, the

symbiosis of laws emphasized shari’a, and there arose a
commitment to a more puritan and religious evolution legally. But
historians also highlight, in a very enlightened way, a continuity of
kanun and its resurgent link with reformist law, the Tanzimat,
implemented during the first third of the nineteenth century. Thus
the code of 1858, enacted by the sultan Abdulmecid, and inspired
by European codes of law, was intended to reduce differences
between men and women even more, while abolishing distinctions
between free persons and slaves, between Muslims and non-
Muslims. . . This code, like medical discourse, placed sexuality
between parentheses. Sexual crimes became euphemistically
treated as “indecent acts”, the notion of zina (an illicit,
“adulterous” sexual act), disappeared, and, even better, the code
chose to go silent on all questions relating to homosexuality and
“effeminizing”, so as not to produce a pejorative image of
Ottoman society. [43] In this context, the highlighting of
borrowings from European legislation (even the similarity of
euphemistic codes?) is thus not exclusive of internal dynamics
and periodizations.

As for the late seventeenth century Puritanism to which D. Ze’evi

refers, it is at the center of his analysis of the homoerotic
question. He formulates it, in fact, in relation to debates on the
contemplation of beauty, which, as has already been pointed out,
is fundamentally resolved in the contemplation of ephebes,
mahabbat al-amrâd. [44] Visual admiration, it is understood, is
not the only matter under consideration, and the love of God
through boys also allows, where applicable, listening (sama’),
even physical proximity, contiguousness, and can go hand in hand
with music and dance. . . The boundary would be blurred, in
certain cases, between erotic literature and mystic debates on the
matter of the unity of being and the contemplation of beauty. A
remarkable trait, and clearly underscored by D. Ze’evi, as it is by
K. El-Rouayeb, this attraction for ephebes is transgenerational
and is also completely indifferent to status, social class, and often
involves young people of the most modest social origins. . .

The flourishing development of these mystic trends led to a

Puritan reaction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
which the stakes were, according to D. Ze’evi, less a matter of
establishing the illicit character of homosexuality as such than
reacting to the overturning of dogmatic and religious order. In this
respect, the distinction that the author establishes between
orthodox Sufism and heterodox Sufism seems debatable; it
addresses a tension, rather, as the author also admits, between
the official mystic brotherhoods and others that “would smell the
sulfur.” Homosexual practices, even among adults, would be
considered less transgressive than this mystic homoeroticism.
They were certainly denounced, but they were held to be
understandable mistakes, occasional losses of control, and they
would not endanger faith, unlike the love of boys in its mystic
modality. Dror Ze’evi, finally, does not hesitate to compare these
trends and counter-trends to the European Reformation and
Counter-Reformation.

Initially, the Puritan reaction won out, and it is in this context that
the historian refers in particular to the reformist al-Dajjâni, in
Palestine, in the seventeenth century, which used a Hadith related
to the Prophet, on the dangers of the contemplation of beauty.
Muhammed, while receiving an Arab tribe, saw a young boy of
great beauty seated before his eyes and asked him to come sit
behind him, so as not to have him in his field of vision any longer.
Thus, at the same time that this homoeroticism was blamed and
suppressed, it remained described as “natural,” since the Prophet
himself would have felt the temptation; the mention of David, lost
in his attraction to Bathsheba, confirms, on the other hand, a sort
of equivalency or non-distinction between women and ephebes.

In a third phase, a sort of balance would be found, but quickly, at

the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sufis collectively
internalized a strong rejection of these homoerotic traditions. In
mystic works, references to love for boys disappeared or, a point
also emphasized by A. Najmabadi and K. El-Rouayheb, they
became invariably interpreted as simple allegorical expressions of
the love of God. Sufism thus totally detached itself from this
contemplative perspective and, eventually, became radically
discredited for doing so.

Is this moral and Puritan turning point of the nineteenth century

general? Does it apply to all areas of expression and
implementations in discourse of sexuality (provided, here again,
that sexuality can be autonomized)? The famous Karagöz puppet
theater example would confirm a similar movement as a whole, at
the same time as the relevance of “deviant” discourses, or
discourses that simply paralleled their own evolution. The puppet
theater, which is a cultural institution in a number of Ottoman
societies, has characters endowed with ferocious sexual
appetites and men with impressive phalluses, removable, of
course; an absolutely omnivorous appetite in women as well as
men. Only one type of sexual attraction is not staged in Karagöz
theater: the attraction of women to other women.

This significant presence of women, and desirable women,

subject to desires, thus confers a strongly heterosexual tonality to
these shows, in contrast to the literary productions that are
strongly focused on masculine homoeroticism. D. Ze’evi offers
one of the most heuristic explanations for this hiatus. On the one
hand, he observes a transition in this respect between the plays
of the Mamluk period, which are significantly homoerotic, and the
plays written and produced in the Ottoman era, which are more
fundamentally heteronormative. The purpose of this evolution
would be to correlate the passage from theater produced in
private spaces, within the homes of notable people during the
Mamluk era, to puppet theaters that are open to the public, on the
streets in the Ottoman period, in particular with the appearance of
cafés. In the first case, the shows were intended mainly for an
audience composed of the social elite, from an elitist culture and
thus homoerotic; in the second case, they target a significantly
more popular and mixed audience.

The substantive argument is, in fact, since it also arises in El-

Rouayeb’s work, that homoeroticism often proves to be a
conventional homoeroticism, intended to protect women,
inseparable in this respect from considerations of social status.
Ottoman Karagöz theater being as insolent and transgressive as it
was “popular,” breaks this convention and thus causes a
maskless, more effective and realistic place for women to appear
against the backdrop of love and erotic games. But as in other
cultural areas, the nineteenth century would bring about
obstacles to these most comical representations of overflowing
sexuality; the Tanzimat reforms put things in order. At the same
time, the introduction of printing, the penetration of printed
works, according to D. Ze’evi, would lead to less erotic
propensities than the more elitist and private circulation of
manuscripts.

This demonstration is particularly suggestive and it raises in a

most pertinent way the question of the hidden or implied
presence of women and consequently that of homoerotic illusion,
a question that finds a central place in the work of Walter
Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli. [45]

A Shared Love
Like the three previous books, the book by Andrews and Kalpakli
reminds us of the power of denial, the breadth of a hidden history
in an era of national modernity; in a moment of modernization that
is confusing itself, in great part, with Westernization, Mustafa
Kemal’s Turkey, more so than other nations, denied its Ottoman
heritage and rejected particularly its homoerotic cultural, literary,
and mystical traditions. In this context of a nationalist Turkey,
literary production became sanitized, heterosexualized (the
beloved male becoming the beloved female) or was interpreted
from a different strictly metaphorical, desexualized angle. . .
Generally, the Ottoman language became, at this time under
Kemal, devalued, reduced to its borrowings from Persian, for
example, and associated with practices that were extremely
eclectic. This topos is the first point that the authors emphasize,
and their ambition is not only to restore the vitality of Ottoman
culture in its own right, but to reinscribe it, if not within its
Europeanness, at least within its full continuity with European
cultures of the first modern age.

The first point of the demonstration is the reminder of a

relationship between the societies of Greco-Roman antiquity and
Ottoman societies. Referring to Paul Veyne in particular, the two
authors emphasize in turn the meaninglessness of the notion of
“indulgence” with respect to homosexuality, which, in any case,
was never conceived of as a distinct problem. [46] They also
address the same concept of a relational world where men are
attracted to other men, since their relationships with women can
never be established with the same degree of intellectual,
spiritual or moral affinity (women, in particular, being less
educated). In these fundamentally “phallocratic” societies, the
most satisfying relationship, the most richly interactive
relationship, as in ancient Greece, would naturally be a man-to-
man relationship (without excluding power or violence-based
relationships). [47]

As a whole, the major monotheistic religions would recognize or

would not disapprove of homoerotic attractions, only beginning to
legislate to eradicate them around the eighteenth to nineteenth
centuries. [48] The Christian West and the Ottoman world
differed little in this respect, according to W. Andrews and M.
Kalpakli, during the entire “premodern” period and the first
modern age. Sexual desires were then perceived as natural; it was
only in the seventeenth century that the West separated the
question of desire from physical urges and established it as a
mental pattern.

The distinctions, in this respect, between the Ottoman world and

Europe are related to the place of women in society, a question
notably linked with the tribal, familial structure of the first
Ottomans. Because the public expression of love for a woman,
including one’s own wife, was impossible in this social universe,
the form of love that could be best publically managed was love
between men. The effect would thus be to amplify masculine
homoeroticism in public discourses, an illusion, as has already
been suggested, of a homoeroticism that was much more
widespread than it would have been in reality. At the very least,
the authors emphasize this difficulty and observe that they can
themselves present the illusion, based on their documentary
references, of a world more massively homosensual than it
actually was, and in addition, had even contributed in the past to
feminizing poetic translations.

The fictitious nature of amorous addresses is thus sometimes

difficult to detect and the notion of androgyny fully makes sense
in this context, which is not, moreover, exclusively Ottoman:
Shakespeare’s world, during the same time period, sought it just
as strongly. [49] This form of instability also begins to echo with
other vacillations that refer to love: social inversions, hierarchical
inversions through the love between a master and a slave. . ., and
generational instability, since ephebes, the objects of desire, were
compelled to become socially desirous upon reaching adult age.

But beyond this relatively specific characteristic which is its

socially inexpressible nature, in Islam and at that time—public love
for a woman—the first modern age proved in Europe as well as in
the Ottoman world to be strongly devoted to love in all its forms,
and to the cult of the beloved, to the extent that the pertinence of
a common era became apparent, the age of beloveds. This
proposition obviously upset all established historiographical
categories and it is not improper to remind Renaissance
specialists, as W. Andrews and M. Kalpakli emphasize, that there
was also an Arabic-speaking Europe (in Spain) and Turkish-
speaking Europe (in the Balkans). So as not to collide with our
usages, rather than envisioning an Istanbul in the Renaissance,
the two authors invent their own period, “a conceptual tool,” an
“age of the beloveds” that goes from the middle of the fifteenth
century until around 1620, which they examine from Istanbul and
the heart of the Ottoman Empire all the way to Mediterranean
Europe (Venice and Florence in particular) and Elizabethan
England, in order to test this continuum in a non-Mediterranean
context. If the interrelation between Europe and the Ottoman
world is more or less accepted, in fact, in economic, commercial
or even agricultural areas, the culture gives rise to other
historiographical resistances. To suggest that Ottoman culture
lives and breathes the same air as Europe is to invite, they
recognize, a reaction of great incredulity.

The demonstration, however, is among the most heuristic. The

richness and the profusion of this work suffer from being
summarized, but the arguments can be tightened in a few
respects. This period is the era of Charles V, Francis I, and
Sulayman the Magnificent. The nature and the scope of these
monarchical forces established on the geopolitical level pay
constant attention to the other, an inter-awareness magnified by
heavy people traffic (the expulsion of the Jews, Millennarian
movements. . .). [50] The idea of an absolute love was developed
also in the context of the affirmation of the absolute monarchy for,
in this context, love relationships were not based on a “man-
woman” model but on a “monarch-courtesan” model, with an
instability or hierarchical reversibility that were just as
structural. [51] It is also not unrelated to Millennarian or reformist
trends (Savonarola in Florence). . . that answered the call of an
absolute God.

From this context a similar culture of love would be born. On both

sides, the same sort of eroticization of social and political, even
geopolitical, relationships would be practiced. If Venice was seen
in Europe as “the Turk’s harlot,” the Ottoman Empire in turn
eroticized Europe. The young Christian, a tavern boy from Galata,
a district of Istanbul, became the emblem of this fantasized
relationship of domination and of this desire (but in line with the
seduction practiced in the Abbasid era by the young Mage or
Zoroastrian, for example). In tandem with the nascent Orientalism
of Europe there was an Ottoman “Occidentalism.” And the
androgynous charms of these ephebes would be just as obvious
in the palaces of Florence or the gardens of the great English
homes of the Renaissance.

Additionally, the same sort of tavern culture developed in London

as in Istanbul, in enclosed spaces as well as in gardens, a culture
of wine augmented by the introduction of coffee and
tobacco. [52] The diversity of the tavern saw social classes
mixing, and proved to be, in the Ottoman Empire as well as in
Europe, a place of interaction between Christians and
Muslims. [53] Finally, in this same space, this same period that
saw wars multiply, which set in motion armies of unruly
mercenaries, and threw onto the streets, once hostilities had
ceased, masses of unemployed young men who were looking for
adventure and sexually both aggressive and available.

Certainly, Venice would implement a culture of love and a

fundamentally heteroerotic courtesan culture, but it sprang from
the same mind-set. The difference would relate to the type of
socially expressible love. Conversely, Florence would develop
more homoerotic traditions, with possibly the same platonic
valuation of chaste love between men as that which existed in the
Ottoman world. [54] A community of homoerotic practices was
thus recognized, but it gave rise, in contrast, in Istanbul, to a real
cultural consecration. Generally, in discourses on love and
eroticism, Ottoman culture engaged in a particularly thriving
cultural production, contradicting the pattern of “sterile
Persianism.” A particular tradition was established: the
description of handsome young men, famous lovers, which
became a social category unto itself. Descriptions of cities now
included sections devoted to these local (masculine) beauties and
a genre developed—born in Persia, of shehrengiz, the praise of
beautiful boys—inventorying the handsome artisans of a given
locality, for example. Obviously the question of the place of
women in this amorous plan comes to mind. Some erotic poems
were commissioned by high-society women, who had fallen in
love with handsome boys, or were even written by women for
men. The only undocumented case is again that of poems written
by women for other women. [55]

This genre of shehrengiz seemed to be of infinite richness, for it

explained the social status of these “beloveds,” objects of desire
and subjects of collective pride, and even named in certain cases.
Much room was made for young apprentices and artisans, but
also for janissaries or young people from good society. The
venality of many of these relationships was flagrant and
denounced by lovers, but it possibly also came out of a trope: the
cruelty of the young lover who let himself be desired, or reserved
himself for others and made money out of his kisses or his
attentions.. . A single one of these poems, composed in the
second half of the seventeenth century, makes an inventory of
feminine beauties. It confirms, in a sense, the social belittlement
of love for women because, much more obviously than in the case
of men, it listed one by one the names and nicknames of women
clearly on the bottom of the social ladder (girls or slaves of
butchers, tanners, poultry farmers. . .) or even socially
downgraded (prostitutes, courtesans) and, to a certain degree,
non-Muslims. [56] The visibility of women was thus, to a large
extent, closely related to their social status and often under a
poetic veil. A parallel was additionally established with
Petrarchism which also “veils” the beloved woman.

In fact, the convention of silencing their presence or identity is not

in itself so specifically Ottoman. The disguising of the identity and
the gender of the male (or female) beloved was practiced similarly
in Elizabethan England and the rhetorical and formal nature of
expressions of love was pertinent there also: a possible echo of a
common Neoplatonic culture which, in Europe, was placed during
the Renaissance. . . At the end of the sixteenth century and at the
beginning of the seventeenth, this age of beloveds declined in the
Ottoman Empire, with the affirmation of Puritan movements that
dealt a death blow to this culture of love; they fought in particular
against its components or its mystic “alibis” and against the Sufi
trends that incarnated it. But the age of the beloveds came to an
end in Europe also, due to the Counter-Reformation. [57] It was
the end of a world and the end of great imperial dreams too.
“Divergent entries into modernity” would be the outcome of this
common history and such is the conclusion of the work. But this
conclusion is also an invitation to revisit the question of the
Renaissance as a European historiographical trope.

On one hand, certain cultural trends, like Mannerism, attest to the

same cultural factors in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. In this
respect, however, it would be desirable if Neoplatonicism were
less immediately considered the root of a common language, for
the references of the two authors to the resurgences of
representations of Ganymede in Europe, draw attention, in
contrast, to our ignorance regarding supposed derivations
adopted from Islamic homoeroticism shared with the ancient
Greek models. [58] This question of the Greek model remains
under a somewhat tutelary status. On the other hand, the rigid
bias of historiography seems blatant to Andrews and Kalpakli, and
there is a strong temptation to follow them into this terrain. The
reworking of Arab or Persian models by the Ottomans, they argue,
reveals—according to accepted historiography—simply a
reticence to deviate from inherited models; but the reactivation of
Greek and Roman models by the Europe of the first modern age
could also be described in this way as imitation and reproduction.
Indeed a new Renaissance could thus be envisioned, opening
onto different roads to modernity, a view that is in line with a
recent trend in historical research that rejects, incisively and
fruitfully, the perspective of an Ottoman Empire in decline. [59]
The issue of a “turning point” in the nineteenth century is thereby
ignored. Another parallel, also suggested by D. Ze’evi, is
established between the Sufi mystic trend of this period and the
Christian Reformation, which sees these as part of the same
historic pulse.

Thus, what has been analyzed as an “age of favorites” in Europe

at the end of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and read
as a constituent moment of a Europe on the road to absolutism, is
here the subject of a completely different, much fuller,
reading. [60] A number of theses in this prolific work call for
further discussion, or even criticism, but it reaches its goal by
showing that Europe and the Ottoman world do not have to be
considered only in interaction and interrelation, but truly in a
community of being and culture that are at least related. This
continuum, in fact, does not exclude cultural differences. Thus,
Andrews and Kalpakli emphasize that the Ottomans,
paradoxically, would not even have conceived of being compared
to Westerners; their own tropisms turned them rather towards
Persia. . .

The strong linearity commonly assigned to the history of the

invention of the homosexual and the repression of homoeroticism
on the one hand, whatever meaning is given to “repression,” and
the highly Eurocentric nature of this historical model on the other
hand, thus tend to reinforce a vision that is just as linear as Islamic
history: gradual loss of power to Europe, then under its impact
and internalizing its values or at least some of them. The recent
trend of studies of gender and homoeroticism that illustrate,
particularly richly, the four works just discussed, the central place
of the Foucauldian problematic of the birth of homosexuality and
heterosexuality, thus over-determines, magnifies and maximizes
the historiographical motif of nineteenth century “shock.”
Colonial shock in numerous situations or shock from Western
supremacy, internalization of shame and denial. . .

The adoption of a stricter or even more radical heteronormative

system is seen as the effect of the West’s imposition of new
sexual norms, or even as the irreversible consequence of reforms
directly incurred by unequal confrontation with Europe. To deny
this impact would be absurd, whether it has been immediate or
relayed by reformist and generally authoritarian state policies.
The almost official homophobia of so many Islamic regimes today
flows from it even more so than contemporary Islamist trends,
they themselves the heirs of this denial just as much as a Puritan
tradition that is internal to Islam. Another facet of research has,
moreover, tackled the question of this sexual confrontation with
the “other,” with alterity, by highlighting and reworking the
Orientalist motif: an eroticization of the East by the West. [61]

Nevertheless, the congruence or the concomitance of these

changes that are internal to Europe and of a brutal or imperial
confrontation of the Islamic world with the West, on the contrary
only make more pertinent, as Andrews and Kalpakli show in
particular, the question of potentially blurred boundaries, of their
identities, at times or periods well before the dramatic
nineteenth-century confrontation. Recent research that even in
Europe identifies this trend to categorization of the homosexual
identity in the seventeenth century rather than in the Victorian
era, a fortiori makes this converging perspective essential. As for
the problem of “interaction,” it would be naïve to say today that
must be on the rise, or at least continually renewed, and also
ingenuous to emphasize its fundamentally reciprocal nature.
Thus, it was through the Ottoman world and more widely the
Muslim world, that the question of tribadism, lesbianism, would
return in Europe and would acquire as such a new visibility. [62] It
is not begging the question to invoke this constant interplay of
returns. As tenuous as they may be, they can over time produce
significant effects.

The issue of variances in gender systems and, in particular, the

system of the status of homoeroticism and its social and
discursive constructions, thus appears, more so than others, fit to
act as a lever to deconstruct a far too-rigid image of an Islamic
world brutally confronted with traumatic and destructuring
Western modernity, and destined to strengthen this same image.
It shakes our periodizations in all cases, not so much because it
would be in and of itself subversive, but because it remains, on
the contrary, in an agreed-upon historiographical moment,
overinvested with meaning, over-determined. . . The
historicization of interference or changes in gender categories
therefore displaces our own cultural categories, displaces our
boundaries, and not only our periodizations.

It results at the very least in a comparative impetus, more or less

restrained, that is also rarely frequent in the historiography of the
Islamic world. The vision of a radically other Muslim world, as a
result of its polygyny in particular, or socially legitimate and public
homoerotic discourses, this vision of alterity can be thus
significantly relativized (imagine for example the polygyny of a
French bourgeoisie entertaining mistresses legitimately and
publically in the mid-nineteenth century), and the
historiographical traditions and conventions in this content turn
out to reify distinctions, separations or borders in the end that are
much more fragile than they seemed. [63]