Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World.

• Position: Book review

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800.By KHALED EL-ROUAYHEB. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2005. Pp. x + 210. $32.50.

Khaled El-Rouayheb opens his book with a quote from Quentin Skinner, who claimed that there are no timeless concepts; instead of general truths there are only various different concepts, which have come and gone with various different societies. This is an apt motto for a discussion on male friendship and love in the premodern Middle East, and more broadly, for a combination of cultural and intellectual history of the Arab-Muslim urban milieu of the Ottoman period up to the end of the eighteenth century. El-Rouayheb's main argument is that the modern term "homosexuality" is anachronistic and misleading. Reconstructing the way in which male homosexual behavior and feelings were conceived and evaluated in the Arab Middle East prior to modernization reveals attitudes quite different from those of our present time, and from what scholarship has assumed.

El-Rouayheb's book, initially a 2003 Cambridge University Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Basim Musallam, confronts several (mis)conceptions common in historiography. One set of misconceptions is the dichotomy used to analyze homosexuality in premodern Arab-Muslim societies. At one pole, scholars claim that Arabic-Muslim culture was tolerant, even sympathetic, toward male homosexuality. Scholars drew on numerous references in diverse genres of literature, reinforced by European travel accounts, to argue that male love affairs were common in all societal groups, including among religious scholars and political notables. At the opposite pole, studies emphasize the strictness with which Islamic law prohibits homosexuality, regarding it as one of the most abominable sins men could commit. In the course of his study El-Rouayheb makes it clear that both lines of arguments are anachronistic and unhelpful. He suggests that simplistic generalizations of permission/prohibition, tolerance/ prohibition/repression are the product of essentialism.

El-Rouayheb discusses a rich and complex range of behaviors around the theme of male love, and how these were perceived and represented. He relies on a vast array of Arabic literary sources, such as chronicles, biographical dictionaries, adab, poetry, mystical treatises, and legal works. His key argument is that Arab-Ottoman society in the early-modern period distinguished between carnal love, especially involving anal...