Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire.

• Author: Al-Samman, Hanadi
• Position: Book review

Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Edited by KATHRYN BABAYAN AND AFSANEH NAJMABADI. Cambridge, Massachusetts: CENTER FOR MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 2008. Pp. xiv + 376. $19.95 (paper).

This is a collection of articles stemming from a workshop held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in May 2003 under the title "Crossing Paths of Middle Eastern and Sexuality Studies: Challenges of Theory, History, and Comparative Methods." Indeed, the anthology lives up to the interplay of fields and methods that its workshop title promises: it engages four historians (Kathryn Babayan, Frederic Lagrange, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Everett Rowsoa), two comparatists (Sahar Amer and Leyla Rouhi), and three Western queer theorists as discussants (Dina AI-Kassim, Brad Epps, and Valerie Traub) in its preview of Islamicate sexuality. Moreover, it examines Arabic, Iranian, Ottoman, French, and Spanish works of satire and insult, legal and medical treatises, love poetry, and romance epics. The editors acknowledge the limitations of their focus on medieval literature, but hope that their investigation into Islamicate literary manifestations will eventually encourage other researchers to apply their findings in the juridical and notarial records pertinent to social history as well.

At the outset, the editors explain their choice of Marshall Hodgson's 1974 coinage of the term "Islamicate" for their title, which is meant "to highlight a complex of attitudes and practices that pertain to cultures and societies that live by various versions of the religion Islam" (p. ix). The promise of this terminology resides in "its conceptual movement" away from the Foucauldian model that locks sexuality into a binary of "Western scientia sexualis" or an "Eastern ars erotica," and a set of taxonomies built on a rigid divide of premodern/modern periodization. In order to disrupt this persistent, static binary, the articles in this anthology introduce history, psychoanalysis, comparativism, and translation as alternative models for studying Islamicate sexuality, and as a way of navigating across geographical, temporal, disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic lines to create a new field of Islamicate sexuality studies.

The self-reflective travels that the authors undertake start with interrogating their terminology. They problematize the use of the modern term '"homosexuality" and its substitute "same-sex" for their lack of...