abu_rashid wrote on Sep 19
th, 2008 at 10:12pm:
soren,
Instead of continuing to project your sick fantasies onto the Muslim 'orient' as many orientalists before you have done, why don't you actually provide a concrete argument to back up your original claims.
Vey well...
As a rule, the beloved [in medieval Persian poetry] is not a woman, but a young man. In the early centuries of Islam, the raids into Central Asia produced many young slaves. Slaves were also bought or received as gifts. They were made to serve as pages at court or in the households of the affluent, or as soldiers and body-guards. Young men, slaves or not, also, served wine at banquets and receptions, and the more gifted among them could play music and maintain a cultivated conversation. It was love toward young pages, soldiers, or novices in trades and professions which was the subject of lyrical introductions to panegyrics from the beginning of Persian poetry, and of the ghazal.
Yar-Shater, Ehsan. 1986. Persian Poetry in the Timurid and Safavid Periods, in Cambridge History of Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, pp 973-974.
My sweetheart is a beauty and a child, and I fear that in play one day
He will kill me miserably and he will not be accountable according to the holy law.
I have a fourteen year old idol, sweet and nimble
For whom the full moon is a willing slave.
His sweet lips have (still) the scent of milk
Even though the demeanor of his dark eyes drips blood.
(Hafez, 14th century)
Some 1,200 years before the summer of 1968 Abu Nawas -- court laureate of the celebrated Caliph Harun Al-Rashid -- penned hundreds of homoerotic poems. As scholars have noted, Abu Nawas's homoerotic ( mudhakkarat ) poetry was long accessible across the Arab world and it was not before 1932 that the first expurgated edition of his verse was printed in Cairo.
(Al_Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2006 Issue No. 793)
In this context, sexual behaviors were conceived simply as pleasure taken at the expense of a subordinate, not as an experience shared between equals. This conceptualization is evident even in texts used for the interpretation of dreams. "If a man dreams of being the insertive partner, great goodness and profit will come his way; but if he dreams of being penetrated, he will soon be overpowered and subjected to great humiliation" (Wright & Rowson, p. 61). It is implicit in these texts that the gender of the receptive partner, although important, was less important than the role one played. For some, women and boys, being of lower status, were nearly interchangeable.
But see also:
Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures By Suad Joseph, Afsaneh Najmabadi
L Crompton - Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, 1997
Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 By Khaled El-Rouayheb
L OUZGANE - Islamic Masculinities, 2006
And so on and so forth. (Imagine how long a list I would give you if I were gay with a bee in my bonnet about Muslims!)
In time-tested fashion, the good muslim will contort himself and resort to invective to deny something as plain and obvious as the nose on his face. This is why the Koran and Mohammed, and by extension islam, cannot be questioned (that would be disrespectful and insulting and we know what awaits people who do that, don't we.) - who knows what might come to light. Dogma (fantasy) must prevail over life, facts and reality.
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