Tag Archives: sufi

Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century

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This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very impor­tant.

Translating Classical Persian Poetry: Farid al-Din Attar’s “Ilahi-Nama”

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One of eight major works that can reli­ably be ascribed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­times, Divine Book) has, accord­ing to Ency­clo­pe­dia Iran­ica, been trans­lated once into Eng­lish, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal nar­ra­tives, each one deal­ing with a dif­fer­ent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asceti­cism, which Sufis under­stand to mean a dis­ci­plined stance of detach­ment and indif­fer­ence towards one’s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ates Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pared, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fer­ence of the Birds), his best known work in Eng­lish. The two poems are sim­i­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enlight­en­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­tique of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true under­stand­ing. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about learn­ing to mas­ter oneself.

The fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (faeries); the sec­ond wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son cov­ets the ring Solomon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how shal­low and mate­ri­al­is­tic the son is for want­ing what he wants and, sec­ond, how the son should under­stand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlight­en­ment. None of the sons, how­ever, accept their father’s lessons at face value, argu­ing that he has mis­un­der­stood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, there­fore, are mis­guided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and right­eous woman who, after her hus­band leaves on pil­grim­age to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at noth­ing to have her — the son accuses his father of want­ing to elim­i­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explain­ing that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­trates how sex, prop­erly com­pre­hended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apoth­e­o­sis,
sex gives birth to a love with­out lim­its;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spir­i­tual love emerges; and when
spir­i­tual love can grow no fur­ther, your soul
will van­ish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the nar­ra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their come­up­pance than one about the spir­i­tual nature of sex­u­al­ity, the son’s mis­read­ing of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a read­ing, how­ever, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desires with­out a strug­gle. They are, in other words, nei­ther evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and will­ing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has pun­ished them with a paral­y­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mean­ing — they can be healed only by con­fess­ing to the woman every­thing they did to her. Con­tinue read­ing →