18
votes
The secret gay history of Islam. In Muslim cultures, homosexuality was once considered the most normal thing in the world – so what changed?
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- Title
- The secret gay history of Islam
- Authors
- Joe Morgan
- Published
- Oct 13 2017
- Word count
- 1457 words
Sorry, but this is hugely inaccurate in many many levels. Putting Ottomans aside, the entirety of the claims about Islam is basically wrong (you can probably find some hadith somewhere, but there are hadith to support any idea; Islam prescribes belief in Torah and in Bible, and a lot of stuff is implied in Quran; Sodom and Gomorrah is anti-gay, stuff like rape and incest is all throughout the Abrahamitic books and no cities are destroyed except Sodom and Gomorrah). Going back to the Ottomans, yes, homosexuality was a thing (just check Pushkin's diary when he came to Erzurum along with the Russian Army, for example), but it was mostly paderasty, and it was taboo. Never was it accepted and welcomed, it all happened despite taboos and stuff, like everywhere else. And mostly among the social elites, just like the paderasty of Ancient Greeks which was reportedly mostly limited to aristocratics and despised by the rest of the populus.
This is a rose-tinted and orientalist depiction of the situation of homosexuality in Islam and in Ottoman empire. It's like, as wrong as it gets.
And, all aside, paderasty is not really homosexuality as we think of it today: it's deeply patriarchal, basically, it's adult males fucking every human with a hole where they can fit their dicks in. It's a tradition of rape, abuse and paedophilia.
Can you link to some sources on the entire comment please? From the reading that I've done on it (which is admittedly marginal) it wasn't mostly pederasty, and it wasn't entirely during the Ottoman civilization. What I noticed was vague evidence of a lot of attempts over the many years to eradicate the evidence on this topic, much like the destruction of Trans-related histories and documents, and Indigenous-related histories.
I'm mostly referring to Ottoman and Islamic situation, but it's not dissimilar within the context of Greco-Roman culture. I can refer you to Plato's dialogues, for example, and especially to Symposion and Lysis, which, among other things, mention a general disregard for paderasty, if I'm not mistaken. Also, Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon can be read either as condoning or deriding paderasty.
W.r.t the Islamic/Ottoman situation, a great resource is the September 2014 issue of the "NTV Tarih" journal (which lead up to the disowning thereof by the NTV channel, and the journal goes on under the name "#tarih"), which delved into the topic of homosexuality in pre-modern eastern Mediterranean.
Basically, all sorts of homosexuality did exist, and mainly paderasty, and while there was not a big active fight against it, it was never condoned. The main driving force behind it was the unavailability of casual sex with females, and the main form of homosexuality was abuse of boys (mostly minors, in todays standards) as a replacement for females.
As an ex-muslim and a Turkish person, I'd wish I was wrong and that the fairy tales the OP article tells were true, but sadly, no. Saying "it was all rainbows til the Brits came" is at best ignorant and at worst an attempt to whitewash a history of abuse and anti-homosexual attitudes.
My understanding of Ancient greek/roman society is that they had no conception of homosexuality/heterosexuality the way we do today. There were social constructs around being penetrated vs. penetrating, and the idea that sexuality in general was bad and sex should only be for procreation existed (although it was not necessarily the dominant ideology). But they did not make any distinction between same-sex sexuality and heterosexuality besides the obvious implications for procreation.
I'm not a historian, but like alexandria I have done some reading on it. If you have some sources that indicate otherwise I'd be interested to see them.
@cadadr isn't talking about ancient Greeks and Romans. He's talking about Islamic cultures. There's a BIG separation in time and space between those cultures.
However, talking about ancient Romans...
... this statement seems at odds with what I've read about ancient (pre-Christian) Romans.
For starters, they used to decorate their homes with naked statues, and used pedestals which depicted penises. Sexuality wasn't seen as bad at all. Romans were quite open about sex. And they had it for fun!
The Romans did differentiate between penetrating and being penetrated: penetrating was masculine, and therefore good; being penetrated was feminine, and therefore bad. But those men were fucking anything that moved - their wives, other men's wives, slave women, even slave men. The only "wrong" was being fucked. A Roman man was never subordinate to another man. And there was no such thing as a "homosexual" - sexuality was a behaviour, not an identity. But fucking was a natural part of life.
I'm not so educated about ancient Greeks, but I don't recall them being prudish about sex, either. The pederasty that @cadadr refers to - where an older man would take a teenage boy under his wing, and teach him how to be a man, and have sexual relations with him while doing so - was a rite of passage. Again, I don't recall anything in their culture about sexuality being bad and sex being only for procreation.
Maybe you could provide some sources of your own?
My comment was in relation to the part of @cadadr's post quoted below. Within the context of their post, my understanding was that they were asserting that Greek homosexuality was only in the form of paderasty and it was despised by the majority of the population. If that's not what they meant, then that's fine and I will happily retract my comment.
The rest of your comment about greek/roman sexuality is basically the same as my own understanding. The entire sentence that you quoted was:
My understanding is that the idea that sex=bad existed, and some groups followed that ideology. But it wasn't the common/dominant ideology. I was just pointing out the idea existed (as opposed to the idea of homosexuality, which did not exist). I was not trying to insinuate that the idea was common or dominant.
Why? I was only ever discussing my (transparently uneducated) understanding. I wasn't trying to tear cadadr's post down, I'm only trying to figure out the truth for my own learning.
It's not that big of a gap actually, especially considering Central and Eastern Mediterranean was/is a cultural continuum that is more interrelated than say Europe, Asia, or even the Middle East is.
My general understanding of this---and it comes from reading 30+ Platonic dialogues, Sappho's stuff, wikiwalking, and other personal research; so stuff that talks about homosexuality a lot but not really focused on it---is two fold:
Paderasty is almost exclusively described by the "older men" that fucked the boys, thus inherently biased. It could become an entirely different story if we could access the stories of the boys while they were the young lovers.
Paderasty was almost exclusively a thing among the aristocrats, the general populus did not condone it, saw it as a thing to protect their boys from.
These forms of homosexuality still continue to exist in Turkey (and AFAIU in other parts of Near East and South Western Asia). If you watch for example the Turkey episode of Sex in Strange Places doc by Stacy Dooley, you'll find a scene where she goes to a street in Taksim famous for trans womens' brothels and interviews people why they come for trans sex workers and whether do they identify as homosexual. They promptly say "because girls don't give it to us" and "no, we're straight" (the clip was on YouTube but I can't seem to find it, sorry).
Edit: forgot to mention that of course this outlook and way of things does coexist with a the current form of homosexuality that exists worldwide.