Illicit desire: Notions of sexual morality in premodern Arab-Islamic literature

Premodern Islamic legal-religious tradition is characterized by a strict sexual morality with rigid boundaries between licit and illicit sexual behavior, with harsh penalties for extramarital heterosexual and homosexual relations. Marital gender roles are regulated and especially women are imposed restrictions.

In other discourses, such as belles-lettres, sex etiquette manuals and history writing, however, these restrictions are often ignored.

Indeed, homosexuality seems to have been considered normal, judging by its prevalence as a motif in widespread poetry as well as the many casual references to it in, for example, historical anecdotes.

Sex manuals devoted chapters to same-sex relations, and medical literature described same sex attraction as a natural variant.

This project aims to examine this discrepancy with thorough analyses of the boundaries of licit and illicit in a number of sources from important periods in Arab-Islamic history. The sources consist of religious and secular texts on sexuality.

I investigate the occurrence of different notions of sexual morality and how these notions have interacted and developed over time, expecting to be able to draw conclusions on sexual morality in different periods, whether and how contradicting sexual norms coexisted.