Sexual taboo in the Middle East

The Middle East is a large region that consists of different countries. Majority of the people in these countries participate in patriarchal religions such as Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, which prohibit premarital sex (sexual activity before marriage). While dating and premarital sex are looked down upon for religious and social reasons, it is not illegal.^[1] In addition, young people rarely learn about sexual health in school, and other sources of information may not be reliable.^[2]

Sexual and Reproductive Health Education

Sexual health education varies from country to country. Sexual education usually includes learning about puberty, sexually transmitted infections and diseases, and preventing unwanted pregnancies.^[2] Most people can agree that sex education is important for young adults to learn about because that is when they are most sexually active. Generally, young people in the Middle East will get their information about sexuality and reproduction from their parents. However, young people are afraid to ask out of fear that their parents will assume they are engaging in sexual activities.^[2]

Media in the Middle East does not offer much when it comes to sexual and reproductive health. In addition, political figures do not advocate for more accurate information when it comes to sexual health. If political figures introduced sexual health more into public schools and the media, then perhaps talking about sex would not be so taboo. although there has been evidence on the importance of sexual education for women and girls, publicly it is still frown upon. Safe spaces are being created in refugee camps in order to help the mere conversation on the subject of sex less taboo.^[3]

Egypt

The formal education system in Egypt provides young people with very limited information on sex and reproductive health. A survey conducted in 2009 by the Population Council in Cairo showed that 15,000 people aged 10–29 received little to no information on sexual health from public school.^[4]

Media Literacy

It is paramount to look at sexual and reproductive education challenges using a single service delivery system as opposed to the current disposition of no vision at all. Among the numerous problems dogging media literacy in Middle East are reproductive health and sexual health issues.^[5][6] The twist in the tale is that premarital sex is largely prohibited while media coverage of such issues as sexual and reproductive health is considered taboo. This indicates a society characterized by self-denial and hypocrisy because people know and even think that sexual reproduction health is crucial but nobody wants to confront it^[6]

Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex

Iran

Majority of both men and women in Iran supported dating in order to get more acquainted with the person before marriage.^[7] On the other hand, when it came to intimacy and non-sexual contact, 69% of men were open to it compared to only 50.5% of women.^[7] There were certain things that would affect a person's attitudes towards premarital sex. Education levels made no significant difference in whether someone agreed with premarital sex. Religion however, played a big part in the attitudes towards premarital sex. Those who were religious were more against premarital sex than those who were not religious.^[7]

Turkey

Premarital sex is growing more acceptable for men in Turkey, but is still widely disapproved of for women. A study done in Turkey including 124 undergraduate students and 60 adults showed some of the various views on premarital sex. Women who have engaged in premarital sex are looked at as being less desirable than women who are virgins. This is because female virginity is valuable in deciding whether a woman is pure in Turkish culture.^[8] Men tended to look more negatively upon premarital sex compared to women, yet men engaged more in premarital sex than women did.^[8]

Political and Public Goodwill

Disconnect between policy, research, and practice is detrimental to sexual and health reproduction in Middle East. Usually, the official policies in Middle East do less than combat the underlying sexual taboo.^[5]

Islam and Homosexuality

Under Islamic law homosexual acts are unequivocally prohibited. The Koran refers to homosexuals as Lot's people (quam Lut), Lot being the Islamic prophet who preached against homosexuality in the cities of Sodom and Gomorra. According to Kligerman, "In the Qur’an, Lut questions, ‘How can you lust for males, of all creatures in the world, and leave those whom God has created for you as your mates? You are really going beyond all limits’... The Prophet Muhammad adds, "Doomed by God is who does what Lot’s people did" (i.e. to engage in same-sex sexual activity) .’"^[9]

Muhammad said that, "’No man should look at the private parts of another man, and no woman should look at the private parts of another woman, and no two men sleep [in bed] under one cover, and no two women sleep under one cover.’ In his last speech, known as the ‘Farewell Sermon’, he added a last condemnation of homosexuality, saying, ‘Whoever has intercourse with a woman and penetrates her rectum, or with a man, or with a boy, will appear on the Last Day stinking worse than a corpse; people will find him unbearable until he enters hell fire, and God will cancel all his good deeds.’"^[9]

Homosexual Behavior

As stated prior, the religious prescriptions of Islam are not a definitive indication of one’s behavior in society. Although one may be hesitant to proclaim themselves openly as homosexual, it is not uncommon for one to participate in homosexual activities so long as they simultaneously uphold other societal norms. One essential institution in the Middle East is the family. So long as a man upholds this institution, by taking a wife and fathering children, what occurs in private will be of no interest to others.^[10] "Known homosexuals were tolerated in public office if they continue to publicly live a heterosexual lifestyle. For instance, Sultan Mehmet II, Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, and Sultan Mahmud Ghaznawi, who invaded India from Afghanistan, are both important historical figures and known gays. Both men had several wives and children. While Westerners would view these men—and those like them—as bisexual, Muslims view them as consistent with shari’a; they maintained an outwardly conforming appearance in terms of familial and public life but happened to engage in homosexual activity."^[10] Homosexual acts can also be well received if they allude to an expression of dominance over another, "’In Turkey, Egypt and the Maghreb, men who are ‘active’ in sexual relations with other men are not considered homosexual; the sexual domination of other men even confers a status of hyper-masculinity.’"^[11]

"Toward the end of the year 1701, a Druze chieftain (Emir) from the Wādī alTaym area in Syria came to Damascus to be officially invested as head military official (Yāyābāshī) of his home region by the governor of the city. According to a contemporary chronicler, the Emir was a notorious womanizer, who ‘in Damascus was determined to conduct himself with his characteristic lewdness.’ Once, while at the house of a local woman, he was surprised by around twenty Turcoman soldiers, who gang-raped him and robbed him of his clothes, leaving him barefoot and clad only in his inner garments. ‘He who encroaches upon the womenfolk (h.arı¯m) of the Muslims deserves more than this,’ they reportedly said before letting him go. ‘News of the incident,’ the chronicler added, ‘reached the women and children [of the city], and songs about him [i.e., the Emir] were composed and performed by singers . . . He then departed to the land of the Druzes, his home, and it was said that the woman remained untainted [i.e., she was not dishonored before the arrival of the soldiers], and thus God forsook the damned Emir at the hands of the Turcomans.’"^[12] The people viewed Turcomans treatment of the Emir as an honorable one. There focus was not on whether or not such acts constituted anything that could be identified as "homosexual" in nature, but rather the effects that such actions would have on the Emir. The Emir, by being both the receiver (the pathic) of the sex act and by doing so against his will (as a result of his attempt to defile, so to speak, the local woman) is stripped of his dignity which has subsequently been transferred to his conquerors. "[T]o penetrate phallically is to dominate, subjugate, and ultimately to humiliate"^[12]

Pederasty in Pre-modern Middle East (1500-1800 CE)

According to literature that can be dated as far back as the 1500s to present day is where we can find evidence of,^[13] pederasty, or amorous and sexual relations between men and adolescent boys. Pederasty is easily confused with pedophilia; the latter is characterized by a sexual attraction to children who have not yet begun pubertal development. Some too draw a distinction between what might be called a biological definition of childhood and a socio-legal one.^[14]

"Mālikī scholars of the early Ottoman period repeatedly confirmed that a man would negate his state of ritual purity if he touched with lust the skin of a beardless or downy-cheeked youth, since they fell under the category of that 'which is normally the object of lust.'"^[15]

The French traveller Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, who visited Egypt between 1777 and 1780, made a similar observation:

"The passion contrary to nature . . . the inconceivable appetite which dishonored the Greeks and Persians of antiquity, constitute the delight, or, to use a juster term, the infamy of the Egyptians. It is not for the women that their amorous ditties are composed: it is not on them that tender caresses are lavished; far different objects inflame them.”^[12]

The Egyptian scholar Rifāah al Tahtāwī, who was in Paris between 1826 and 1831, noted:

"Amongst the laudable traits of their character, similar really to those of the Bedouin [arab], is their not being inclined toward loving male youths and eulogizing them in poetry, for this is something unmentionable for them and contrary to their nature and morals. One of the positive aspects of their language and poetry is that it does not permit the saying of love poetry of someone of the same sex. Thus, in the French language a man cannot say: I loved a youth (ghulām), for that would be an unacceptable and awkward wording. Therefore if one of them translates one of our books he avoids this by saying in the translation: I loved a young female (ghulāmah) or a person (dhātan).”^[12]

At the end of his book Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Khaled El-Rouayheb concludes,

"Falling in love with a teenage youth and expressing this love in verse were not punishable offenses, and a significant number of Islamic scholars, though not all, asserted that such behavior was not objectionable."^[16]

Western Moral Influence

Today, for some, the Middle East is known as one of the most repressive regions with regards to sexual expression. Some historians have noted, however, that with respect to homosexuality, such repression was, imported, so to speak, from the West. [T]he encounter with European Victorian morality was to have profound effects on local attitudes toward what came to be called "sexual inversion" or "sexual perversion" (shudhūdh jinsā).^[17] With the Middle East's contact with the West came an increasing importance placed on assimilation, so to speak, with the values and systems prescribed from the West. The rise in participation in international markets came the destruction of the kinship-based community and an increasing stigma toward homosexuality "‘The concept of homosexuality as defining a particular type person and a category of ‘deviance’ came to the Middle East [through the agency] of the West’ as well. Until Western influence, homosexuality did not carry a negative connotation in the Muslim world. The change in community structure and the rising influence of Western perceptions thus largely created the contemporary taboo against homosexuality in Muslim societies."^[18]

See also

References

This page was last edited on 6 April 2024, at 22:13