Islamic Homosexualities
edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe
"The fullest analysis of homosexual behavior over the many centuries and diverse regions of the Islamic world. . . . A splendid collection!"
Randolph Trumbach, City University of New York
The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. In Western stereotypes, Islamic societies are economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and, as we are now beginning to discover, a great deal of variation in terms of gender roles and sexuality.
As Lila Abu-Lughod shows in Writing Women?s Worlds, women living in Islamic communities have recourse to a variety of means of enhancing their status and offsetting the otherwise confining strictures of religious law. 
In a similar way, although much less studied, patterns of male and female homosexuality have existed and sometimes flourished within the Islamic world. Islamic Homosexualities reveals that same-sex relations have, until quite recently, been much more tolerated under Islam than in the Christian West.
The articles in this collection reveal both age-stratified patterns of male homosexuality, as seen in the erotic and romantic poetry of medieval poets, and gender-based patterns, in which both men and women might, to varying degrees, choose to live as members of the opposite sex or, indeed, a third gender status.
Islamic Homosexualities offers both cultural and historical analysis based on the theoretical perspectives of gender studies, feminism and lesbian/gay studies. Topics range from historical patterns of male homosexuality in medieval Persia, Spain and Egypt to the more recently documented ?sworn virgins? of the Balkans (women who forswear marriage and live as men) and the alternative gender statuses of the male khanith in Oman and the female mustergil in southern Iraq. Chapters include contemporary ethnography as well as reviews of historical evidence.
CONTENTS
Part I: Introduction to Islamic Homosexualities
Introduction by Will Roscoe and Stephen O. Murray
The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexuality by Stephen O. Murray
Precursors of Islamic Male Homosexualities by Will Roscoe
Muhammad and Male Homosexuality by Jim Wafer
The Scattered References to Woman-Woman Love in Islamic Societies by Stephen O. Murray
Part II: Literary Studies
Vision and Passion: The Symbolism of Male Love in Islamic Mystical Literature by Jim Wafer
Corporealizing Medieval Persian and Turkish Tropes by Stephen O. Murray
Male Love and Islamic Law and Arab Spain by Louis Crompton
Part III: Historical Studies
Male Homosexuality, Inheritance Rules, and the Status of Women in Medieval Egypt: The Case of the Mamluks by Stephen O. Murray
Homosexuality Among Slave Elites in Ottoman Turkey by Stephen O. Murray
Male Homosexuality in Ottoman Albania by Stephen O. Murray
The Balkan Sworn Virgin: A Cross-Gendered Female Role by Mildred Dickemann
Some Nineteenth Century Reports of Islamic Homosexualities by Stephen O. Murray
Gender-Defined Homosexual Roles in Sub-Saharan African Islamic Cultures by Stephen O. Murray
Part IV: Anthropological Studies
Institutionalized Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq by Sigrid Westphal-Helbush (trans. Bradley Rose)
The Sohari Khanith by Stephen O. Murray
Male Actresses in Islamic Parts of Indonesia and the Southern Philippines by Stephen O. Murray
Two Baluchi Buggas, a Sindhi Zenana, and the Status of Hijras in Contemporary Pakistan by Nauman Naqvi and Hasan Mujtaba
The Other Side of Midnight: Pakistani Male Prostitutes by Hasan Mutjaba
Not-So-Gay Life in Pakistan in the 1980s and 90s by Badruddin Khan
Two Islamic AIDS Education Organizations by Eric Allyn and Stephen O. Murray
Conclusion by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe
