Before Homosexuality in the Arab‐Islamic World, 1500–1800

Before Homosexuality in the Arab‐Islamic World, 1500–1800 is a 2005 book by Khaled El-Rouayheb, published by the University of Chicago Press. El-Rouayheb had written a PhD dissertation on the subject of homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic world, and this dissertation was supervised by Basim Musallam. El-Rouayheb revised the dissertation into this book. As of 2006 El-Rouayheb is a University of Cambridge postdoctoral fellow.

El-Rouayheb's thesis is that the male same sex desires expressed in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are not homosexuality in the modern, Western sense. Shusha Guppy of the Times Higher Education Supplement wrote that the book is "a more nuanced and limited study of "how homosexuality was perceived" in a particular period in the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire before modernity", and therefore not a "Kinsey report" and not a general study. Donald L. Boisvert of Concordia University wrote that the work is one of the "few accessible studies of this sort". The author uses adab, biographical dictionaries, chronicles, travel journals written by Ottomans and Europeans, legal interpretations of the Quran and sharia, poetry, mystical treatises, and religious interpretations of the Quran and sharia as sources.

This book, a monograph, has been translated into French and Slovenian. The French version was published in 2010 and the Slovenian version was published in 2012.

El-Rouayheb argues his thesis by stating that essentialist views of homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic world generally do not consider the contrast between the two roles in anal intercourse (liwāt): active and passive, the contrast between chaste desire (‘ishq) and sexual desire, and the contrast between anal intercourse and other kinds of sexual acts. El-Rouayeb weighs the definitions of homosexuality and argues in favor of Michel Foucault's position that "homosexuality" is a construct of the conditions of the time period and against the "essentialist" view that homosexuality has always been present. El-Rouayheb stated that the importation of European attitudes against homosexuality, which began in the 19th century, affected the view of homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic world.

...
Wikipedia