Note: The following is the outcome of a brainstorming session: It is divided into 3 parts: The first was hurriedly noted down during the actual discussions - and hence is pretty 'raw': Despite its incoherence, the general line of thought can be discerned: and can be useful in developing the relevant themes. The second and third parts were inferred from some initial reflection on the discussions, and project a number of options to follow up in structuring the inquiry and identifying some of the themes to follow up.

 

 

You have been created of a single self and of it created its twain, and of the pair disseminated the multitude. Here sex is related directly with the origins of creation and the preservation of the human species: hence use of duality here, al zawjiya, the pairing, points to a radical distinction between human sexuality and animal sexuality, since here the terms of reference are not confined to ‘male’ and female’, but zawj, to underline the centrality of this feature for the institution of civilization: al umran: Umran considered as a function of human vocation: al istikhlaf, and the charge, or the trust, implicit in the God connection: Man’s relation to God. See sura al baqara (30) and cf. Surah al a’raf (3): ... Allah taking the covenant with Adam’s offspring: Am I not your Lord: Aye, said they: in testament; Lest you might say that we were unaware of this pledge/ trust. In this covenant, is a pointer to the individual responsibility in implementing umran: Note the immediately following ayah, whence the distinction between fathers and sons is implicit in the claim that might be made that our fathers before us have diverged, and we were merely their offspring.

The quranic ayas repeatedly affirm the difference between pairing in the human context from that in the general animal context, by relating it to three objectives: which constitute the source for understanding the crucial role of sexuality in this complex. These objectives are partly bound to the pair, and to the family, taken as a nucleus, or a micro unit in society. Hence in sura Rum: we read: And of His Signs he has created for you of yourselves, pairs, that you might find in them your repose, and He has made between you bonds of love and compassion, that ye may see in these Signs for those who understand. It is in sakan: in tranquillity and repose, that the ecology for productivity and for umran can be assured: It assures the pscychological prerequisites for inner peace embedded in love, compassion, and sense of responsibility/ duty... The other factor implicit in the Aya: It is He who has created out of water – fluid – humans and made between them relations of nasab- and sahar/ The actual semen, the fluid, which ensues in the sexual intercourse between the pair, is not simply idle fluid extracted, or wasted , from the sexes, simply as an overflow and expression of a consummation of sexual desire: rather , this very fluid is transformed into an origin for humankind, and for human society: a particular society, which will come to be enmeshed in a web of ascending relations that will underpin the human and the basic relationships which will cement and structure the social organism: a web of relationships subsumed in al nasab and relations... so that human attributes go beyond mere male indicators, to assuming the bonds that constitute the social network: father, uncle, nephew, ..brother, and so that the female is more than simply a biological species: and comes to be a social character: a wife, a mother, an aunt, a daughter, a niece... a member in a circle of overlapping networks... such that the very concept of society becomes a valid and viable entity. A moral, relational, meaningful, and purposeful entity.

The third objective: the maintenance or preservation of the Kind, or the species, and the promotion, or the development and growth the matrix of continuity and connections from one generation to the next... as if the mission of stewardship and umran, constitutes a banner passed on from father to son.. so that we get different strata of granfathers and grandmothers linking tens of generations, and binding them in links of meaningful relations... a virtual kinship of the kind.

In this sense, sexual relations assume a sacred dimension: expressing an enduring human bond... a sacred function in which the distinct elements of individual desire and enjoyment on both parts, the pair, such elements come to be attached to the means and ‘instruments’ and not the ends, or purposes. In this way, the sexual instincts come to be motives for instituting the founding unit, the family, and not ends in themselves. When we look at pairing in the animal kingdom, in contrast, we simply find a single objective or end: a natural end, identified with promoting growth...ie. preserving the species.

On this account, the great religions, esp. Judaism and Islam, were particularly stringent in their attitudes to matters of zina/ or adultery and fornication and various sexual digressions. In the OT we find sanctions on adultery to be stoning to death: The Old Man and the Old Woman: stone them to death: as a vengeance from God... [nikalan min allah]; Likewise, the Qur’an came with a similar sanction/ punishment and referred to it as [nikalan] and advocated physical / corporative punishment: lashing. Whether we think in terms of the biblical or the quranic injunctions, we come to see the meaning intended: whereby the human who has disdained and scorned his own humanity, and fallen so low in his sexual pursuits as to that of the animal level... could only most suitably be reprimanded in his conduct and confronted with a punishment suited to ‘rebellious’ or wayward beasts: as physical punishment: beating with stones, or sticks... The absolute non compromising attitude of qur’an has to do with an attempt to foreclose man’s temptation to forget his essential humanity, and vocation, and what that should mean in terms of a collapse of umran, and the end of civilization....This is why too, the woman question: and the imperative of having woman placed in her proper stature: it has continued to defy humanity and constitute the Achilles’ heel of cities and civilizations... Whenever woman’s position was in doubt or controversial, it was a key pointer to the onsetting dissolution of societies and cities. Rome is a good indicator and testimony.. and, so too, the history of other outgoing empires or the decline and fall of many others: whenever we try to understand the underlying factors to social dissolution we shall identify a vital connection to the prevailing attitudes to women and sex.

II

As background to the normative setting of my inquiry, some thought on the general theoretical framework may be in order. It would help locate or situate the normative account against a common index – as it were, from whence it would be possible to identify and relate as we narrate.

One might initially distinguish three socio-cultural types or modal cultures against which to plot the sexual narrative in different societies. These are premised on a distinction between three types of society: the promiscuous, the prudish, and the sane. This distinction is a function of the prevailing norms of sexuality. The matrix for defining sexuality and attitudes to sexuality lie on a nature–culture divide: In the first instance, sexuality is an all natural domain to be contrasted with a setting where it belongs to the realm of culture and cultural mores. Profiling the two basic modes embodied in the promiscuous and the prudish varieties puts this distinction into focus. Take human societies dotting the planetary globe as they might be viewed from its antipodes: At the one end we encounter a normative horizon where sex is taken for a natural instinct, lying distinctly outside the domain of right and wrong, inscribed in an ethic of the innocence of nature - from nature we come and unto nature we return. Creature of nature, or part thereof, Man is a sexual animal subject to the natural order and nature subscribes to its own survival /self-preservation code to which the human species is an ontological / biological extension. Society is the collective representation of this naturally encoded species. At the other end of the global spectrum, witness the revulsion against this physical law of nature in a flight into the spiritual realm where the language of representation of reality takes on a new spin. Here we encounter the conflictual pulls between two antithetical worlds. The profanity of nature is countered by the sacred a realm open to human aspirations to the extent that humans can distance themselves from the flesh....In the spiritual economy of moral man, sexuality is a mute and mutilating category. We temporarily leave behind the natural antipode.

Banished and confined to the dark underworld of the devil sexuality in the ‘moral antipode’ is relegated to a catalogue of the sins of the flesh. It is the false promise, the lure of immortality that baited the archetypal pair of our ancestors out of Paradise, and launched mankind onto its journey of estrangement and redemption in this world as the punishment for the Fall. There is a perpetual wart in the human conscience, an ineluctable irony that it is the fate of mortals to contend onto eternity: but for the love of God, for the coming of the Savior and the crucifixion... He died for our sins: that the sins of the father might not be borne onto eternity by the sons. (and daughters?) On this count, a complex and ambivalent morality ensues... If sexuality is admitted as admitted it must be, if simply in view of man’s fallen nature, then it has to be hedged by all kinds of norms: to be safeguarded, to contain the havoc that must ensue. The idea here is how to concede to a world of sin and abomination, where sexual abstention is the ideal norm: a world where the hierarchy of sainthood is marked for those who resist its temptations, beginning with the temptations of the flesh. The compromises that are worked out in the terrestrial sphere yield a model of ambivalent moralities. Victorian England provides a classic example of this kind of society where norms and social mores are developed to such excellence as to leave little room in its midst for uncouth improprieties - which were conveniently banished outside the boundaries of civility and civilization, to an exotic (and depraved) Orient.

Both the promiscuous society and its prudish counterpart are ontologically and historically of a piece. They are postulated on an understanding of man and an attitude to nature. Morality and the modalities of culture are a function of this set of fundamental conceptions which draw on a variety of sources, philosophical, theological, and mythological. But in all cases, the received wisdom, or the discovered sensibilities are attuned to a particular conception of man, nature, where social morality is the outcome of a perceived dialectic between the one and the other. In more sophisticated contexts, whether in traditional cultures, or in historical civilizations, the dialectic between nature and man is played out against an intervening transcending variable which mediates the interaction between the two spheres, that of human agency, and that of natural contingency. This transcendent variable is identified with the supernatural, a realm beyond man and nature that is enigmatically, and intimately bound up with both. This realm is embodied in a universe of discourse that draws on an idiom of tradition and / or divine revelation. Its sources are embodied in scripture transmitted from one generation to the next, inscribed in a philosophy of time and creation. Conversely, it in non-scriptural communities, it is embodied in an oral tradition that is consecrated and perpetuated through time, inscribed in a communal memory, and manifested in the rites and customs that lend the community its identity and ascribe it its codes of conduct and affinities. This vertical tangent intersects with the horizons that span the man/nature continuum and becomes an autonomous and distinct sphere associated with human culture and presiding over the temporal flux.

The site in which the norms of sexuality at any given moment of time are subject to contestation, the outcome is subject to this mediated dialectic played out at the conjuncture where multivalent, or multivariant influences are forged. At one end is the generational pull, the pull of tradition, or conversely, there is the ideational pull, that draws on the supernatural or on the injunctions of revealed religion, and at the other, there are the variable constellations of compulsions that are worked out on the homo – natura plane. The very ambivalence of man, as a being constituted of body and mind, of a physique and a psyche, of flesh and spirit is ineluctably played out on the altar of sexuality: the condition for his very mortality and morality, bound into one.

One other observation on this bifocal model of alternative sites and contexts where the norms of human sexuality are conceived and crystallized, as they shape and evolve through time. These models are antipodal, each in a way constituted in and constituting the mirror image of its counterpode. Yet, the affinities between these two models do not stop at their oppositionality, but extend to their being apposites. These models for all their obvious differences, share more in common than might at first be assumed. Indeed, they lie of a single plane, as much as lying on the same continuum: there subsists between them a certain / singular compulsive affinity. Not only does Nature play the ultimate arbiter in shaping / grounding their moralities, whether positively or negatively, but there exists between them a certain logical affinity that is played out in time, as much as through time. Suffice it to note that the ultimate refuge for an excess of promiscuity lies in the psychological recesses of the cloister, just as when the reprieve in self-exile and denial has run its course, promiscuity re-emerges in full swing as the touted release. We will not stop here to comment on the latent wisdom in Nature or on the benign providence that oversees the efficacy of the balance mechanisms that ultimately safeguards the integrity of the life-force in the interests of humanity and its preservation.

The point to make here is that underlying the momentum that sustains the realm of sexuality and with it the conditions for the life of the species is the dynamic of the oscillating culture mode..[ supplementing and superintending the contrasting models of socio-cultural dynamics is the dynamic of the oscillating culture mode grounded in a horizontal bearing of the episteme. Ie.] Paradoxically, the common ground for both models, the brothel and the cloister, is pitched against a horizontal bearing of knowledge and being, one identified with the oscillating culture type where promiscuity is the dissolution of a reified spirituality, and the elevation of the promiscuous is sought in the recovery of the key to the lost sanctuary.

The archetype for modular societies seen in terms of the sources, scopes, forms and cultures of their respective sexual moralities is not however exhausted at the threshold of the oscillating culture type with its alternating variants. The matrix against which the archetypes of culture forms are conceived is itself postulated on a duality that takes the vertical axis of knowing and being as the pivot for constructing an al-ternative culture-type. The latter is constituted round an an integrated vital space forged at the juncture of conjoining temporal affinities to the ontic polarities in creation. The polarities refer to the vertical axis which relates (at the same time as it differentiates) the human to the transcendent: man and God. What type of socio-cultural model grounded in the norms of sexuality would be conceivable in this median culture- type? How would it differ from its counterpart in the oscillating culture type? Let us consider the premises for this extra-spectral alternative in order to grasp the range of realizable mortal horizons and societal possibilities, beyond the tension fields cultivated in the antipodes.

[To be continued: Link this holistic model to some current initiatives in the ‘ecological mode’: point out some of the logic/ quantum thinking and its implications for the sane society.

With the tawhidi paradigm providing the grounds for rethinking sexuality in the Muslim world, we first apply this initiative at the level of the sources of the tradition, before extending it to the empirical field of case studies. From the qur’anic injunctions on human sexuality we take our stand at the frontiers of a zone of liminality where the lines of the permissible and the forbidden are tightly drawn. This provides the discursive space for probing levels of meaning and for identifying connections or affinities which might normally go unheeded in the more ‘transparent’ zones of the web of human relations. This is the core of my presentation. For the sake of clarity and coherence though, and in order to make my contribution more meaningful in the context of the other field presentations, a more general normative/ cognitive map is needed against which to place my own interpretative foray as well as the excurses from the field.

III

Mapping out the Sources and hierarchies grounding the normative sphere of sexuality in the Muslim imaginaire and experience.

The following is a general outline of the presentation as I see it at this point of research and reflection on the theme: ‘Sexuality in Islam: Normative Perspectives’. It differs somewhat from the original abstract where the focus was exclusively on a thematic reading of the qur’anic injunctions on adultery and slander. That was taken as an access to addressing the normative context of sexuality in Muslim societies. Now I am situating the proposed reading against a broader perspective combining both a theoretical and historical dimension as the context for the philosophical aperture in which the reading is embedded.

The paper will be divided into three parts:

I. Cognitive. A theoretical framework introducing the main ideas and conceptual tools of analysis. This includes an introduction to such concepts as the ‘bearings of a culture’ and modal culture-types; the tawhidi paradigm; operational archetypes for sexuality in variable socio-cultural settings/ historical societies. Muslim societies are located in this cognitive framework.

II. Geneology. Mapping the normative framework in the Muslim setting identifies, classifies and distinguishes the historical sources. A concentricity of ‘imaginaires’ or socio-sexual imaginations ensues from a systemic rethinking of the sources. In this section our interpretative strategy creates/ sites a discursive opening for engaging the normative Muslim horizons at the interstices of the historical and the theoretical. The aim is to highlight the setting against which actual practices in specific communities take place.

III. Synthesis. In this section I would like to bring together the first two parts by applying the conceptual and theoretical insights to understanding specific constituencies against evolving praxis (= attitudes/conduct & beliefs, knowledge, understanding). The implementation is conceived on two levels: On a general level I relate the tentative archetypes of sexuality to the reality of shifting and overlapping contexts in contemporary Muslim societies - ‘context’ refers to communities of interpretation as well as to communities of practice. The different approaches to sexuality are also taken as competing grounds for contesting and affirming identity and affinity in the current politics of change (regionally/globally). The other level relates to specific normative sources and raises the imperative of challenging ‘conventional’ (=traditional & modern) Muslim attitudes and approaches in a bid to engage textuality on a higher and more authentic plane. Rethinking the boundaries of the moral life against the qur’anic injunctions on fornication and slander paves the way to a symbiotic articulation of sex as foundational in the deep ecology of the civic community in the [modal ]‘sane society.’