First  Draft  for AAA97  Panel

Sexuality and Spirituality

Beyond Imagining Sexuality in Muslim Societies

.... to its Articulation.

Notes   

        Normative Dimensions

Here are some lines of thought on the theme in question. They may suggest a theme for a central thesis and then can be follow up with an ‘argument’ to substantiate it. The following may be explored as a possible point of departure for our inquiry into a normative perspective on sexuality in Muslim societies.

"The normative dimension is especially important in understanding Muslim societies. This is not because conduct and relations in these societies necessarily embody or enact these norms, for as with all human conduct, in all human societies, it would be naïve to assume a simple correspondence. But we need to understand that to the extent that Muslim societies are identified in the mind of their members and in the mind of those who observe them with Islam, the normative dimension constitutes a central marker of this identity. Norms too have much to tell us about the primary constituents of society: Is it the individual, or the community? In the modern West, the process of ‘individuation’ has gone a long way , meaning that the organization of state and society assume the autonomy of the individual as an ultimate value. This autonomy has created an expanding space for individual choice and experimenting with alternative life-styles, where ‘freedom’ is the supreme value. In such a context there is little room for a normative discourse since the prevailing cultural relativism sanctions a situational ethics that subverts the underlying premise for such a discourse.

Boundaries Questioned?

Muslim societies are not immune to the winds blowing from western modernities, and their social cultural fabric is as fragile as their political economies and power structures. While the roots of a politics of market economies and liberal moralities may not be center stage, they are doubtless playing havoc at the fringes and periodically threatening their centers… However, it is largely the law of unintended consequences that commands the public square wherever resistance is encountered. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, boundaries are not so clearly defined in particular Muslim settings between a ‘public’ and a ‘private’ sphere. The resistance which is released in these overlapping centers of private and public invoke their like currents throughout the immune order of these societies. It is this mechanism that has given rise to a certain kind of politics that has increasingly come to characterize contemporary Muslim societies as they attempt to fend for their threatened autonomies and identities before the onslaught of hegemonizing, homogeneizing global currents. This is a politics of identity and recognition that may find a partial expression at the level of the polity, but is thorougly embedded in a grass-roots culture that permeates the community. Unlike the Western European and the North American advance posts of civilization where liberalism has taken its toll on the structures and ethos of community there, these are elements which have been sustained in societal centers throughout the Muslim world. This grass roots culture persists notwithstanding the havoc they have endured from the impositions and excesses of the native-alien institutions , foremost of which is the modern state itself which, for reasons of its own, has deployed its vanguard security apparatus to break down these alternative centers of resilience.

Identity and Recognition

In standing on the grounds of a politics of identity and recognition, Muslim societies may unwittingly be drawing on the reserves of a tradition that may have become already depleted in the protracted encounter with modernity and the recurrent resistances to the encroachments of the ‘west’. However, it is this very challenge of being caught between a depleting tradition and a globalizing modernity that is being contested that the opportunities and possibilities are generated for playing out the politics of identity and recognition. The fallout may be observed in the public square. But for the real source of this resistance, the wellsprings of the energy, and the articulations of the message we will need to tap into the inner sanctuaries of the embattled self. Struggling as it is for its own self-definitions and moralities, it awakens to find itself at the threshhold of an intensifying encounter with the modern world. In some ways, if we try to situate Muslim societies on a timeline between the modern and the traditional - (however contentious these categories may be) - we find them closer to the latter. Together, Muslim and traditional may share more a politics of tradition and recognition that draws on a code of honor and a deference to a world that recognizes measure and direction, simply, a world of right and wrong.

There is however a certain distinction, or difference, which limits the affinities with a traditional order contrasted with the rational liberal order identified with modernity. If in the category of tradition, the place of freedom and autonomy which define the ultimate moral grounds of modernity may be disputed, in underlying paradigm that constitutes the boundaries of the Muslim identity, such autonomy and freedom are taken as a premise for a code of honor and commitment to which they are subsumed, not substituted. Morality is ultimately anchored in transcendence, and its testing ground is primarily sought in the individual conscience, even though its projection onto the public square, in the common space where the community holds its intercourse, is expected to follow as a matter of course. Here again, in the Muslim paradigm the individual and the community do not exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. The spheres overlap, there are points at which they intersect, and points at which they diverge, and in the interval, is created that common space, where the standards that regulate the intercourse are expected to flow homogeneously, reinforcing a mutual code of honor, trust, and deference that sets the bounds of civility in Muslim society.

A Sense of  Place

An analogy of this interdependent and interactive psychology that structures the moral code may be taken from a classical model of architecture found in the historical Muslim city. I will take my example from a typical traditional Arab home in a small town in Syria where I was unexpectedly hosted some twenty years ago . There I spent a memorable evening under an enchanting star studded sky, in the privacy of a courtyard garnered by an upstairs gallery leading to a number of private rooms. The adjoining rooms to the courtyard , itself a private enclosure, included other common areas, like the kitchen, and probably other guest areas. We were served dinner in the courtyard, it being a pleasant late September evening, the different members of an extended family were around lounging casually, comfortably, exchanging stories of the day and commenting on current news. I remember some gargling waterpipes, or nergilas, with an older woman blowing on one of them – a sight of some exotic fascination for me since this was not quite the custom from where I came in Egypt. The atmosphere was pleasant, relaxed, intimate, and friendly. It was a mixed company, including young and old, a cross section of generations. 

Yet, it was neither cramped nor noisy: there was a sense of space, openness, of being embraced and entertained without being imposed upon, choked or constricted. Later in the evening we retired, each to their family quarters upstairs, myself to the guest room, the doors closed, and each could enjoy their own privacy. I forgot to mention that this accommodation of space within space, of an enclosure that opened outward and upward onto further enclosures was itself part of a residential quarter that was itself thoroughly unassuming on the outside.. if not entirely bland. The adjoining houses were surrounded by high walls and the only opening onto the narrow street was the main access door. The general orientation of the place was inward and upward. It was an ideal allocation of space that symbolized the close-knit character of the community, that could accommodate the diverse needs for privacy and the personal with the public and the communal.. the transition from private to public, from inner to outer, entailed a discrete and subtle transfer: there was no abrupt rupture: it replicated the kind of transitions and relations with the ‘outside’ - the kind of interactions/ intercourse that took place within the common space that was shared by the extended family and its guests/ neighbors was a training ground for mobility and exchange in a number of other nodal spaces that provided the horizontal links that connected the smaller units that grew round kith and kin in the primary domestic space.

Models for Diversity

This model may not be the classic one encounters in anthropological discourses on the economy of space in ‘typical’ Muslim communities where the emphasis is on the more familiar segregation that institutes the boundaries between the sexes. I am sure there was ample space in the adjoining rooms for separate reception quarters to accommodate the women and the men separately, as convention might have it. The basic architecture allows for that dispensation when the situation calls for it, and I have since been in a variety of other urban ‘model’ homes - that maintain the basic normative architecture in their designs.. And possibly the modest middle class family that hosted me may not have been the typically ‘traditional’ family observing the strictest of codes, and possibly the average family residing in that middle class quarter of an old Syrian town may have been closer to the average middle class Muslim milieu I was familiar with in comparable urban centers in Egypt than any I might have encountered in Saudi Arabia, for example. But all these qualifications precisely serve to point to the lessons I would like to draw for the purposes of my presentation.

The following questions come to mind: Why the normative perspective? What do traditions and norms share? Consider the consensual dimension in the formation of both norms and traditions.

Muslim societies share with all traditional societies a significant attachment to norms. In fact, Islamic societies are primarily constituted at the normative level, at least in the minds of Muslim. To the extent that Islam has permeated a society it provides its primary source of values; whatever other sources or traditions may have contributed in the past of these societies to their normative reserves, their influence is often only sanctioned through their identification with Islam. This is no doubt due to wide-ranging scope of prescriptions and proscriptions in Islam which encompass the span of human conduct throughout life. More specifically, we need to understand the meaning of the second part of the shahadah that takes Muhammad to be the Messenger of Allah, rasul allah, in the Muslim’s belief system and social imaginaire. 

The Prophet of Islam provides his followers with a concrete human model that extends to all walks of life, and to which common men and women from all walks of life can easily relate. The teachings of the Prophet are simple, plain, clear narrations that touch on instances concrete and ethical beginning from the inner extending to the outer, entailing the human relationship to its lord and creator, to embrace the web of connections that bind one to the community at every conceivable level. As an accessible human model who is at the same time the epitome of the Perfect Man, the Prophet’s example not only integrates the spheres of social activity and the different roles assumed by people in their lifetime, but which also serves to integrate the different aspects of the human psyche. 

With an unequivocal sense of right and wrong firmly embedded in the Muslim social imaginaire and rooted in an integrated psyche, and with knowable standards of right and wrong and an embedded sensibility for discerning the difference, it is not surprising to find Muslim societies, even as they change and adapt to 'modernity', especially conscious of the normative dimension. One might indeed suggest that on account of the accelerated pace of change in Muslim society in the latter part of the 20th century, and in view of the ineluctable currents of globalization that have swept over and confounded much familiar terrain, Muslims are increasingly conscious of what their identity means to them, and especially, of the salience of the normative dimension. It is in this context of challenge and opportunity, a challenge to take the measure of who they are as individuals and communities and an opportunity to redefine themselves and re-examine the markers of identity in a confoundedly dangerous world, that a consideration of the normative dimension underlying human conduct and human relations becomes increasingly important.

One of those areas that invites special attention is ‘sexuality’ - not simply in view of the fact that it has so frequently been taken for granted...or so little discussed in serious academy; or because so much about it has been assumed, and left implicit in the treatment of related topics, but for other reasons as well, some of which have a special pertinence to Muslim societies.