This week’s readings call into question
what ‘modern’ day notions of sexuality really are; both readings analyze the
effects of imperialism on sexuality in the Arab/Muslim world from the sixteenth
to the nineteenth century. Afsaneh Najmabadi’s piece Early Qajar focused on how pre-imperialist Ottoman Empire saw
sexual desire as acceptable and celebrated beauty in all forms, without using
gendered adjectives. Neither beauty nor sexual attraction were gendered and
strongly regulated until the 19th century. Khaled El-Rouayheb’s work
Before Homosexulaity in the Arab-Islamic
World agrees with Najmabadi, and further explicated why homosexuality is
not a modern day concept formed in late 19th century Europe, but
rather homosexuality has been an acceptable party of everyday life before
imperialism and colonialism.
The readings both caused me to, once
again, reevaluate modernity. What it is? When did it begin? And what concepts
are we trying to claim as inherently modern even with evidence suggesting
otherwise? Only in the past few decades has there been a push to give equal
rights to people identifying as homosexual. This increased pressure on
countries to give rights to homosexuals has led to corporations and nations
alike to using gay rights as a way of marking their modernity. The assumption
has become that a modern, well-developed country would openly provide rights to
the homosexual individuals of the population. These readings show that the
world before imperialism was not homophobic, only after colonialism did most of
these nations begin to think of homosexuality as a sin.
I came across a quote online that
reaffirmed, Islam has been relatively open about sexual behavior and sexuality.
http://tmihijabi.tumblr.com/post/80755960338
this post only prove to me that many of the ideas we consider to be so ‘modern’
are nothing more than the lasting effects of imperialism and only 200 years
later are people coming forward with the truth. Sexuality is nothing new, as
long as people have been around there has been sex in all its forms. It is
ignorant to assume that sexuality is somehow a modern day notion.
I find it interesting that in Western society it is seen that to admire someone's beauty automatically equates to sexual desire. Its seen as though one's beauty and one's sexuality are the same thing. "Amrad love" challenges this notion. I thought it was interesting how the blog post you linked mentioned that it was actually a result of colonialism that "forced Indian Muslim scholars to retranslate these Arabic texts into Urdu using euphemisms that were acceptable to the colonialists". Considering the consistent rhetoric that Muslim and Arab cultures need Western "saving" and that their beliefs are "backwards" and unmodern, in actuality it is because of colonialism that talk of sex became taboo.
ReplyDelete