https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299403
Ottoman Lyric Poetry:
“Entertainers:
https://academic.oup.com/past/article/257/1/55/6524598?login=false
West European visitors to the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period frequently referred to sodomy. They depicted it as a common practice there, associated particularly with ‘renegades’ (converts to Islam). The report of an investigation into a sexual scandal at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588, discussed here, shows special sensitivity to this issue. Historians generally discount the comments of visitors to Ottoman territory on this topic, either dismissing them as mere prejudice, or arguing that the practices they observed were equally current throughout western Europe. This article contests both of those assumptions. While prejudice was indeed present, the observations were accurate overall –– as Ottoman sources confirm. The practices were not equally prevalent in western Europe; they were specific to a pan-Mediterranean culture of same-sex relations between adult men and adolescents. But although the practices were essentially the same, there were significant differences between the Ottoman/Muslim Mediterranean societies and those of the Christian western Mediterranean. In the latter, religious and legal norms were more severe, affecting the degree to which such sexual behaviour was public and culturally expressed; in the former, a strong cultural tradition of homoeroticism gave some legitimation to these same-sex relations, and made them more avowable.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2020.1715142
Assessments of the decriminalization of homosexuality are rarely questioned. It is widely accepted that the Ottomans decriminalized homosexuality in 1858 owing to the absence of penalties assigned to private same-sex intimacy. The reason for this misanalysis rests upon the universalization of the Western formula for the decriminalization of homosexuality. This assumption about the Ottomans has been made without examining how they had criminalized homosexuality in the first place. Two penal cultures that criminalized homosexuality differently cannot decriminalize it by way of the same legal framework. The current method excludes, moreover, the subject country’s history. This elicits neo-orientalist conclusions such as the Ottomans’ decriminalization of homosexuality in 1858 via the introduction of the 1810 French Penal Code, without an accompanying examination of how the Ottomans had criminalized homosexuality before 1858. This assessment method not only facilitates neo-orientalism, but also casts a significant doubt on this method’s validity.
It sometimes seems surprising to us to see that sodomy was accepted in the Ottoman Empire and Islamic lands, while “homosexuality” was prohibited in Islamic law, but the reason why it seems like this to us is our anachronistic perspective. For us to have passionate love for a young man and although having sexual intercourse with someone are concepts that fall on the same spectrum under the term ‘homosexual’, this was not the categorization for pre-modern people. “What is prohibited by Islamic law is not ‘homosexuality’, but male-to-male anal sexual intercourse (sodomy).”
For example, although the Egyptian jurist and poet Abdullah Ash-Shabrawi (d. 1758) was an Islamic jurist, he also wrote poems for young boys. Below is a section of the poem he wrote to a young boy named Ibrahim.
“It is difficult to believe that Shabrawi clearly committed a great sin by writing such a poem. [Probably] Shabrawi simply did not believe that what he was doing fell into the same category as sodomy, which is strictly prohibited by Islamic law.”
Many additional passages in the Torah, such as Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which are often said to “target homosexuality”, actually have a similar context. There is no ban on non-penetrative sexuality, neither for women nor for men. But our perception of homosexuality includes these. The social level of sexuality is different for them. Removing our modern homosexuality from a text with a different perception means imposing the meaning.
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