Islamic Homosexualities by Stephen O. Murray

If you have difficulty locating or obtaining any items you're interested in please let me know. One physician opined, “If the ubnah is prolonged, the person affected by it cannot be cured, in particular, if he is obviously feminine and effeminate and loves very much to be like a woman.Click on links (underlined) for access to items or more information. Murray, medieval Arabic medical researchers also described ubnah as a condition, debating whether it was susceptible to treatment. It typically refers to receptive gay male sex, but according to gay-studies scholar Stephen O.

The company has since adopted the less controversial mithli.)Īt least as old as luti is ubnah. (Like the translators of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Google caused an accidental stir in 2006 when a user noticed that its software translated gay to luti.

Luti is usually translated as sodomite and is widely considered derogatory, but some gay Arabic writers have recently co-opted the term the way gay anglophones reclaimed the word queer in the 1980s. It’s a reference to the biblical and Quranic personage Lot, who was associated with the sinful city of Sodom. The word luti, for example, appears in 13 th-century Arabic literature. Classical Arabic texts have several words for homosexuals and homosexuality dating back to the ninth century. If these theorists are correct, then the Islamic world was about 1,000 years ahead of the West on this issue. Several linguists backed Foucault’s claim, arguing that many Western languages had words for homosexual acts, but not for homosexuality, until very recently. In Michel Foucault’s 1976 book The History of Sexuality, the French philosopher claimed that although homosexual acts are prehistoric, Europeans and Americans didn’t recognize homosexuality as a trait until the 19 th century. Clemons has picked up on a decades-old debate in Western academic circles. When did the Arabic-speaking world recognize the existence of homosexuality? A pair of Arabic speakers told Clemons that Arabic doesn’t have a respectful word for gay, except for the recently coined word mithli.

The Arabic subtitles for the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel translate the word gay into the Arabic equivalent of pervert, according to an article by Steve Clemons in the Atlantic.

Islamic Homosexualities by Stephen O. Murray