fruit of love, the birth of children, that keeps death at bay. Nature appears
to have arranged matters so that these two presentiments of immortality occur
together. The Judeo-Christian God becomes the partner of human lovers: “Lovers
could not love if they did not have an ally against death, if the only
certainty were the grave and silence,” writes Michael Wyschogrod. Anyone who
has been in love with someone of the opposite sex knows precisely what I am
talking about. Those who have not may consult the Song of Songs, for example:
The
love of bride and bridegroom is not quite the same thing as the love of God and
his congregation, but the passion as strong as death that unites men and women
is analogous to the encounter with the Other in the person of God.
On the extreme opposite of the spiritual spectrum, we encounter
pederasty as the foundational experience of Sufism. According to Wikipedia,
As
a Sufi practice of spiritual realization and union with the godhead, the
meditation known in Arabic as Nazar ila'l-murd, "contemplation of the
beardless," or Shahed-bazi, "witness play" in Persian has been practiced from
the earliest years of Islam. It is seen as an act of worship intended to help
one ascend to the absolute beauty that is God through the relative beauty that
is a boy.
The medieval Persians were not the first to practice
the higher sodomy. The Greeks of the 6th century BC preferred young boys,
procreating out of patriotic habit while their women closed their eyes and
thought of Athens. Adoration of youth is a very different way to capture from
love a sense of immortality. In Greek legend the gods turned Narcissus into a
flower to punish his pride in refusing male suitors. Pederasty thus was present
at the origin of the concept of narcissism.
The medieval Persians surpassed the Greeks in enthusiasm. Hafez, widely
considered the greatest Persian poet, wrote such verses as
My
sweetheart is a beauty and a child, and I fear that in play one day
He will kill me miserably and he will not be accountable according to the holy
law.
I have a fourteen year old idol, sweet and nimble
For whom the full moon is a willing slave.
His sweet lips have (still) the scent of milk
Even though the demeanor of his dark eyes drips blood. (Divan, no 284)
And about the Magian baccha:
If the wine-serving magian boy would shine
in this way
I will make a broom of my eyelashes to sweep the entrance of the tavern.
(Divan, no 9)
Hafez is typical of the Muslim philosopher-poets
of the epoch. Ehsan Yar-Shater wrote:
As a rule, the beloved [in
medieval Persian poetry] is not a woman, but a young man. In the early
centuries of Islam, the raids into Central Asia produced many young slaves.
Slaves were also bought or received as gifts. They were made to serve as pages
at court or in the households of the affluent, or as soldiers and body-guards.
Young men, slaves or not, also, served wine at banquets and receptions, and the
more gifted among them could play music and maintain a cultivated conversation.
It was love toward young pages, soldiers, or novices in trades and professions
which was the subject of lyrical introductions to panegyrics from the beginning
of Persian poetry, and of the ghazal.[8]
As noted, it is
tempting to dismiss the pederasty of the Sufi philosopher-poets as a cultural
artifact of traditional society, along with the mystical practice of
“contemplation of the beardless”. This would obscure rather than shed light,
however, for three reasons.
The first is that traditional society is precisely what revelation seeks to
temper. The Hebrew Bible abjures pagan practices, just as Mohammed inveighs
against the pagans. Yet we do not find a single instance of a Hebrew poet
celebrating homosexuality until, of course, late 20th-century Tel Aviv. Classic
Persian and Arab literature ooze with it. Islam could not extirpate a
pederastic culture including virtually all the leading poets of the high Middle
Ages except by suppressing the Sufi cults. There were a number of reasons that
both the Sunni and Shia mainstream persecuted Sufism, but a prominent one was
the cited practice called “contemplation of the beardless” in which the dervish
sought communion with the eternal by immersing himself in the beauty of
adolescent boys.
Second, the same sort of people who reject the demands of “organized religion”
in favor of “free spirituality” have made the defense of homosexuality the
Shibboleth of their generation. Speak out against gay marriage in the United
States, and you have made yourself a pariah in any of the strongholds of
liberalism, especially university campuses. I do not believe in criminalizing
adult homosexuality, any more than I believe that a heterosexual chosen at
random is necessarily a better person than a homosexual chosen at random. But
the experience of divine love reflected in the love of men and women and their
children is the foundation of society, and gay marriage would have dreadful
consequences.
Third, pederasty has become a plague in parts of the West, and widespread abuse
of children has occasioned a crisis in the Catholic Church. It is hard to avoid
the impression that sexual misbehavior is associated with a retreat from faith
in a personal God, namely the Jesus who lived on earth and was crucified and
was resurrected, in favor of a mushy and unspecific spirituality - something
like Sufism, in fact. Perhaps the same link between spiritual and sexual
narcissism is at work in the West.
Notes
1. Mephistopheles addresses the boy angels (in Tony Kline’s translation
online):
What wretched luck, and dire!
Is this Love’s own element?
My whole body’s bathed in fire,
I scarcely feel, my head’s so burnt. –
You float to and fro, sink down a while,
Move your sweet limbs with earthly guile:
True, a grave expression suits you well,
But I’d still like to see you smile a little!
That would be an eternal delight to me.
Like the lovers’ mutual glance, you see:
A simper round the mouth, is how it’s done,
You, the tall lad, you could make me love you,
The priest’s pose doesn’t really suit you,
So show a little lust, and look hereon!
You could be more modestly naked too,
That robe’s long hem, so demure in its rising –
They turn away – and seen from the rear view –
Those rascals now are really appetising!
See http://www.tonykline.co.uk/klineasfaust.htm
2. The West-Ostlicher Divan of 1814
3. See The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid
Al-Din Attar, by Hellmut Ritter, John O'Kane, Bernd Radtke (Brill: New
York 2003), p 516 et seq. Ritter quotes a 1936 travelogue from Albania: “Still
another oddity: among the Albanians there is 'love of beauty'. Fifty to sixty
people are united through love for a beautiful youth. Quite frequently they ask
the father’s permission in the morning, take the boy with them and have him sit
on a table. Everyone sits in front of him and gazes at him admiringly for
hours. These youths are called dilber. They’re dressed up like a girl,
ie, with finger rings, a pleated silk shirt ... silk sash and a small hat
tilted to one side …” Comments Ritter, “Since Albania from far back in time has
been a home for Sufi orders, it is not far-fetched to assume that the described
practice is also of Sufi origin.”
5. Khwaja Samsu d-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Sirazi, flourished 14th century
6. Mawlana Jalal-ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, 1207-1273
7. Wikipedia entry, “Pederasty in the Islamic World.”
8. Yar-Shater, Ehsan. 1986. Persian Poetry in the Timurid and Safavid Periods,
in Cambridge History of Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, pp
973-974.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
