“He makes them male and female”: Intersexuality in Tafsir and Hadith Literature According to queer activist Faris Malik, conventional heteronormative exegesis of Surat ash-Shura verses 49-50 effaces older interpretations that ascribe intersexuality to the will of God. The verses read: “God has dominion over the heavens and the earth. He creates what He wills. He prepares for whom He wills females, and He prepares for whom He wills males. Or He pairs them male and female (yuzawwijuhum dhukr?nan wa in?than), and He makes those whom He wills to be ineffectual (‘aqim). Indeed He is the Knowing, the Powerful.” The first verse states that only God has the power to confer sons and daughters: to some, God gives males, to others, females. Malik claims that English translators fudge the second verse by rendering it “Or He gives some people both sons and daughters, and makes some barren.” My exploration of tafsir literature from the 7th to 20th centuries demonstrates that Malik has a point: early Qur’an interpreters did relate divergent opinions on the meaning of the verse. While the majority of interpreters explained verse 42:50 as saying that God gives some people both male and female offspring, some (for example, al-Qurtubi) also related the alternative reading that God may make a single person both male and female. Hadith collectors also related reports of hermaphrodites, citing the infinite creative power of God. As demonstrated in my previous scholarship on legal manuals and medical texts from the 8th-17th centuries, Muslim jurists acknowledged intersexuals as natural variants of human sexual development and treated them as a third sex, with unique gendered procedures for prayer, circumcision, dress, manumission, inheritance, and burial. The hadiths and divergent interpretations of verse 42:50 support my contention that Muslim scholars did not (contrary to Sanders 1991) universally understand biological sex as dimorphic. In keeping with the Galenic models of sexual development then in vogue throughout Hellenic-influenced societies, all sexes were some variant of originally-male development (Laqueur 1990, 2003; Ze’evi 2006), with intersexuals as a medial possibility between wholly-male and wholly-not-male (female). Divergent interpretations of verse 42:50 reflected and reinscribed the dominant medical theories about sex, and informed adjudication of sex in ambiguous cases. This study provides a historical context with which to frame contemporary discussions of intersexuality, gender reassignment, and gender tolerance in Islamic contexts.

Scholarly literature characterizes nineteenth century Ottoman sexuality and eroticism with the silencing of previous sexual discourses and heteronormative configurations of love and erotic desire. While making this claim, scholars of Ottoman sexuality take for granted what heteronormativity means and seem to assume that the emerging heteronormative discourses were coherent and stable. This paper will ask the question how “hetero-” were the most popular narratives of late Ottoman love and eroticism by focusing on a number of early Ottoman novels and stories on the love between the dandy and hyper-sexualized femme -fatale and the love between the tomboy/female cross-dresser and masculine young man. In the narratives of degenerate love between the effeminate dandy and the hyper-feminine femme-fatale, the dandy was not characterized by his lack of interest in women. On the contrary, he has an excess desire for women. Idealized masculine man's love for the tomboy/female cross-dresser strengthened his masculinity. Both the dandy and the ideal masculine man are reminiscent of the effeminate woman-lover (zen-dost) and masculine boy-lover (mahbûb-perest) of classical Ottoman literature whose gender identities were shaped in relation to their objects of desire. Thomas Laqueur (1990) says, in pre-Englightenment texts based on Galenic medicine and one-sex model, men could easily be softened when they associate with women too extensively and girls could easily turn into boys. In one-sex model the focus is on gender, rather than the biological sex as in two-sex model. In nineteenth century, two sex model was increasingly adopted through translation of medical texts, advice literature and popular novels to Ottoman Turkish. Dror Ze'evi (2006) claims that with this process, there emerged a discrepancy between the local narratives based on one-sex model and the translated medical texts, which resulted in the silencing of existing sexual scripts. Instead of assuming that co-existence of the seemingly discordant discourses automatically means silence, the paper focuses on the narratives that emerge from these discrepancies and examine the ways this discordance becomes productive by looking at the aforementioned figures in popular late Ottoman prose. Neither the love between the dandy and femme-fatale, nor its counterpart, the love between tomboy and her lover could be read as expressions of hetero-erotic desire felt for the other gender, or expressions of homosexual desire for the same sex. Produced by the discrepancies of seemingly discordant discourses, these narratives reveal the queer space opened by the inconsistencies of heteronormativity.

When Napoleon occupied Egypt in 1798, the presence of French Orientalists offered Egyptians a rare opportunity to mingle and interact with their country's new rulers. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti's (1754- ca.1822) chronicle entitled 'Ajaib al-Athar offers valuable information about the interaction that took place between the French savants and Egyptian 'ulama (cf. Peter Gran, David Ayalon, and al-Sayyid Marsot's publications). While al-Jabarti's account furnishes us with a historical perspective, Hassan al-'Attar (1766-1835) offers a literary depiction of those interactions in his "Maqamat al-Faransis" (cf. Elliot Colla and Shaden Tageldin's research). Another source that has so far eluded the attention of scholars are Isma'il al-Khashshab's (d. 1815) homoerotic poems on Louis Rémy Raige (1777-1810), a young French Orientalist. These poems shed light on a different type of interaction, namely, the homoerotic attraction. In this paper, I will examine those poems and compare them with two other types of poems al-Khashshab wrote: the "ghulamiyyat," in which he expresses his infatuation with young servant lads, and the panegyrics he dedicated to his Mamluk patrons. As panegyrics, the poems follow the well-known trope found in classical ode poetry (al-Mu'allaqat), whereby the poet's ungrateful lover is displaced by a generous and steadfast patron. However, viewed as homoerotic compositions, al-Khashshab's verses subvert the depiction of Oriental homosexuality in the European canon at the time. Whereas European travellers regarded homosexuality as symptomatic of Oriental decadence and moral depravity, al-Khashshab's poems undermine those misconceptions by portraying Raige as coyly eager to reciprocate with his ardent Egyptian lover. The poems are significant because al-Khashahab's reversal of normative gender roles complicates the depiction of Middle Easterners as passive and lazy, as Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism. The verses depict an assured, confident lover addressing an equally robust French beloved. The self-respect of both parties is not undermined as a result of the occupation. Unlike al-'Attar's maqama, al-Khashshab does not depict the French as entirely feminized. As a result, his masculine-cum-effeminate depiction of Raige subverts the way French Orientalists (e.g. Volney, Denon, and Fourier) cast themselves in their respective travel accounts--as detached (heterosexual) observers, who are immune to the locals' darts of love, and as masters of their own desires and actions. In effect, al-Khashshab's poems reveal an important aspect of cross-cultural interaction, namely, the mutual homoerotic desire for the Other.

Terrorists enter a couple’s home in the middle of the night. They drag the man and woman out of their bed to interrogate them. “What is your name?” they ask the wife. “My name’s Aisha,” she replies. “Oh,” responds their leader, “that’s my mother’s name so I won’t kill you.” He turns to the husband and poses the same question. Trembling, the man replies, “My name’s Muhammad but everyone calls me Aisha.” This joke, like so many others from the height of Algeria’s civil conflict of the 1990s (the “Dark Decade”) transmitted strong views concerning masculinity. Here, the man is depicted as powerless while he claims a female name to try save himself at the expense of his so-called manliness. Indeed, jokes represented discursive imagined worlds through which Algerian civilians explored the extent of the horrors that unknown, masked fighters could inflict upon them at any time during their country’s decade-long armed struggle of the 1990s. As this paper asserts, Algerian jokesters did not randomly choose to laugh at instances in which the war’s major belligerents –the state and insurgent groups claiming to act in the name of Islam– robbed normal men their supposed “manly” character. Rather, as this paper shows through a textual analysis of these anecdotes, men used comedy to express feelings of inadequacy and a sense of helplessness in the face of what they perceived to be a general weakening of the “typical Algerian man” during the violence of the 1990s. This presentation will explore shifting notions of masculinity during the “Dark Decade” as individuals articulated them through humor. Both in the period leading up to and during the war, Algerian communities told jokes that played on socially-accepted norms concerning “appropriate” male behavior and sexuality. In the middle of the armed struggle, though, these anecdotes reflected how the terrifying and random violence that characterized the conflict incited a gender crisis among Algerian men who were supposed to embody ideals of masculine citizenship. Scholars have long recognized the gendered nature of citizenship in Algeria. Yet, little work has been conducted on how these gendered notions of citizenship have shifted over time. By drawing upon dozens of jokes from the country’s “Dark Decade” and theories of gender and humor, this paper fills this gap in the literature while contributing to scholarly understanding of how the nature of violence in Algeria during this conflict impacted subjectivities of gender.

Can fever tell a story? Despite recent attention in Arabic literary scholarship to questions of the body and affect, fever remains neglected as an object of study. Replete with feverish encounters and descriptions, Arabic literature is a wellspring for scholars to examine the literary function of fever. Faced with an existential dilemma, the ?Ab?ssid poet al-Mutanabb? composes a poem wherein he employs the metaphor of a deadly fever that visits him like a lover in the night. Over ten centuries later, fever also figures into the contemporary fiction of Hud? Barak?t, but this time as a narrative strategy to depict the political and social tragedies that befall her characters in the Lebanese Civil War. In my paper, I explore this topic to argue that fever (?umm?) is a moment when the body intervenes, for the sake of self-preservation, to destabilize and reconfigure systems of knowledge and power that inform the narrative structure of a text. In my paper, I use al-Mutanabb?’s fever poem to create a theoretical framework, outlining the pathology of fever and exploring its behavior within a literary text. Furthermore, I demonstrate how fever simultaneously attacks and heals the body, behaving as poison and cure (Plato’s pharmakon). Imprisoned within the liminal space created by the fever (sleep and wakefulness, life and death, etc.), al-Mutanabb? claims that only movement and travel can effectively counterbalance the inebriating effects of his condition. Against this theoretical framework, a close reading of fever in Barak?t’s novel Sayyid? wa-?ab?b? reveals that fever not only functions as a liminal space, but also as a moment of intervention. In a state of fever, systems of knowledge and power are renegotiated and reconfigured within the narrative, challenging what is accepted as truth and lie, memory and imagination, etc. This epistemological reconfiguration sets narrative in motion, transforming fever into an active agent rather than a passive symptom. This paper pioneers a study of fever in Arabic literature, exploring new territory, and also deploys an approach that allows pre-modern and modern literature to be read side-by-side, focusing on the linguistic and philological threads that tie these traditionally distinct bodies of literature together, while respecting their independent historical contexts.