This panel explores a variety of medieval Arabic and Persian texts through the conceptual lenses of gender and embodiment. Each paper introduces a fresh approach, whether to genres centrally concerned with gender and embodiment, such as legal and medical texts, or to genres frequently read in disembodied ways, such as Sufi poetry. Among the questions we ask are: What methods or reading practices can be used to understand the ways gender and embodiment operate in texts? How might we better attend to the embodied and gendered experiences of people objectified by or excluded from elite discourses of law and medicine? To what extent does (mis)translation obscure or distort the literary significance and signification of bodies? With its attention to language and translation across genres, the panel takes up long-standing questions in the field about whether and how gender and sexuality are useful categories of analysis outside of the modern West.
The panel’s first paper, “Knowing Oneself Complexly: The Struggle for Khuntha Self-Determination,” brings medieval Arabic writings produced by jurists discussing the khuntha under the light of innovative scholarship on embodiment and subjectivity, and argues for the use of methodological strategies capable of showing how marginalized bodies exercised their subjectivity and agency. “In Sore Need of Healing: Medicine and Masculinity in the Medieval Indian Ocean,” the panel’s second paper, analyzes the way piety and masculinity animates the journeys of two unexpected healers, a Shafi’i jurist in Yemen and an administrator-turned-physician in Gujarat, India. The third paper, “(Dis)embodying Sufi Poetry: Theories of Poetic Imagery and the Mistranslation of the Imaginal Body,” makes the case that the discussion of embodiment in the Islamicate world must extend beyond the external form(s) of the corporeal body to include other embodied phenomena—such as affect and language—through an analysis of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s “embodied poetics” and the many (mis)translations of a famous ghazal of Jalal al-Din Rumi. The fourth and final paper, “Neither Disguise nor Drag: Cross-Dressing and Embodiment in Middle Arabic Literature,” argues for a more expansive understanding of the boundaries of the body in interpreting episodes of cross-dressing in Middle Arabic literature.
From Persian poetry to Arabic fiqh, from the imagined worlds of the 1001 Nights to the interconnected spaces of the Indian Ocean, this panel presents novel perspectives on gender and embodiment in medieval Islamicate texts.
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Dr. Saqer Almarri
Muslim legal treatises and narratives discussing khuntha matters tend to overlook the very subjects they describe. Recent scholarship on the khuntha in pre-modern discourses of medicine and law have paved the way for a re-imagining of how we can understand a khuntha as existing as a person within the first millennium of Islamic societies that locates them within Islamic legal and gender systems. While much of the legal manuals and medical manuals vacate the discourses from mundane everyday social specificities, we may be able to revisit these discourses to read how the khuntha themselves were active and embodied subjects rather than hypothetical bodies used to discuss legal doctrines of inheritance and physiological theories of generation. This paper builds on insights and methodologies in contemporary Feminist and Trans and Intersex scholarship on engaging with the archive to explore how these discourses may offer us a way to construct critical narratives of the khuntha as a complexly embodied and active subject in the face of societal power structures. In a re-examination of primary sources narratives involving khuntha subjects, we can see how a khuntha in all their complexity may exercise agency and use their knowledge of their own bodies and their knowledge of their own ambiguous gender status within society as a path for gender self-determination.
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Shireen Hamza
At opposite ends of the Arabian Sea, on either end of the fifteenth century, two men wrote about why they decided to learn ṭibb. Ṭibb was a kind of elite medicine properly learned through both textual study and apprenticeship; those who had trained enough to be called physicians (ṭabīb) policed its boundaries carefully. But here, in Gujarat at the end of the fourteenth century and in Yemen in the late fifteenth, two pious men with little to no formal training charted strange pathways through ṭibb. This presentation will explore the regional specificities of Islam and of ṭibb that shaped these paths for Shihab al-Din Nagauri in Sultanate Gujarat and Ibrahim al-Azraq in Rasulid Yemen. Nagauri's Sufi teacher had as much to do with his turn toward ṭibb as al-Azraq's Shafi'i shaykh, but these male master-student relationships show up very differently in the two men's medical writings.
In al-Azraq's text, Tashil al-Manafi' fi'l-tibb, as well as its reception in the following centuries, it is clear that he participated in a broader movement of ulama in Yemen. These texts of ṭibb, pitched at non-physician, literate men, instructed and encouraged their audiences to heal the broader Muslim community who were supposedly in serious need of their help. Through their compilations, abridgements and experimentation, al-Azraq and other ulama assembled beneficial and accessible texts for this purpose. Across the sea, Nagauri was urged by Sufi teachings to give up his lucrative administrative position at a court and, thus, had ended up a poor and pious physician. As he details in his Persian text, Shifa al-Maraẓ, Islam had motivated him to become a healer, yet he sought out both Muslim and non-Muslim teachers among yogis, hybridized the two formal medical systems he had learned, and treated both Muslim and "Hindu" patients with this hybrid medicine, all the while calling it ṭibb.
Though these men were not anthologized within physicians' histories of the great men of medicine, I argue that masculinity shaped both their access and approach to ṭibb as well as their choice to write on the subject. Drawing on a growing body of work in the history of science and Islamic studies, this paper explores the construction of "scientific masculinities" across these Arabic and Persian medical texts.
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Dr. Matthew Thomas Miller
Jami (d. 1492), the towering fifteen-century Persian Sufi poet, in his commentary on Ibn al-Farid’s wine ode, entitled Lavami', presents the reader with two distinct ways of analyzing the poem’s anacreontic imagery. Most of his work reads as a traditional Sufi interlinear commentary “on the words, phrases, unveiling[s], symbols, and allusions [of the poem]” with the clear goal of revealing for the reader the elaborate supra-literal network of allusions to myriad Quranic passages, hadith, and Sufi metaphysical concepts that are contained in each of these poetic “symbols.” This “symbolist” method of hermeneutic analysis, as one of its modern scholarly proponents has termed it, became one of—if not the—primary lens through which both premodern and modern readers have read Sufi poetry.
But Jami—in this same commentary—advances another theory of poetic imagery as well, which he terms “expressing meanings in the clothing of forms.” Analyzing the “complete similitude” of earthly wine and love, Jami presents a radically different and deeply embodied perspective on the poetic function of metaphoric imagery. Sufi poets, he argues, “employ” “words and phrases” drawn from “sensorial perceptions/tangible objects” (mahsusat), such as “earthly (ṣūrī) wine,” as metaphors for higher spiritual realities because they reproduce for the uninitiated reader an imaginary experience that simulates (metaphorically) the ineffable experience of divine love and union. Jami’s theory of metaphoric imagery is what contemporary linguists would refer to as “embodied”: it sees linguistic meaning produced in and through embodied experience. The “meaning” of Sufi poetry, in short, is located as much (or more) in the movement of the imaginal bodies that populate its poetic world as in the sum of the dictionary/lexicon equivalents of each word, phrase, or symbol.
Pushing the conversation about embodiment in the Islamic world beyond the physical body proper, this paper will show the significant implications this “embodied poetics” has for how we read, analyze, and even translate Sufi poetry. Through an analysis of a famous ghazal of Rumi and its numerous translations, I will demonstrate how the “disembodied” theory of language implicitly followed by many scholars of Persian poetry has caused them to mistranslate the mystical “meaning events” embedded in this poem’s image schemas.
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This paper investigates modes of gendered embodiment in pre-modern Arabic texts through episodes of cross-dressing. These are defined as episodes in which a character previously identified with masculine nouns and pronouns is presented with feminine nouns and pronouns, or vice versa, and in which some description of clothing acts as the means by which the switch in gender is perceived and/or explained. While these episodes have often been associated with the topos of disguise, I argue that they are not necessarily meant to be understood as moments of misrecognition, even when characters express surprise or astonishment upon having their gender perception challenged or undone. Drawing from insights in the fields of gender, sexuality, and trans studies, as well as recent scholarship on the pre-modern history of the body, this paper presents evidence from fifteenth- to seventeenth-century manuscripts of Alf layla wa-layla (1001 Nights), and related exemplars of what has been called Middle Arabic Literature, to suggest that bodies were seen as inseparable from social contexts in which clothing acted as a powerful signifier.
This reading challenges assumptions that the sexed morphology of the body was understood to exist independently from contextualized modes of gendered embodiment, such that it would need to be hidden or disguised for a character to cross successfully from one gender to another. More broadly, it proposes an understanding of embodiment that exceeds the limits of the body as "enfleshed entity," to use Rajyashree Pandey’s words, and explores possibilities for new translations of Middle Arabic texts that resist defaulting to binary conceptualizations of bodies and clothing, sex and gender (Pandey 2016, 13). In doing so, this paper makes a contribution to recent efforts in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern history to historicize the body by bringing literary evidence into a conversation so far dominated by legal, medical, and religious texts. It also contributes to the fields of gender, sexuality, and trans studies by examining gendered embodiment in a non-Western and pre-modern context.
