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Originally posted 2022-06-30 15:03:00.

So-called ‘homosexuality’, as it is known in the Anglo-West is almost non-existent outside it, despite efforts being continually made to revise history. That is because in all other places and at all other times, sex between males was strictly limited to sex between men and boys or older youths and younger boys, and sex between men and catamites who had permanently adopted the appearance and social role of women — mukhannathun — or today, ladyboys.

The following chapter from Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb.  The author’s footnotes are numbered in the text, my comments are italic in blue.

In the “homosocial” world of the early Ottoman Arab East, sexual symbolism was never far from the surface. Yet actual sexual intercourse between adult men was clearly perceived as an anomaly, linked either to violence (rape) or disease (ubnah).[1]

However, sex between men and boys was practically universal in the Islamosphere, which for centuries was far more relaxed about this than the Christian world.

Sexual relations between men and boys in the early Ottoman Arab East were almost always conceived as involving an adult man (who stereotypically would be the “male” partner) and an adolescent boy (the “female”).

Continue reading “Sex between men and boys in the Islamic world”