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Producing Desire

University of California Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................................ixList of Tables.....................................................................xiAcknowledgments....................................................................xiiiNote on the Transliteration of Arabic and Turkish..................................xvIntroduction: Sex as Script........................................................11. The Body Sexual: Medicine and Physiognomy.......................................162. Regulating Desire: Shari'a and Kanun............................................483. Morality Wars: Orthodoxy, Sufism, and Beardless Youths..........................774. Dream Interpretation and the Unconscious........................................995. Boys in the Hood: Shadow Theater as a Sexual Counter-Script.....................1256. The View from Without: Sexuality in Travel Accounts.............................149Conclusion: Modernity and Sexual Discourse.........................................167Notes..............................................................................173Bibliography.......................................................................201Index..............................................................................213

Chapter One

Medicine and Physiognomy

Medicine, its conceptions of the human body, and the sexual script it produced provided the scientific basis for most sex-oriented discourses in Muslim Middle Eastern societies. Its injunctions and prohibitions, believed to originate in scientific knowledge, were subsumed by other discursive arenas, from literature to sacred law, almost intuitively, as part of their basic assumptions about the world. This was true as long as these discourses could maintain a common coherent basis, but the changes brought about by new medical knowledge at the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries created a rift between this and other arenas in which sexual matters were discussed.

This chapter traces the basic theories and concepts of traditional Ottoman Middle Eastern medicine as they relate to male and female sexuality, to the sexual and asexual body, and to the mechanics of sex. Medical developments throughout the period, culminating in major changes in the nineteenth century, brought about a crisis of discourse. As I hope to demonstrate, the discrepancy between changes in medical knowledge and in other discourses created an unresolved tension in the array of sexual scripts, which resulted in confusion and a sense of foreboding.

MEDICINE'S AUTHORITATIVE VOICE

Medicine's image as a set of cosmologically anchored, almost divine scientific facts gave its texts, specifically those based on the Galenic tradition, a unique standing in society before the modern period. While other disciplines, such as dream interpretation lore, were believed to be inferior manifestations of the word of God as interpreted by the ulema, medicine had become a powerful discourse with an autonomous status. The period's authors recognized this status in their classifications of the sciences. In some respects, we can even say that medicine's standing rivaled that of religion. God's message was given in many different and contradictory voices. Orthodox sunna may have been the officially sanctioned norm in many cases, but Sufi sects of all hues, and other Islamic groups, proposed different, sometimes conflicting interpretations of religion, thus posing a constant challenge to orthodoxy's claim of axiomatic truth. Medicine, in contrast, seemed to the lay public almost unequivocal, despite outside challenges and arguments among physicians about medical methods. Tensions between common medicine and prophetic traditions, which never assumed center stage, were already resolved to a large extent by the fifteenth century. Thanks to the efforts of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, and their contemporaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, few voices of dissent or doubt disrupted medicine's authoritative voice. Its message, seemingly unconcerned with relative morality, commanded special authority, almost reverence. When looked at as a sexual script, pre-nineteenth-century medicine became a major voice in the discursive world of educated social groups.

Furthermore, since the dominant medical system throughout most of the period espoused a holistic view that created interdependence among the cosmos, the elements, the soul, the body, and its constituent parts, it was fully compatible with a religious view of the universe and man's place within it. While elements and humors were the prevalent theoretical currency, medical discourse also allocated limited space to divine intervention, through the several souls that animated the body and made it function. Thus it did not appear to counter religious knowledge or to threaten its standing, and over the years a clear modus vivendi was established to safeguard the boundaries between manmade science and God's absolute truth.

OTTOMAN MEDICINE AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS

Throughout the centuries, incremental changes in the Islamicate world, notably by famous physicians such as al-Razi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn al-Nafis, along with many others, largely transformed the basic corpus of ancient Greek and Roman medical knowledge, changing practical aspects of diagnosis and treatment and making invaluable contributions to the development of medical sciences. With time, Galen's revised concepts became much more than a medical theory. In the manner of a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, Galenic medicine had become a set of basic assumptions, ideologies and cosmologies, tools and methods, as well as a set of queries and a specific terminology, all of which created an enclosed medical world.

This is not to say that the theory was unchallenged. In the Ottoman world, curative knowledge was multifaceted and eclectic. Practitioners of medical systems prevalent in the Byzantine world and in Safavid Iran shared the stage with those specializing in Indian and Far Eastern methods. A place of honor was reserved for a set of vague medical ideas based on the Koran and the hadith (known in Arabic as al-tibb al-nabawi, prophetic medicine) alongside popular medical practices performed by Sufis and other mystics believed to be endowed with healing powers. Yet only humoral medicine enjoyed official support and privilege, as well as the endorsement of the intellectual elite. Such popular medical concepts may have held sway in the minds of many people or may have been preferred as methods for treating disease, but intellectually (and therefore textually) they remained on the cultural fringes, vying for right of entry but never quite achieving it. Only physicians proficient in Galenic medicine attended to the sultans' health, practiced their craft in major city hospitals, formed important guilds, and compiled most of the medical treatises.

We know little about the origins of the Ottoman medical tradition. The first Ottoman authors of medical texts were residents of Anatolia who found their way to other cultural centers in the Middle East, such as Cairo and Tabriz, and returned home as physicians. One of the earliest medical texts in Turkish was a pharmaceutical treatise, Khawas aladwiya,...