15
Of Whiskey and Wine
Khushwant Singh, the Indian man of letters and surely one of the most underrated Indian novelists writing in English, wrote of his visit to Pakistan:
Prohibition is as much of a farce in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as it was in Morarji Desai’s India. A drinking man can find liquor in the mirages of the Sahara desert. In Pakistan it does not run like the river Ravi in spate, but it does trickle in tumbler fulls in most well-to-do Pakistani homes. You may have whiskey served in metal tumblers or in a tea-pot and have to sip from a China cup. It costs more than twice as much as in India but also goes down twice as well because it tastes of sin.620
Later Singh watched a debate on television between three mullas and the Pakistan Minister of Information. The next evening, Singh found himself sitting next to the same minister of information at a formal dinner. The minister read a speech welcoming Singh and the rest of the Indian delegation. In reply, Singh got up and told the minister that the next time he met the mullas, he should recite them the following verses:
Mulla, if your prayer has power
Let me see you shake the mosque!
If not, take a couple of pegs of liquor
And see how the mosque shakes on its own.
“There was,” continued Singh, “a roar of applause in which the minister joined. Then he whispered in my ear: ‘If these fellows [i.e., the mullas] had their way, they would make our girls’ hockey teams play in burqas.’ ” (The burqa is a stifling, tentlike garment that totally covers a woman from head to toe, with only a small embroidered grill opening at eye-level to allow her to peer through at the outside world.)
Hanif Kureishi, a British writer whose father was of Pakistani origin, went to several parties in Karachi, Pakistan. At one attended by people of power—landowners, diplomats, businessmen, and politicians—Kureishi found that they were drinking heavily. Every liberal in England knows you can be lashed for drinking in Pakistan. But as far as I could tell, none of this English-speaking international bourgeoisie would be lashed for anything. They all had their favorite trusted bootleggers.... I once walked into a host’s bathroom to see the bath full of floating whisky bottles being soaked to remove the labels, a servant sitting on a stool serenely poking at them with a stick.621
Charles Glass writing in the Times Literary Supplement (22 April 1994), recounts this story of hypocrisy in Saudi Arabia:
Possession of alcohol was illegal, but I was offered wine and, in the houses of royal princes, cabinet ministers, and ambassadors, whisky (the favoured drink was Johnny Walker Black Label). I learned that a prince with whom I had shared a whisky in the evening would in the morning sentence a man to prison for drinking.
There is no country in the entire Islamic world where there is no alcoholic drink available, and where some Muslim is not transgressing the Islamic prohibition against wine and spirits. While the rich and sophisticated drink their smuggled bottles of whiskey or gin, the poor produce their own wine or alcoholic drink from dates, palms, and sugar cane. I can vouch from personal experience that even during the holy month of Ramadan in 1990, both the brothels and the wine shops were open in Algeria.
The prophet Muhammad in one verse of the Koran (sura 16.69) praises wine as one of the signs of God’s grace to mankind. However, as the early companions of the Prophet often got drunk, Muhammad was obliged to show some disapproval (suras 2.216; 4.46), until finally in sura 5.92 He actually forbade it outright: “O true believers! Surely wine and maysir and stone pillars and divining arrows, are an abomination of the work of Satan; therefore avoid them, that ye may prosper.” According to Islamic law, drinking wine is punishable by eighty lashes, though according to some traditions repeated drinking of wine is punishable by death.
As remarked in an earlier chapter, Arabs of the time of Muhammad found it difficult to embrace Islam because of its prohibition of wine and restriction of sexual intercourse. For the Arabs, these were the two delicious things, “alatyaban.” Pre-Islamic poetry622is full of references to the joys of drinking wine in taverns and wine shops. Even with the advent of Islam, the praise of wine remained an integral part of Arabic poetry for centuries—in fact, no other literature can boast such a rich collection of wine poems, known as “khamriyya” in Arabic. Once again, as with the development of Islamic science and philosophy, Islamic literature flourished despite Islam, rather than thanks to it.
At the court of the caliphs where royal patronage was enough to shield the revelers from the prescribed eighty lashes, wine flowed freely at parties. But ordinary Arabs also refused to give up wine despite the risk of imprisonment. We might quote Abu Mihjan, who was imprisoned and later exiled by the Caliph Umar in the early days of Islam for continuing the praise of wine:
Give me, o friend, some wine to drink; though I am
well aware of what God has revealed about wine.
Give me pure wine to make my sin bigger because only
when it is drunk unmixed is the sin complete
Though wine has become rare and though we have been
deprived of it and though Islam and the threat of
punishment have divorced us from it:
Nevertheless I do drink it in the early morning hours
in deep draughts, I drink it unmixed and from time to
time I become gay and drink it mixed with water.
At my head stands a singing girl and while
she sings she flirts;
Sometimes she sings loudly, sometimes
softly, humming like flies in the garden.
Abu Mihjan could not even face the thought of being without wine after he was dead, and so he composed the following verse:
When I die bury me by the side of a vine so that my
bones may feed on its juices after death.
Do not bury me in the plains because I am afraid that then
I cannot enjoy wine when I am dead.623
This tradition of wine songs continued under the Umayyads who were totally unable to silence them. The wider significance of this defiance has been subtly analyzed by Goldziher624, who wrote: “The Umayyad rule was ill-equipped to silence wine songs, as it expresses the spirit of opposition to the piety of Medina, which was contrary to the old Arab way of life. Thus the tradition of glorifying wine was not interrupted in Arabic poetry and rarely is a voice raised against its enjoyment. So we find the phenomenon of a people’s poetry being for centuries a living protest against its religion” (my emphasis).
Khamriyya or wine poems thus became a means of protest and rebellion defying not only Koranic precepts, but the entire culture that attempted to shackle with arbitrary restrictions the independent spirit of the poets, who detested any kind of asceticism.
In the first Muslim century we have poets like Ibn Sayhan, al-Ukayshir, and Ibn Kharidja singing of the pleasures of love, music, and wine. Al-Ahwas went as far as possible in his defiance of religion and of the political regime of the time—a defiance that landed him in the pillory.
In the second century, we have the illustrious Walid b. Yazid who was surrounded by a large group of poets singing the praises of wine and the hedonistic life. We also have the group of poets whom Bencheikh625 calls the “Libertines of Kufa:”
It is here, and at its best, that Bacchism appears as the expression of a rebellion, that the attitudes of the poet take on subversive overtones. The rebellion is spectacularly directed against religious precepts; it is not an accident that most of the poets of this group fall under the accusation of zandaka, and several of them paid with their life for their desire to reject a constraining socio-cultural, system.
We have already met many of these poets in our chapter on heresy. Other names include Bakr b. Kharidja, who spent most of his time in taverns, and Ziyad al-Harithi, who indulged in orgies of drinking with his friend Muti b. Iyas.
Here we might mention another habitué of taverns, the black slave Abu Dulama,626 the court jester under the early Abbasids, but also the poet who used low expressions and displayed “all sorts of filth with cynical joy,” in brief, a kind of Arabic Eddie Murphy. He also took the court jester’s liberty of attacking Islam and Islamic laws with much insolence.
Numerous other wine poets lived a generally dissolute life, going from one drinking bout to another, but finding enough time to write some Bacchic verse. Wine also played an important part in the writings of the mystics, where it was one of the symbols of ecstasy.
Abu Nuwas (762-ca. 814) was the greatest wine poet—and probably the greatest poet—in the Arabic language. He appears in countless comic episodes in the Thousand and One Nights, where he is often in the company of Harun al-Rashid. Many specialists would rate him the greatest poet in the Arabic language. He was born in Ahwaz in 747. We know little of his parents, but Abu Nuwas always considered himself more Persian than Arabian. He spent his youth in Basra and Kufa, studying philology and poetry. He eventually made his way to the court of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. Nicholson627 describes him as “A man of the most abandoned character, which he took no pains to conceal, Abu Nuwas, by his flagrant immorality, drunkeness, and blasphemy, excited the Caliph’s anger to such a pitch that he often threatened the culprit with death, and actually imprisoned him on several occasions.”
Abu Nuwas was capable of writing in many different styles but the inspirational fount of his poetry was wine and love. When he was not singing the praises of beautiful boys, he was composing incomparable wine songs, which rarely exceeded fourteen lines. For example:
Ho! a cup, and fill it up, and tell me it is wine,
For I will never drink in shade if I can drink in shine!
Curst and poor is every hour that sober I must go,
But rich am I whene’er well drunk I stagger to and fro.
Speak, for shame, the loved one’s name, let vain disguise
alone:
No good there is in pleasure o’er which a veil is thrown.628
At least Abu Nuwas cannot be accused of hypocrisy. He also advocates excess, suggesting that, in the end, one will be forgiven by the merciful God:
Accumulate as many sins thou canst:
The Lord is ready to relax His ire.
When the day comes, forgiveness thou wilt find
Before a mighty King and gracious Sire,
And gnaw thy fingers, all that joy regretting
Which thou didst leave thro’terror of Hell-fire!
The greatest poet after Nuwas was Ibn al-Mu’tazz (executed in 908) who was also celebrated for his wine songs and descriptions of drinking customs.
As we began, we can end with Pakistan and Khushwant Singh. Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) is often considered Pakistan’s national poet. He carried on the tradition of wine songs in Islamic literature. Singh describes his visits to Faiz in this manner: “When I went to his room in the morning, he was drinking [usually Scotch]. I had my breakfast and left.... When I returned at noon, he was drinking. I had my lunch and retired for a siesta. Later in the evening I joined him for a couple of drinks and had my dinner. He continued drinking. [This continued] till the early hours of the morning.”
Faiz was a communist, at least during one period of his life, but, in Singh’s words, “his daily consumption of premium brand of Scotch and imported cigarettes would have fed a worker’s family for a month. ”629
Faiz wrote:
There will be no more war.
Bring the wine and the glasses
champagne and goblets
Bloodletting is a thing of the past: so is
weeping.630
Pigs and Pork
In 1968, when he was in Karachi, Pakistan, Salman Rushdie persuaded Karachi television to produce Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Rushdie takes up the story:
The character I played had a long monologue in which he described his landlady’s dog’s repeated attacks on him. In an attempt to befriend the dog, he bought it half a dozen hamburgers. The dog refused the hamburgers and attacked him again. “I was offended,” I was supposed to say. “It was six perfectly good hamburgers with not enough pork in them to make it disgusting.” “Pork,” a TV executive told me solemnly, “is a four-letter word.” He had said the same thing about “sex,” and “homosexual,” but this time I argued back. The text I pleaded, was saying the right thing about pork. Pork, in Albee’s view, made hamburgers so disgusting that even dogs refused them. This was superb anti-pork propaganda. It must stay. “You don’t see,” the executive told me, ... “the word pork may not be spoken on Pakistan television.” And that was that.631
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is banned from Islamic countries since the main characters are pigs, even though they are shown to be ultimately ruthless and tyrannical.
From time to time, in some Muslim countries, religious police raid toy shops to sniff out mugs in the form of the Muppet character Miss Piggy—if any are found, they are smashed publicly.
“You know,” remarks writer Paul Theroux, “you have travelled through the looking-glass when you are in a country where Miss Piggy is seen as the very embodiment of evil.”
The Islamic aversion to even literary pigs is depriving Muslims of such delights of English literature as P. G. Wodehouse’s stories of Lord Emsworth and his prize sow, the Empress of Blandings. Though, perhaps, the Muslims are well rid of Winnie the Pooh and his friend Piglet.
The absolute disgust and revulsion engendered in the Muslim mind at the thought of eating this “most loathsome beast” is nothing short of fanatical and worthy of psychoanalytical consideration. John Stuart Mill632 clearly saw the significance and special nature of this hatred:
Nothing in the creed or practice of Christians does more to envenom the hatred of Mahomedans [Muslims] against them than the fact of their eating pork. There are few acts which Christians and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust than Mussulmans regard this particular mode of satisfying hunger. It is, in the first place, an offence against their religion; but this circumstance by no means explains either the degree or the kind of their repugnance; for wine also is forbidden by their religion, and to partake of it is by all Mussulmans accounted wrong, but not disgusting. Their aversion to the flesh of the “unclean beast” is, on the contrary, of that peculiar character, resembling an instinctive antipathy, which the idea of uncleaness, when once it thoroughly sinks into the feelings, seems always to excite even in those whose personal habits are anything but scrupulously clean, and of which the sentiment of religious impurity, so intense in the Hindoos, is a remarkable example.
The Koran expressly forbids pork:
Sura 5.3. You are forbidden carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh dedicated to any other than God.
Sura 6.145. Say: I do not find, in what is revealed to me, aught forbidden to him who eats thereof except it be carrion, or blood outpoured, or the flesh of swine—that is an abomination—or an ungodly thing that has been hallowed to other than God. (See also 2.173; 16.115.)
In sura 6.145, the reason given for the prohibition is that pork is an “abomination.” At least, Yusuf Ali, Arberry, and Sale translate the Arabic word “rijas” as abomination, and John Penrice’s famous dictionary and glossary of the Koran also gives “abomination” as the correct translation; yet Dawood and Rodwell translate it as “unclean.” We shall return to this point shortly.
The attitudes and remarks about food restrictions and the eventual adoption of certain prohibitions in the Koran can be understood only if we see them as attempts at Muslim self-definition, especially vis-a-vis Judaism. The Koranic precepts developed in a milieu “in which each religious community was distinguished by its own regulations concerning food.”633 Thus at suras 2.168, 5.87, 6.118, and 7.32, the Koran castigates those who would impose arbitrary dietary laws rather than be grateful to God’s bounty.These verses are clearly aimed at Christian ascetics and those pagans who had recently converted to Judaism and had adopted noachic precepts concerning food regulations. Later, “it became important to define Islam as against Judaism.”
Muhammad was not a systematic thinker, and it is futile to look for a coherent set of principles in the Koran. Muhammad dealt with a number of problems as they arose, and we can trace the historical background of many of the rules and regulations prescribed in the Koran. Thus we find conflicting or even contradictory tendencies in the Koran and early Islamic dietary laws concerning food; these have been named the restrictive and the liberal tendencies by Cook.634
For instance, let us look at the liberal tendency, probably derived from Christian polemic against the Jews. The enormous number of Jewish prohibitions led Muhammad to criticize those who imposed excessive restrictions on themselves, for God does not wish to weigh down the faithful with too many useless and arbitrary rules concerning food (sura 2.286). The Jewish prohibitions are even seen as divine punishment for the sins of the Jews (suras 4.158, 16.119). Similarly the insistence on the lawfulness of fish arose from opposition to Samaritan and Judeo-Christian practice.
The restrictive tendency was probably derived from the Jews. The Koran and all Muslim law schools, of course, prohibit pig. Rodinson points out that this prohibition was found among the Judaizing pagans and was also a feature of the dietary laws of certain Judeo-Christians. It was probably through this route that this prohibition was adopted in Arabia.
If asked why he does not eat pork, the average Muslim will reply, “It is forbidden in the Koran.” That is sufficient for him, no further explanation is deemed necessary. More often, with middle-class, educated Muslims, the chances are the reply will be “because the pig is a dirty animal, and in hot countries is prone to disease.” The more sophisticated may even go on to name the diseases that are to be found in pigs or are transmitted by them to humans, such as trichinosis.
These hygienic reasons for the prohibition of pork are older than one would imagine, but nonetheless false. For example, Maimonides (1135-1204) said: “All the food which the Torah has forbidden us to eat have some bad and damaging effect on the body.... The principal reason why the Law forbids swine’s flesh is to be found in the circumstances that its habits and its food are very dirty and loathsome.”635
Pigs were not known, or hardly known to the pre-Islamic Arabs.636 Pliny in his Natural History noted the absence of pork in Arabia. We know from Sozomenus (fifth century A.D.) that certain pagan Arabs abstained from pork and observed other Jewish ceremonies. If that is the case, why would Muhammad prohibit an animal that was not likely to be found in Arabia, let alone eaten? This prohibition makes more sense if we see it as something adopted later as the Arabs came into contact with the Samaritans and Jews in Palestine and began forging their own religious identity.
The Koran describes swine’s flesh as an abomination, and not as “unclean.” The Muslims took over the prohibition from the Jews and Samaritans. This only pushes the question one step farther back. Why did the latter groups prohibit it? Modern social anthropologists are reluctant to assign origins to belief and behavior, but as far as I know, no modern anthropologist accepts the view that pigs were forbidden because of hygienic reasons, though certain historians, theologians, and archaeologists do. Let us look at the reasons why the hygienic explanations are not acceptable.
Trichinosis637 is a disease caused by a small parasite nematode worm, Trichinella spiralis, which is passed onto man in undercooked, infected meat—almost always pork. It is only rarely a serious disease, but complications can arise. Symptoms include fever, muscle pain, sore eyes, and malaise. No one, needless to say, in the biblical Middle East knew anything of T. spiralis, or of the relationship of the parasite to pigs or humans. Only in 1835 was the parasite first found in human muscles, but, at that time, it was still considered harmless. Not until 1859, twenty-four years later, was it realized that the parasite could be transmitted to man through eating pork and recognized that these parasites could cause disease. Moreover, symptoms are not always easy to detect. In the United States there are said to be 350,000 new infections a year, and yet only 4.5 percent show any symptoms.
Many people point to the heat in the Middle East as the prime cause of parasites being present in pork.
But trichinosis is a disease of cold and temperate regions, thus it is more common in Europe and America than the Near or Middle East.
Cattle, sheep, and goats are also responsible for transmitting certain diseases to humans. Undulant fever is contracted from handling infected cattle or from milk; Malta fever is passed onto man from goats; anthrax, a very serious disease, is transmitted to man by sheep and cattle and can lead to symptoms like fever and result in pus and scabs.
What of the putative dirty habits of the pigs? Pigs are not particularly worse than chickens and goats who also eat dung. Water buffaloes wallow in filthy, muddy water. Amongst the Northwestern Melanesians described by Malinowski, dogs were considered much dirtier than pigs.638
In any case, if their habits engendered such disgust, why were they domesticated? We know that they were domesticated in Southwest Asia sometime between 9,000 B.C. and 6,000 B.C., and formed an important element of the Sumerian diet. Herodotus tells us there were swineherds who belonged to a separate class in Egypt. But if there were swineherds, then there must have been a demand for pig meat. If the Jews were aware of the diseases caused by eating undercooked pork, why was this knowledge not available to other groups that did eat pork? In fact, Hippocrates claimed that eating pig flesh gave strength.
Christianity spread the use of pork, but the earliest Christian converts were Jews. Had hygienic considerations been the real reason for the prohibition of pork, then surely they would have continued to be valid, and Christians would have adopted the prohibition.
That terms such as “disgusting” and “dirty” are hopelessly subjective can be seen from the fact that later Muslim law schools permitted certain animals to be eaten that would disgust the average European. For example,639 three of the four main Sunni schools and the jurist Ibn Hazm permit eating the lizard. Surely there is no more revolting a creature than the hyena, which lurks around dead meat, stinking carcasses, and rotting bodies; yet the Shafi‘ites, Ibn Hazm, and the normally intolerant Hanbalis allow it to be eaten. The Malikis, Shafi’ites, and Ibn Hazm also permit the hedgehog as food. All the schools, without exception, allow the camel and locust for Muslim consumption.
What then is the real reason for the taboo on eating pork? According to Robertson Smith,640 the ancient Semites had a ritual attitude to swine, its flesh being forbidden for ordinary food, though it could be eaten on special occasions. Among the Syrians swine’s flesh was taboo, “but it was an open question whether this was because the animal was holy or because it was unclean.” Ideas of sanctity and noncleanliness were not yet distinguished. According to Frazer,641 the Jews also had an ambiguous attitude to swine—did they worship or abominate them? Frazer suggests that the Jews revered swine, and we know that
some of the Jews used to meet secretly in gardens to eat the flesh of swine and mice as a religious rite. Doubtless this was a very ancient ceremony, dating from a time when both the pig and the mouse were venerated as divine, and when their flesh was partaken of sacramentally on rare and solemn occasions as the body and blood of gods. And in general it may perhaps be said that all so-called unclean animals were originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they were divine.
A similar situation prevailed in Egypt.
These explanations, though adequate for that which concerns pigs, are inadequate to explain all the details of the dietary laws in the Old Testament, with their various systems of classification. Nor do Frazer and Robertson Smith explain why certain animals acquire the status of divine.
All modern explanations of the dietary laws in the Old Testament take their starting point from the discussions found in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) and Implicit Meanings (1975).
Essentially, Douglas sees “food taboos” in terms of category relationships, of boundaries, and hence of anomalies and ambiguities that do not fit the boundaries. According to Douglas,642 animals were expected to have those essential physical features proper to their respective habitats, with the means of locomotion as the crucial feature.” Thus, cattle were expected to go on four (cloven) hooves, birds primarily to fly (rather than to walk), and fish to have fins. Rodents were prohibited because of their indeterminate movement.” The Biblical classification “rejects creatures which are anomalous, whether in living between two spheres, or having defining features of another sphere, or lacking defining features.” “Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong ... that different classes of things shall not be confused.”
“Cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing ungulates are the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist”: thus the pig, which is cloven-hoofed but is not a ruminant, is therefore excluded, and nothing is said about its putative dirty habits in the Old Testament. “As the pig does not yield milk, hide, nor wool, there is no other reason for keeping it except for its flesh. And if the Israelites did not keep pigs they would not be familiar with its habits.”
Edwin Firmage643 finds Douglas’s thesis wanting in many respects. I can only give a very sketchy account of his criticisms and his own proposals for the solution. The means of locomotion is not the unifying principle behind the perception of uncleanness (why cloven hooves and not simple hooves?). “Why does anomaly ipso facto make these things unclean and inedible?”
Instead Firmage provides his own answers:
The driving force... was surely the notion that Israel had been called to be a holy people. It was the priest’s special concern to see to it that the conditions for holiness were observed, first of all in the sanctuary but also among the people at large. He was to teach the people what constituted ritual uncleanness, and how it was to be eliminated. The priests took the notion of Israel’s calling a step further, however, when they created the dietary law.... It goes beyond the more limited notion of personal purity, in that it distinguishes not any person who is pure from one who is not, but Israelites as against other nations. When, therefore, the priests realized that the Israelite diet too should come under the requirements of the injunctions of holiness, they had in the sacrificial animals ready made models of cleanness by which they could judge the purity of items in the Israelite diet.... These same commonly sacrificed species also provided the bulk of the ordinary man’s diet of meat. However, while man’s diet included those animals regularly given to the deity, man nevertheless enjoyed a greater variety of meats than the deity. The question for the priest was, then: which of these other meats were consistent with the paradigm of “proper” meats defined by the sacrificial species? The handful of species fit for God’s altar-table, universally accepted as such from the beginning, provided the required definition of cleanness for the rest of the animal world. The priests drew an analogy between the Israelite diet and that of YHWH, whose staples (the sacrificial species) became the measure of fitness for all other animals in the ordinary Israelite’s diet.
When it came to applying this standard of comparison, only those animals which superficially resembled the sacrificial model were allowed.
But the priest had to give some general guidelines for the layman, and he accordingly picked out those features that he believed could easily be applied in deciding difficult or borderline cases. “The present criteria themselves are therefore not exactly the raison d’être of most of the dietary prohibitions. They are, however, indicative of the more general and fundamental criterion of dissimilarity with the temple paradigm. It is this which is the mainspring of the dietary law.”
The weakness of Firmage’s argument lies in the idea of “the handful of species fit for God’s altar-table, universally accepted as such from the beginning.” In other words, the Israelites had some prior notion of what was fit to be sacrificed. It is surely inadequate to tell us that certain species were accepted from the beginning as fit for God’s altar table. That is the very problem that is worrying us—what criteria did they use to arrive at those “handful of species?” The Israelites took the sacificial species as their paradigm, but how did they choose this paradigm in the first place?
We might briefly look at the solutions proposed by Marvin Harris644 and Simoons. Harris gives an ecological explanation for the abomination of the pig. Pigs were orginally kept for their meat—as a source of animal protein. In the forest habitat, the pig lived on roots, tubers, and fruits. Once this forest disappeared the pig had to be raised on grain, and therefore competed for man’s own food resources. Thus the pig became too expensive to serve as a source of meat. The prohibition against eating pork was a means of ensuring that farmers did not yield to the temptation to raise pigs, which would have been disastrous for the community. This theory, while ingenious, raises further questions. If pigs were raised on what Firmage calls marginal food, then surely they would not have posed such a serious threat to the community’s resources. There is also the question of the amount of deforestation occurring in forested areas. De Planhol,645 the greatest authority on geography and Islam, has shown that it was the prohibition of pork that led to deforestation. The prohibition “led to the grazing of sheep and goats in the wooded mountains, and certainly accelerated deforestation, which was catastrophic in these arid and semi-arid countries.” De Planhol gives the example of Albania: when we pass through the countryside from the Muslim to the Christian sections, the amount of woodland immediately becomes much greater.
Pigs can still be a useful animal after deforestation.
According to Simoons646 the prejudice against pigs and pork developed among pastoral peoples living in arid and semi-arid regions. Pigs were unsuited to the pastoral way of life, but were widely diffused among agricultural peoples. There was a conflict between two peoples and two ways of life. The pig symbolized the way of life of one group, while contempt for the pig was a symbol of the other group. There is obviously something in this, but many would not find it acceptable because it does not explain all the other dietary laws.
Many scholars, however, come back to the notion of group loyalty and allegiance. For instance, Edmund Leach says:
In nearly all societies food is one of the tags by which members of the different social classes are differentiated. We eat this; they eat that. What we eat is “good,” “prestigious,”“clean”; what they eat is “bad,” “defiling,”“dirty.” Where populations of mixed religion live side by side in one locality one way of marking out the boundaries of social class/caste/religion is by having different rules about food taboos. This is very markedly the case in India where one can encounter every possible combination of prohibition in castes which are living side by side.
For our purposes, the above account is enough to explain why Muhammad chose certain prohibitions—as a means of marking out the boundaries from other religions, and as a means of acquiring Muslim identity. The prohibition of pork thus has nothing to do with the dirty habits of the pig or the diseases it can transmit to man; pigs and their habits were hardly known to the Arabs.
Having emphasized the nearly universal loathing in Islam for pork, I shall now give examples648 of exceptions to the rule. It seems that both Avicenna and Haly Abbas (al-Majusi) favored eating pork for its medicinal qualities. De Planhol cites the example of the Ghomara Riffian heretics of the Middle Ages who permitted the flesh of female pigs to be eaten. Berbers of Iherrushen and Ikhuanen in North Gzennaya, Morocco, raised pigs until recent times. People tend to be secretive about it in Morocco, though according to Westermarck, its inhabitants used to eat the liver of the wild boar to gain strength. In China, Muslims will eat pork but simply call it “mutton.” The Druse are also said to partake of the flesh of swine.
IN PRAISE OF PIGS
The modern, relatively hairless pigs that we know today derive from Sus scrofa vittatus, which has been bred in China since Neolithic times, but which reached Europe only in the eighteenth century. Charles Lamb sang the praises of the pig in the nineteenth century, and here is how a modern philosopher describes the virtues of the pig:
Surely the pig was created expressly for the table.... The pig also looks like food: a round, plump offering on sticks, ready at any moment to lose its individuality and slide down the metaphysical ladder from thing to stuff. Furthermore, he tastes good, and can be made to taste better, the more you work on him. He is the source of charcuterie, the highest of all culinary art-forms, which surpasses in boldness and finesse anything that the Jews or Muslims, for all their ingenuity, have been able to achieve from their abstinence.... I cannot think, therefore, that God’s purpose was rightly perceived by the author of Leviticus, and am even inclined to the view that, when it comes to the pig, there is something ungrateful, even blasphemous, in refusing to eat him.649
Homosexuality
The greater tolerance for homosexuality in the Islamic world has been recognized for a long time. From the nineteenth century onward, many Westerners have been going to Muslim North Africa to look for the homosexual adventure that their own society condemned.
At the beginning of Compton Mackenzie’s novel of homosexuality, Thin Ice, published in 1956, the narrator and his friend Henry Fortescue go to Morocco where Henry is erotically aroused by their porter, Ali. Henry goes up country in pursuit of Ali, while the British vice-consul reassures the narrator that there was no danger, that conditions in the interior were not as bad as they were painted. Then the vice-consul adds: “Curious. It passed through my mind yesterday that your friend was that way inclined. Well, nobody in the Moslem world between Tangier and the Khyber Pass is going to criticize his tastes.”650
Starting at the latter end of the Islamic world, let us look at the situation in the Khyber Pass. The emperor Babur651 (1483-1530), was to pass through the Khyber Pass and eventually make his home in India. In his autobiography, Babur tells us with much delicacy how he fell in love with a boy:
In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as the verse says, “I maddened and afflicted myself” for a boy in the camp-bazaar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in.... From time to time Baburi used to come to my presence but out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him; how then could I make conversation and recital? In my joy and agitation I could not thank him (for coming); how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away? What power had I to command the duty service to myself? One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or put words together was impossible.... In that frothing up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, barehead, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard.
Sir Richard Burton was to confirm Islamic tolerance for homosexuality, particularly at the Khyber Pass end:
The cities of Afghanistan and Sind are thoroughly saturated with Persian vice [i.e., homosexuality], and the people sing
The worth of cunt the Afghan knows
Kabul prefers the other “chose!”
The Afghans are commercial travelers on a large scale and each caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in woman’s attire with khol’d eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses and henna’d fingers and toes ... they are called Kuch-i-safari or traveling wives.652
Burton gives further examples of the “vice,” ranging from Persia to Morocco, but as his “Terminal Essay,” in which they appear, is now famous, I will not quote from it further. Instead I will give one last example of the prevalence of and tolerance toward homosexuality from the work of the ethnographer Cline, writing in 1936, about his field work in Western Egypt at the oasis of Siwah: “All normal Siwan men and boys practice sodomy.... Among themselves the natives are not ashamed of this; they talk about it as openly as they talk about the love of women, and many, if not most of their fights arise from homosexual competition.”653 Even marriages between men and boys were celebrated with great festivities and reveling; brideprices for boys were as much as fifteen times that paid for a girl.
Though some scholars find the Koranic attitude, at worst, mildly negative or even ambiguous, I think it is clear from the following references that it was fairly condemnatory: sura 4.16: “If two men among you commit indecency, punish them both.”
Suras 7.80, 81: “And Lot said to his people: Do you commit indecent acts that no nation has ever committed before? You lust after men in preference to women. You really are a degenerate people.”
Sura 26.165: “Will you fornicate with males and abandon your wives, whom God has created for you? Surely you are a people transgressing all limits.”
Sura 27.55: “And tell of Lot. He said to his people: Do you commit indecency though knowing its shameful character, lusting after men instead of women.”
We know from the punishment meted out to the people of Lot (“who were utterly destroyed,” sura 26.166) that sodomy was not to be tolerated. However, the ambiguity creeps in in the passages of the Koran describing the delights of paradise: sura 52.24. “And there shall wait on them [the Muslim faithful] young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls.”
Sura 56.17. “And there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine.”
Sura 76.19. “They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders.”
Are these boys available for sexual dalliance, or are they there only to serve?
If the Koran remains ambiguous on this point, the hadith or traditions are, by contrast, quite clearly and harshly against the practice of sodomy. The Prophet found sodomites abhorrent and asked for their execution—for both the active and passive agent.
The various schools differ as to the punishment of the homosexual. Ibn Hanbal and his disciples insisted on death by stoning, while the other schools demanded whipping, usually a hundred lashes. But it seems unlikely that these punishments were ever applied, since tolerance seems to have been the order of the day from the beginning.
We have enough historical and philological evidence654 to show that homosexuality was known in pre-Islamic Arabia. Our evidence is richer for the seventh century. The early caliphs punished homosexuals rather severely—by stoning, burning, and throwing them off a minaret, etc. During the Abbasid period there seems to have been many caliphs who were homosexual: al-Amin (ruled 809); al-Mutasim (833); the Aghlabid Ibrahim (875); at Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman (912); and the great Saladin (Salah al-Din, 1169), famous for his jihad against the Crusaders. As for Muslim Spain in the eleventh century, Henri Peres tells us: “Sodomy is practised in all the courts of the Muluk al-Tawaif. It is sufficient to point out here the love of al-Mutamid for Ibn Ammar and for his page Saif; of al-Mutawakkil for an ephebe; of Rafi al-Dawla, son of Mutaskim, for his minion whose name we do not know; of al-Mutamin of saragossa for one of his Christian pages.”
Homosexuality was common in all parts of society, from schools to religious brotherhoods. The hammams or Turkish saunas, decorated most un-Islamically with erotic mosaics, paintings, or statues, were a meeting point for many homosexuals. Male prostitution was also common in most large towns; often young boys offered themselves for a price to travelers in hostels.
Our greatest evidence for the prevalence and tolerance of homosexuality, of course, comes from the poets. Some of the greatest poets in the Arabic language have glorified homosexual love, often in the most overt and frank language imaginable. Here, once again, the name of Abu Nuwas stands out. Here is a poem attributed to him in the Perfumed Garden:
O the joy of sodomy! So now be sodomites, you Arabs.
Turn not away from it—therein is wondrous pleasure.
Take some coy lad with kiss-curls twisting on his
temple and ride him as he stands like some gazelle
standing to her mate.
—A lad whom all can see girt with sword and belt
not like your whore who has to go veiled.
Make for smooth-faced boys and do your very best to
mount them, for women are the mounts of devils!
There are several such poems attributed to Abu Nuwas in the Perfumed Garden and the Thousand and One Nights, with accompanying scandalous stories of homosexual adventures.
Though 1 have concentrated on male homosexuality, there is also evidence to suggest that lesbianism existed to the same extent, and was no less tolerated. The Perfumed Garden has a chapter on lesbians where this verse extolling the virtues of tribadism is quoted:
A girl who is slender, not clumsy and flabby, will show you how to rub and grind.
So quickly come and lose no time in savoring true delight.
And then you’ll know that all I say about the joy that
Lesbians feel is right.
How wretched and unhappy the vagina that a penis splits!
It loses all the ecstasy that another girl can give and
entails, to boot, the infamy and shame
that fall on girls who lie with men.656
Whatever the sociological, psychological, or biological reason for the prevalence of homosexuality in Muslim society, there is no doubt that it was tolerated to an extent unimaginable in the Christian West.