166 The American Journal of Islam and Society 37:1-2 Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature Pernilla Myrne London: I.B. Tauris, 2020. 228 pages. In a fascinating passage in his epistle to Abū ʿAlī b. al-Ḥārith on differ- ences in character, the polymath Qusṭā b. Lūqā (d. 300/912) observes that there are three kinds of sexual preference among people (al-nās): “those who incline to women, those who opt for boys (al-ghilmān) exclusively, and those who are disposed to both.”1 As the context clearly indicates, the referent of “people” here is, unsurprisingly, adult males: the minority group with whose pens and for whose edification and/or entertainment the over- whelming majority of premodern Arabic texts were composed. This is no less true in the domain of the erotic, as demonstrated by Pernilla Myrne in her outstanding recent monograph on female sexuality in the third and fourth centuries AH, which partly redresses this systematic neglect with its welcome focus on women and their agency. Inevitably, she does so through (meticulous) examination of a range of works of decidedly male prove- nance. Myrne tracks the relevant debates across literary genres, always with an eye to the representation of women’s voices. Chapters are thematically organized and address such topics as female sexuality in medicine, ero- tology and religious discourse proper (fiqh, ḥadīth, and tafsīr)—as in the first section of the book—as well as male-female verbal battles, mujūn, and tribadism (saḥq), in its second part. This is a formidably versatile piece of scholarship. Much attention is paid to the Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha (c.l. 4/10th century), a veritable encyclopaedia of sex and our earliest extant Arabic erotological work, discussion of which reoccurs throughout. Myrne does very well to highlight as painstakingly as she does both the extra-Islamic origins of much of this discourse in Late Antiquity from Greek and also Sanskrit materials (3, 19-24, 51-53, etc.), along with the variety of view- points expressed therein. She is normally very careful not to over-gener- alize: the physicians of premodern Islamdom generally embraced the view that female orgasm and ejaculation (inzāl) were necessary for conception, though there were exceptions (34). Similarly, the dominant opinion, cul- turally, supported the notion of women as hypersexual, nine times as libid- inous as men, though some occasionally questioned this (60). On Islamic law, Myrne is more given to erroneous overstatement, as in her claim that 167 women are incapable of contracting their own marriages (70, against the Ḥanafīs),2 that female circumcision is merely a recommended practice (82, contra the Shāfiʿīs),3 or that jurists equated liwāṭ to zinā (147, against the Ḥanafīs and Ẓāhirīs).4 These are however minor oversights that do not de- tract in any significant way from Myrne’s accomplishment in this book, which is considerable. Female Sexuality is a philologist’s dream: the woman who faints at cli- max is a rabūkh (60), we learn; the amorous feminine sounds and move- ments accompanying coitus are, collectively, ghunj (64, 84-85). Saḥq (pre- ferred in this period to siḥāq and musāḥaqa) could be used to refer to any sexual practice involving deliberate clitoral stimulation, not merely of the same-sex kind, as is often assumed (146). Myrne handles a large number of lexically-exacting texts deftly, and must be warmly commended on her knowledge of Arabic. On rare occasions, however, odd choices are made: nikāḥ is for example consistently rendered as “marriage” or “marital sex” (e.g., 9, 47, 69), notwithstanding the author’s extensive treatment of and frequent references to the phenomenon of slave-concubinage. This is more likely a slip than a conscious error. Theorists of “Islamic medicine” (a term Myrne defends, 3) distinguish themselves from their Late Antique Greek antecedents by their greater fo- cus on female pleasure, along with the relevant pharmacology (14). They universally adopted the two-seed theory of human genesis, while demon- strating awareness of the various Greek and Sanskritic alternatives (22, 51). Phraseology seems to imply that drugs were administered to women, passive consumers of them, while female practitioners of sub-medical arts such as midwifery were held in contempt by (male) professionals (40-41). Already by the period of the Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha, erotology had come to include elements of medical discourse, in simplified and often imperfect- ly understood form, especially for the treatment of sexual dysfunction (implied to affect men more so than women, 49). ʿAlī b. Naṣr al-Kātib, to whom the text is attributed, emphasises the importance of sexual harmony (ittifāq) and the quest for simultaneous climax, which compensates for all other defects in male partners, or so he claims (46, 61-62). Celibacy, no less than overindulgence, is regarded as physically deleterious: in moder- ation, sex enhances health. And though the physicians of Islamdom did not usually subscribe to the idea of the “wandering womb”, they did warn of the dangers of “uterine suffocation” (ikhtināq al-raḥm), caused by ex- cess semen or the retention of menses, according to Galen (28). Works of Book Reviews 168 The American Journal of Islam and Society 37:1-2 erotology devoted the requisite attention to sexual etiquette and technique, often attributed to unknown sages (ḥukamā’) and drawing no doubt on the Kāma Sūtra, at least parts of which were available in translation (perhaps via Middle Persian, 57). More interestingly, much Islamicate sexual wisdom is ascribed to older women, including the enigmatic Ḥubbā al-Madīniyya, to whom our sources give the role of sex-educator extraordinaire in Umayyad Medina (63-64). Not all of the anecdotes told of such women are especially flattering. In both verbal jousting, in which women eloquently defended (for example) their marital rights in the presence of governors and judg- es, and also in the more narrowly sexual domain, greater outspokenness is invariably attributed to women of the pre- or early Islamic period, or alternatively to slave-concubines (jawārī) later on, as the “ideology of gen- der” (in Leila Ahmed’s phrase) increasingly made itself felt in early Abbasid times (169). It is in instances of women’s eloquence (balaghāt al-nisā’) that their earthy frankness is in greatest evidence. Myrne’s book does much to validate the claims of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) in his infamous Risāla fi l-Qiyān that expectations of decorum between the sexes were not always as they later came to be.5 Though there are many indications in the sources of women’s frankness on matters sexual, as in the copious literature of mujūn (socially and reli- giously subversive material, usually with erotic or bacchic themes), Myrne notes that women were much more typically the recipients of such treat- ment than those trafficking in it. Women were parodied much more com- monly than they are said to have spoken up, especially by salacious poets like Abū Nuwās (d. 199 or 200/814 or 815) and Ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 391/1001), the pioneers of mujūn and sukhf, respectively (117-118, 142). Myrne does not simply assume that all instances of women’s speech reflect male ventril- oquism; at least in some cases, she suggests, we must not rule out a priori the possibility that the sources convey actual sentiments once expressed by female actors (e.g., 141). One fascinating case is the verse arguments commending saḥq (normally, tribadism) against nayk (penetrative sex). Sometimes, it is observed, saḥq is defended as merely an alternative to nayk in the absence of, or given the problems entailed by, male partners, not least of which pregnancy. At other times, tribadism is clearly given preferential treatment and is vaunted as a superior to coitus, as the practice of an exclu- sive “sisterhood” (150, 164). It is here, among other places, that one wishes Myrne had paused to reflect on the possible implications of the sources on this point at greater length. Though clearly familiar with constructionist arguments on sexuality (summarized on 145), the term “homosexual” is 169Book Reviews consistently deployed to render classical Arabic terms, in rather anachro- nistic fashion. The author nowhere engages this important historiograph- ical debate directly, but is content to simply refer to it without committing herself to either side. This is somewhat unfortunate. Ultimately, much of the literary production of Abbasid Baghdad re- flects straightforwardly “masculinist” norms and priorities. Myrne endorses Shawkat Toorawa’s view that the transition from oral (and aural) to literary culture did much to contribute to this (171). The increasingly homosocial atmosphere of Abbasid Baghdad can only have encouraged elite male soli- darity. In extreme forms, this manifested in sukhf, which can be considered the sophisticated poetic form of what the current President would term “locker-room talk”. As such, Myrne does especially well to highlight wom- en’s voices: this is no mean feat, given the nature of the sources. No less significant an achievement is her attention to the manuscript record, which reveals that there are very serious disparities between the few printed edi- tions of extant erotological texts and their manuscript variants (e.g., 203). In this as in other dimensions of Arabic and Islamic Studies, good critical editions remain a desideratum. Such shortcomings as this book contains are few, and those very minor. Besides the errors noted, it would have been useful to include a more sub- stantial discussion of auto-eroticism, serious scholarly treatment of which is now long overdue. In any case, this remains an impressive and extremely valuable exploration of an understudied subject, one I recommend without reservation to those interested in the history of sexuality, Islamic law and gender, and classical Arabic literature. Its timely appearance has thankfully permitted me to incorporate it into this semester’s teaching. Omar Anchassi Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Endnotes 1. R.P. Paul Sbath, “Le Livres Des Caractères de Qosṭā ibn Loūqā: Grand Savant et Célèbre Médecin Chrétien au IX Siècle” [critical edition and French trans- lation], Bulletin de L’Institut d’Égypte 23 (1940-1): 103-167 (at 112). 2. E.g. al-Sarakhsī (d. 490/1097), al-Mabsūṭ (Beirut: Dār al-Ma`rifa, 1989, repr. of the 1331 Dār al-Saʿāda edn.), 5:10. 170 The American Journal of Islam and Society 37:1-2 3. E.g., al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), Kitāb al-Majmūʿ: Sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab li-l- Shirāzī, ed. Muḥammad Najīb al-Muṭīʿī (Jeddah: Maktabat al-Irshād, n.d.), 1:349. 4. E.g., al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), al-Hidāya bi-Sharḥ Bidāyat al-Mubtadī, ed. Naʿīm Ashraf Aḥmad (Karachi: Idārat al-Qurʾān wa-l-ʿUlūm al-Is- lāmiyya, 1417), 4:104-105. For the Ẓāhirīs, see Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), al-Muḥallā bi-l-Āthār, eds. Khālid al-Rabbāṭ et al. (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2016), 16:449. 5. The Epistle on Singing-Girls of Jāḥiẓ, ed. and trans. AFL Beeston (Warmin- ster: Aris and Phillips, 1980), 19-22. doi: 10.35632/ajis.v37i1-2.726