This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16^th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very important.

First, from The New York Times, The New Abor­tion Providers:

[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clin­ics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hos­pi­tals made up 80 per­cent of the country’s abor­tion facil­i­ties. By 1981, how­ever, clin­ics out­num­bered hos­pi­tals, and 15 years later, 90 per­cent of the abor­tions in the U.S. were per­formed at clin­ics. The Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion did not main­tain stan­dards of care for the pro­ce­dure. Hos­pi­tals didn’t shel­ter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doc­tor came to mean refer­ring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abor­tions in your own office.

This was never the fem­i­nist plan. “The clin­ics’ founders didn’t intend them to become vir­tu­ally the only set­tings for abor­tion ser­vices in many com­mu­ni­ties,” says Car­ole Joffe, a soci­ol­o­gist and author of a his­tory of the era, “Doc­tors of Con­science,” and a new book, “Dis­patches From the Abor­tion Wars.” When the clin­ics became the only place in town to have an abor­tion, they became an easy mark for extrem­ists. As Joffe told me, “The vio­lence was pos­si­ble because the rela­tion­ship of med­i­cine to abor­tion was already ten­u­ous.” The med­ical pro­fes­sion rein­forced the out­sider sta­tus of the clin­ics by not speak­ing out strongly after the first attacks. As abor­tion moved to the mar­gins of med­ical prac­tice, it also dis­ap­peared from res­i­dency pro­grams that pro­duced new doc­tors. In 1995, the num­ber of OB-GYN res­i­den­cies offer­ing abor­tion train­ing fell to a low of 12 percent.

“Under pres­sure and stigma, more doc­tors shun abor­tion,” wrote David Grimes, a lead­ing researcher and abor­tion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 med­ical jour­nal arti­cle called “Clin­i­cians Who Pro­vide Abor­tions: The Thin­ning Ranks.” In a 1992 sur­vey of OB-GYNs, 59 per­cent of those age 65 and older said that they per­formed abor­tions, com­pared with 28 per­cent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abor­tion Fed­er­a­tion started warn­ing about “the gray­ing of the abor­tion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the num­ber of sites pro­vid­ing abor­tion across the coun­try almost dou­bled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, accord­ing to the Gutt­macher Insti­tute. But by 2000 the num­ber shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 per­cent from 1982.

There’s another side of the story, how­ever — a delib­er­ate and con­certed coun­terof­fen­sive that has gone largely unre­marked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advo­cates have qui­etly worked to reverse the mar­gin­al­iza­tion encour­aged by activists like Ran­dall Terry. Abortion-rights pro­po­nents are fight­ing back on pre­cisely the same turf that Terry demar­cated: the place of abor­tion within main­stream med­i­cine. This abortion-rights cam­paign, led by physi­cians them­selves, is try­ing to recast doc­tors, chang­ing them from a weak link of abor­tion to a strong one. Its lead­ers have built res­i­dency pro­grams and fel­low­ships at uni­ver­sity hos­pi­tals, with the hope that, even­tu­ally, more and more doc­tors will use their train­ing to bring abor­tion into their prac­tices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to inte­grate abor­tion so that it’s a seam­less part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

Sec­ond, from Newsweek​.com, The Anti-Lesbian Drug:

Genetic engi­neers, move over: the lat­est scheme for cre­at­ing chil­dren to a parent’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions requires no DNA tin­ker­ing, but merely giv­ing mom a steroid while she’s preg­nant, and presto — no chance that her daugh­ters will be les­bians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’

Or so one might guess from the storm brew­ing over the pre­na­tal use of that steroid, called dex­am­etha­sone. In Feb­ru­ary, bioethi­cist Alice Dreger of North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity and two col­leagues blew the whis­tle on the con­tro­ver­sial prac­tice of giv­ing preg­nant women dex­am­etha­sone to keep the female fetuses they are car­ry­ing from devel­op­ing ambigu­ous gen­i­talia. (That can hap­pen to girls who have con­gen­i­tal adrenal hyper­pla­sia (CAH), a genetic dis­or­der in which unusu­ally high pre­na­tal expo­sure to mas­culin­iz­ing hor­mones called andro­gens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking gen­i­talia.) The response Dreger got from physi­cians and sci­en­tists who were out­raged over this unap­proved use of dex­am­etha­sone caused her to dig deeper into the sci­en­tific papers of the researcher who has pro­moted it.

Dreger is one of the women who brought the cli­toral surg­eries per­formed by Dr. Dix Pop­pas to light.

Seri­ous domestic/intimate part­ner vio­lence trig­ger warn­ing in the first few para­graphs of this post.

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school — tells me that she’s at last made her deci­sion: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m sud­denly lis­ten­ing from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leav­ing her mouth no longer coa­lesce into mean­ing­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness, and then, as if some­one else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair where I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and slap­ping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is sense­less and bloody. I see myself scream­ing in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor, and kick­ing her in the stom­ach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hear­ing what she has to say, my lover con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Real­iz­ing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Lock­ing the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel cer­tain the vision will not return, and I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her I have work to do in the library and there­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­posed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. After a cou­ple of blocks, how­ever, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing vio­lence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some out­side force has taken con­trol of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly par­a­lyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance hav­ing this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor, is to write out what I’m feel­ing, a strat­egy that has helped me fig­ure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, how­ever, what comes out of me is the begin­ning of a poem:

I want a bearded man, shirt­less,
in faded jeans, to come one bare­foot night
and take me in his mouth.

Like the vio­lence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from some­one other than myself, but the shock of recog­ni­tion I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct con­trast to the sense of alien­ation I expe­ri­enced while wait­ing in my bath­room to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was wait­ing for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also real­ize I am sud­denly calm, as if I have found what writ­ing was sup­posed to help me look for, and I am cer­tain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to under­stand­ing why that vision of vio­lence came to me.

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When a good friend of mine who is not Jew­ish found out that her first child was going to be a boy, I asked her if she intended to have him circumcised.

“Yup,” she answered, smiling.

“Do you know how unnec­es­sary and painful the oper­a­tion is?”

Same smile, same answer, “Yup.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because I will not have my son look­ing like a freak! I’ve been with guys who weren’t cir­cum­cised, and they were, well, dis­gust­ing.” She shook her head and wrin­kled her nose at the mem­ory. “They told me sto­ries about what it was like to be dif­fer­ent in the locker room. I just don’t want my son to have to go through that.”

“What if the knife slips?”

Back to the orig­i­nal smile, “It won’t. It almost never does.”

I asked her if she’d ever actu­ally seen a cir­cum­ci­sion. She said no, and so I asked if she planned to be present when her son was cut. Given how strongly she felt, I sug­gested, it seemed to be only right that she should be, if only so she could answer any ques­tions her son might have when he got older. She closed her eyes and raised her palms between us to ward off the image I’d just con­jured, “I, I, I couldn’t. There’s no way I’d be able to let them do it.”

“But then why have it done at all?”

“Look, my son will be cir­cum­cised!” Her tone made it clear the con­ver­sa­tion was over. “He will have a nor­mal penis and a nor­mal sex life, and I will thank you in the future to mind your own business.”

///

I remem­ber how shocked I was – I was a col­lege fresh­man – when my friend Pierre turned around in the locker room after a bas­ket­ball game and dis­played an organ hang­ing between his legs that looked more to me like an elephant’s trunk than a man’s sex­ual appa­ra­tus. I’d never seen an uncir­cum­cised penis before. Well, no, strictly speak­ing, that’s not true. I know now that at least some of the men in the het­ero­sex­ual pornog­ra­phy I’d watched were uncir­cum­cised, but since I only ever saw those penises when they were erect, the skin the women on the screen would occa­sion­ally pull up and down over the glans of those organs appeared to me in my igno­rance to be skin no dif­fer­ent than what I had left over after my cir­cum­ci­sion (which was almost non-existent); I just assumed that, for what­ever rea­son, those men had more of it. So I guess the accu­rate thing to say is that I’d never seen an uncir­cum­cised penis that was not erect, and my first response to see­ing Pierre’s was that it looked fem­i­nine, effem­i­nate. Or maybe emas­cu­lated is a more pre­cise term. Either way, what I felt was a mix­ture of pity and disgust.

I went back to my room and thought hard about my reac­tion. Pierre was a good friend and it trou­bled me that I should be repulsed by his body. It took a while, but I finally real­ized that what made Pierre’s penis seem so alien to me was not merely the cov­er­ing his fore­skin pro­vided; it was that his fore­skin made it impos­si­ble for me to pic­ture Pierre’s penis erect. Not that I thought he didn’t have erec­tions; I knew he had a girl­friend with whom he was hav­ing sex. Rather, I couldn’t imag­ine what Pierre’s erect penis looked like, couldn’t fathom the mech­a­nism by which the fore­skin moved out of the way, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for him to enter a woman’s vagina and expe­ri­ence the plea­sures of sex, includ­ing orgasm and ejac­u­la­tion, that depend upon an exposed glans. It was this inabil­ity to envi­sion Pierre pen­e­trat­ing a woman or ejac­u­lat­ing that made his penis seem to me some­how less than mas­cu­line than mine – because, of course, I assumed that my penis, cut as it was, was the way a penis was sup­posed to be.

Iron­i­cally, in cul­tures that prac­tice cir­cum­ci­sion as an ado­les­cent rite of pas­sage, remov­ing the fore­skin is often equated with remov­ing the last ves­tige of mater­nal, mean­ing fem­i­nine, influ­ence. Not to have it removed, even to flinch while it is being removed — sig­ni­fy­ing fear and the inabil­ity to with­stand pain — is to reveal one­self as cling­ing to the fem­i­nine, unwill­ing to sep­a­rate from one’s mother, and there­fore unwor­thy of man­hood. Since we in the United States cir­cum­cise our boys as infants – and I am talk­ing here about rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sions, not the Jew­ish rit­ual of brit milah, which needs to be dis­cussed in a dif­fer­ent con­text – ques­tions of fear and the inabil­ity to with­stand pain are irrel­e­vant, but I think that the image of a cov­ered glans as less than mas­cu­line is nonethe­less very present in our cul­tural imag­i­na­tion. Or, to put it more pre­cisely, I think that the rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys makes their bod­ies con­gru­ent with our culture’s ideal of mas­culin­ity as clean, hard, always ready for action, and always, implic­itly if not explic­itly, on the offensive.

To start, cir­cum­ci­sion quite lit­er­ally turns a boy’s penis inside out, mak­ing what is essen­tially an inter­nal part of his body, the glans, an exter­nal one, and since the exposed glans is what first enters a woman dur­ing vagi­nal inter­course, it is hard not to read the cir­cum­cised penis as a penis always pre­pared, if not com­pletely ready at any given moment in time, to pen­e­trate – rep­re­sent­ing in the flesh the patri­ar­chal het­ero­sex­ual norm that val­ues a man’s “get­ting it in her” over almost every other aspect of sex. More­over, the cleaner and dryer penis that cir­cum­ci­sion cre­ates has nei­ther the odor nor the taste asso­ci­ated with the lubri­cat­ing dis­charges of both its uncir­cum­cised coun­ter­part and women’s gen­i­talia. Just like the ado­les­cent rite-of-passage cir­cum­ci­sions that I men­tioned above, in other words, the rou­tine med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion per­formed on boys here in the US removes from an infant’s penis that which makes it sim­i­lar to a vagina – except that, because we cir­cum­cise our boys when they are infants, a cut penis will feel to those boys as they grow up as if it were the penis with which they were born, pro­vid­ing the illu­sion of a bio­log­i­cal proof that patriarchy’s gen­der dichotomies – embod­ied in the dry, clean and there­fore “civ­i­lized” penis ver­sus the wet, messy and there­fore “sav­age” vagina – are indeed “nat­ural,” inher­ing in male and female bod­ies and not con­structed through the processes of cul­tural production.

Once these boys under­stand that they were cir­cum­cised, of course, the cat – so to speak – ought to be out of the bag, but the idea that a cir­cum­cised penis is the nor­mal, nat­ural and there­fore healthy penis, is given the weight of med­ical author­ity not only through doctor’s pro­mot­ing the procedure’s osten­si­ble health ben­e­fits (which I will dis­cuss in more detail else­where), but also through the med­ical images that shape our under­stand­ing of what our bod­ies ought to look like. In many of those images, at least here in the United States, the fore­skin is either entirely absent or, if it is present, not labeled. Here are two online examples:

• Shands Health­Care is a pri­vate, not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion affil­i­ated with the Uni­ver­sity of Florida. The A.D.A.M. Mul­ti­me­dia Health Ency­clo­pe­dia on its web­site includes this image of the male repro­duc­tive sys­tem in which the glans is exposed and in which the fore­skin is not even labeled. (To my eye, it’s ambigu­ous whether the bunched skin at the base of the glans is sup­posed to be the fore­skin or not.)
• Vis­i­ble Pro­duc­tions, a Colorado-based mul­ti­me­dia com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany, which boasts, accord­ing to its web­site, the “world’s most exten­sive library of 3D dig­i­tal mod­els [of the human body]” based on data from the Vis­i­ble Human Project. Do a key­word search on “penis” and you get nine results, none of which show an intact penis. Searches on “fore­skin” and “pre­puce” return no results.

In Five Bod­ies, John O’Neill writes that the “oper­a­tion of polit­i­cal and eco­nomic power does not aim sim­ply to con­trol pas­sive bod­ies or to restrain the body politic, but to pro­duce docile bod­ies” (ital­ics in orig­i­nal), bod­ies which accept the truths of power as self-evident and not in need of exam­i­na­tion, moti­vat­ing the peo­ple inhab­it­ing those bod­ies to gov­ern them­selves in con­gru­ence with those truths. Rou­tine infant male cir­cum­ci­sion is a per­fect exam­ple. By per­form­ing the oper­a­tion on infants whose gen­der iden­ti­ties have not yet formed, med­i­cine recre­ates as phys­i­cally embod­ied med­ical facts a set of male dom­i­nant cul­tural beliefs about mas­culin­ity — always ready for sex, dry, clean, civ­i­lized — and then teaches us that these are the bench­marks against which we need to mea­sure men’s gen­i­tal and sex­ual health. To argue this, how­ever, is not to argue that cir­cum­ci­sion causes male dom­i­nant sex­ual behav­ior in men; nor is it to pre­dict that cul­tures which med­ically cir­cum­cise will be inher­ently more male dom­i­nant than those which don’t. Rather, it is to sug­gest that those cul­tures which do med­ically cir­cum­cise infant boys have cho­sen that pro­ce­dure as one of the ways they give men bod­ies in which patri­ar­chal mas­culin­ity and male dom­i­nant behav­ior feel natural.

Clearly, then, end­ing the rou­tine cir­cum­ci­sion of infant boys will not bring patri­archy to its knees, but pulling at the threads by which the pro­ce­dure is woven into our cul­tural fab­ric as nec­es­sary, or at least desir­able, does reveal some of the more insid­i­ous ways in which patri­archy itself is woven into men’s bod­ies as the nat­ural state of things; and once that weave is revealed as pre­cisely not nat­ural, we can start to imag­ine not just a dif­fer­ent kind of pat­tern, but even a dif­fer­ent way to use the loom on which the fab­ric is woven. Think objec­tively for a moment. Leave aside, if you can, the med­ical jus­ti­fi­ca­tions and ratio­nal­iza­tions, the myth­i­cal con­tent and his­tor­i­cal imper­a­tives we are taught to impose on the prac­tice of med­ical cir­cum­ci­sion, and think sim­ply in terms of actual events. A boy is born. Some­time between his entrance into the world and his first two weeks of life, he is taken away from his mother, strapped down with full phys­i­cal restraint in a room full of strangers, and his fore­skin, a sen­si­tive, func­tional and still devel­op­ing part of his body is pulled away from the head of his penis and ampu­tated – some­times with and some­times with­out anes­the­sia. He has given no con­sent, has no aware­ness of the med­ical and/or cul­tural con­sid­er­a­tions that moti­vate the pro­ce­dure, and he has lit­tle or no recourse, once the surgery has been per­formed, to change what has been done to him. There is no way to pre­dict what effect his cir­cum­ci­sion will have on him, but that is not the ques­tion we ought to be ask­ing our­selves. Rather, we ought to be ask­ing why we as a cul­ture so despise the body with which he was born that we need so rad­i­cally and so painfully to alter it, and then we need to be ask­ing if that is the kind of soci­ety we really want to be.

Works Cited

O’Neill, John. Five Bod­ies: The Human Shape of Mod­ern Soci­ety. Ithaca: Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity Press 1985 (The link takes you to the revised edition.)

In 1834, Sylvester Gra­ham — inven­tor of the cracker that con­tin­ues to bear his name — pub­lished a book called A Lec­ture to Young Men, in which he warned that mas­tur­ba­tion would trans­form a boy who prac­ticed it reg­u­larly into:

a wretched trans­gres­sor [who] sinks into a mis­er­able fatu­ity, and finally becomes a con­firmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid shriv­elled [sic] coun­te­nance, and ulcer­ous, tooth­less gums, and fetid breath, and fee­ble bro­ken voice, and ema­ci­ated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hair­less head — cov­ered per­haps with sup­pu­rat­ing blis­ters and run­ning sores — denote a pre­ma­ture old age, a blighted body — and a ruined soul! (Quoted in Kimmel)

Gra­ham, who was one of the most pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful of the non-medical writ­ers on this sub­ject, believed the male body was sim­ply not equipped to han­dle “the con­vul­sive parox­ysms attend­ing vene­real indulgence” — read: ejac­u­la­tion — and so even mar­ried men, whose sex­ual activ­ity with their wives was cer­tainly beyond the moral reproach usu­ally asso­ci­ated with mas­tur­ba­tion, had to be very care­ful not to overindulge – which for Gra­ham meant more than once a month. Oth­er­wise, they risked

Lan­guor, las­si­tude, mus­cu­lar relax­ation, gen­eral debil­ity and heav­i­ness, depres­sion of spir­its, loss of appetite, indi­ges­tion, faint­ness and sink­ing at the pit of the stom­ach, increased sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ties of the skin and lungs to all the atmos­pheric changes, fee­ble­ness of cir­cu­la­tion, chill­i­ness, head-ache, melan­choly, hypochon­dria, hys­ter­ics, fee­ble­ness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weak­ness of the lungs, ner­vous cough, pul­monary con­sump­tion, dis­or­ders of the liver and kid­neys, uri­nary dif­fi­cul­ties, dis­or­ders of the gen­i­tal organs, weak­ness of the brain, loss of mem­ory, epilepsy, insan­ity, apoplexy — and extreme fee­ble­ness and early death of off­spring.… (Quoted in Kimmel)

Gra­ham rec­om­mended dietary mea­sures, specif­i­cally his crack­ers, to com­bat men’s temp­ta­tion to plea­sure. J. H. Kel­logg, whose flakes were also orig­i­nally devel­oped and mar­keted as an anaphro­disiac, didn’t stop with food. In Plain Facts for Old and Young, pub­lished in 1888, Kel­logg rec­om­mended a series of home reme­dies for mas­tur­ba­tion, includ­ing ban­dag­ing a boy’s penis, cov­er­ing it with a cage and tying the boy’s hands at night when he went to sleep. For par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult cases, Kel­logg rec­om­mended cir­cum­ci­sion “with­out admin­is­ter­ing an anaes­thetic, as the brief pain attend­ing the oper­a­tion will have a salu­tary effect upon the mind, espe­cially if con­nected with the idea of pun­ish­ment” (Quoted in Kim­mel). Nor was Kel­logg the only expert to sug­gest that pain was the best coun­ter­mea­sure to male mas­tur­ba­tion. Other writ­ers seemed to com­pete with each other to see who could come up with the cru­elest form of inter­ven­tion. Rec­om­men­da­tions included apply­ing leeches, punch­ing a hole in the fore­skin and insert­ing a metal ring, cut­ting the fore­skin with jagged-edge scis­sors and apply­ing a hot iron to a boy’s genitals.

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At eleven, I am the youngest of eight boys lined up along one row of lock­ers in the oth­er­wise empty men’s room at the swim­ming pool to which the day camp we are attend­ing takes us every other day. Nor­mally, I’d be chang­ing with boys my own age, but a mix-up back at the camp grounds landed me on the bus with these guys, who are all twelve and thir­teen. I turn my back to them to hide the erec­tion that has taken hold of my body and which I am hav­ing dif­fi­culty fit­ting into my bathing suit. Despite my best efforts to remain incon­spic­u­ous, how­ever, my move­ments attract their atten­tion and one of them sneaks up behind me and looks over my shoul­der. “Hey,” his voice rings out metal­li­cally, “look at the size of Newman’s boner!”

Like a pack of dogs that has been thrown a sin­gle piece of meat, the group sur­rounds me in a tight cir­cle, while I stand there not mov­ing, body point­ing me into the air above the mid­dle of the room, wish­ing I could van­ish, that it would van­ish, but no mat­ter how much I will it, the damned thing will not go down.

“What are you, a homo!?”

“Other guys’ dicks must turn him on!”

“Wanna suck mine, queer!?”

The taunts con­tinue for what seems like hours, though it is prob­a­bly only a few min­utes, and then the head coun­selor comes in and ush­ers us all out to the pool. I can’t believe he didn’t hear what the other boys were say­ing, but he acts as if he didn’t, barely look­ing at me as he shows me where the boys in my group have spread their towels.

Later that evening, while I’m get­ting ready for bed, I stand naked before the full-length mir­ror inside my door and tuck my penis out of sight between my legs. I’m not try­ing to imag­ine myself as a girl, but I am intrigued by the pos­si­bil­ity of a body that does not have erections.

///

When I was a teenager, I read in Pent­house mag­a­zine a let­ter – I think it was in Xavier Hollander’s “Happy Hooker” col­umn – in which a woman described how she and a friend took revenge on a man who’d tried to rape the friend. The writer of the let­ter arranged to meet the man at a disco, invited him to her apart­ment, and seduced him into being tied, spread-eagled, to her bed. Then the woman’s friend, who’d been wait­ing in another room, came in, and the two women teased the man sex­u­ally until he was beg­ging them for release. In response, the women took out a razor and shav­ing cream, telling him that, if he ejac­u­lated while they rubbed his penis, they would shave all the hair from his body. The let­ter went on to describe in great detail first the man’s plead­ing with them not to do it and then his efforts to keep him­self from com­ing while the women took turns mas­tur­bat­ing him. Finally, of course, he came, and the women shaved him, threat­en­ing to slice off his tes­ti­cles if he didn’t lay still.

Now, of course, I under­stand not only that the let­ter might have been, that it most prob­a­bly was, a com­plete fab­ri­ca­tion, even that it might even have been writ­ten by a man, but also, assum­ing for the sake of argu­ment that the events it relates actu­ally hap­pened, the fact that is was pub­lished in Pent­house means that its sole pur­pose was to feed, to shape and even to cre­ate the desires and fan­tasies of the boys and men like me who read the mag­a­zine. At the time, though, I read the let­ter naively, assum­ing it to be true – why, after all, would some­one pub­lish a let­ter that wasn’t? – and so it was clear to me that it described a rape. The woman who osten­si­bly wrote it didn’t present what she and her friend did to the man as any­thing else — except to make clear that it was moti­vated by revenge — and she never implied that he enjoyed it. Nonethe­less, my sex­ual imag­i­na­tion was drawn to the story. For months, for years after­ward, I fan­ta­sized about women tying me to a bed and cre­at­ing in my flesh an arousal so all-encompassing that I too would be will­ing to beg for release. Yet no mat­ter how hard I tried to imag­ine a con­clu­sion other than the one in the let­ter, I always ended up the vic­tim of some ver­sion of the revenge the writer and her friend took, and what I remem­ber most about this now is how fully this end­ing short-circuited the fan­tasy, and when I say “fully short-circuited,” I mean fully and com­pletely. If I was mas­tur­bat­ing, I found it very hard to con­tinue; if I was sim­ply day­dream­ing, I’d have to stop and think of some­thing else, not because I felt and was try­ing to avoid, or deny, the guilty, shame­ful plea­sure that often accom­pa­nies “for­bid­den fan­tasies,” but rather because I was scared. I sim­ply did not trust the women I imag­ined not to turn into the women described in the let­ter. More than that, though, I iden­ti­fied with their victim’s expe­ri­ence of hav­ing the plea­sures of his body turned against him, and the knowl­edge that I could be shamed just as he had been shamed taught me only one thing: my body was always the poten­tial weapon of my own defeat.

///

We’re sit­ting in a cir­cle in a reme­dial com­po­si­tion class that I’m teach­ing. The stu­dents are read­ing aloud and com­ment­ing on fables they’ve writ­ten over the week­end. The prose is awk­ward and ungram­mat­i­cal, though I am impressed with the imag­i­na­tive effort some of my stu­dents have made. There’s a mod­ern­ized ver­sion of Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood, set in an upper class neigh­bor­hood with the most sought-after senior boy in the local high school tak­ing the part of the wolf. There’s also a gender-reversed Sleep­ing Beauty, in which Princess Charm­ing turns out to be the home­less woman who sleeps in the park. I’m about to move on to the next part of the les­son when Wal­ter, who’d announced when we began that he wasn’t going to read what he’d writ­ten, asks whether I’d like to hear his story. Of course I say yes.

Walter’s nar­ra­tive takes place in the future and involves a very pow­er­ful drug dealer whose orga­ni­za­tion has been infil­trated by a top female nar­cotics agent pos­ing as a pros­ti­tute. When the dealer’s lover, who also works for him as a pros­ti­tute, learns that the oper­a­tion has been com­pro­mised, she tells him imme­di­ately. Armed with this infor­ma­tion, the dealer exposes the spy and has her tor­tured slowly and painfully to death. To express his grat­i­tude, he takes his lover to bed, giv­ing her, in Walter’s words, “the lit­eral fuck of her life, pound­ing away until she was no longer breath­ing.” The story ends with a descrip­tion of the lav­ish funeral the dealer gives her.

When Wal­ter fin­ishes read­ing, he looks around the cir­cle with a sar­cas­tic and self-satisfied grin. The rest of the class is silent, no one except me will­ing to meet his eyes, and I’m hop­ing that one of his peers will be the first to speak, con­demn­ing what he’s writ­ten not in the voice of author­ity — which my voice would inevitably be — but in the voice of his own com­mu­nity. A minute passes before I real­ize that his class­mates don’t intend to respond, and so I call on a few stu­dents by name, male and female, to see if I can draw them out. The men all say that the story is “sick,” while the women tell me they think it’s not even worth respond­ing to. Yet it has to be responded to, and so I ask Wal­ter if he really believes that fuck­ing a woman to death could be an expres­sion of gratitude.

“Of course,” he says, “For the woman it’s the ulti­mate ful­fill­ment, and for the man it’s the ulti­mate proof.”

“Of what?”

“Of man­hood,” he responds, “Women would take tick­ets and stand in line to be with a man pow­er­ful enough to fuck them like that.” He says these words with a con­vic­tion I at first can’t think how to argue with, but then I won­der aloud if he would include his girl­friend or his future wife in that line of women.

“I’m not talk­ing,” he says, “about doing this to some­one I love. I’m talk­ing about the pieces of trash you can pick up at the local bar, the sluts who give it away, the hook­ers who do it for money, women who are ask­ing for it.”

“Why,” I ask, “do they deserve to be murdered?”

“They’re whores,” he responds, “No one cares about them.”

I take a dif­fer­ent tack, ask­ing him if he’s ever killed any­thing other than an insect. When he says no, I ask him if he real­izes that he’s talk­ing about using his own body, his penis specif­i­cally, as a mur­der weapon and that the mur­der he says he would like to com­mit is not sim­ply one in which his vic­tim dies in his arms, but is also one in which he would feel against his own flesh the inter­nal process of her dying.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

Try­ing again, I go back to what he said about not want­ing to fuck to death a woman he loves and ask if he makes a dis­tinc­tion between the sex he would have for plea­sure with that woman and the power he says he would like to expe­ri­ence of using sex to kill. Wal­ter looks at me with a mix­ture of pity and con­tempt. “Power,” he says, “is pleasure.”

Class ends. As I’m putting my papers in my brief­case, Wal­ter steps up to my desk. “Now that every­one else is gone,” he says, his voice full of con­spir­a­to­r­ial cama­raderie, “be hon­est. Wouldn’t it feel great to take some slut to a hotel and then meet your bud­dies later and tell them you’d killed her with your dick?”

“No,” is all I can think to say.

“Sure, maybe now that you’re older and you can’t get it up like you used to – I was in my thir­ties – but when you were younger, when you were an under­grad­u­ate, wasn’t fuck­ing some­thing you did so you could share it with your bud­dies, and impress them, and wouldn’t they have wor­shipped you if you told them you’d fucked some­one to death?”

I decide that mono­syl­labic answers are the best way to deal with this line of ques­tion­ing. “No,” I tell him again.

Wal­ter waits a few sec­onds for me to say more. When I don’t, he mut­ters some­thing under his breath of which I think I hear the words pathetic and excuse. Then he walks out, and it’s the last I see or hear of him until I get my final ros­ter with a W for with­drawal next to his name. Of course there are many rea­sons why he might have had to with­draw from the class, but it’s hard for me not to think he did so because I wasn’t “man enough” to be his teacher.

///

In an episode of the long-and-deservedly-defunct TV series She-Wolf Of Lon­don, a very old man is brought into the hos­pi­tal dying of unknown causes. The doc­tor on duty believes the old man is either senile or insane because he keeps insist­ing he is actu­ally twenty-seven years old and that he was turned into an old man by a woman. As the doc­tor leaves, he orders a nurse to give the old man a seda­tive. Once the nurse and the old man are alone, how­ever, she unzips her uni­form to reveal black-lace lin­gerie, and the old man rec­og­nizes her as the woman who has aged him — one of what the view­ers will later learn is a group of suc­cubae who have opened an escort ser­vice in England’s cap­i­tal city. As the old man looks on in help­less ter­ror, the suc­cubus begins to climb into the hos­pi­tal bed where he is lay­ing. As she does so, she reminds him in the voice of a preda­tor enjoy­ing the pow­er­less­ness of its prey that all he has to do is not want her and he will be able to live. All he has to do, in other words, is not have an erec­tion and she will not be able to fuck him to death.

To me, the point was obvi­ous. Bas­ing the Jew­ish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own read­ing of the Hebrew Bible was ask­ing the over­whelm­ingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­vert­ible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was some­how the will of the monothe­is­tic god. To assert that line of rea­son­ing as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­gested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believ­ing Jew, it was a cor­ner­stone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the col­leagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My hus­band,” she said, “would say you were an anti­se­mitic Jew.”

I stared at my col­leagues across a sud­den gap of estrange­ment I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I under­stood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an anti­se­mitic def­i­n­i­tion of Jew­ish­ness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teach­ers always used it to explain the anti­semitism of non-Jews who were crit­i­cal of Israel: To sug­gest that there might be a per­spec­tive from which Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many dif­fer­ent ways, over and over again, was to sug­gest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a peo­ple ought not even to be.

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I have writ­ten before about the book of per­sonal essays deal­ing with man­hood, mas­culin­ity and male sex­u­al­ity that I tried, unsuc­cess­fully (even with the help of an agent) to get pub­lished in the 1980s. Evolv­ing Man­hood was the work­ing title, though my agent pre­ferred and used my sec­ond choice–What Kind of a Man Are You Any­way?–because she thought it might sell bet­ter. When my agent finally dropped me because it was clear that no one was going to buy the man­u­script – which I may one day make the sub­ject of a whole other essay – I put the mate­r­ial aside and went back to work­ing on my poetry, and then I was com­mis­sioned to do the trans­la­tions of Per­sian lit­er­a­ture that I am still work­ing on, with the result that Evolv­ing Man­hood receded into the back­ground of my writ­ing life, and this makes me sad, not only because I worked damned hard on those essays, but also because I think some of the writ­ing has held up pretty well, even though it is, some of it, 20 years old, and because I think the ques­tions I was try­ing to explore are still pro­foundly rel­e­vant. More, I am sad­dened by the fact that the odds are over­whelm­ingly against my return­ing to this mate­r­ial in any sub­stan­tial way. Time, both in the sense of what my com­mit­ments are now, per­sonal and pro­fes­sional, and of my dis­tance from what I wrote back then, is work­ing against me.

So, since I don’t want what I think is worth keep­ing to dis­ap­pear into my fil­ing cab­i­net for­ever, I have decided that I will start a series called Frag­ments from Evolv­ing Man­hood made up of just what the title says, though the posts may be edited if I think it is nec­es­sary. I decided to make this the first one because it is Passover, a hol­i­day that, broadly speak­ing, is (or should be) about social jus­tice but that is also about what it means to be Jew­ish in a world where being Jew­ish can get you killed.

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World

As a Jew­ish man, like it or not, my iden­tity within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity as both a man and a Jew is defined by the fact of my cir­cum­ci­sion. Even though I am Jew­ish first because my mother is Jew­ish, at least accord­ing to the tra­di­tion accepted by most of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the world, I entered God’s covenant with Abra­ham, became fully a mem­ber of my own peo­ple, only after my fore­skin was removed, and for the first fif­teen or so years of my life, I roman­ti­cized the moment of that cut­ting. Imag­in­ing a blood­less cer­e­mony sat­u­rated with self-conscious majesty, I saw my boy’s body wrapped warmly and securely in a blan­ket, held peace­fully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max, smil­ing drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I’d been given to suck on to dull the (as it was explained to me by my grand­mother) very small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cut­ting was done, my mem­ber­ship in the covenant, not to men­tion into the com­mu­nity of Jew­ish man­hood, was cel­e­brated with food and drink. I pic­tured myself being passed lov­ingly among the guests, cud­dled and cod­dled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be.

When I turned six­teen, how­ever, I wit­nessed an actual brit milah, or cir­cum­ci­sion cer­e­mony. The house was full of peo­ple. I could see in the room beyond the room where I min­gled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cut­ting. Peo­ple were chat­ting, jok­ing, shak­ing hands with old friends, and mak­ing new acquain­tances, but when the mohel—the man who per­forms Jew­ish cir­cum­ci­sions — arrived, the atmos­phere became imme­di­ately seri­ous. As he shook hands with the boy’s father and with those other men who would par­tic­i­pate in the cer­e­mony, the women left and the room grew quiet. The boy, bun­dled tightly in a blan­ket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been cho­sen for the honor of hold­ing the child while the pre­lim­i­nary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man upon whom had been bestowed the priv­i­lege of hold­ing the infant in his lap when the cut­ting was actu­ally done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that lit­tle boy howled. A full-throated protest against exis­tence and the world, his scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain.

The men smiled and laughed as if they did not hear the child’s voice. Above his wail­ing, they shouted mazel tov! — congratulations! — and shook hands with each other and with those who had par­tic­i­pated in the cer­e­mony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy’s scream­ing did not stop. I was taken to meet the child’s father. He smiled at me proudly, grip­ping my hand and, as his still shriek­ing son was car­ried from the room, steered me into the din­ing area where peo­ple were begin­ning to eat. This was not the peace­ful cer­e­mony I had imag­ined. This was hypocrisy, the sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion and cel­e­bra­tion through denial of the pain of the boy who’d just been cut, and also of the pain I had felt, and of the pain of every man in that house. I felt mocked, betrayed, and tremen­dously angry, but I had no words to express what I was feel­ing. Even now, hav­ing rejected cir­cum­ci­sion in my own fam­ily, it’s hard to dis­miss the rit­ual merely as the patri­ar­chal mark­ing that, at its roots, it is. Because what­ever else that rit­ual might be, the his­tory of the oppres­sion of the Jews has made it also a sign of defi­ance, a bod­ily affir­ma­tion of Jew­ish (male) iden­tity and Jew­ish (male) worth in the face of enor­mous persecution.

I put the word male in paren­the­ses in the last sen­tence because, while cir­cum­ci­sion marks only men and is there­fore prob­lem­atic from the point of view of gen­der equal­ity within the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jew­ish moth­ers to con­tinue to allow their sons to be cir­cum­cised, or for Jew­ish women to con­tinue to value cir­cum­ci­sion as a reli­gious rit­ual, a phys­i­cal mark and as a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between the Jews and their god at times when forc­ing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would iden­tify appro­pri­ate tar­gets for their hatred and vio­lence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holo­caust, for exam­ple, Yaffa Eli­ach tells a story that, whether it is com­pletely true or only an embell­ished ver­sion of the truth, illus­trates pre­cisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a mas­sacre of Jew­ish chil­dren, the tale goes, a Jew­ish woman demanded of a Nazi sol­dier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bun­dle of rags on the ground near the saw­dust. She unwrapped the bun­dle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pil­low was a new­born babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and cir­cum­cised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the bless­ing of the cir­cum­ci­sion. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Uni­verse, who has sanc­ti­fied us by thy com­mand­ments and hast com­manded us to per­form the circumcision.”

She straight­ened her back, looked up to the heav­ens, and said, “God of the Uni­verse, you have given me a healthy child. I am return­ing to you a whole­some, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the Ger­man, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pil­low. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive dur­ing the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me pre­cisely for being “whole­some and kosher.” Yet while the vio­lence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in com­par­i­son to the vio­lence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonethe­less omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pil­low, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my cir­cum­ci­sion is my con­nec­tion to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who cir­cum­cised and were cir­cum­cised at a time when a cut penis could have got­ten them killed. Yet that blood is also about the mak­ing of men, and as long as the mak­ing of men requires such blood­shed, man­hood will con­tinue to require the spilling of blood as its proof.

Tony Judt, a well-known his­to­rian, has writ­ten an engag­ing essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYR­Blog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sex­ual behav­ior on (and, by impli­ca­tion, off) cam­pus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with every­thing he says – and he would prob­a­bly say it’s because I am a prod­uct of my (and his) times – but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snip­pets, which, taken out of con­text, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU’s His­tory Depart­ment], a second-year grad­u­ate stu­dent came by. A for­mer pro­fes­sional bal­le­rina inter­ested in East­ern Europe, she had been encour­aged to work with me. I was not teach­ing that semes­ter, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door dis­cus­sion of Hun­gar­ian eco­nomic reforms, I sug­gested a course of inde­pen­dent study — begin­ning the fol­low­ing evening at a local restau­rant. A few ses­sions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the pre­mière of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame drama­ti­za­tion of sex­ual harass­ment on a col­lege campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behav­ior? What delu­sional uni­verse was mine, to sup­pose that I alone could pass untouched by the puni­tive prud­ery of the hour — that the bell of sex­ual cor­rect­ness would not toll for me? I knew my Fou­cault as well as any­one and was famil­iar with Fire­stone, Mil­lett, Brown­miller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irre­sistible eyes and that my inten­tions were…unclear would avail me noth­ing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anx­i­eties of con­tem­po­rary sex­ual rela­tions offer occa­sional comic relief. When I was Human­i­ties dean at NYU, a promis­ing young pro­fes­sor was accused of improper advances by a grad­u­ate stu­dent in his depart­ment. He had appar­ently fol­lowed her into a sup­ply closet and declared his feel­ings. Con­fronted, the pro­fes­sor con­fessed all, beg­ging me not to tell his wife. My sym­pa­thies were divided: the young man had behaved fool­ishly, but there was no ques­tion of intim­i­da­tion nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was cen­sured. Indeed, his career was ruined — the depart­ment later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Mean­while, his “vic­tim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the Uni­ver­sity Lawyer. Would I serve as a wit­ness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the uni­ver­sity for fail­ing to take seri­ously “her” needs as a trans­ves­tite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Man­hat­tan Supreme Court to explain the com­plex­i­ties of aca­d­e­mic harass­ment to a bemused jury of plumbers and house­wives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prej­u­diced against my client because of her trans­gen­dered iden­tity pref­er­ence?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman — isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The uni­ver­sity won the case.

***

Here as in so many other are­nas, we have taken the ’60s alto­gether too seri­ously. Sex­u­al­ity (or gen­der) is just as dis­tort­ing when we fix­ate upon it as when we deny it. Sub­sti­tut­ing gen­der (or “race” or “eth­nic­ity” or “me”) for social class or income cat­e­gory could only have occurred to peo­ple for whom pol­i­tics was a recre­ational avo­ca­tion, a pro­jec­tion of self onto the world at large.

Why should every­thing be about “me”? Are my fix­a­tions of sig­nif­i­cance to the Repub­lic? Do my par­tic­u­lar needs by def­i­n­i­tion speak to broader con­cerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the per­sonal is polit­i­cal”? If every­thing is “polit­i­cal,” then noth­ing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lec­ture on con­tem­po­rary lit­er­a­ture. “What about the woman ques­tion?” some­one asked. Stein’s reply should be embla­zoned on every col­lege notice board from Boston to Berke­ley: “Not every­thing can be about everything.”

Full dis­clo­sure: One rea­son this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the ques­tion he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harass­ment police, who surely were on my tail as I sur­rep­ti­tiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and com­pellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.

One of eight major works that can reli­ably be ascribed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­times, Divine Book) has, accord­ing to Ency­clo­pe­dia Iran­ica, been trans­lated once into Eng­lish, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal nar­ra­tives, each one deal­ing with a dif­fer­ent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asceti­cism, which Sufis under­stand to mean a dis­ci­plined stance of detach­ment and indif­fer­ence towards one’s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ates Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pared, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fer­ence of the Birds), his best known work in Eng­lish. The two poems are sim­i­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enlight­en­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­tique of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true under­stand­ing. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about learn­ing to mas­ter oneself.

The fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (faeries); the sec­ond wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son cov­ets the ring Solomon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how shal­low and mate­ri­al­is­tic the son is for want­ing what he wants and, sec­ond, how the son should under­stand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlight­en­ment. None of the sons, how­ever, accept their father’s lessons at face value, argu­ing that he has mis­un­der­stood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, there­fore, are mis­guided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and right­eous woman who, after her hus­band leaves on pil­grim­age to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at noth­ing to have her — the son accuses his father of want­ing to elim­i­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explain­ing that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­trates how sex, prop­erly com­pre­hended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apoth­e­o­sis,
sex gives birth to a love with­out lim­its;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spir­i­tual love emerges; and when
spir­i­tual love can grow no fur­ther, your soul
will van­ish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the nar­ra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their come­up­pance than one about the spir­i­tual nature of sex­u­al­ity, the son’s mis­read­ing of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a read­ing, how­ever, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desires with­out a strug­gle. They are, in other words, nei­ther evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and will­ing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has pun­ished them with a paral­y­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mean­ing — they can be healed only by con­fess­ing to the woman every­thing they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «