There is a recurrent presence of homoerotic poems in Hispano-Arabic poetry. Erotic literature, often of the highest quality, flourished in Islamic culture at a time when homosexuality, introduced as a cultural refinement in Umayyad culture, played an important role.
Among the Andalusi kings the practice of homosexuality with young men was quite common; among them, the Abbadid emir Al-Mu'tamid of Seville and Yusuf III of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada wrote homoerotic poetry.Eisenberg. 1996, p.56-57 The preference for Christian male and female slaves over women or ephebes of their own culture contributed to the hostility of the Christian kingdoms.Eisenberg. 1996, p.64 Also among the Jewish community of al-Andalus homosexuality was even normal among the aristocracy.Eisenberg. 1996, p.59-60
The contradiction between the condemnatory religious legality and the permissive popular reality was overcome by resorting to a neoplatonic sublimation, the "udri love", of an ambiguous chastity.Ibn Hazm. 1967, p. 69-70 The object of desire, generally a servant, slave or captive, inverted the social role in poetry, becoming the owner of the lover, in the same way as happened with courtly love in medieval Christian Europe.
The homoeroticism present in Andalusian poetry establishes a type of relationship similar to that described in ancient Greece: the adult poet assumes an active (top) role against an ephebe who assumes the passive (bottom) one, which came to produce a literary cliché, that of the appearance of the "bozo",Bozo: (From lat. buccĕus, from the mouth). m. Hair that points to the young men on the upper lip before the beard is born. which allows, given the descriptive ambiguity of the poems, both in images and grammatical uses, to identify the sex of the lover described. Much of the erotic-amorous poetry of the period is devoted to the cupbearer or wine pourer, combining the bacchic () and homoerotic () genres.
It began to flourish in the first half of the 9th century, during the reign of Abderraman II, emir of Córdoba. The fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the eleventh century and the subsequent rule of the Almoravids and the division into the Taifa kingdoms, decentralized culture throughout al-Andalus, producing an era of splendor in poetry. The Almohad invasion brought the emergence of new literary courts in the 12th and 13th centuries. The greater female autonomy in this North African ethnic group led to the appearance of a greater number of female poets, some of whom also wrote poems that sang of feminine beauty.
Context
The civilization developed in the Umayyad Caliphate from Córdoba rivaled and even surpassed that of Christian Europe. After the death of Charlemagne in 814 and the subsequent decline of his Empire, the only city that rivaled Córdoba in Europe was Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire and located at the other end of the continent. The caliphs of Córdoba surpassed their Byzantine contemporaries in culture. Literature, especially poetry, was enthusiastically cultivated, as was the case in all Arab countries; during the period, Arabic came to surpass Latin as a language in works on medicine, astronomy and mathematics; Christians on the peninsula learned Arabic to perfect an expressive and elegant style, and scholars from all over Christian Europe traveled to Toledo or Córdoba for their studies. It is likely that they maintained a superior standard of public administration: many of the Christian and Jewish subjects preferred the rule of the infidels, whose legislation was no more intolerant than Christian laws.
After the Arab conquest in 711 there was a unique flowering in the Iberian peninsula of homoerotic poetry, which repeated a phenomenon of the Islamic world in general, with parallels in the erotic lyric poetry of Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan, India, Turkey and North African countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Anthologies of medieval Islamic poetry from the great Arab capitals show, over almost a millennium, the same current of passionate homoeroticism found in the poems of Córdoba, Seville or Granada.
Homosexuality, consented to on the basis of a general Koranic tolerance towards sins of the flesh, was introduced as a cultural refinement among the Umayyads, despite the protests of some juridical schools. Thus, Ibn Hazm of Córdoba was tolerant of homoeroticism,Ibn Hazm, 1967. p. 290 showing his reprobation only when it was mixed with some kind of public immorality, an attitude apparently shared by his contemporaries.
Both philosophically and literarily, Greek classicism was known and respected by the Andalusian authors, whose work of translation and compilation was essential in the survival of many classical texts. Many of the themes of Andalusian poetry, such as the praise of ephebic beauty, are directly derived from Greek homoerotic poetry, which they knew through translations from the time of the great library of the Córdoba of the Umayyad caliph Hisham II.Reina. 2007, p. 73
Islamic law and homosexuality
The severity and intolerance that characterized traditional Judaism and Christianity in sexual matters reappeared in the laws of the third Abrahamic religion. Regarding homosexuality, some important schools, such as that of the theologian Malik of Medina or the literalist Ibn Hanbal, contemplated the death penalty, generally by stoning. Other schools of law saw it more fitting to opt for flogging, generally one hundred lashes.
However, other aspects of Islamic culture show some contradiction with the severity, inherited from the Old Testament, which dominated the legality of Islam in this respect. The popular attitude was much less hostile to homoeroticism and European visitors were surprised at the relaxed tolerance of homoeroticism among Arabs, who seemed to find nothing unnatural in relations between men and boys. In medieval Arab treatises on love, this so-called "emotional intoxication" is provoked not only by the love of women, but also by the love of boys and other men. While in the rest of Europe it was punishable by burning at the stake, in al-Andalus homosexuality was common and intellectually prestigious; the work of authors such as Ibn Sahl of Seville, explicit in this sense, was carried to all corners of the Islamic world as an example of love poetry.Reina. 2007 p. 72-73
Ibn Hazm's only mention of lesbianism in The Ring of the Dove is, in application of Islam, damning. But Arabic references to lesbianism are not so apparently condemnatory: at least a dozen romances between women are mentioned in The Book of Hind, herself an archetypal lesbian; a 9th century Treatise on lesbianism (Kitab al-Sahhakat) has been lost, and later works on Arab eroticism contained chapters on this subject.Crompton. 2006, p.166Crompton. 1997, p.150 Some women in al-Andalus had access to education and were able to write freely. In their poems, love for another woman is treated and present in the same way as that of male poets for other men.
The Australian historian Robert Aldrich points out that in part this tolerance towards homoeroticism is due to the fact that Islam does not recognize such a marked separation between the flesh and the spirit as Christianity does and has an appreciation for sexual pleasure.Aldrich. 2008, p.274 Other reasons would be aesthetic: in the Koran it is a man, Yūsuf (the prophet Joseph), who in surah XII is presented as the maximum representative of beauty. In this Koranic text, the Platonic concept that beauty is what generates love, in a terrible, rapturous way, is also shown. García Gómez points out in his introduction to The Ring of the Dove that Muslims call "al-iftitān bi-l-suwar" the "disorder or commotion that souls suffer when contemplating beauty concretized in harmonious forms," illustrating it with the story of the Egyptian noblewomen who cut their fingers while peeling oranges, snatched by the beauty of Yūsuf.Ibn Hazm. 1967, p. 67
Among the Andalusian kings the practice of homosexuality with young men was quite common; Abderraman III, Alhaken II (who had offspring for the first time at the age of 46, with a Christian Basque slave girl who cross-dressed, in the fashion of Baghdad, as if she were an ephebus), Abd Allah of the Taifa of Granada, the Nasrid Muhammed VI; among them, the abbot Al-Mu'tamid of the Taifa of Seville and Yusuf III of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada wrote homoerotic poetry; Abderraman III, Alhaken II, Hisham II and Al-Mu'tamid openly maintained male harems.Reina. 2007 p. 81 It is known that the Hispano-Arabs preferred Christian slaves as sexual partners to women or ephebes of their own culture, which provoked the enmity and continuous hostilities of the Christian kingdoms. The martyrdom of the Christian child Pelagius of Córdoba for resisting the wishes of Abderraman III, first Umayyad caliph of Córdoba, for which he was later sanctified, is well known.
Also among the Jewish community of al-Andalus homosexuality was even normal among the aristocracy. To quote from the collective volume Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages (1979), in Spain there was "a courtly and aristocratic culture characterized by a romantic individualism (in which there was) an intense exploration of all forms of liberatory sexuality: heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality". Homosexual pleasure was not only frequent, but was considered more refined among the well-to-do and educated; apparently, there is data indicating that Sevillian male prostitutes in the early 12th century were paid more than their female counterparts, and had a higher class clientele. Prostitutes were relegated to the urban plebs and especially to the peasants who visited the cities.
Homoeroticism in Andalusian Literature To overcome the contradiction between religious legality and popular reality, Arabic literature resorted to a curious hadith attributed to Muhammad himself: "He who loves and remains chaste and hides his secret and dies, dies a martyr's death". The poet, apprehender of beauty, was impelled to sing of masculine beauty. The sublimation of courtly love through Neoplatonism, of singing bodily beauty transcended into ideal Beauty, allowed the poet to express his homoerotic feelings without danger of moral censure.
Homosexual love (مذكرات mudhakkarat) as a literary theme occurred in the realm of poetry throughout the Arab world; the Persian jurist and litterateur Muhammad ibn Dawud (868 - 909) wrote, at the age of 16, the Book of the Flower, an anthology of the stereotypes of the love lyric that devotes ample space to homoerotic verses; Emilio García Gómez points out that Ibn Dawud's anguish, due to the homoerotic passion he felt all his life towards one of his schoolmates (to whom he dedicated the book), was a spring that led him to realize a platonism that García Gómez identifies as a "collective yearning" in Arab culture to redirect a "noble spiritual flow" that found no way out. Ibn Dawud clothed it with the Arab myth of "udri love", whose name comes from the tribe of the Banu Udra, which would literally mean "Sons of Virginity": a refined idealism created by Eastern rhetoricians, an "ambiguous chastity", according to García Gómez, which was "a morbid perpetuation of desire".
Both the punitive and sentimental traditions figure in Andalusian literature, and notably in the writings of its best-known love theorist, Abu Muhammad 'Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Sa'id ibn Hazm (994-1064), better known as Ibn Hazm, who says of love in The Ring of the Dove: