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What Ottoman erotica teaches us

about sexual pluralism
İrvin Cemil Schick was born in Istanbul,
Turkey. He holds a PhD from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and has worked and taught in the US and
Turkey. His current research interests are
cultural and intellectual history, the arts
of the book, gender and sexuality, and
human-animal relations, all in the context
of Islam and particularly Turkey. He is the
author, editor or co-editor of eleven books
as well as numerous articles.

1,100 words

Edited by Sam Haselby

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An erotic scene, ascribed from the
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Bukhari. leading
1743 CE. Photo courtesy Sothebys

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H istory might be the best antidote to the unthinking, and pernicious,
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naturalisation of cisgender identity and heterosexuality. When
confronted with the fact that, for most of history, people simply did not
conceive of human sexuality in fixed and dimorphic terms, it becomes much
easier to imagine a liberating, pluralist future.

In ancient Greece, the semi-institutionalised relationships between erastês

and erômenos (ie, adult men and young boys) offer an example of sexual
mores that differ from those of the present. When scholars say that
‘homosexuality’ is a modern construct, they do not, of course, mean that
people in the past did not engage in same-sex romantic or erotic relations.
ey mean, rather, that same-sex relations were viewed in pre-modern times
as merely a predilection or practice, whereas during the 19th century they
came to be considered an innate nature, an identity.

e German term Homosexualität was coined only around 1868 by the

Austro-Hungarian author and journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny (formerly
Karl-Maria Benkert). is fact raises the question of how people might have
conceptualised what we now think of as homosexuality before the word
existed. is is why, as Robert Beachy has suggested, we should speak
instead of the ‘invention’ of homosexuality in late 19th-century Europe. In
this context, the title of intellectual historian Khaled el-Rouayheb’s book on
same-sex relations avant la lettre is significant – Before Homosexuality in the
Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (2005).

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In the Ottoman Empire, prior to the advent of Western-influenced

heteronormativity in the late-19th century, sexual mores presented a very
different picture. A closer look at the Ottoman experience of sexuality is
instructive. With the Ottomanists Helga Anetshofer and İpek Hüner-Cora at
the University of Chicago, I have been combing through five centuries of
Ottoman literary works searching for sexual terminology. e results of this
research – currently more than 600 words – teach us, if not necessarily how
people actually lived, then at the very least how they thought about sex
throughout the Ottoman-speaking world, principally the territory of modern
Turkey and its immediate neighbours.

Although there is no doubt that the vocabulary extracted thus far is not
exhaustive, some clear patterns have emerged. In particular, it indicates that
one can speak of three genders and two sexualities. First, rather than a
male/female dichotomy, sources clearly view men, women and boys as three
distinct genders. Indeed, boys are not deemed ‘feminine’, nor are they mere
substitutes for women; while they do share certain characteristics with them,
such as the absence of facial hair, boys are clearly considered a separate
gender. Furthermore, since they grow up to be men, gender is fluid and, in a
sense, every adult man is ‘transgender’, having once been a boy.

Second, sources suggest that there are two distinct sexualities. But rather
than a hetero/homosexual dichotomy, the two sexualities are defined by
penetrating and being penetrated. For a man who penetrates, whom he
penetrates was considered to be of little consequence and primarily a matter
of personal taste. It is indeed significant that the words used for an ‘active’
man’s sexual orientation were quite devoid of value judgment: for example,
matlab (demands, wishes, desires), meşreb (temperament, character,
disposition), mezheb (manner, mode of conduct, sect), tarîk (path, way,
method, manner), and tercîh (choice, preference). Being objects of
penetration, boys and women were considered not quite as noble as men. As
sexual partners, however, neither women nor boys were held to be more
estimable than the other. In short, instead of a well-defined sexual identity,
literature suggests that, in Ottoman society, a man’s choice of sexual partner
was viewed purely as a matter of taste, not unlike a person today might
prefer wine over beer or vice versa.

E l-Rouayheb has shown that the assessment of many Western

Orientalists concerning the ostensible prominence and acceptance of
homosexuality in the Middle East and North Africa has been anachronistic,
suffering from the presentist presumption of the universal and
transhistorical validity of a unitary notion of homosexuality. He has argued
that pre- and early modern Arabic sources suggest the existence of a more
nuanced, role- and age-differentiated view of same-sex relations. As Frédéric
Lagrange, a scholar of Arabic literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, has put it in
Islamicate Sexualities (2008): ‘the contemporary Western reader who has
never perhaps questioned his holistic conception of homosexuality finds it
“sliced up” into a multitude of role specialisations, since medieval authors
usually see no “community of desire” between, for instance, the active and
the passive partners of homosexual intercourse.’

e sexual terminology used in Ottoman-era literature suggests that

precisely the same held in that case as well: ‘homosexuality’ as an all-
embracing term covering partners male as well as female, young as well as
old, active as well as passive simply did not exist. Instead, the Ottoman
language is extremely rich in highly specialised words that describe specific
participants fulfilling specific roles.

By the late-19th century, relations between men and boys had fallen into
disfavour. In a much-quoted document submitted to Abdülhamid II, sultan
from 1876 to 1909, the historian and statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha wrote:

Woman-lovers have increased in number, while boy-beloveds have

decreased. It is as if the People of Lot have been swallowed by the
earth. e love and affinity that were, in Istanbul, notoriously and
customarily directed towards young men have now been
redirected towards girls, in accordance with the state of nature.

e decline in pederasty was, of course, salutary. However, the change also

heralded the advent of Western-influenced heteronormativity in Ottoman
society, and of the repression it inevitably entails.

Homophobia is a powerful force in Turkey today. On 26 May 1996, a week

before the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements
(Habitat II) held in Istanbul, a Right-wing mob staged a pogrom against
cross-dressers and transgender people living on Ülker Street near Taksim
Square, resulting in deaths and injuries as well as their eviction from their
homes. Last year, the authorities prevented Istanbul’s annual Gay Pride
parade from taking place after a band of troglodytes threatened to disrupt it.

One can only hope that the Turkish government’s much-flaunted veneration
of its Ottoman ancestry will, one day, also extend to a more enlightened
approach to sexuality.

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