WOMEN WITH MUSTACHES

AND MEN WITHOUT BEARDS

A closer look at Afsaneh Najmabadis exploration of Qajar

INTRODUCTION
How do we employ gender analytically so as to write history differently,
to write history from which women are not absent and gender is not a
missing category; one in which issues of gender and women are not
afterthoughts and appendixes?
The case of Qajar

BEAUTY
Rustam al-Hukama describes the young men toward whom Tahmasb
Mirza (Safavi) was sexually inclined in these terms: young beardless
men,rose-faced,silver-bodied,cypress-statured, narcissus-eyed,
coquettish, with sugar lips, wine bearers with tulip cheeks, moon-faced,
Venus-shaped, with crescent eyebrows, magic eyes, black-scented hair,
and crystalline chin folds, and full of games and coquettishness
These literary and visual representations of male and female beauty were
not confined to objects of desire. Descriptions and illustrations of real
living persons of power,like kings,princes,and Sufis,were similar until the
late Nasiri period.

UNDERSTANDING BINARIES
Rustam Al- Hukama on Nadir Shah: sweet-featured, tall and wellproportioned, and sweet-scented.said to have large green eyes,wide
connected eyebrows,red cheeks,narrow waists, slanted nose, thin lips,
and long fingers
These descriptions are not limited to rulers- also used to describe slavesyoung male and female beauties
Ghilman and Hur- Quaranic concepts of eternally young male and female
beauties
Homoerotic love is not seen as a departure from a hegemonic
heterosexual love

THE AMRAD
beautiful youg beardless men
Permissible is a trace of a mustache
Absolutely no beard
Amrads were wine servers and objects of desire
The first sign of a mustache is also called mihrgiah. Literally,love- plant,
growth of affection,
provided a perfect metaphor for the intersection of garden and body.
Mihrgiah is a plant with medicinal uses but can be fatal in excess, much
like the love of the young, cruel adolescent that provided a central theme
for poets verses of suffering.

THE BEARD
In Persian texts of ethics and manners, woman and mukhannas (an adult
man who made himself look like a young beardless man,displaying a wish
to remain the object of desire of adult men) are often linked
In the 11th century text titled Qabusnamah, a seventy-year-old ruler fears
falling in love with a recently purchased ghulam. He orders his vazir
(minister/adviser) to free the slave but to keep him indoors until his beard
is fully grown
Shaving a mans beard was considered a form of moral punishment

DESIRING THE BEARDLESS AND THE

BEARDLESS AS OBJECTS OF DESIRE
Desiring the beardless= desiring the adolescent
By the seventeenth century, however, some texts on ethics define an adults man
desire for the adolescent as an illness as well. Whereas the thir- teenth-century Akhlaq-i
Nasiri called such desire excessive attraction,the seventeenth-century Akhlaqialamaratransformed it into an illness (maraz)

Fashioning oneself as beardless= wanting to be desired by men

linked to ubnah,considered in medical discourse as an illness...considered abject
characters, subject to religio-cultural approbation and sometimes severe punishment
In some Muslim societies, such figures were accommodated through gender crossdressing and integration in the margins of the world of women, and/or into professions
such as music, dancing, and reciting poetryanother reason that sometimes they have
been considered effeminate.

DESIRE AS SPIRITUALITY
What makes the adolescent male so desirable?
Rowson says from the midninth centurysome Muslim mystics claimed
to see in the beauty of adolescent boys a testimony to the beauty and
goodness of God, and initiated the practice of gazing at such a boy as a
form of spiritual exercise. The boy was thus known in Sufi parlance as a
witness (shahid)
Thus, in the greater spiritual discourse of Sufism, poets werent positing
themselves as female admirers, but in fact prioritizing male desirability

DESIRE AND RELIGION

Know that whenever a woman or boy approaches, Satan prompts, Look,
and see what they are like.
Sodomy is not an explicit sin in the Quran
What does this have to do with sexuality?

TYPOLOGIES
2 types of public spaces moderm spaces of the theatre etc where male homoeroticism was illicit
homosocial spaces like the sports club, etc.

Focault says that homosexual as a type did not exist before it was
invented in 19th century Europe
Najmabadi hesitates to impose his framework onto something that was
chronologically well before his findings, but she skillfully points out the
problems with his argument

NAJMABADIS CRITIQUE OF
FOCAULT
1) by locating same-sex identification in modern Euro-America,one
renders homosexuality external to other places,an alien concept for
formation of desire in these other cultures,an argument fully used by
homophobic cultural nativists who are happy to (al)locate homosexuality
in the West.
2) it introduces a radical alterity with the past, producing the premodern
as a radically different time
It might be that fixing the usage of words like homosexuality, gay and
lesbian happened post nineteenth century, but the desire types may have
existed well before that

 In the case of Iran and much of the Islamic world, sexual practices were
generally not considered fixed into lifelong patterns of sexual orientation
Men engaged in a variety of sexual acts, although procreative sex was
seen as a societal obligation, while other acts were linked to the
pleasures of power, gender,age,class,and rank
if men performed their procreative obligations, the larger community was
generally not much concerned with the rest of their sex life

Even rulers and noblemen were commonly identified as lovers of

women or lovers of Amrads creating a distinction in their sexual
preferences

BOYS CANT BE FORCED

Reports concerning sexual practices between older men and adolescent
males indicate that the adult men were punished if the youth had been
forced.The punishment was usually bastinado and sometimes cutting off
an ear and parading the culprit in the marketa lighter punishment than
for the rape of a virgin girl, for which the perpetrator might be castrated

PUBLIC REACTIONS TO
HOMEROTICISM
In 1872, Vali Khan Gurjistani wrote Risalah-i fujuriyah (An Essay on
Debauchery),in which he recorded his sexual adventures with twentyeight Qajar princesses,sixty-five male and fifteen female prostitutes,and
twenty- seven male and eighteen female servants. He was generous with
descriptive detail,and his book appears to have been widely read
By the end of the nineteenth century,however,many of the accounts of
male homosexual liaisons became embedded in the political critique of
ones opponents,or within the moral critique of a country in decay.

DOES IT STILL HAPPEN?

we have extensive records of male same-sex activities, including what
seems to have been a well-known practice of adult men keeping younger
men as their companions, sometimes referred to as adam'dari (keeping a
male)
The older man was sometimes referred to as the cover(milhaf) of the
younger one.
The 1921 city census of Tehran suggests that the practice of adam'dari
continued into the twentieth century and perhaps continues to the
present.