Khaled El-Rouayheb

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800

Professor or Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History Khaled El-Rouayheb

Attitudes toward male homosexuality in the premodern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as inconsistent. On the one hand, Arabic love poetry, biographical works, and bawdy satires suggest that homosexuality was a visible and tolerated part of Arab-Islamic elite culture before the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Islam supposedly considers homosexuality an abomination and prescribes severe punishment for it. In Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Khaled El-Rouayheb shows that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, belles lettres, biographical literature, medicine, physiognomy, dream interpretation, and Islamic legal, mystical, and homiletic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality. Instead, paramount importance was given to distinctions that are not captured by that term--between active and passive sexual roles, between passionate infatuation and lust, and between penetrative and nonpenetrative intercourse. The first book-length treatment on the perceptions and evaluations of male homoeroticism in premodern Arab-Islamic culture, this book will become a welcome and frequently referred to addition to the bookshelves of readers interested in the history of sexuality, Islamic history, Arabic literature, gay and lesbian studies, and the history of ideas.

This book investigates the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period.

Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century

Recent years have seen a dramatic change in scholarly views of the later career of Arabic and Islamic philosophy. For much of the twentieth century, researchers tended to dismiss the value of Arabic writings on philosophy and logic after the twelfth century, often on the basis of the prejudice that handbooks, commentaries and glosses are of necessity pedantic and unoriginal. This assumption has now been abandoned. As a consequence, a vast amount of later Arabic writings on philosophy and logic, hitherto neglected, are now being studied and edited. The present work is an attempt at giving an overview of the development of Arabic logic from 1200 to 1800, identifying major themes, figures and works in this period, while taking into account regional differences within the Islamic world. It offers a corrective to Nicholas Rescher's seminal but now outdated The Development of Arabic Logic, published in 1964.

The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800)

Sabine Schmidtke

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that, unlike other reference works, the Oxford Handbook has striven to give roughly equal weight to every century, from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook is also unique in that its 30 chapters are work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered, in particular taking advantage of recent new editions and translations that have renewed interest and debate around the Islamic philosophical canon. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy gives both the advanced student and active scholar in Islamic philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, a strong sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like and a deep view of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at stake. Most importantly, it provides an up-to-date portrait of contemporary scholarship on Islamic philosophy.

Khaled El-Rouayheb

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