Eroticism, Sexuality and Islamic Culture: Notes on the unthoughtthinkable

Abstract

Islamic epistemology has, like any other tradition, constructed its own sex/gender discourses, devices and technologies. This work represents a first approach to eroticism and sexuality in Islamic culture from an anthropological and interdisciplinary perspective. For authors like Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Islam is a symbolic economy of pleasure; for others, like Mohammed Arkoun or Fatima Mernissi, this is a debatable claim. This article accordingly proposes an exploratory introductory revision of thinkable and unthinkable aspects of Muslim sexual ethics and the Muslim erotic imaginary. Through well-known literary works and other secondary sources, it examines normative and other discourses that reveal traces of alternative – sometimes dissident – ways of thinking about and experiencing sexuality and eroticism in different spatio-temporal contexts. It concludes with some reflections on the current obstacles and debates surrounding the configuration of gender relations and the construction or affirmation of contemporary socio-sexual and religious identities.