Islam and homosexuality do not mix. We base this on the awful stories of Isis killing LGBT citizens, the cases of men fleeing their predominantly Muslim nations to the east, fearing for their lives that could be ended by embarrassed family members, and we watch as the influx of new Muslim citizens in Europe sway the common vote against LGBT / equal rights.
History is a bitch. Especially when it repeats itself (Trump / Goldwater). But it's also a bitch when you learn that something you hate was actually an accepted part of your culture before, debunking your self proclaimed history.
I want to thank the History Boys from Dailyxtra.com for educating me about the Mamluks. Here's an excerpt from their most recent story, "Beautiful, Buff Mamluk Warriors – The homosexual military ruling class slaves of Syria and Egypt."
In an Islamic world given strongly to homosexual predilections, Mamluks were revered as much for their aesthetic and erotic potential as their military prowess. Historian Everett K Rowson outlines the multitude of ways the foreign slaves were coveted for their beauty. Rowson shares a couple of poems from the (male) Arabic upper class:
Look there and you will see one with an innocent gaze,
Ruby-lipped, hazing with an eye adorned by kohl,
A son of the Turks, whose languid glances are arrows
Shot from his eyelashes at every noble man.
Another poem commands Arab maidens to get away, “For I have hitched my fate to a Turkish city boy,” and that he favours this boy’s “narrow glance” over the Arabic women’s “wide eyes.”
Aside from plenty of evidence of Islamic societies taste for Caucasian boy-flesh, historian James Neill writes that Mamluks often fancied one another, since “scholars take it as a given that pederastic relationships between the slave-cadets and adult Mamluk warriors was common practice.” The Mamluk world was a homosocial one; even after they married, Mamluk soldiers continued to live with the others. Illustrating the sins the boys got up to in the barracks, one story explains how a eunuch officer overseeing young Mamluks was informed that when one of his charges was performing the major ablution, cleansing himself of his sins, the eunuch would send someone to inspect the boy’s underwear, looking for nocturnal emission — the lack of which meant there’d be hell to pay.
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Al-Subki also described how the Mamluks’ valets were just as guilty, working out “new fashions in clothing designed to stimulate lust; they outdo women in adorning themselves and seduce people with their loveliness.”
But since these slave soldiers were from another nation, was this enough to blame the corrupt homosexual occurrences on a corrupt external source? And did the Mamluks mix with the Islamic population? For more of the History Boys and this story, go over to the Dailyxtra.com and finish this educational and somewhat erotic read.
Thanks for the good read boys. I'll be following you for more history lessons.
h/t: to the History Boys, Michael Lyons , the main author of this piece, and Jeremy Vance Willard. History Boys appears on Daily Xtra on the first and third Tuesday of every month. You can also follow them on Facebook.