Reading Desire: Islamic Ethics and Homoerotics in Early Modern India

Medieval Islamic texts in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu are rich in erotic and homoerotic themes. Scholars have interpreted the prevalence of these themes as evidence that early modern Muslim societies exhibited “cultural tolerance” and even “cultural legitimation” of same-sex erotic practices, including sodomy.[i] Neglected in this scholarship is a crucial historical question: how did specific communities of early modern Muslims engage with classical texts featuring erotic themes? My paper addresses this question by analyzing early modern Indian commentaries on the Gulistan (Rose-Garden), one of the most widely circulated literary texts in the medieval Islamic world.

Composed in the thirteenth century by Saʿdi of Shiraz, the Gulistan became a foundational educational text, studied across the Islamic East and beyond, from the Balkans to Beijing. The book is written in rhyming Persian prose, interwoven with Arabic and Persian poetry. Through short, witty anecdotes, the Gulistan imparts ethical lessons. Often considered part of the “mirror for princes” genre, the Gulistan was commissioned by kings across Asia in lavishly illustrated manuscripts, now extensively studied by historians of Islamic art. But how did ordinary people in small towns and villages engage with the text?

My first contention is that Indian engagements with the Gulistan reveal a far wider reach of Perso-Islamic literacy than previously recognized. Between 1657 and 1857, at least thirty commentaries on the Gulistan were produced across India. Commentators often framed their work as correcting common errors in textual transmission and interpretation—evidence, in itself, of the Gulistan’s wide circulation. But my paper also presents important extra-textual evidence. Manuscripts of both the commentaries and the Gulistan itself were copied across diverse locales by scribes in small towns, often working for local teachers. By analyzing the production, circulation, and materiality of these manuscripts along with readers’ annotations, this paper reveals the deep entrenchment of Persianate culture in early modern South Asia.

My second contention concerns the Gulistan’s role in shaping attitudes toward religious ethics and homoeroticism in early modern South Asia. Mana Kia and Franklin Lewis have highlighted the Gulistan’s role as a textbook of adab—a concept denoting both eloquent language and refined social behavior. Building on their work, I ask: what specific ethical and linguistic lessons were derived from its erotic and homoerotic stories? I argue that early modern Muslim commentators approached the Gulistan through a paradigm of the “ethics of erotics.” Experiencing and discussing different forms of desire, including same-sex desire, was part of this framework, but acting upon them was not. In this gap between desire, language, and action lay the possibility of ethical cultivation.

By examining Gulistan commentaries as scholarly attempts to shape normative Islamic attitudes toward same-sex desires and practices in early modern India—and by considering their reception as indirect but significant evidence of their influence—this paper addresses a longstanding challenge in histories of sexuality in medieval Islamic societies: the gap between literary texts and social norms. I question the scholarly tendency to infer medieval social realities solely from contemporary readings of classical texts. Instead, I foreground the social and intellectual contexts in which literary texts circulated in early modern Muslim societies. While texts belonging to the genres of jurisprudence or belles-lettres—which are the focus of Khaled El-Rouayheb’s Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800—were addressed to specialized audiences, the Gulistan’s reception offers insight into the everyday cultivation of religious ethics and its entanglement with erotics.

--

[i] Noel Malcolm, ‘Forbidden Love in Istanbul: Patterns of Male–Male Sexual Relations in the Early-Modern Mediterranean World’, Past & Present no. 257 (Nov 2022): 55–88, 81 (legitimation). Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Duke, 2005), 301 (tolerance). Similar arguments have been made for early modern Iran and India. See Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity(Berkeley, 2005); Scott Kugle, When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry (Chapel Hill, 2016). As per the literary scholar C.M. Naim, pederastic same-sex relationships were ‘fairly common, and accepted as a matter of fact, in eighteenth-century Delhi. They were not frowned upon or publicly condemned.’ C.M. Naim, ‘Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry,’ in Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C.M. Naim (Delhi, 2004), 19–41, 28.