Reading Desire: Islamic Ethics and Homoerotics in Early Modern India

While scholars have recognized the ubiquity of erotic and homoerotic themes in classical Islamic literatures, they have neglected an important 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). I argue that the production, circulation, and materiality of these manuscript commentaries reveals the influence of the Gulistan in the everyday cultivation of Islamic ethics, beyond the royal courts that are the loci of existing studies. Commentators approached the Gulistan through a paradigm I call 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.