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[Homosexuality] is a destructive pretension against the plan of God.

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There is no denying the extraordinary wealth of material documenting same-sex love and desire between women in the medieval Islamicate world. The medieval Arabic tradition of eroticism is particularly noteworthy because it is far more progressive than is commonly imagined, given the current reappropriation of Islam by fundamentalist political regimes. It brings to light a much richer understanding of sexualities than is imagined to be possible in lands with a majority Muslim population. The texts that have survived are especially valuable because they paint medieval Arab and Muslim women with unexpected agency over their social and sexual lives and have thus the potential to become powerful models of resistance for contemporary Arab and Muslim women. Recovering the evidence of lesbianism and of lesbian-like attachments in the medieval Arabic tradition speaks thus to the emancipatory possibilities of the history of sexuality. Moreover, the medieval Arabic practices of homosexuality and lesbianism also challenge contemporary Western and Eastern (Arabic) assumptions about gender and, in particular, the binary constructions of masculinity and femininity. It is thus significant for the cross-cultural history of sexuality and holds great promise in redressing what Bennett has termed “the heterosexist bias of history.

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I wanted the professor to stand up and tell us what I’m sure he knew: That the word “homosexual” didn’t appear in the Bible until the year 1958… that the Book of Leviticus is speaking of temple prostitution… that the words in the New Testament which have been translated to read “homosexual” mostly stem from a Greek word with no English equivalent… that Bible printers intentionally sell weak translations to the public because they fear backlash from conservative fundamentalists… I wanted my professor to just tell us that our generation is doing it again… I wanted him to tell the class that Christianity is doing to gays what it has done to women and various “otherly” groups for centuries… That we haven’t learned much from past Bible-centered mistakes like the Crusades, or the trial of Galileo, or slavery…