islam – The History of BDSM

Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, by Robert C Davis

Orientalism, Slavery, Uncategorized No Responses »

Dec 052012

Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. Palgrave MacMillan, 2003 Amazon

What you might call “Mediterranean slavery”, of Christian Europeans captured through piracy or raids and enslaved in North Africa or the Near East, coexisted with Atlantic slavery, roughly paralleling the dates. While the numbers about Atlantic slavery are pretty solid, the numbers on Mediterranean slavery are far less so, and Davis is forced to piece together rough estimates from a variety of different sources.

Trying to pin down numbers of Barbary slavery is beyond the scope of this blog, and I don’t want to get into any kind of “oppression Olympics” about different slave economies. (Discussions of white slavery tend to bring out people with an axe to grind. One discussion of Barbary coast slavery on Fetlife included a post with a link to a white pride site. This included lengthy incoherent rants about the place of white people in history. One passage included an array of pictures of tribal people with facial tattoos or body modifications, followed by another array of white people with facial tattoos or piercings. The caption said that these white people took no pride in their heritage and were trying to imitate other races.)

The evolution of a new fetish: veiling erotica at Tales of the Veils

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Oct 192012

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, it would be fascinating to witness the birth of a particular fetish, and I was fortunate enough to find one that has born recently.

Tales of the Veils, a site devoted to veiling fetish, announced its seventh anniversary last month.

Wives and slaves: Beyond Slavery, Bernadette J. Brooten, ed.

Religion, Slavery, Uncategorized No Responses »

Oct 022012

Brooten, Bernadette J., ed. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Although Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders have always recognized the difference between slavery and marriage between men and women, they have sometimes applied concepts from slavery to marriage.

Pg. 8, “Introduction” by Bernadette J. Brooten

Interview with Muslim slave Alia

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Aug 242012

LN pointed me at this fascinating interview, courtesy of the Leatherati Youtube channel, with slave Alia who is a devout Muslim woman who is also the slave of Master Skip Chasey. She comes from a cultural background quite different from most people in the greater BDSM world, and there are interesting parallels between her life as a devout Mulsim woman and her life as a slave.

Sex pits of Tehran: “Passionate Uprisings”, by Pardis Mahdavi

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Nov 232010

Mahdavi, Pardis. Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution Standford University Press, 2009 Google books

This fascinating book is based on a series of Mahdavi’s visits from America to Iran between 2000 and 2007, which gave her an interesting longitudinal perspective of social change in Iran.

Mahdavi’s book explores a particular “thin slice” of Iranian society: young, urban, secular-minded, middle-class (or wishing to appear so), over-educated, under-employed, mobile (via cars and mobile phones), and exposed to the developed world via Internet and satellite TV. The men go clean-shaven and hair-gelled. The women wear tight-fighting mantos (coats) and headscarves that show their streaked hair, plus multiple layers of makeup. It’s a particular style of dress that has developed by dancing on the edge of Iran’s sartorial laws, under which a bare ankle, a three-quarter sleeve or a few centimetres of exposed hair could result in harassment, arrest or being whipped. Its also a statement against identifying with the ascetic look of morality police. They drive to house parties (no night clubs or other public venues), drink imported liquor, dance (completely forbidden) to Iranian-American hip-hop, and screw around, all the while looking over their shoulders.

Classic sheikh

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Nov 202010

Sociological Images has a post on Race and Gender themes of “Sheikh Romances”, a popular subgenre of mass market romance.

Sheikh romances are generally set in fictional countries in the Middle East, with a male character described as a “sheikh,” “sultan,” or something along the lines of “king of the desert.” He is, of course, invariably rich and powerful. The female protagonist, on the other hand, is a White woman, usually from the U.S.

…

For more examples, go to Amazon and search “sheikh romance.” Seriously, there are tons of them — Traded to the Sheikh, Stolen by the Sheikh, The Desert Prince’s Mistress, The Sheikh’s Virgin, Love-Slave to the Sheikh, The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride (notice the recurring economic transaction theme?), and my new personal favorite book title ever, Hired: The Sheikh’s Secretary Mistress…

This subgenre is, of course, a descendant of Edith Maude Hull’s 1919 novel The Sheik (filmed in 1921 with Rudolph Valentino in the lead), and also the harem pornographic novel typified by The Lustful Turk (1828).

I’d be interested to know if there’s been an upsurge in this particular subgenre over the past ten years, with the West’s increased involvement in the Middle East and the Islamic world since 9/11.

The comments are pretty interesting, suggesting that romance novels follow the same basic pattern of resolving gender conflicts while varying the setting.

The new Orientalism is the same old Orientalism: Rana Kabbani’s Imperial Fictions

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Feb 262010

Kabbani, Rana. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient Saqi, 2008 Link

Indeed, Orientalist images of the future will not be stylised depictions of milky-white odalisques, held captive by brown, turbaned villains. Rather, they will be grainy photographs of Iraqi men, stripped of clothes and dignity, at the mercy of army dogs and bestial United States soldiers – reduced to being the playthings of the ‘few bad apples’ of the damned, rotting cartload. Anonymous snapshots of torture-porn at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad must stand as the twenty-first century’s depraved answer to ‘Le Bain Turc’ of Ingres.

Pg.15

The Erotic Margin, by Irvin C. Schick

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Jul 082009

Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse 1999. Link

Schick makes one point very clear at the outset: don’t simplify Orientalism into “West=male/Orient=female”. There are too many alternate ways of characterizing the two civilizations. Some saw the West as a vulnerable female sexually threatened by the masculine Orient. Female Western visitors to Turkey or Persia sometimes saw the lives of Oriental women as having more agency and autonomy. Writers from all over the political spectrum have used the (fantastic, largely imaginary) harem as an allegory of society. TE Lawrence say Oriental men as masculine role models. These portrayals were driven by everything from anxieties and fears to confusion to “outright self-loathing.”

Flagellation in the Muslim holy day of Ashura

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Jan 092009

From Slate: Self-flagellation is a major part of the Muslim holiday, the Day of Ashura.

A subset of male Shiites injure themselves on Ashura to represent their grief over the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the prophet, at the hands of the Ummayad army in 680. These people engage in violent rituals such as pounding their chests with their fists, lacerating their scalps with a knife or machete, or self-flagellation with a zanjeer—five blades connected to a wooden handle by steel chain. But none of these forms of expression is sanctioned by mainstream religious authorities; most prominent Shiite clerics object to all forms of self-mutilation, since it has no basis in early religious history and appears barbaric to outsiders.

The parallels between self-inflicted ordeals in Islam and in Christianity are striking, as the practice persists in spite of what leaders say and the lack of any scriptural support. Prominent Muslim clerics have issues fatwas condemning the practices, that they reflect badly on the faith and harm the body.

Reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” one-handed

Featured Articles, Orientalism 2 Responses »

Jan 172007

One thing I’d always hoped to witness, since I started to study sexuality seriously, was the birth of a new fetish. To me, that would like seeing a new species evolve right before your eyes.

I have yet to be the first to discover a fetish, but I’m always on the lookout for new ones. The closest I’ve come is coming across the web site, Tales of the Veils. This site is devoted to stories and images of veiled women. This is not about the cute little diaphanous veils worn by women in harem fantasies. This is about heavy, full-body covering garments worn by Muslim women living in strict purdah. I believe, though this is the kind of thing which can’t be proven, that veil fetishism has grown in the past few years. The site quotes from a Wikipedia article which seems to have disappeared:

A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism