The following paper was read at the Society for Shaykhi, Babi, and Baha'i Studies meeting in

Providence, Rhode Island, in November 1996.

The first draft of the paper was about twice as long as the time available for presentation would allow, so
I narrowed the focus to aspects of three issues. Again, given the time constraints, the paper deals with
these in fairly condensed form. I used a large number of sources but presented the conclusions rather
than the process of reaching them in the paper. So, there is an unincluded set of footnotes of about twice
the length of the paper that would be needed to document what is there.

Given the subjects discussed, some people may find parts of the paper uncomfortable.

-J. A-I.

The Provisions for Sexuality in the Kitab-i-Aqdas

in the Context of
Late Nineteenth Century Eastern and Western Sexual Ideologies

R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram
If we bracket the issues of the facticity of God or revelation and simply accept them as working
hypotheses, then what would we posit to be happening socio-culturally at the inception of a new
religion arising from a revelation? Well, just as the saying has it that one person and God constitute a
majority, so God and a revelator must constitute a unique socio- cultural entity that is distinct from the
society to which the revelation is addressed. Thus, the impact of the revelatory process in that society
can be reasonably conceptualized as an acculturative interaction between it and revelation.
Acculturative processes are always bidirectional. When two socio-cultural systems come into contact
they effect one another and both must accommodate to the interactive process. In the case of a
revelatory event, then, if we view it as contact between two cultures, the culture of God and the
revelator and the culture of the receiving society, we would expect that not only would the revelation
have an effect on the receiving society but that the society would have an effect on the revelation. No
matter how transcendent our idea of God may be, nor how initiatory of a new social order we may
expect revelation to be, the comprehensibility and utility of that revelation would be dependent on its
adapting already existing socio-cultural materials and using them as a springboard from which to
launch change. The understanding of a claimed revelation, then, whether we accept the claim or not,
requires us to understand how it uses the ideological materials provided by its host society.
In the case of what is claimed as the Baha'i revelation we have a complex set of socio-cultural
interactions. Although it is customary to refer to the Baha'i Faith as being in origin a "Persian" religion
and to link its corpus of revealed text to "Persian" culture, this is an over simplified view. Apart from
the fact that nineteenth century Iran was both polyglot and multicultural, it should be borne in mind that
the actual corpus of text that presents the revelation was primarily produced outside Iran. Also, the
majority of the life of the revelator, Baha'u'llah, was spent outside Iran, and (despite cultural contact
with that country through correspondence, individuals who traveled to and fro, and the small Persian
community resident around him) was spent not in an Iranian cultural context but in the polyglot,
multicultural context of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. (These circumstances were even more
pronounced in the case of his son and successor, 'Abdu'l-Baha, who left Iran at the age of nine, was
polylingual, and moved easily in a broad range of both Eastern and Western cultural contexts.)
Thus, when we wish to look at the acculturation processes involved with the Baha'i revelation we need
to look further than Qajar Iran and this would seem especially so when the revelation is linguistically
distanced from the generality of members of that culture by being delivered in Arabic.
In this paper, I wish to try to explicate the parameters of the provisions in the Kitab-i-Aqdas regarding
sexuality. In doing this I am taking the author at his word when he says "Think not that We have
revealed unto you a mere code of laws" (5); and assuming that rather than constituting a Baha'i shariah
the intent of the Aqdas is to use the available socio-cultural constructs, embedded as they are in the
denotative and connotative aspects of the language used, in a way that provides a key to a new order of
socio- cultural arrangements that is not bounded by or limited to the culture(s) that first received the
text.
This discussion will not focus so much on behavior as on the cultural ideals by which behavior is
constrained and judged. The Aqdas and its associated texts were written in the 1870s and 1880s in a
socio-cultural context that cannot simply be labelled "islamic." Although Baha'u'llah was confined to
the Akka/Haifa area, this was centrally placed in a broader geographic region noted for a series of
cultural ideals related to sexuality that are generally encompassed under the rubric "Mediterranean
culture." These cultural ideals exist in a dialectical relationship with each of the religions of the region.
That is, in specific circumstances the determining factors in preferred and actual behavior may be based
in a religious system, the set of general cultural ideals, or some combination of the two.
It is quite common to consider the ideology of the "Orient" in static, ahistorical terms. It is also
common to anachronistically project the ideology of the modern West onto its own past and use that as
a standard with which to compare the East. I will as much as possible focus on ideas that can be
confirmed to have been current in the 1870s and 1880s. As the Eastern Mediterranean of the late
nineteenth century was the site of considerable contact between Eastern and Western cultures,
particularly in the realm of religious based ideology, it is necessary to consider the Aqdas in relation to
both in order to determine whether it is actually presenting innovative conceptions or borrowing
Western ideas that are "new" to the East.
Before the writing of the Aqdas, the only family and personal law systems available to those taking on
a Baha'i identity in the Middle East were religious. These Baha'is petitioned Baha'u'llah to provide
them with such a legal system of their own. The Aqdas gave them a current basis on which to function
without having to have recourse to other religious law. It is important, however, to look at the specific
situations addressed by the Aqdas and then to consider the general principles underlying their
treatment. It is not necessarily the case that the specifics of the original situation are intended to be
applied universally rather than such general principles.
It is important in reading revealed texts to distinguish between the normative and the contextual. One
must not simply conflate instructions on how to deal with what is with statements about what should
be.
The choice of Arabic for the revelation of the Aqdas emphasizes the universality of its intent rather than
the specificity of the situation of the Persian Baha'is who had been requesting such guidance, and also
places it in a context of textual tradition that assumed, indeed required, scholarly mediation for use.
The Q'uran was revealed in the vernacular of those to whom it was immediately addressed, although it
also claimed a wider applicability. The Aqdas is not in the vernacular of those whose need it
immediately addresses, but in an established cross-cultural religious lingua franca associated with a
tradition of scholarship. This distances the Aqdas from its immediate audience while allowing it to
function as an answer to their immediate needs.
The Aqdas (and its supplement, Questions and Answers) treats three aspects of sexuality which I will
discuss in turn: Sexual fluids; illicit sexual conduct; and marriage.
The aqdas abolished tout court the concept of ritual pollution (75) and yet it also makes specific
reference to the principal biological markers of male and female sexual identity: semen and menstrual
blood. Semen is quite specifically stated to not be ritually polluting and contact with it is encompassed
within the bounds of regular hygiene. (74) The case of menstrual blood is dealt with in an even more
pointed fashion. (13)
Remembering that the concept of ritual pollution has been completely abolished and therefore
menstruation cannot involve ritual disability, it is interesting that menstruation does provide women
with a choice in respect of the regular salat and fasting: They may substitute the recital of a tasbih
formula after ablutions for the prayer or each day of missed fasting. Thus menstruation is differentiated
from illness: The ill are not permitted to perform salat or fast (Q&A 93); menstruating women have a
choice to observe the requirements or substitute another obligation. Thus it is clearly reinforced that
menstruation does not impose a ritual impurity. In Islam, the menstruating woman not only may not
perform salat or fast but is forbidden to utter one verse of revealed text or even perform ablutions. The
Aqdas obliges the menstruating woman to either perform salat and fast or take the option of repeating a
revealed verse not once but 95 times.
However, quite contrary to the blanket abolition of the concept of ritual pollution in the Aqdas, let
alone to the specific requirement for menstruating women to perform ablutions and ritual acts, it is
evident that the Eastern Baha'i community continued to believe in menstrual pollution and that this was
taught to early Western Baha'is and given as the reason why women were excluded from membership
on a House of Justice.
The receptivity of Westerners to the logic of menstrual pollution as a reason for anything is not
surprising. Late nineteenth century Western ideology -- whether religious or medical -- regarded sexual
fluids as highly problematic. In the 1870s, there was a serious discussion in the correspondence
columns of The Lancet about whether a ham cured by a menstruating woman would spoil. It was even
suggested in the medical literature that intercourse with a menstruating woman could cause gonorrhea.
Semen was also considered problematic in the West. Its "loss" through means other than vaginal
intercourse, and specifically vaginal intercourse aimed at procreation, was considered hazardous to
both moral and physical health and was often termed "pollution".
To remove sexual fluids from the realm of the sacred or moral and to treat them as a matter of hygiene
was innovative in both Eastern and Western ideological contexts.
Illicit sexuality is discussed in the Aqdas, and Questions and Answers, in relation to two concepts: zina
and liwat. In islamic legal usage the latter term may be considered a more behaviorly specific subset of
the former. More usually, zina refers to sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who are not
married to each other (depending on the legal authority followed, it may or may not be of consequence
for determining punishment if at least one is married to someone else).
In Mediterranean culture, there is a strong preference for male sexuality to be expressed through
intromissive ejaculation and thus an assumption that men desire, indeed need, penetration of a sexual
object. In the case of zina, there is a further explicit assumption of assymetrical roles: There is an
individual who perpetrates an illicit act, and an individual who makes possible the perpretration of an
illicit act by someone else. That is why, as rape is considered a form of zina, it is readily possible to
conceptualize the victim of rape as a guilty party. As Mediterranean culture assumes that women are
both in a constant state of sexual readiness, and that almost any object of possible penetration can
arouse a man to action by its mere presence, women are virtually by definition the possibility of the
perpretration of an illicit act.
In islamic law, zina is punishable by either death or 100 lashes depending on the marital status of the
individuals and the particular authorities followed. In the Aqdas, the only prescribed punishment for
zina is a fine with a provision in Questions and Answers that there may be further legislative
consideration of the issue.
Zina is somewhat misleadingly translated in the English edition of the Aqdas as 'adultery'; liwat is even
more misleadingly treated as if it referred to homosexuality. Liwat is a behaviorally specific term. The
perpetrator, who must be male, of liwat performs anal or inter-crural sex on another who may be either
male or female. Just as in zina generally, there is thus a role differentiation between the perpetrator and
the one who makes perpetration possible. In terms of sanction, liwat is usually treated under islamic
law as a form of zina. Inter-crural sex may be separately identified as tafhid, but is usually treated
legally as a variant of liwat.
The Mediterranean emphasis on intromissive ejaculation is associated with an instrumental attitude
toward sexual activity. A man does sex to another person for his own pleasure, to prove his masculinity,
and occasionally to beget children.
The esentially agressive nature of liwat can be seen in the tradition of dabib, or 'crawling,' where sexual
access to another individual is gained through getting him drunk or drugging him and then perpetrating
liwat while he is unconscious. Crawling may also be done by simply using cover of darkness to creep
up on a sleeper and overpower him. Given the gender segregated living arrangements of Middle
Eastern societies, dabib is prepetrated on other males.
That liwat is conceptualised first and foremost as exemplifying dominance can be seen in the
mainstream Saudi legal opinion that a non-muslim who perpetrates liwat on a muslim must always be
put to death; and in the 1982 Iranian legal code which provides that both individuals involved in tafhid
should be punished with 100 lashes, but that if a non-muslim prepetrates tafhid on a muslim then the
non-muslim will be condemned to death.
Liwat does not encompass fellatio or mutual masturbation. The latter is common in the middle east but
generally considered simply one of those things young men do that does not need to be acknowledged
or discussed. Nor can liwat include sexual activity between women as the perpetrator of liwat must
have a penis. Some authorities consider sahq, sexual activity between women, as a form of zina, but
this is problematic as standard definitions of zina require penetration.
In Questions and Answers, the matter of punishment for liwat is left to future consideration by a House
of Justice. In the Aqdas, there is an implicit reference in the sentence: "We shrink, for very shame, from
treating of the subject of boys." It was simply taken-for-granted in Middle Eastern tradition that all men
find boys sexually attractive and that men who are attracted to boys are not a 'different' type of men but,
on the contrary, 'normal' men who desire intromissive ejaculation for which a boy taken in liwat is as fit
as a woman taken in liwat or vaginal intercourse.
Although egalitarian relationships between pairs of adult men that involved mutual sexual activity have
not been unknown in Middle Eastern societies, there was no specific term to cover such liasons before
recent decades. They fell outside regular socio-cultural categories, and they were not subsumable under
liwat.
If we note the widespread use of dancing boys dressed as girls for prostitution in the Middle East; and
the practice of female prostitutes dressing as boys to increase their appeal to customers who would
engage in either anal or vaginal intercourse with them; and remember that the customers of both the
dancing boys and the travesti girls are married men: It is evident that expecting recent western terms
like 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' to be readily applicable in this socio-cultural milieu in any
meaningful way is futile.
We may also note for purposes of comparison that in late nineteenth century New York working class
Italians, and the decidedly un-Mediterranean Irish, held that male sexuality centered on intromissive
ejaculation and that the object used to achieve that was not particularly relevant for defining masculine
identity. Intromissive ejaculation demonstrated the superiority of the penetrator and that was what
mattered.
In both the West and the East, the principal aim of sexual norms was to bolster adult male dominance,
both in situations of illicit sex and in marriage. Islamic marriage was based on a concept of husband as
owner (malik) and wife as owned (mamluka) and even the most advanced muslim thinkers of the late
nineteenth century assumed an innate disability to being female, even when they were directly citing
Western sources. The West did generally assume the existence of an essential difference between men
and women that provided a limit to women's development. If women tried to emulate men beyond a
certain point, this would result in them being literally desexed (unable to bear children) and becoming a
neither man nor woman monstrosity.
Whether an Aristotelian model of woman as literally an ill-conceived man, a Hippocratic-Galenic
model of woman as an inferior blending of male and female semen, or the most up-to-date Western
medical model was used: In the late nineteenth century women were generally considered to be
constitutionally both inferior in essence and impaired in peformance compared to men. Thus neither in
the East nor the West was it ideologically possible to conceptualise marriage as bringing together
equals.
The Aqdas, and its associated texts, do not accept any of these models but present men and women as
having the same potentials and make social progress dependent on these being fully expressed.
Baha'u'llah renders gender attribution irrelevant as a parameter of individual or social action. The
Aqdas provides for more equitable treatment of women within the current gendered systems and lays
the basis for ungendered norms.
Following from the principle of mutatis mutandis it is not simply a case of what is expressed as from a
man to a woman incorporates from woman to man, and vice versa, but that gendered language is in fact
rendered degendered. This is made explicit in other writings where it is stated that women are as men
in this dispensation. Gendered textual usage should be read as gender inclusive. Thus, although licit sex
is limited to marriage, it could be regarded as a valid reading of the text to consider the sexes of the
partners unspecified and irrelevant.
Although the Aqdas mentions having children as a function of marriage, if the validity of a marriage
depended on its potential to bring forth children, then the infertile and women past menopause could
not marry.
While it is certainly a function of the social institution of marriage to provide for the reproduction (both
physically and culturally) of a society, it is not necessary for all marital pairings to physically produce
offspring to accomplish this. There can be societal advantages to limiting physical reproduction and
increasing the enculturative resources available for each child through a higher adult to child ratio.
And, indeed, Baha'u'llah enjoins a general societal responsibility for the adequate education of children
in addition to the particular parental responsibility.
A view of marriage that sees it at the institutional level as accomplishing reproduction but that
emphasizes the development of the individuals within any particular pairing does not necessarily
privilege any set of gender arrangements and has a broader cross-cultural applicability than one which
defines particular marriages in narrow gender terms.
Both zina and liwat are sexual relations that take place outside of a context in which the long term
rights of both participants are regarded. Unlawful sex is literally unprotected sex -- it takes place in
relationships that are not associated with social supports and long-term obligations. Lawful sex, as
defined in the Aqdas, takes place in marriages, which are relationships embedded in a network of
familial support and providing for the mutual development of the partners.
Limiting legitimate sexual expression to marital relationships and defining marital relationships in
terms of mutual growth invalidates exploitation in sexual interaction. To be valid, the expression of
interpersonal sexuality must contribute to mutual growth irrespective of whether or not it also leads to
children.
The Aqdas can indeed be taken as simply a "code of laws". The Eastern Baha'is largely did so and the
Western Baha'is have generally followed them. Taken that way it represents one more example of a
religious code rooted in a particular culture that its followers seek to impose on all cultures.
Alternatively, the Aqdas can be read as a liminal discourse that provides the tools to, among other
things, re-envision the ideology of gender and sexuality in each and every culture.
R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram