Notes on Cross-Dressing in Early Egyptian Cinema

In the Spring of 1998, Middle East Report published an article by Garay Menicucci titled “Unlocking the Arab Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in Egyptian Film.” To my knowledge this was the first article to talk about homosexuality in Egyptian film and to nuance it along the same lines argued by Vito Russo in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet (which was made into an eponymous, must-see documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman in 1995). Menicucci’s was a wonderful oeuvre into the gender and sexual queer of Egyptian cinema. He was the first to unearth Bint al-Basha al-Mudir (1938) as lesbian subtext. He too was the first to bring to critical attention other cross-dressing films like Lil Rijal Faqat (1964), Bint Ismaha Mahmoud (1975), Sukkar Hanim (1960) and al-Anissa Hanafi (1953). Menicucci is no stranger to the Arab world, having lived and worked in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. He is able to give us nuanced readings of these films, and is careful not to imbue them with a Western gay and lesbian epistemology, but rather focuses on the use of gender and sexual transgression as products of the thought of progressive, social elites, seeking to unseat traditional marriage and sexuality.

However, the notion of the closet holds steadfast in his analysis. For those of us here who are not specialists, the concept of the Celluloid Closet operates on a standard of subtext. Subtext in this case is when for several reasons — be they cultural or social, or (in the event of censorship) legal or bureaucratic — gender and sexual minority love has to find a way to express itself in heterosexually permissible ways. With the advent of the Hays censorship code in 1930, Hollywood began to rewrite many a screenplay; censors would write out the homosexual or transgender characters all together or at least give them very unhappy, unenviable endings. Therefore, those who wanted to transgress against this implicit and explicit homophobia had to find ways to write homosexuality, to signify it, in code. Among the easiest means available to the screen writer is the plot convention of mistaken identities through cross-dressing. That William Shakespeare used this more than four-hundred years ago is worth mentioning; it is not a new invention. And if one cannot prove that the director or the screenwriter had any intention of exploring same-sex love or desire by exploiting the convention of cross-dressing, then at least we can think of that audience member who either wittingly or unwittingly was being given the closest thing of a representation of their desires as they were ever going to get on screen. I do genuinely believe that some cross-dressing films were imbued with far too much misogyny and resentment for homoeroticism for them to have been intended as transgressions. Among these are Sukkar Hanim or Mamlakat al-Nisa2, for example. In contrast, there is the film al-Anissa Hanafi, in which a biological man (played by Ismael Yassin), undergoes a gender re-assignment surgery and subsequently becomes a woman who is accepted by her neighbors and who marries the local butcher, even becoming pregnant with his offspring. Much of the “comedic” value is at the expense of the “ugly” woman that Ismael Yassin makes, but there is a lot in this film to recommend it as sympathetic.

We might like to take a step back and say “whoa, hold on a minute. You’re telling me this film is pro transgenderism? Transgender identities had not even emerged historically, just yet. Surely, it must be a reflection of a post-war Egyptian sense of emasculation: this is 1953 after all, we’re still not even a whole year into the Nasser revolution.” Let’s just stick with that there was a crisis in Arab male masculinity and this film is about that. We’re more comfortable here, somehow, it makes our scholars feel like they’ve dug in and produced valuable knowledge that proves once again just how very Western and unprecedented all this talk of sexual and/or gender minority identity and rights is. That’s fine with me, I won’t argue with you, but I do think that this film both acknowledges and celebrates (an at least unspecified) gender and sexual diversity, while making a strong case for women’s emancipation.

In one telling scene, Hanafi (whose post-op name is Fifi) is talking to her step sister with whom she is constantly fighting. Moments earlier, Fifi caught her step sister on the rooftop with the local veterinarian who is in love with her and she with him. Fifi wants to prevent her sister from developing a bad reputation and is making demands to keep her from misbehaving in public again, by emphasizing restriction of movement. The following dialogue then ensues:

“Listen, when you were a man….”

“Shut up! I have never been a man, I have always been a mademoiselle.”

“At any rate, it is not shameful for a man to turn into a woman or for a woman to turn into a man. But what is shameful is for the man to be selfish and prevent the girl from getting an education and make her live in a prison like the one we are living in. “

“Why, what are you missing? You don’t eat, you don’t dress up, you’re being starved?”

“Life, my dear, is not just eating, drinking and dressing up.”

“What else is it then?”

“Everyone in this world has to have a purpose and the girl’s purpose is to get an education, so she can prepare herself for the day she is going to be a mother responsible for raising her children.”

Finally, what I want to leave us with today is one cross-dressing film from this fertile period in Egyptian cinematic history that has escaped critical attention. This film was titled Lahalibo and it was released in 1949 and was the film, along with al-3eish w al-Mil7 (1949), that began Na3ima 3akef’s acting career. Na3ima 3akef was an incredibly talented Egyptian acrobat, dancer and actress. Legend has it that she began her performing career at the tender age of four, beginning in the traveling circus founded by her grandfather and now being managed by her father. The story goes that he eventually lost the business to his gambling debts. Another version of events indicates that it was when her father remarried that she was forced to move to Cairo with the rest of her family and to make a living as a street performer before joining an Acrobatic troupe. Eventually, she would become a sensation at Cairo’s prestigious Kit Kat Klub and through her connections there would meet Egyptian director Hussein Fawzi who would give her her filmic Debut in 1949. Fawzi and 3akef signed an exclusive contract and she was the star in at least fifteen of his films. Of the earliest of these was Lahalibo (1949) which may have been written specifically for her.

Lahalibo is a cross-dressing comedy about a young circus and dancing performer, whose parents have died but whose wealthy grandfather wants nothing to do with her because of his hatred for girls. In order to obtain access to him, she disguises herself as his grandson. Thus begins her double-life. One as a performer and the other as the Basha’s handsome grandson. 3akef taught herself how to tap dance and in this scene we see her give us a performance, the visual aesthetics of which are somewhat reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930). Mistaken for a man by everyone except her co-performers and the object of her affection, Amir, this scene is a delight to watch. 3akef died of cancer at the very tender age of 37.

*Originally published on November 3 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/notes-on-cross-dressing-in-early-egyptian-cinema/ now discontinued.

The Founding Fathers of Egyptian Cinema Were Mothers

It is a widely known fact that the Egyptian cinema industry is unparalleled in its reach in the Arab world. From the North African reaches to the Arabian Peninsula, no Arab household with access to television has foregone the influence of the Egyptian silver screen of the twentieth century. With our numerous dialects, which are often unintelligible as vernacular vary widely across the expanses covered by the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa, the Arab world has implicitly learned the Egyptian dialect through the ubiquity of great (and sometimes not so great) motion pictures. Thus, Egypt is the star of the Arab world; it has been our political beacon since the 1950s, setting an example of expelling colonial and imperial interests, even if that example was very short-lived and is currently in tatters.
Egypt of the twentieth century also gave us a kind of identitarian cohesion through its popular cultural output. Whether through Oum Kulthum’s highly anticipated and widely televised monthly concerts, or Abd al-Halim’s blockbuster protagonisms or al-Sheikh Imam’s political dissent, Egypt has been telling the story of humanity in Arabic in a way whose reach is incomparable in the twenty-two other Arab nation-states. But while this may be a very unsurprising fact, what is little known is the extent of women’s involvement in founding the Egyptian cinema industry. Despite patriarchal discouragements that seek to inhibit women from pursuing film production, the Egyptian film studio was built by women about whom we do not hear enough.

At a time when there were five production companies making films in Egypt, one of these, Lotus Productions, belonged to the Lebanese-born Assia Dagher, who immigrated to Egypt in the 1920s. Dagher’s career spanned a lifetime of filmic production, and estimates of her output vary. According to Nadia Wassef, in the extremely important documentary ‘Ashiqat al-Cinema al-Masriya Part II, Dagher produced fifty films, whereas Rebecca Hillauer in her equally monumental work, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, claims that Dagher produced over a hundred films.

Alongside her niece Marie Queeny and Ahmad Galal, whom Queeny would later marry, Dagher made films that would define filmmaking for the next generation. Dagher was a shrewd business woman and was even able to survive the Nasser administration’s nationalization of film studios, and pressed on to produce the epic film Al-Nassir Salah Al-Din in 1963, hiring Youssef Chahine as director. Salah Addin cost 120, 000 Egyptian dinars to produce, and as researchers tell us, back then it was the most costly film in Arabic filmmaking history. It is said that the film’s budget was six-times the budget of the average Egyptian film from the period. Dagher preceded this historical epic with her depiction of the legendary Egyptian queen Shajar al-Durr in an eponymous film in 1935. This was the Arab world’s first first historical epic depicted on the silver screen.

But even before Dagher became the giant film producer who would usher in a generation of filmmakers, there was Aziza Amir, who starred in and produced Egypt’s first feature-length film, Leila, in 1927. She founded a production company, Isis, that same year and produced Bint al-Nil (1931) and Bayya’at al-Tuffah (1939). In her doctoral dissertation, “The Plight of Women in Egyptian Cinema…” Marisa Farugia credits Amir with being the first Arab filmmaker to address the Palestinian question in her films Fatat Min Falastine (1948) and Nadya (1949).

Farugia further argues that Bahija Hafez should also be considered as one of the founding pioneers of the Egyptian cinema industry. Hafez founded the Fanar Film Company in 1932, and produced her first feature-length film, al-Dahaya, in 1933. Farugia further illuminates that al-Dahaya was the first Arab film to be subtitled in a foreign language (French). Hafez also wrote, produced and starred in Layla Bint Al-Sahra in 1937, and according to Farugia the film was banned in Egypt and internationally (despite winning the Venice Film Festival in 1938), for its depiction of the 6^th century Persian King, Anusharwan, as a villain.

There can be no doubt, when gleaning over the incredible filmography of these founding mothers that their central preoccupation was to make films about women, films that sought to re-tell and re-envision what it means to be a woman in the Arab world. They lived courageous lives, and pioneered extraordinary accomplishments and yet our school books fail to celebrate them. They gave us what we take for granted, they gave us the feature-length Egyptian film! Dagher, starring alongside her niece, Marie Queeny, also gave us the very first same-sex subtext in Arabic filmic history.

The film in which this occurs tells the story of Hikmat (Dagher), a poor but educated young woman, who is compelled to disguise herself as her brother (who lies ill in a hospital). She must do this in order to take his position as a private tutor for an aristocrat’s younger children, or else face homelessness. Badriya (Queeny), an older child in the family, finds Hikmat-in-disguise extremely attractive. And in this scene she is working hard to seduce “him,” and “he,” at some point, for whatever reason, decides to oblige. Earlier in the film, Badriya sought the advice of Hikmat-as-a-woman on how to seduce a man. Hikmat told her that she should take a flower to him, drop it on the floor and wait until he picks it up. Hikmat thought that Badriya was asking for this advice in relation to her own would-be husband, her cousin Bayouni, and little did she know that Badriya has her sights set on Hikmat-in-disguise. Here it is, a clip from Bint al-Basha al-Mudir, dating back to 1938.

*Originally published on October 6 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/the-founding-fathers-of-egyptian-cinema-were-mothers/ now discontinued.

Shooting from the Lip

“Can I shoot you?” asked a beautiful young woman towering above me in her floral summer dress. Her face was obscured by the heavy light of a hot sun beaming at me from behind her head, as I looked up in surprise at the question.

“Excuse me?” I asked. She sat next to me on the park bench and pulled up an impressive DSLR camera with a not insignificant zoom and said: “you’re photogenic, can I take a picture of you?” People who want to shoot me don’t usually ask my permission, and this tends to involve militants at checkpoints, but I remind myself that the war is over and I’m not there anymore. I’m not feeling particularly photogenic either, I hadn’t brushed my hair or washed my face, I had stayed up all night writing a final paper on Richard the Third, that jerk!

“So, I guess you saw High Art at the movies recently?” I said, I was being a little mean, secretly I was flattered. She caught my drift right away, it was the movie playing in theatres at the time, starring Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchel, and all of a sudden our campus was overrun with women-loving-women sporting hefty sized cameras, looking to re-enact the sexual tension of an ultimately tragic relationship. 


“No,” she protested, “I’ve been doing this for a very long time.”

“Oh, yeah, since when?”

“Since I was thirteen. My father bought me my first camera. It was a ---” I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce let alone spell the German manufacturer’s name. “My name is Elizabeth, what’s yours?”

I gave her my name and I said that if she wanted to shoot something, it should be interesting. “Do you want to come to my indoor rock climbing gym? I’ll be there all day Saturday.”

“I can’t,” she said, “I have a date with Destiny.”

“Ok, well, now you’re being cryptic.”

“No, seriously. I have a date with a girl, her name is Destiny.”

“Dating is for amateurs,” I said.

“What the hell does that even mean?”  I didn’t reply. I looked meaningfully at my Richard the Third paper and then up at the summer horizon from the park bench. I guess I knew what I meant, but it would take me years to be able to articulate those feelings and thoughts clearly, and by then it was too late to answer her question.

I submit my paper at the English Department office and shuffle off to get some day time sleep. I get to the dorm room and my roommate, Dareen, who hasn’t seen me since I left on Friday afternoon to visit family, rejoices ecstatically at the sight of me.

“Oh my God, thank God, you’re here,” she says, “Karen, Karen, wake up, the homo’s back! We’re starving man, we ran out of food yesterday and we don’t have any money.”

“Oh, yeah, my dad says ‘hi,’ he sent you some bananas, there’s enough calories in those to fuel a walk to the moon,” I said, producing a 500g bag of “banana” lollies that every kid growing up in Sydney of the 1980s and 90s would remember seeing at the local convenience store.

My parents put their life savings together to run this store because by the time they came to Australia no one would hire a highly experience Arabic teacher or public health inspector, both in their fifties. Sometimes I think to myself, maybe if someone was around to help them with their resumes, maybe they could have become employees again somewhere. Instead, they worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Like a good Arab kid, I’d go back on the weekends and work there; in high school I’d give them one hour of my time a day in which they could have lunch. At the time it felt like a lot, too much even. I must admit now I could have done much more to help.  

Karen emerged from her stupor to rejoice at the “bananas” being thrown her way.  “We don’t have to go to the Student Union meeting any more, I was going for the sandwiches,” Karen said honestly, in what were to become the final years of Australia’s involuntary student unionism.

I woke up after the sun had set, around 9 p.m. and found myself going for a walk to clear my head for thoughts on what to write for another final paper on the Death of Arthur.  I ran into Elizabeth again, this time she seemed in a hurry. She said they were having an end of semester dress up party in her parents’ home; that I should come, but I shouldn’t judge her because her parents lived in a virtual palace. She said she’d read the communist manifesto in German when she was thirteen. I told her she must have been very busy at that age. Destiny was with her, I scratched my head and I said I wouldn’t know what to come dressed as, looking at the two of them trying really hard to get out of being in a room full of strangers. Destiny fired out “come dressed as an Israelite,” I looked at her in disbelief, I didn’t see the humor in it.

Karen and Dareen convinced me that we should all go together in Karen’s rusty, unregistered comby van, which ran on sheer miracle. I guess I was already a little in love with Elizabeth, it was hard not to be. Her politics turned out to be more Irish Catholic than Australian in a city where genuine understanding was next to impossible to find. Besides, her taste in music was just the introduction to the indie queer rock I’d been missing from my life. I agreed to go to the party but I didn’t dress up as anything. My hair was tied back in a little pony tail, and I announced that I was going as Steven Segal, but I got to be more creative with it as the night went on.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Elizabeth’s unconsciously homophobic mother asked. Someone had told her that there was a Palestinian in the house and she came to make sure I would know that she was a sympathetic Greens voter.

“Well, since horror is relative, I’m supposed to be straight.” She didn’t think that was funny. She blinked a couple of times, looked away and walked off.

Elizabeth’s younger sister, Louise, zoomed in on their father’s face with her camera and we were amusing ourselves with the specks of white fungus under his nose, that she had blown up to a substantial size in the view finder when he caught us laughing at him. A little later in the night he would exact his revenge on me, since he was in no position to admonish Louise, the apple of her mother’s ball-busting eye. “I don’t know whether I should hug and kiss you or shake your hand,” he said to me virtually out of nowhere, pointing at my arms in a sleeveless shirt. I gathered that he meant he wasn’t sure whether he should greet me as he would do a woman or a man. I said we could do both but we would have to review the case once I’d clocked the number of truck driving hours needed for the issuance of a full license. He seemed surprised. I told him I had always wanted to drive a really, really big truck. “Into what? Centerpoint Tower?”

Samar Habib with Lisa Dettmer on KPFA;s Women's Magazine.

Parvez Sharma’s Jihad for Love in Mecca

I first beheld Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad For Love at its Sydney premiere in 2007. As I sat to watch it, I felt as though my research career into gender and sexuality in the Arab world was unfolding before my very eyes. It was for this reason that I approached him in 2009 to provide the foreword to what became a seminal collection under the title Islam and Homosexuality. With Sharma’s latest film, A Sinner in Mecca, premiering in theaters nationwide this month, I’ve had to revisit his previous works to give the new film the critical reading it deserves. In contrasting the two films, it is evident that A Jihad for Love is about every other gay or lesbian Muslim who may be suffering religious persecution, while A Sinner in Mecca is about just one. For this reason A Sinner in Mecca is a very intimate filmic experience; Sharma really opens himself up to tremendous vulnerability, putting his deepest personal wounds on display for us to treat as an exhibit. It takes tremendous courage to display this kind of vulnerability and love.

At the outset, A Sinner in Mecca, is visually difficult to watch. The claustrophobia induced by the heavy crowding, the instability of the hidden camera Sharma takes with him throughout his pilgrimage, and the protagonist’s evident melancholia in digging into the dark recesses of his personal and familial history, all ensure that we have a necessarily unpleasant viewing experience. The absence of pleasure, however, is what points to the gravity of the subject of the film. The subject is Sharma himself, a gay Muslim man from India, whose early encounters with Sufi Islam are being challenged institutionally by the rise of Wahhabi influence globally. What is more, Sharma carries with him an ever-present, irrevocable grief – a relationship with his beloved mother who was never able to fully accept his sexual orientation and who is no longer with us. Sometimes, A Sinner in Mecca feels like an extended eulogy, not only for Sharma’s relationship with the most important woman in his life, but for the Islam he knew as a child: one of forgiveness, lightness and the intoxication of love.

Taking us through Mecca, we, a non-Muslim audience who is not permitted entry into the holy city, get to see what the Hajj looks like in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. We see scores of buses carrying pilgrims, we see far too much rubbish on the streets and intense over-crowding. We get to see the air-conditioned super malls featuring multinational companies like Starbucks and the deluge of commerce that the Saudi government has built into a “Mecca of Capitalism.” We see the remnants of a pre-Islamic history being slowly erased as the pilgrim continues on in his progress. The harshness of the Hajj experience is never decorated for us as anything other than hardship. It is a painful progress; it involves suffering and a great deal of confusion on both a literal and psychic level. It is through undergoing this process that Sharma finally emerges with an answer to his conundrum: would Islam [and by extension his mother] accept him as a gay man?

Sharma has made progress in his tireless pursuit of this existential question since A Jihad for Love came out in 2007. Back then, Sharma appeared to favor orthodox methodologies of interpretation in which homosexuality is forbidden. He appeared to take for granted that it is not theologically sound to question the interpretative tradition, or to situate the emergence of prohibition historically. While he fell short of saying modern or alternative interpretations are disingenuous, there was a level of un-interrogated acceptance that this may very well be the case. Sharma further illuminated on this point in his foreword to Islam and Homosexuality: “I do not feel that a purely theological solution to … the problem of the homosexual, is possible.” Instead, Sharma wished to focus on the “impact religious rulings have on believers’ lives. Theology and the rules that bind it often ignore the human experience and refer to homosexuality as an object, a behavior, a sin, without recognizing that sexual preference can be a major constituent of the religious self,” Sharma wrote in 2009. I could not help but feel that at least some of the filmmaker’s suffering could have been alleviated by some of the remedial, liberationist theology on this subject that we can trace back at least a thousand years with Hassan al-Basri and that filled the pages of Islam and Homosexuality. Had he done so, the title of the film, A Sinner in Mecca, may have been ironic if not different.

Ultimately, however, A Sinner in Mecca, is less about sexual orientation than it is about the centralization of Islam and its current confinement to Wahhabism as a fallacious, anachronistic and myopic site for Islam’s birth. When we enter the labyrinths of the pilgrimage, a site that draws Muslims from all around the world, that brings together men and women, Sunnis and Shiites, rich and poor, and when we are made participants in the drawn-out symbolism and rituals of the hajj, be they circling the Ka’ba or stoning the devil, then the epistemological scaffolding needed to talk about LGBT rights disintegrates completely. For this reason, A Sinner in Mecca devotes itself to talking about homosexuality and Islam in ways that are not terribly familiar to the film’s predominantly Western audience. On this topic, Sharma had reflected in 2009 that “I have witnessed the endless debates that diasporic Muslims engage in, in the cool, air-conditioned corridors of Western academia, employing languages of emancipation we have developed mostly in the West. In Cairo, in Delhi, and in Jakarta, the realities of life beyond the taps that run dry or the power outages that punctuate days and nights are completely different. The limited and limiting languages of Western labels and constructs are just not an option.” We can now add Mecca to the list of those sites in which the usual language with which we discuss emancipatory or liberationist theology is not able to function. Sharma’s answer to this conundrum is evident in both A Jihad for Love and A Sinner in Mecca: his focus is on the lived experience, the language of common humanity, the language of yearning for acceptance, the need to belong; the language of love, loss and suffering.

*Originally published on September 13, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/parvez-sharmas-jihad-for-love-in-mecca/ now discontinued.

Same-Sex Power and Sexuality in a Medieval Arabic Source

Holding of an 18th century manuscript
at the Royal Library in Copenhagen

The following is an excerpt from a chapter on same-sex sexual behavior and desire among women. The book the chapter comes from, Nuzhat al-Albab Fima La Yujad Fi Kitab, was written by a Tunisian scholar named Ahmad Ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi who died in 1253 A.D. A translation of this chapter, along with  translations from other sources, appears in Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850-1780 (New York: Teneo Press, 2009). 93-96.

Tifashi was from the Tunisian town of Tifash (hence his name) and he seemed to be someone who appreciated a good laugh. The book contains some truly brazen anecdotes that are sexually explicit even by today’s standards – they may make you blush, they may titillate you, or they may be deemed grossly offensive. Tifashi, however, should be appreciated for the seasoned scholar that he was. He travelled widely across the Arabic-speaking world, including Morocco, Egypt and Syria. His first book was about classifying gem stones, and there is another manuscript that is sometimes attributed to him that contains recipes and prescriptions for treating sexual ailments, but some scholars dispute that he is the author of Rujoo3 al-Shaykh ila Sibah. It is said that he studied the works of the famous philosopher, al-Kindi, but all biographical information on him is rather sketchy. He does tell us in the introduction to this book that it contains a collection of stories and tales that he had heard from fellow travellers. Some stories were told to him by those to whom it happened, while some stories were told to him second-hand (as is the case in the excerpt below). In 1992 a Beirut-based publisher, that was operating out of London during the Lebanese civil war, Riad El-Rayyess, published a modern edition of this book (edited by Jamal Juma). There was a French translation by René Khawam of the chapters involving male same-sex relations and eroticism, titled Les Délices Des Coeurs in 1971. The English translation of the French translation (yes, a translation of a translation) was published by Gay Sunshine Press under the title A Promenade of Hearts in 1988. I hope you enjoy this story for the cultural treasures it reveals, but most importantly for the triumph of its female protagonists in spite of the uninvited spectatorship of the narrators and ours! For further analysis of this text, see chapters 3 and 4 of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East.

One of the scholars in Damascus engaged me in conversation and
said that one of the highest-ranking Egyptian judges told him:
‘I went out one night to the cemetery, and this cemetery was for
the use of the Egyptian householders where they met their female
friends. It is a place where women gather every week, so they
are not forbidden to meet there and spend the night or use it as
a dwelling. Within the cemetery they have built residences, on
which a considerable sum of money has been spent,’” he said. “So
I decided that I would leave my home with the intention of staying
there with my family, supplying myself with whatever I needed
for sleep as well as food and hay for the mule and so on. I closed
the door to my house and darkness progressed with its lamp and
I traversed on my own, riding the mule, until the hour became
late and I arrived at the cemetery after sunset and at the onset of
darkness. And as I was walking amongst the graves, in a remote
place in one of the corners of the cemetery, I heard, in one of the
graves, a moaning and groaning and a kind of panting that strips
the mind and steals the heart. I had never heard anything like it and
I didn’t think anyone did it as such: with measured movements
and natural rhythms and sayings of internal rhyme that cause one
to forget the melody of strings and render the mistresses of the
flute invisible.

‘And so I steered my mule to the wall of the tomb and then I
climbed up and looked in, to find two women. The one on the
bottom was a Turkish concubine who was more beautiful than the
full moon and more balanced than the branch. She was white, soft
and busty, and on top of her there was a short woman, robust, nice
looking, clean clothes, except she didn’t look like the one below
her, as she grinded her and treated her to this talk. Meanwhile,
the woman below replied a little inadequately as though she was
learning from her.

‘And so when I saw this I could not hold myself together and I
yelled out at them and said: “Rise, God damn you!” And I rode
towards the tomb with the intention of locking them in, and then
calling on passers-by to discipline them. By the time I was at the
door, the one who was on top had got up, and the bottom one had
begun to get up, and so she said to her: “Stay where you are.” And
so she remained lying on her back and then uncovered her belly and
navel and her chest, by removing a blue robe that was on her, and
there appeared a chest like marble, and breasts like pomegranates,
and a belly like a mound of snow, in which the naval appeared as
a fat vial that has crystallized into a hot white curd, tinged with
redness. I had never seen anything with its greatness or pureness.
‘And then she said to me:

‘“Damn you, you beast, you oppressor, have you ever seen
anything like this?”

‘So I said to her: “By God no.” She said to me:

‘“Here is before you a rare feast that God has prepared for you, so
go on your way.”

‘When I saw and heard this I was stripped of reason and
morality and I could not control myself, so I said to her: “Damn
you, I have this mule.”

‘She said: “So I’ll hold it for you.”’

‘I alighted, and as God as my witness, I was going against
my nature in doing this, and then I gave her the reins and the whip
and I entered the tomb. I undid the flag’s knot and placed it on
my leg and then I loosened my pants and threw the end of my
pallium over my shoulder, and I inserted my hand and removed
my tail. I drew near the concubine and I bent over her and when
I brought the head of my penis to the lips and found their softness
and warmth, I did not feel anything other than the hooves of my
mule departing and the woman yelling: “I’ve let go of the mule.”
‘So I got up, devoid of reason and sensibility, and I went outside,
and there was the mule departing among the graves in the gathering
darkness. Since I lost sight of him, I did not know where he went,
but I ran after him in that condition: member erect, pants undone,
the flags on the top of my feet, my pallium tangled up—getting up
one minute and falling again at another.

‘And the mule continued in his early departure and I continued to
run after him, and moreover the damned woman, when she had let
him go, struck him on his waist with the whip, so the mule began
to move towards anyone who approached him and to kick at them
with his heels. I ran after him in a condition which if it had only
been a sketch on paper would have caused the melancholic much
laughter and stopped those in a hurry, so how much funnier would
it have been to see in reality!

‘And it so happened that the mule had passed his feeding time,
and he was better at finding his way to the city than the sand
grouse, and he continued to run and I to run after him, unable to
catch him, and so he would disappear in the darkness or someone
would find him and ride him and then I could see nothing more.’

* Originally published on September 4, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/same-sex-power-and-sexuality-in-a-medieval-arabic-source/ now discontinued.

A Micro History of Human Warfare

The terrible but not unexpected news came. "Your majesty, there has been another massacre by chemical weapon at the Rafah mine. It's the third one in as many days. We should hold off our mining operations until we know..."

"Nonsense!" The queen interrupted him, pushing off three smaller servants  who were in the act of attending to her. "Regather your troops, the work must go on. A few fallen soldiers is a small price to pay for what we have to gain in return. How many more days do you need to mine the great white mountain?" He fumbled hesitantly. A general was supposed to be cold and calculating but he could only think of his finest, lying twisted by the roadside. He was sending them to certain death and contrary to what the murderers believed, he had room for conscience and consciousness. He often wondered who they were and where they came from. He knew they were not forces of nature like water falling from the sky. These were technologies of warfare that they sported. Efficient killing things applied deliberately. They did not have the appearance or randomness of the natural disaster. He felt powerless against an enemy so mighty; how he wished he were back in the thick of battle of limb to limb combat. He had seen many of these and led the kingdom to great victories. 

                                                                          *** 

When news of the third massacre at the mine came, Arletta was at her station as usual, packing away the produce in the cellular granary of the hive. Distressed, she asked if anyone had seen her love but those who were returning from the site could not help her. Their heads were bowed and a certain look of defeat crossed their worn faces. It always comes without warning, it's faster than the speed of light, how quickly that cloud mass bursts over our heads. Without giving thought to what would happen if she left the production line, Arletta started running toward the mine. 

She ran and ran and ran and finally made it to the high road above ground. The linear battlefield was strewn with bodies of the dead, some were still writhing in agony. She looked into their faces and felt each of their pain and for a moment she was struck by her own selfishness. How could she be only

really interested in the survival of one in particular above the others? Ever since she was a little one, obedience of the queen and service of the collective had been impressed upon her. Individual ties and personal romances were heavily discouraged and now she could see why, because there were no guarantees, the one could be taken away at any moment, never to be seen again.

                                                                         *** 

Angelo sat at the kitchen table in quiet disgust and self-loathing. "Ants are people too," he said peering over his typewriter and looking the teenager and her mother in the eye.

"No they're not," protested the child with alacrity. "Their brains are so small, they don't even know they're dying."

"You have no way of substantiating that claim, but how comforting it must be for you to think that," he said quietly.

"You know," he continued after a long silence during which the landlady was thumbing through a photographic history of the Guatemalan civil war, "if you give them enough time they complete the work they are doing and then go back to the colony. They're breaking down the big chunks of food you left out last night into small enough pieces that they can then transport. When the 

mission is complete or in the absence of a food source, they have no interest in your table top or your kitchen. All they needed was a bit more time." He looked back at the typewriter and stared for hours at an otherwise blank page with the title: A Macro History of Human Warfare.