, 6 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
No it didn't. The word 'homosexuality', and with it the sense of same-sex attraction as an immutable characteristic, was not coined until 1869. This is the kind of anachronism which powerfully illustrates just how westernised Islam has become.
In Ibn Hajar's entertainingly named 'Enormities', anal intercourse between men & tribadism are both condemned - but individually, not as instances of a category called 'homosexuality'. Islam was the heir of the Greek/Roman model, with its hierarchical notions of penetration.
The Western concepts of 'homosexuality' & 'heterosexuality' derive ultimately from Romans 1.26-27, where Paul fatefully conflated male-male & female-female relations. The originality of this conception is reflected in the long struggle to find a word for it.
The word 'sodomy' was coined in the 11th century - but it referred to the sin of unnatural sex (& as such might be used to describe bestiality, or masturbation, or anal sex between a man & woman). "Understood as an immutable characteristic, homosexuality was a German invention."
"A way of conceptualising desire that had originated with an itinerant Jew back in the reign of Nero came to enjoy a global sway. In the sexual order as in so much else, the roots of modernity reached deep into Christian soil."

From my new book, 'Dominion', out this Sept.
Though - as in the ancient Mediterranean, and not coincidentally - the real stigma in Islamic culture attached to the penetrated.
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