 If you want me to continue with my work, it is crucial to support the channel via Patreon. Moreover, make sure to subscribe to Bobby's perspective on Rumble. All the links are in the description box below. May Allah bless you all. Alright guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new Manu's Bobby, guys, very controversial video today, we're gonna check out Homosexuality in the Islamic World by the channel El Mukadima. This is a topic that I haven't deeply researched myself, this is why we're gonna check out today's video. However, I heard a few things about it. There was a time where Islamic rulers were engaged in Homosexuality and even drinking alcohol, a more liberal time in the Islamic world. I believe it is very important to have a closer look into that era to understand what truly shaped that time of the Islamic world. Guys, before we start the video, as always, if you enjoy the content, leave me a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and if you want to further support this channel, all the links are in the description box below. And now with no further ado, let's have a look. Hi, welcome to El Mukadima, my name is Yavish. Today we're gonna talk about Homosexuality in the pre-modern Islamic world. While today, the Islamic world and Homosexuality don't seem to go together, in the past there was a rich tradition of Homosexuality being expressed through stories and poetry. While it was never completely allowed, it did become an open secret. Without watching the whole video, just seeing those first couple of seconds, I already have to conclude that as he said already, it was never truly allowed within Islam. So therefore, even those rulers apparently didn't try to make the Haram Halal. It was always crystal clear what kind of position Homosexuality has within Islam. Nevertheless, they still practiced it. Before we begin, I'd like to say two things. First, the term Islamic or Islamicate world is often objected upon by people because it seems to imply that Islam is responsible for whatever the topic of discussion might be. Here, as in all of my videos, the term Islamic world is used for its geographical meaning. It's great that he points that out because even nowadays, we speak about Christian countries such as America or Germany or France. But matter of fact, those are secular countries. So now historically, if we look at this time frame, you could speak about Christian countries. Nevertheless, we know nowadays they're not truly practicing Christians. And therefore that he uses the Islamic term as a geographical term makes much more sense here, of course. Because as I said in the beginning, it is clear what is Haram and what is Halal. Discussion might be. Here, as in all of my videos, the term Islamic world is used for its geographical meaning. The world that comprised of empires that called themselves Muslims. Of course, this is a huge region going at times from Spain to India. And not everyone followed the same practices and social norms. Second, there was a lot of rasty in the Islamic world. Older or even old men often had sex with underage mainly boys. In the modern times, we call that disgusting man. This video isn't about that. I didn't think it was appropriate to talk about that in a video about homosexuality because there are two completely different things. So this is something that I cannot really talk about here on YouTube. So probably we're going to censor this part and re upload the uncensored version to rumble yet again, however, if we look into the statistics and we look into Now, this is not a theology channel, but Islam's stance on sexuality is related to its history. And so we must talk about it. Most, if not all scholars of Islam maintain that acts are forbidden in Islam. In the modern era, there are some who are starting to find room for homosexuality. But before the modern era, there were no scholars, at least to my knowledge, who tried to reconcile sexuality with Islam. And therefore, if there was absolutely no scholar at all from the beginning of Islam that would have agreed with sexuality within Islam, it is haram. And hence, anybody that now tells you that is halal goes against traditional original Islam and therefore is leading you astray. Clearly in the hadiths, there could have been some room for discussion, but the Quran itself makes it quite clear with the story of the prophet Lut and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for homosexuality. So according to all schools of thought, it is forbidden. However, there's a range of opinions about the punishment for it. But like I said, this isn't a theology channel. This prohibition, however, didn't stop people from doing it. Before the modern era, there wasn't such a thing as a sexual identity. People could indulge in homosexual acts without having it contribute to their identity. Especially in the Islamic world, this was absolutely true across the world. If you look into historical figures such as Alexander the Great, there are many instances where such people engaged in homosexuality engaged in same sex. However, they were not identified as a so-called actual man. They did not label themselves as such. Most of them still would marry women and actually have children. They would have a normal life quote unquote and engage in activity on the side. Now listen guys, I'm not here to justify what those men did or tell you that is a okay, not quite the opposite. However, there is one takeaway point here. Of course, those men did not identify with a label and that is truly important to keep in mind here. Because if you are involved in certain sinful behavior, let's say you had a drink, you drank alcohol, that doesn't make you automatically an alcoholic. You can stop any time. Once you label yourself something, you get deeper and deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. And this is why when we look at all of those isms nowadays, they try to create a social construct and with that they succeed to change a huge portion of a generation. And that is the real risk here. Once you start identifying yourself as something, once you start labeling yourself as something, you cannot really get out of that niche so easily. However, if you identify and you understand that you committed a detestable act, that you committed some sinful behavior, you can always repent and come back. There should be no label on you. You should be just you. Such a thing as sexuality, but not such a thing as a sexual. Of course, there were other identities that sometimes overlapped with sexuality. For instance, there were women who dressed like men and this contributed to their identity, but they could have sex with either men or women and it had nothing to do with how they dressed. What is really important to understand here is that this is a reoccurring theme. This is why we read in the Quran that the people of Lot have been wiped out. This is nothing new. Me growing up in the West, growing up during the times of modernity, I thought that all of those things are new, right? Now we have transgender people, now we have homosexual people, now we have all of that technological advancement and therefore it is just different times. Different people now times have changed, but the core hasn't changed. All of those things are repeating over and over again. You heard it here back then, some women they would dress up as men and men would dress up as women as well. They would put on makeup. Nowadays it is more sophisticated. We have hormones, we have surgery to make men appear like women. Back in the day they would castrate the men so they wouldn't produce testosterone. The technology was more crude, but nevertheless those people did exactly the same what you see nowadays. In the Islamic Empire, in the Greek Empire, in the Roman Empire, those practices repeat over and over and over again and this is why we have been warned throughout the ages in the books revealed by God. But Ibn Sina or as he's known in the West, Ibn Sina actually talks about sexuality being a state of being rather than just an act, though he considered it an incurable disease. Of course, even if you had homosexual relations, you were still expected to be part of a familial unit and have children. As long as you did that, there was no dishonor or anything like that for having sex with a person of the same gender. In fact, it wasn't even scandalous. This was certainly true for two of the Islamic monarchs who preferred to have sex with men. First, Abbasid Caliph Alamin. It's really fascinating to me. I would like to understand what kind of perspective of Islam those caliphs had back in the day because nowadays it is fairly easy to research and understand that who is prohibited within Islam. They surely knew that too. So I'm really curious to know what kind of perspective they had on Islam. What were they following? Harun al-Rashid's son and successor had a preference for eunuchs. He began appearing with them in public. This was quite scandalous in Abbasid Iraq in the 9th century, but primarily because it seems that Alamin was spending too much time with them instead of running the empire. This is what I mentioned just a minute ago. Eunuchs, men that would get castrated, men that wouldn't produce testosterone, and therefore they would appear more womanly, more feminine. And this is the crude technology of getting rid of hormones, male hormones within your body. Nowadays we have androgen blockers that men that want to become women quote unquote take. So his mother, his brother, appeared a counter attraction for him by dressing up beautiful girls in the clothing that was worn by eunuch servants at the time. Since Alamin began appearing with them in public, this started quite a trend of women wearing masculine clothing. Second, we know that Khalif al-Hakam II of Kordoba had a preference for men. This got to such a level that he didn't even touch women, and hence he couldn't produce an heir. His wife, Subh, had to cut her hair and start dressing up like men. She was even given the nickname of Jafar, a male name. Jafar was also the name of al-Hakam's closest friend from childhood. Al-Hakam wasn't able to produce his first heir till he was 46. Other than these two, we know stories of many sexual relationships between monarchs and their courtiers. We know that al-Hakam II's father, Abdul Rahman III, had a male harem as well as a female harem. We know that al-Mu'tamid, the emir of the Taifa of Seville, was in love with a poet named Ibn Ammar. Wherever slave soldiers were involved, there was almost always a sexual relationship between the monarch and one or more of his trusted men. Some famous examples involve Mahmood of Ghazna and Malik Ayyaz, Alauddin Khilji and Malik Kafur, and of course the Mamluks of Egypt were famous for it too. It was even so common among the Ottoman soldiers that they often appointed someone to keep an eye on new soldiers and their superiors. So now I have to say this is pretty shocking to me, this is very surprising, because at first I thought alright, we're talking about a distant age back in the day, right? But now they're talking about the Ottomans and this was the last caliphate. This was 100 years ago, not too long ago. So this is truly interesting man, what is happening here? We're talking about the last caliphate, the last caliphate 100 years ago, the last time that Muslims were in charge, that we actually had a legitimate Islamic state. And now you're telling me, up to that last legitimate Islamic state, most of the rulers were actually actuals. And now after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, after the dissolution of the caliphate, now all of a sudden Muslims go back to the traditional understanding of homosexuality within Islam. That is extremely strange. In the Islamic world, we usually don't see egalitarian, homosexual relationships between two people of a similar social class. There were almost always between people of different social classes, monarchs and servants or slaves, Sufi teachers and their students, etc. Speaking of Sufis, one area where we often imagine homosexuality being common is Sufism. Sufi poetry is full of seeming homogeneity. Yeah, I do have to agree though, because if you look at the poetry of Rumi about his friend Shem Stabrizi, you definitely get those vibes. And mentions love between men again and again. So naturally, it is often interpreted as being sexual in nature, but that's way too simplistic a view of this poetry. Obviously, it's not always easy to tell whether that love is just platonic love between two friends, or if it's romantic, and even if it's romantic, does it involve sex? I mean, in the modern mind, Rumi and Shem Stabrizi were lovers in the night time, but that doesn't really seem to be the case. Of course, Rumi loved Shem Stabrizi, there's hardly any debate about that. But it's tough to tell what kind of love that was. Rumi was an adherent to the Sharia, and he explicitly talked against Sodomy, so we can assume that their relationship wasn't sexual. However, that wasn't the case for all Sufis. Sufis spanned the entire spectrum in regards to their adherence to the Sharia. Some Sufis stuck to the Sharia to the finer details, while some rejected it almost completely. While none outright admit to having sex with other men. Out of the fear of orthodox Muslims, there are inferences here and there. This also extended to the concept of Shahid Bazi. To grossly simplify the concept, Shahid Bazi is the idea that you can love God by loving one of God's creations, which mostly meant beautiful men and boys. Again, how far you can go in this is debated. So for people that don't know, I doubled in the New Age myself, and you have many cults within the New Age that then turn out to be sexual movements. How do they get them? It's very, very simple. They say, hey, we are all one. God is one. Everything is one. Everything is a beautiful unity. And everything is love, of course. So in order to express God's love, we have to love each other. You and I, we are one. You are me. I am you. So let's just all have sex. When you come down to Thailand and you go to islands such as Kopangan, for example, there are people that hold spiritual retreats and 90 percent of them end up being an orgy. Appreciate their beauty. Could you love them? Or could you even have sex with them? Among the advocates of Shahid Bazi, we find names such as Jami, Atar and Hafiz. Like I said before, none explicitly advocated for sex. Some people even interpret this love for other men in poetry to be a metaphor for their devotion to God. But then why use the metaphor of men and non-women? Because a lot of Islamic philosophy was inspired by the ancient Greeks, and they usually mentioned the love between two men in their poetry. This was so common that unless otherwise stated, an ancient Greek reader would normally assume that any kind of love mentioned in literature was between two men. Contrary to most modern readers, who'd usually assume that it was between a man and a woman. Some poets and scholars did say that attraction to other men is natural, but you must resist it and be pious. This includes Ibn Hazm, an Andalusian polymath, who mentions stories of men who fell in love with other men and died from heartbreak. He also mentions how common homosexuality was in Al-Andalus and how people were often tolerant of it. This tolerant of homosexuality is even mentioned in contemporary Christian sources, which mention it, of course, as a sin of the lustful Arabs. As if we don't see a rich history of actuality within the Catholic Church. While male homosexuality seems to be very common, we don't find many references toward female homosexuality. Europeans who visited the Islamic world in the late medieval and early modern periods imagined a lot of lesbian stuff going on in the harems, but there's hardly any mention of it in Islamic sources. One example I found interesting and funny is from a Venetian envoy at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent who writes that if women of the harem wanted cucumbers, they were sent to them sliced, so they wouldn't use them for pleasure related purposes. How much of this is reality and how much is just fantasy is tough to tell. I really had to bite my tongue for this video, so Insha'Allah one day we're going to react to the whole video on rumble during a live stream for example. To boil it down, however, the most shocking aspect of the whole video is for me personally that the community within the Islamic world lasted until the Ottoman Empire on such a great scale that even Caliphs within the Ottoman Empire were still practicing homosexuality openly. And that of course opens up the question, when did the Muslims change? When did they return more to a traditional understanding of Islam? Why is it not rampant nowadays? Or maybe it is and we do not know about it. The quintessence of the whole story is of course to not make the haram halal. However, seeing this history I have to say that we should be much more compassionate with brothers and sisters that are afflicted by such passions. Alright guys, and this is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave the thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already guys, please do so. And if you want to further support this channel via Patreon for example, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support guys and as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.