The following paper was read at the Society for Shaykhi, Babi, and Baha'i Studies meeting inProvidence, Rhode Island, in November 1996.The first draft of the paper was about twice as long as the time available for presentation would allow, soI narrowed the focus to aspects of three issues. Again, given the time constraints, the paper deals withthese 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 twicethe 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-Aqdasin the Context of Late Nineteenth Century Eastern and Western Sexual Ideologies

Jackson Armstrong-Ingram

If we bracket the issues of the facticity of God or revelation and simply accept them as workinghypotheses, then what would we posit to be happening socio-culturally at the inception of a newreligion arising from a revelation? Well, just as the saying has it that one person and God constitute amajority, so God and a revelator must constitute a unique socio- cultural entity that is distinct from thesociety to which the revelation is addressed. Thus, the impact of the revelatory process in that societycan be reasonably conceptualized as an acculturative interaction between it and revelation.Acculturative processes are always bidirectional. When two socio-cultural systems come into contactthey effect one another and both must accommodate to the interactive process. In the case of arevelatory event, then, if we view it as contact between two cultures, the culture of God and therevelator and the culture of the receiving society, we would expect that not only would the revelationhave an effect on the receiving society but that the society would have an effect on the revelation. Nomatter how transcendent our idea of God may be, nor how initiatory of a new social order we mayexpect revelation to be, the comprehensibility and utility of that revelation would be dependent on itsadapting already existing socio-cultural materials and using them as a springboard from which tolaunch 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-culturalinteractions. Although it is customary to refer to the Baha'i Faith as being in origin a "Persian" religionand to link its corpus of revealed text to "Persian" culture, this is an over simplified view. Apart fromthe fact that nineteenth century Iran was both polyglot and multicultural, it should be borne in mind thatthe actual corpus of text that presents the revelation was primarily produced outside Iran. Also, themajority of the life of the revelator, Baha'u'llah, was spent outside Iran, and (despite cultural contactwith that country through correspondence, individuals who traveled to and fro, and the small Persiancommunity 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 needto look further than Qajar Iran and this would seem especially so when the revelation is linguisticallydistanced 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 regardingsexuality. In doing this I am taking the author at his word when he says "Think not that We haverevealed unto you a mere code of laws" (5); and assuming that rather than constituting a Baha'i shariahthe intent of the Aqdas is to use the available socio-cultural constructs, embedded as they are in thedenotative 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 thetext.This discussion will not focus so much on behavior as on the cultural ideals by which behavior isconstrained and judged. The Aqdas and its associated texts were written in the 1870s and 1880s in asocio-cultural context that cannot simply be labelled "islamic." Although Baha'u'llah was confined tothe 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 "Mediterraneanculture." 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 basedin 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 alsocommon to anachronistically project the ideology of the modern West onto its own past and use that asa standard with which to compare the East. I will as much as possible focus on ideas that can beconfirmed to have been current in the 1870s and 1880s. As the Eastern Mediterranean of the latenineteenth 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 borrowingWestern ideas that are "new" to the East.Before the writing of the Aqdas, the only family and personal law systems available to those taking ona Baha'i identity in the Middle East were religious. These Baha'is petitioned Baha'u'llah to providethem with such a legal system of their own. The Aqdas gave them a current basis on which to functionwithout having to have recourse to other religious law. It is important, however, to look at the specificsituations 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 beapplied universally rather than such general principles.It is important in reading revealed texts to distinguish between the normative and the contextual. Onemust not simply conflate instructions on how to deal with what

with statements about what

should be

.The choice of Arabic for the revelation of the Aqdas emphasizes the universality of its intent rather thanthe 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 italso claimed a wider applicability. The Aqdas is not in the vernacular of those whose need itimmediately addresses, but in an established cross-cultural religious lingua franca associated with atradition of scholarship. This distances the Aqdas from its immediate audience while allowing it tofunction as an answer to their immediate needs.The Aqdas (and its supplement, Questions and Answers) treats three aspects of sexuality which I willdiscuss 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 specificreference 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 encompassedwithin 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 thereforemenstruation cannot involve ritual disability, it is interesting that menstruation does provide womenwith a choice in respect of the regular salat and fasting: They may substitute the recital of a tasbihformula after ablutions for the prayer or each day of missed fasting. Thus menstruation is differentiatedfrom illness: The ill are not permitted to perform salat or fast (Q&A 93); menstruating women have achoice to observe the requirements or substitute another obligation. Thus it is clearly reinforced thatmenstruation 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. TheAqdas obliges the menstruating woman to either perform salat and fast or take the option of repeating arevealed verse not once but 95 times.However, quite contrary to the blanket abolition of the concept of ritual pollution in the Aqdas, letalone to the specific requirement for menstruating women to perform ablutions and ritual acts, it isevident that the Eastern Baha'i community continued to believe in menstrual pollution and that this wastaught to early Western Baha'is and given as

the

reason why women were excluded from membershipon a House of Justice.The receptivity of Westerners to the logic of menstrual pollution as a reason for anything is notsurprising. Late nineteenth century Western ideology -- whether religious or medical -- regarded sexualfluids as highly problematic. In the 1870s, there was a serious discussion in the correspondencecolumns of The Lancet about whether a ham cured by a menstruating woman would spoil. It was evensuggested 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 vaginalintercourse, 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 hygienewas innovative in both Eastern and Western ideological contexts.Illicit sexuality is discussed in the Aqdas, and Questions and Answers, in relation to two concepts: zinaand 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 notmarried to each other (depending on the legal authority followed, it may or may not be of consequencefor 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 throughintromissive ejaculation and thus an assumption that men desire, indeed need, penetration of a sexualobject. In the case of zina, there is a further explicit assumption of assymetrical roles: There is anindividual who perpetrates an illicit act, and an individual who makes possible the perpretration of anillicit act by someone else. That is why, as rape is considered a form of zina, it is readily possible toconceptualize 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 canarouse 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 theindividuals 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 legislativeconsideration of the issue.Zina is somewhat misleadingly translated in the English edition of the Aqdas as 'adultery'; liwat is evenmore 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 andthe one who makes perpetration possible. In terms of sanction, liwat is usually treated under islamic