12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic

Law
Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen
Volume 2, Issue 3, Spring 1995

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0002.302
[http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0002.302]

In 1982 Sayyid cAbd Allah, a 19-year-old student of medicine at al-Azhar, Cairo's

Islamic University, contacted a psychologist complaining that he was suffering from
extreme depression, and asked for psychological treatment. The psychologist, Salwa
Jirjis Labib examined him and discovered that he suffered from a disturbance of his
sexual identity, or more precisely, psychological hermaphroditism [al-khunutha an-
nafsiya]. She treated him for three years, making all possible effort to restore a male
sexual identity to him, but eventually she had to give up. She explained the failure as
inevitable in cases like this where treatment is begun after puberty. Salwa Jirjis then
referred him to the surgeon cIzzat cAsham Allah Jibra'il, to have sex-change surgery
performed.
Given the seriousness of the operation, Jibra'il referred Sayyid cAbd Allah to another
psychologist, Hani Najib. Najib soon reached the same diagnosis and agreed that
surgery would be the best course. He therefore set out to prepare the patient for it.
For a year Sayyid cAbd Allah was treated with female hormones, while
experimenting with dressing up like a woman and living with the other sex. This
stage lasted for about a year, whereupon Sayyid cAbd Allah signed a request to have
the surgery performed. This was done on January 29, 1988. The surgeon cIzzat
cAsham Allah Jibra'il removed the penis and created a new urinal orifice and an
artificial vagina. This is the standard procedure in sex-change operations. The
operation went well; Sayyid cAbd Allah soon recovered. According to his
psychologist Salwa Jirjis he took the name Sally and today lives happily and satisfied
with her female identity.

The Case
The story could end here, but it does not. What Sally soon found out was that this
operation was not just a personal matter, but involved a number of authorities, apart
from arousing a huge interest in the media and the population at large. It could be
most interesting to interview Sally about her childhood, the time at the al-Azhar, and
so forth. This is not what I am going to do. This study will focus on the reactions in
the media and among religious authorities, primarily the Mufti of the Republic,
Sayyid Tantawi.
The phenomenon of sex-change operations is a rather complex one, and I must
confess that I am myself at a loss as to what to think of it. This study, then, is not
trying to depict the ulama as adverse to a beneficial and, in any event, inevitable
modernization. It assumes, however, that responses to a sex-change operation are
bound to be strong in a society which has traditionally been characterized by a clear
separation of the sexes, an issue which is again at the top of the agenda due to the
Islamic awakening taking place in these years. Sally is neither the first nor the latest
person to have undergone such an operation, but she is by far the most famous: few
people in Egypt who occasionally read a newspaper have never heard about Sally.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 1/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

What was so special about Sally? In order to answer this question, this study will
follow the events, analyze the themes of the public debate, and, finally consider the
fatwa by the Mufti in some detail. The material used will be the Egyptian press, the
report of the Public Prosecutor, and the fatwa which I have copied from the Dar al?
Ifta records.
The first thing that happened after the operation was that the Dean of the Medical
Faculty refused to admit Sally for the final exams. At the same time, he refused to
transfer her to the Medical Faculty for girls (absolutely separated from that of the
boys, and situated in another part of town). Realizing that she would need official
recognition of her new sex and name, Sally applied to the Administration of Civil
Matters [ Maslahat al-Ahwal al-Madaniya] to have her name changed from Sayyid
Muhammad cAbd Allah to Sally Muhammad cAbd Allah.
News about the operation broke on April 4, 1988. In an interview with al-Ahram
Sally talked about her difficulties at al-Azhar which dated back long before the
operation: "it is strange that they still want to punish me, now that I have actually
become a woman,—as if I committed a crime at the moment I entered the operating
room. [1] [#N1] Responding to this remark, al-Azhar issued a declaration stating that it
had set up a special committee for the investigation of the case, and when, a couple
of months before the operation, the committee had examined Sayyid(performing
among other things an ultra?sound examination of the prostata) it had come to the
conclusion that he was one hundred percent male, both outwardly and inwardly.
After the operation Sally had refused to be examined by the committee again. Sally
herself, who looked sexily out to the reader holding a pair of sunglasses to her
mouth, saw no reason why she should suffer yet another examination: she confirmed
that although she had known about her female identity for long, it was only now she
had become "a cheerful girl", and she was planning to marry soon and would wear
the veil [2] [#N2] .

Sally's provocative behavior and the grave accusations of al-Azhar together created a
stir in the media which was to last for months. Clearly, al-Azhar maintained, she had
committed a crime; or rather, he had, for far from changing a sex the doctor had in
fact mutilated a man whose motives, it was suggested, were of the basest sexual
nature: by claiming himself a woman, Sayyid was trying to have legitimate sexual
intercourse with another man [3] [#N3] .

Having received a number of complaints about the operation, the representative of

the Doctors' Syndicate [ Niqabat al-Atba] in Giza, Doctor Husam ad-Din Khatib,
examined the case and summoned the surgeon, Jibra'il, the anesthetist, Ramzi
Michel Jadd, and the psychologist to discuss the case with three doctors appointed
by the Syndicate. The Syndicate, it must be said, has since 1984 been dominated by
the Islamic movement. The three doctors agreed that the surgeon had committed a
serious medical error by not confirming the presence of a disease before operating [4]
[#N4] .

The Doctors' Syndicate found support in the declaration from the committee of the
Azhar University. Presumably aggrieved at the discovery that such an operation had
been performed on one of its students, the committee handed over its findings to the
Doctors' Syndicate in order that it examine the case and hold the surgeon
responsible. The Azhar committee and the Doctors' Syndicate were in agreement
that a grave error had been committed; the right procedure would have been to stop
the hormonal treatment and continue with a purely psychological cure.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 2/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

On May 14, 1988, the Doctors' Syndicate sent a letter to the Mufti of the Republic,
Sayyid Tantawi, asking him for a fatwa on the matter. His fatwa, which is
reproduced below, concluded that if the doctor testified that this was the only cure
against the disease, then this treatment was permissible. It must, however, never be
performed at the mere wish of a man to become a woman, or vice versa. This fatwa
was not quite to the point, since it evaded the question of whether the diagnosis of
psychological hermaphroditism was acceptable from the point of view of Islamic law.
Consequently, opponents of the operation interpreted it as supporting their cause,
because it condemned sex-change operations performed simply at the wish of the
patient [5] [#N5] . On the other hand, Sally's party (and, eventually, the Public
Prosecutor) saw it as supportive of their position, because it placed the final decision
with the medical doctor.

On June 12, 1988, al-Azhar took the case to court, claiming that the surgeon was
liable to punishment for inflicting a permanent disease upon the patient, according
to § 240 in the penal code [6] [#N6] . The Public Prosecutor [ an-Niyaba al-cAmma]
carried out an investigation.

The Public Prosecutor summoned Fakhri Salih, the medical examiner. Salih
consulted the relevant scientific literature on the subject, as well as the Medical
Counselor for the Hospital Sector. They agreed that while, from a purely physical
point of view, Sayyid cAbd Allah had been a man, psychologically speaking he was
not; the diagnosis of psychological hermaphroditism had been accurate, and it was
correct that after puberty this disease is only curable by means of a surgical
operation. The surgeon had been following the rules of his profession, consulting
relevant specialists, and the operation had been performed properly. He had not
inflicted any permanent physical disablement on the patient. The patient could be
regarded [ yuctabar] as a female, although lacking uterus, ovary and menstruation.
Finally, he examined Sally on September 12 and concluded that the anus had not
been recently nor continously used for sodomy [ liwatan].
The Doctors' Syndicate did not accept the findings of the medical examiner, but
insisted that the surgeon had operated on a man who was as much a man as any
man. A meeting was held where they exchanged views on the matter [7] [#N7] . Shortly
before that, on November 11, the Doctors' Syndicate gave a press conference where it
stated that the operation was not a matter only for specialists, but had been a case of
public morals and therefore of public interest. It was an assault on the principles,
values, ethics and religion of Egyptian society. Consequently, the Syndicate deleted
cIzzat cAsham Allah Jibra'il from its membership records, and the anesthetist Ramzi
Jadd was fined £E 300 for his participation in the operation [8] [#N8] .

On December 29, 1988, the Public Prosecutor acquitted the surgeon cAsham Allah
Jibra'il of the charge of inflicting a permanent disease. The final report confirmed
that the operation had been performed properly according to the standards of these
operations [9] [#N9] . Almost a year passed before he closed the Sally case in October
1989, and in November Sally finally received the certificate stating that she was a
woman, almost two years after the operation [10] [#N10] . Her grievances did not end
here, however, for al-Azhar still would not recognize her as a woman and admit her
to the Medical Faculty for girls [11] [#N11] . It took another charge and another one and a
half years before the Administrative Court repealed the Azhar decision of expelling
Sally and allowed her to enter any university she might wish in order to pass her final
exams [12] [#N12] .

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 3/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

The Press
This is the story of Sally. Let us now take a closer look at some of the themes
discussed in the Egyptian press. The first thing to be noted is that differences in the
press treatment did not strictly follow along political lines, and that I have only come
across one single comment on the case made by a woman [13] [#N13] . Both
governmental and oppositional newspapers were bringing critical and supportive
comments; they were informing about the development of the case, but many of
them also became the vehicles of a heated debate between partisans and opponents
of the operation, even if the opponents were almost invariably in the majority. I did
not, however, find any positive evaluation of the operation in any Islamic newspaper.
What we have seen in the debate and in the legal proceedings is a struggle over
Sally's sex. Everybody seems to agree that she cannot decide this on her own—it is a
public issue. The psychologists say that she is now a woman, but used to suffer from
psychological hermaphroditism, whereas al-Azhar and its supporters maintain that
she is a man, and has always been one. Al-Azhar does not accept a psychological
diagnosis and insists that the body cannot lie: every individual has a true sex which
can be discovered by close examination. This is one of the basic dividing lines in the
case, and it is by no means new: from the Islamic camp, psychology is often
suspected of being a Western science bent on changing the mores of Egyptian
society. As a professor of psychology succinctly remarked, "the case is not a new one,
but it highlights a new concept [that of psychological hermaphroditism] and thus
raises an important issue: which should hold the primary position, the soul or the
body?" [14] [#N14]

To the Azhar professor of physiology it raises no such question, but rather another,
practical one: "which medical, moral or legal means may be applied to prevent a
repetition of a tragedy which has caused so much confusion [ balbala] in the
population?" He goes on to state that there was nothing 'transsexual' about the case,
which was simply a question of 'sodomistic inclinations'. 'Transsexual' is the
diagnosis used to legitimize operations transforming men into artificial women in
order to satisfy their abominable sexual demands. Research has established,
however, that their mental state is due to failures in their upbringing, mainly caused
by parents who spoiled them too much and gave them little discipline, or even gave
their boy a girl's name, or their girl a boy's. This is all perverse, and will lead to
perverse results. The important thing, then, is to defend Egyptian values, principles
and religion against any deviation [inhiraf] leading to perversity [15] [#N15] . To sum up:
Sayyid was a man and whatever inclinations he may have had were not inborn, but
acquired. By acquiescing in the operation, the doctors had departed from medical
grounds and had simply given in to Sayyid's perversities.
According to the Azhar view, God has created mankind in pairs and His Revelation
makes it clear that the distinction between the sexes (as well as the one between
believer and unbeliever) is the fundamental distinction whereupon society is
founded. Their interaction may pose a threat to the social order, and this threat
(which mainly emanates from the woman) must be contained. In this, the Azharis
are to a large degree in accordance with earlier Muslim societies, to whom the male-
female distinction was so crucial that hermaphrodites posed a dilemma of some
seriousness, as can be witnessed from the number of discussions on the status of the
hermaphrodite found in Medieval Muslim legal literature. Paula Sanders has
recently analyzed this material and has dubbed the very elaborate legal prescriptions
laid down for the exact determination of a sex a form of gendering the ungendered

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 4/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

body; that is, attributing a sex to a body which did not posses only one sex, simply
for the sake of preserving a binary system: [16] [#N16]

If medieval Muslim jurists had an overriding anxiety, it was not any of

the particular concerns-incest taboos, modesty, segregation, or even
hierarchy-that organized their negotiation of gender, but maintaining
the gendered integrity of their world as a whole. Their received view of
the world was as a place with only two sexes, male and female... A
person with ambiguous genitalia or with no apparent sex might have
been a biological reality, but it had no gender and, therefore, no point
of entry into the social world: it was unsocialized.

One is reminded of the Azhar reaction to Sally: she could not continue with the male
students, nor could she be transferred to the girls' department. Like the
hermaphrodite, she is "gendered", and as we saw, she cannot understand what is the
problem now that she is clearly a woman: the way she sees it she "went from the
world of men to the world of women." [17] [#N17] To al-Azhar, however, she had already
been gendered as a man, according to a mixture of the old juridical techniques and
modern medical ones, both focusing on the body and denying the possibility of a
psychological hermaphroditism. She had been a man and was still a man, but now
less so, because she had been bereft of her male sexual organs and been attributed
with artificial (and imperfect) female ones. She was not a full man, definitely not a
woman and not a true hermaphrodite. What was she then? One or two people argued
that she had become a eunuch, an interesting idea considering that eunuchs were in
medieval Islamic societies precisely the persons who were permitted to travel
between the men's and the women's spheres and often were in charge of the
Harem [18] [#N18] . Consequently, if Sally was a eunuch she would be allowed to enter
both the male and the female Medical Faculty. Eunuchs were, however, not supposed
to dress up like women. Azhar took a much more negative stand: Sally was
fundamentally a khawwal, that is an effeminate man who is willing to play a passive,
female role in sexual intercourse with other men, a well-known term of abuse in
Egypt denoting the lowest and most despicable kind of manliness. The operation had
turned this khawwal (who was still a man) into an artificial woman. This was the
opposite of gendering: the surgeon had ungendered a gendered body, and this new
ungendered body was of a new type altogether, betwixt and between, equally
unacceptable in the girls' and in the boys' Medical Faculty, because it really had no
point of re-entry into social life. In an article in Rose al-Yussuf, cAbd Allah Mabruk
an-Najjar, teacher of Islamic law at al-Azhar, sets out to do what a medieval Islamic
legal scholar ( faqih) would have done: discussing the rules for this new case in
relation to engagement, marriage and so forth. Moreover, an-Najjar lists a number of
reasons why Sally (or rather: Sayyid) is liable to punishment from the point of view
of Islamic law: firstly, he made himself a hermaphrodite (and hermaphroditism is
punishable, because it leads to the abominable crime of homosexuality, which is "the
worst crime in which a society can become entangled"). Secondly, he made a doctor
of the type who is craving for fame mutilate him so that he became a deformed man,
—and mutilation of oneself is a crime according to Islamic law. Finally, this
deformation was made not in order that he could beget children, which is the proper
context of sexual desire,—but solely in order to indulge in sexual acts, and such a
marriage for sexual pleasure( zawaj mutca) is also illegal [19] [#N19] . There are thus
plenty of reasons why he should be punished from an Islamic point of view [20] [#N20] .

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 5/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

It is my impression that the Sally case provided an opportunity for so-called

"moderates" on the Islamic wing to enhance their Islamic credentials by opposing
the operation in an agitated fashion. This is most characteristic of the comments
made by these teachers at al-Azhar who fought to defend Azhar's position and
wanted Sally punished. This, I believe, is the main reason why the Sally case became
such a hot issue compared to other sex-change operations [21] [#N21] . Another reason is
Sally's age: she was no longer a minor. As argued by the Public Prosecutor, Sayyid
had been a grown-up student who had made a decision for himself after a
considerable period of reflection. To the Azhar conservatives, far from being an
argument, this was an aggravating circumstance: Sayyid had made a deliberate
choice on an issue where there ought to be no choice at all.
To the Islamic movement and its press, the case looked a little different. First of all,
there was nothing very surprising about it: sex-change operations were bound to
happen sooner or later, given the direction in which Egyptian society is moving. The
details of the case were of relatively minor interest since there would be little point in
just blaming Sally or her doctor, blamable though they might be. To the Islamists,
Sally was but a symptom of all the evils of Egyptian society today, a society which to
the more radical Islamic wing is simply anti-Islamic [ jahili]. The Islamic press was
therefore much less preoccupied with the Sally case as such, but occasionally it
referred to "the age of Sally" [22] [#N22] . Why is Sally an apt symbol of the evils of
society? Because she literally embodies all its evils. Consider the case from an
Islamist point of view: a fundamental difference between Islamic society and other,
especially Western societies, is the attitude to the sexes. While Islamic society, in
accordance with the Koran, maintains the fundamental difference and
complementarity of the sexes, this natural difference is blurred and denied in the
West. There, men have become effeminate and women masculine, due to the mixing
[ ikhtilat] of the sexes in schools, work and society at large, not to mention in the
Western indulgence in illicit sex [23] [#N23] . By contrast, in the virtuous Islamic society,
men's and women's worlds are separate, and strict rules regulate their co-existence.
The most important contacts between men and women take place inside the family,
and the only way of relating properly to a person of the other sex with whom one
does not share blood is through marriage. Outside these legal ways of interrelation
there are a number of illicit ways, the most grave of these being fornication [ zina], a
key concept of the Islamic movement's diagnosis of Egyptian society, since it is not
normally punished in Egypt, though being one of the five principal punishments [
hudud] mentioned in the Koran.
Sally's body, then, becomes the perfect symbol of what is wrong in our age, or even of
what has happened to the body of believers, the umma: here we have a Muslim youth
studying at the venerable Islamic Azhar university, who consults specialists of
Western psychology (one of them being a woman) and is told to follow his perverse
inclinations towards becoming a woman. Significantly, the names of the
psychologist, the surgeon and the anesthetist reveal that they are Christians [24] [#N24] .
The surgery (a technique imported from the West) is performed, and Sayyid changes
his Muslim male name into a non-Muslim female one. And what comes out is neither
male nor female, but something in between the two, a mix. Indeed, we live in "the
age of Sally" [ fi casr Sali] where men and women are mixed in all sorts of ways, due
to the Western corruption of Egypt: Sally is the literal embodiment of the Western
castration of Muslim society and culture. The "age of Sally"?reaction considers Sally
less of a criminal and more of a victim than does the Azhar reaction.

The Fatwa
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 6/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

Immediately after news had broken about the operation, Egypt's muftis were asked
for fatwas on the question. As we know, apart from the Mufti of the Republic, there
are the president of al-Azhar's Fatwa Council [ Lajnat al-Fatwa] and the mufti of the
High Council for Islamic Affairs [ al-Majlis al-Acla li sh-Shu'un al-Islamiya], who
publish their fatwas in the periodicals of these two institutions. The two former were
immediately consulted by the journalists, at a time when few details about Sally were
known, and both answered that sex-change surgery could be performed if the
medical experts assured that this was the only way whereby the patient might obtain
his true sex [25] [#N25] . The mufti of the High Council, however, did not publish a fatwa
until October l988, when he denounced the operation because it had transformed a
man into something neither man nor woman, but much akin to a hermaphrodite,
which was ironic since this was precisely the disease the doctor had purported to
cure [26] [#N26] .

As mentioned above, the Mufti of the Republic was consulted by the Doctors'
Syndicate in May l988 for a fatwa on the subject. Given the official inquiry, this
fatwa is much longer and better argued. It is reproduced below from the records of
the Mufti's Administration, the Dar al-Ifta: [27] [#N27]

FATWA ON SEX?CHANGE OPERATION JUNE 8, 1988

To the honored general secretary of the Doctors' General Syndicate.
This is an answer to the Syndicate's letter number 483 of May 14, 1988,
asking for the opinion of religion on the matter of a student of
medicine at the al-Azhar university, who has been subjected to a
surgical operation (removing his male organs) in order to turn him into
a girl.
We find that cUsama ibn Sharik tells: "A bedouin came to the Prophet
and said, 'O, Messenger of God, can you cure?' And He said, 'Yes, for
God did not send a disease without sending a cure for it, knowing it
from His knowledge...'" This [ hadith] is told by Ahmad [ibn Hanbal].
There is another version: "Some bedouins said, 'O, Messenger of God,
can you cure?'. And He said. 'Yes. God's servants can cure themselves,
for God never gave a disease without providing a cure or a medicine for
it, except for one disease.' They asked, 'O, Prophet of God, what disease
is that?' He said, 'old age.'" This version is related by ibn Maja abu
Da'ud, at-Tirmidhi, and others. ( Muntaqi l-Akhbar wa Sharhan nayl
al-Awtar, v. 8, p. 200, and Fath al-Bari bi Sharh Sahih al-Bukhari, by
al-cAsqalani [29] [#N29] , v. 9, p. 273, in the chapter on those who imitate
women).
As for the condemnation of those who by word and deed resemble
women, it must he confined to one who does it deliberately [
tacahhada dhalika], while one who is like this out of a natural
disposition must be ordered to abandon it, even if this can only be
achieved step by step. Should he then not comply, but persist [in his
manners], the blame shall include him, as well— especially if he
displays any pleasure in doing so.

The person who is by nature a hermaphrodite[ mukhannath khalqi] is

not to be blamed. This is based on [the consideration that] if he is not
capable of abandoning the female, swinging his hips in walking and
speaking in a feminine way, after having been subjected to treatment
against it, [he is at least willing to accept that] it is still possible for him
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 7/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

to abandon it, if only gradually. But if he gives up the cure with no good
excuse, then he deserves blame.
At-Tabari took it as an example that the Prophet (God bless him and
grant him salvation) did not forbid the hermaphrodite from entering
the women's quarters until he heard him giving a description of the
woman in great detail. Then he prohibited it. This proves that no blame
is on the hermaphrodite for simply being created that way.
That being so, the rulings derived from these and other noble hadiths
on treatment grant permission to perform an operation changing a
man into a woman, or vice versa, as long as a reliable doctor concludes
that there are innate causes in the body itself, indicating a buried [
matmura] female nature, or a covered [ maghmura] male nature,
because the operation will disclose these buried or covered organs,
thereby curing a corporal disease which cannot be removed, except by
this operation.
This is also dealt with in a hadith about cutting a vein, which is related
through Jabir: "The Messenger of God sent a physician to abu ibn
Kacb. The physician cut a vein and burned it." This hadith is related by
Ahmad [ ibn Hanbal] and Muslim. What supports this view is what al-
Qastallani [30] [#N30] and al-cAsqalani say in their commentaries on it:
"This means that it is incumbent upon the hermaphrodite to remove
the symptoms of femininity."
And this is further sustained by the author of Fath al-Bari who says
"...having given him treatment in order to abandon it..." This is a clear
proof that the duty prescribed for the hermaphrodite can take the form
of a treatment. The operation is such a treatment, perhaps even the
best treatment. This operation can not be granted at the mere wish to
change sex with no clear and convincing corporal motives. In that case
it would fall under that noble Hadith which al-Bukhari relates through
Anas: "The Messenger of God cursed the hermaphrodites among the
men and the over-masculine women, saying 'expel them from their
houses', whereupon the Prophet himself (God bless him and grant him
salvation) expelled one, and cUmar expelled another one." This Hadith
is related by Ahmad and al?Bukhari.
To sum up: It is permissible to perform the operation in order to reveal
what was hidden of male or female organs. Indeed, it is obligatory to do
so on the grounds that it must be considered a treatment, when a
trustworthy doctor advises it. It is, however, not permissible to do it at
the mere wish to change sex from woman to man, or vice versa. Praise
be to He who created, who is mighty and guiding. From what has been
said the answer to what was in the question will be known. Praise be to
God the most High.

This is a rather difficult fatwa, and so vague that both parties cited it in support of
their position, as we have seen. In order to make sense of it, we shall divide it into
sections.
The first part consists of various versions of a Hadith the meaning of which amounts
to the observation that there is a cure for every disease, and consequently also for
hermaphroditism. This is a standard introduction in Tantawi's medical fatwas: thus,

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 8/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

for instance in the fatwa from 1989 on organ transplantation [31] [#N31] . It reveals his
eagerness to support medical progress as long as it does not infringe on Islamic
moral principles.
Next, Tantawi discusses those men who resemble women, that is hermaphrodites.
Here he has consulted the various Hadiths on the subject, as they have been
recorded and commented upon by the famous Egyptian Hadith scholar ibn Hajar al-
cAsqalani (d. 1448). One particular Hadith is commented upon: it tells how a
hermaphrodite at the conquest of Ta'if promised to lead one of the warriors to a lady
who had four tyres of fat under her stomach and eight over her hips. When the
Prophet heard about this offer he forbade his wives ever to let a hermaphrodite into
their chambers [32] [#N32] . Following al-cAsqalani and at-Tabari (d. 923), Tantawi
deduces that since there was nothing wrong with the hermaphrodite until it was
discovered that he had been spying on the women, a hermaphrodite cannot be
blamed for being created as such. There are two different types of hermaphrodites,
those who are so by birth, and those who have acquired their manners. Both must be
told to strive to free themselves from the hermaphroditism, even if this will be a slow
process. They must not indulge in it.
Third, Tantawi concludes that hermaphroditism is something which must be cured,
if possible, and if a doctor asserts that a surgical operation is the only way to do it,
then he must go ahead and perform one, be it from man to woman, or vice versa.
Here he makes an interesting remark: what the doctor should be looking for are a
buried female or a covered male nature, which can then be brought to light by means
of the surgery. This amounts to saying that every human being has one true sex
which may be covered by limbs or organs belonging to the other sex. The truth,
however, is always underneath. Tantawi thus makes a distinction between an
outward appearance [ zahir], which may be deceptive and an inward essence[ batin]
which is always true—a well-known and important theme in Muslim culture [33] [#N33]
.
Fourth, a Hadith about the Prophet sending a physician to a man to cut a vein is
taken as evidence that removing parts of the body through surgery is permitted.
Combining this with ibn Hajar al-cAsqalani's remark that the hermaphrodite must
strive to abandon his state, Tantawi deduces that it is permissible to perform surgery
to remove limbs or organs which do not belong to the hermaphrodite's true sex.
As the fifth point, Tantawi finally relates the Hadith which seems to be most to the
point and according to which the Prophet cursed hermaphrodites and overly
masculine women and expelled one of them from his house. This Hadith, however, is
taken not to signify a general curse on hermaphrodites, but rather a prohibition
against performing a sex-change operation for the fun of it. It must be a treatment,
curing hermaphrodites by revealing their true sex. [34] [#N34]

What is Tantawi doing in this fatwa? Well, basically he is quoting a former Mufti of
the Republic, Jadd al-Haqq cAli Jadd al-Haqq, who issued a fatwa on sex-change
operations in response to an enquiry from the Malaysian Center for Islamic Research
in l981 [35] [#N35] . What, then, are they doing? They are not referring to the elaborate
fiqh discussions of hermaphrodites and the like, but they discuss some of the
Hadiths of the Prophet on the issue in order to come up with a new ruling on this
new phenomenon—which means in legal terms that they are practicing ijtihad.
There are around a handful of Hadiths dealing with hermaphroditism and
transvestitism, all apparently quite hostile towards them; in several of them the
Prophet expels the hermaphrodite to the desert. One of the first things to decide is
which of the Hadiths gives the most general rule. Tantawi and Jadd al-Haqq both
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 9/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

focus on the one where a hermaphrodite is expelled as a punishment for having

revealed the secrets of the harem and conclude that, inversely, if he had not done this
he would not have been expelled. From this they conclude that those who are
hermaphrodites by nature cannot be blamed for it, as long as they strive to rid
themselves of this ambiguity and move towards increased sexual inambiguity. If they
move in the other direction—that is towards ambiguity, indulging in their
hermaphroditism—then they are to blame and must be banished from the social
world.
Tantawi thus stresses that the correct position for a hermaphrodite is to be on the
move away from the hermaphroditic state, that is under treatment. Surgery is such a
treatment. In order to sustain the idea of the hermaphrodite being on the way either
further into or out of his state,—that is, hermaphroditism as a process—Tantawi
maintains the dogma that every human being has only one sex, which is its true sex.
In this way, hermaphroditism is reduced to being corporal and psychological
movements and manifestations denying this true sex. Consequently, the task of the
doctor will be to identify which of the ambivalent outward forms corresponds to the
true inner sex, which he describes as hidden, or covered. As mentioned, the task of
identifying the true, inward [ batin] essence behind misleading, outward [ zahir]
manifestations, is well-known to the Islamic tradition: that is also the concern of the
mystic, the philosopher, and possibly even the theologian. It is called ta'wil, a key
concept in the Islamic understanding of the search for truth. The search for the true
sex is a search for the truth about a human being. This idea is not altogether alien to
western thought, either. In the preface to the book Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B.,
Michel Foucault describes the shift in mentality when, with the break-through of the
medical sciences in the eighteenth century, the possibility of a body having two sexes
was abandoned and the idea of a true sex gained ground. One of the casualties in this
new and more rigid understanding of the true sex—and indeed of an intimate
relationship between sex (or gender) and truth—were the hermaphrodites who were
now all taken to be "pseudo hermaphrodites" [36] [#N36] .

Mufti Tantawi seems to be squarely on the side of medicine in this matter. Defending
a binary sexual system, he maintains that every human being has one sex and only
one. While to medieval Muslim jurists gendering was a way of eliminating
ungendered bodies, to Tantawi they simply cannot exist in the first place: the surgery
performed on Sayyid cAbd Allah was no 'gendering of an ungendered body', for such
a thing as an ungendered body does not exist. Rather, the surgery was a re-gendering
of a body whose sex had been socially and physically disguised but was nevertheless
not changed in the least by the operation: far from legalizing a sex-change operation,
Tantawi's fatwa denied the possibility of performing one altogether.

Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen is a research fellow at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute of

Near Eastern Studies, University of Copenhagen. He wrote his dissertation on the
office of the State Mufti in Egypt, and is currently at work on a project about
transformations in the Druze religion, in Lebanon and Syria, 1970-1995. The
following article appeared in the collection, Middle East Studies in Denmark, from
the Odense University Press.

1. Al-Ahram, April 4, 1988, p. 10 [#N1-ptr1]

2. Al-Ahram, April 6, 1988, p. 6 [#N2-ptr1]
3. Rose al-Yussuf, April 11, 1988, pp. 28-29 [#N3-ptr1]
4. Al-Ahram, April 24, 1988, p. 12 [#N4-ptr1]

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 10/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

5. Al-Ahram, June 17, 1988, p. 16 [#N5-ptr1]

6. This article is not about professional liability, but simply an article in the
chapter on murder, assault and battery. See, Qanun al-cuqubat wa l-qawanin
al-jina'iya al khassa (Cairo, 1983), p. 120 [#N6-ptr1]
7. Al-Ahram, November 29, 1988, p. 10 [#N7-ptr1]
8. Al-Ahram, November 11, 1988, p. 10 [#N8-ptr1]
9. The report has been published: an-Niyaba al-cAmma: Min mudhakkarat an-
niyaba al-camma. M ajallat Hay'at Qadaya ad-Dawla 35, (4), 1991:159-69.
The Public Prosecutor stresses that al-Azhar did not take psychology into
account, and the Doctors' Syndicate never examined Sally itself [#N9-ptr1]
10. Al-Ahram, November 8, 1988, p. 13 [#N10-ptr1]
11. Al-Ahram, December l, 1988, p. 18 [#N11-ptr1]
12. Al-Ahram, July 3, 1991, p. 1 [#N12-ptr1]
13. This is in Rose al-Yussuf, May 9, 1988, where Dr. Samiya at-Timtami, Head of
the Department for Human Heredity of the National Research Center, explains
the different kinds of hermaphroditism [#N13-ptr1]
14. Al-Ahram, May 25, 1988, p. 7 [#N14-ptr1]
15. Al-Ahram, May 31, 1988, p. 11 [#N15-ptr1]
16. Paula Sanders, "Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval
Islamic Law," in Women in Middle Eastern History, Ed. Keddie & Baron (New
Haven, 1991), 74-95 [#N16-ptr1]
17. Al-Ahram, April 4, 1988, p. 10 [#N17-ptr1]
18. On eunuchs, see the article "On the Eunuchs in Islam" in David Ayalon,
Outsiders in the Lands of Islam (London, 1988), pp. 67-124 [#N18-ptr1]
19. According to the Sunnis. This marriage of limited duration is permissible
according to Shica law [#N19-ptr1]
20. "The boy Sally is an artificial female". cAbd Allah Mabruk an-Najjar, Rose al-
Yussuf, April 11, 1988, pp. 28-29 [#N20-ptr1]
21. This was also suggested by Professor Sacid cAbd al-cAzim. "A quiet, scientific
view on the case of sex-change surgery," al-Ahram, May 25, 1988 [#N21-ptr1]
22. See e.g. ash-Shacb, April 26, 1988, p. 12, on "Art in the age of Sally".
[#N22-ptr1]
23. It should be noted that Orientalism has had the reverse image of the Orient as
transsexual and hermaphroditic: men in long dresses all-too willingly indulging
in homosexual intercourse, etc. See Marjorie Garber, "The Chic of Araby:
Transvestitism, Transsexualism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation," in
Body Guards, edited by Epstein & Staub (London, 1991). [#N23-ptr1]
24. It must be said that I have not come across any reference to the fact that the
doctors were Christians [#N24-ptr1]
25. Al-Ahram, April 4, 1988, p. l0 (Dr. cAbd Allah al-Mashadd, president of the
Azhar Fatwa Council); Al-Ahram, April 9, 1988, p. l (Dr. Sayyid Tantawi, Mufti
of the Republic). [#N25-ptr1]
26. Minbar al-Islam, October 1988, p. 132 (Mufti cAtiya Saqr). April 9, 1988, p. l
(Dr. Sayyid Tantawi. Mufti of the Republic). . [#N26-ptr1]
27. Dar al-Ifta record vol. 118, pp. 290-92 [#N27-ptr1]
28. I believe that the work referred to is Nayl al-Awtar min asrar fi sharh
Muntaqa l-Akhbar, by the Yemini scholar ash-Shawkani (d. 1832)
29. Al-cAsqalani, also known as ibn Hajar, Cairo (d. 1448) [#N29-ptr1]

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 11/12
12/27/2019 Sex Change in Cairo: Gender and Islamic Law

30. Al-Qastalani ash-Shafici. Egyptian scholar (d. 1517). The work referred to here
is probably Irshad as-sari fi sharh al-Bukhari [#N30-ptr1]
31. Printed in Tantawi Muhammad Sayyid: al-Fatawa ash-sharciya. Cairo.
Mu'assasat al-Ahram. 1989. p. 45 [#N31-ptr1]
32. This Hadith is related and commented upon in great detail in al-cAsqalani ibn
Hajar: Fath al-bari bi sharh al-bukhari (Bulaq, 1882), vol. 9. pp. 291-94
[#N32-ptr1]
33. Support for this theory may be found in e.g. Nikki Keddie, "Symbol and
Sincerity in Islam," Studia Islamica XIX, 1963: 27-64; and Leo Strauss,
Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Illinois, 1952) [#N33-ptr1]
34. al-cAsqalani, ibn Hajar: Fath al-bari bi sharh al-bukhari (Bulaq, 1882), vol. 9.
p. 492 [#N34-ptr1]
35. Record 115, number 132. This fatwa has been published in Dar al-Ifta: al-
Fatawa al-islamiya (Cairo, 1980-93), vol. 10. pp. 3501-03 [#N35-ptr1]
36. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. (Paris. 1978). This is the
story of a girl, Alexina, growing up in a completely female environment, the
convent school in the mid-nineteenth century, who at the age of eighteen was
'discovered' to be a man and forced to undergo a juridical sex-change.
Interestingly, a similar story of a girl growing up in a female environment until
the age of eighteen when she was 'discovered' and underwent sex-change
surgery was reported by the Egyptian media in the summer of 1993. See al-
Ahram, June l2, 1993. p. 7 [#N36-ptr1]

Hosted by Michigan Publishing, a division of the University of Michigan Library.

For more information please contact mpub-help@umich.edu.
Print ISSN: 1074-9055 • Online ISSN: 1558-741X

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.302?view=text;rgn=main 12/12