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Palgrave Studies
in Gender and Education

Exploring
Contemporary
Issues in Sexuality
Education with
Young People
Theories in Practice

Kathleen Quinlivan
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education

Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly
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der and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is
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include pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’ and
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and staff; trajectories and intersectional inequalities including race, class,
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scapes; diversity and difference, including institutional (schools, colleges,
universities), locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions);
varied global activism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public uni-
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continuing critical shift of gender and feminism within (and beyond) the
academy.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14626
 Kathleen Quinlivan

Exploring
Contemporary Issues
in Sexuality
Education with
Young People
Theories in Practice
Kathleen Quinlivan
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

ISSN 2524-6445     ISSN 2524-6453 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
ISBN 978-1-137-50104-2    ISBN 978-1-137-50105-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50105-9

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 To all the researchers, teachers, and young people, who together,
experiment and grapple with what more sexuality and relationships
education can become.
 Foreword

In this Foreword for Kathleen Quinlivan’s broad and deep look at sex
education as it is practiced, I don’t want to re-describe what she is doing,
as she has clearly provided that roadmap in her introduction. Nor will I
explain her approach in each chapter, depriving the reader of any glorious
discoveries herself. Instead I will follow Quinlivan’s own urging to focus
on affective interconnections and assemblages, and to speak to what I’ve
learned and what I too have experienced and felt in the everyday lives of
students in sex education classes. I do so as a psychologist, with all the
limitations of that particular formal training, but also as a sex educator, a
theorist, and – why not? – as someone who listens to jazz. There is some-
thing about Quinlivan’s take on rhizomatic education and her openness
to what is referred to as “molecular flights” – the need to always leave
open a plot of land – that has reminded me of jazz. And, as Quinlivan
invites the reader and her students to follow this kind of flight as well as
any spontaneous connections, I find myself taking that particular path.
A book needs to be organized, sentence following the sentence before,
paragraphs bridged by transitions, chapters logically sequenced. No
poetry. Perhaps a few images, snuck in if the press will permit because
they are indeed expensive. The Foreword fits into the structure of a book
as a guard at the gate, the emcee, the hostess opening the door at a dinner
party and taking your coat, the welcoming committee. But if we under-
stand Quinlivan’s urgings towards reconsidering and then opening up
vii
viii Foreword

normative practice, this author of the Foreword might do none of those

or all of those.
Jazz pieces have structure, and within them, from start to finish, bits of
structure, performed and undone. A jazz melody has a beginning, mid-
dle, and end, although it doesn’t have to end or begin as planned, but at
the heart of jazz are the riffs. These become the piece and take you to
unexpected places, returning you to a theme that can be heard differently
having taken the journey sideways and sometimes backwards – and then
again, forward. A jazz riff surprises like when affect evoked and even felt
in the body of a student or a teacher in a sex education class, felt in a way
that could disrupt the structure of the class. Riffs invent new tunes
sparked by a melody, evoke contrasting feelings or perspectives as they
draw attention to a bass line here, and a chord structure there. The uncer-
tainty in improvisation is itself an affect that I sense Quinlivan is urging
us to embrace. And so my first riff will be on affect, affect in the class-
room, and affect around “failure.”

Affect and Failure

Affect is positioned in this book and then questioned as something for-
gotten and forbidden, something to be controlled, especially in schools.
Sex Education is presented as the subject in schools that is most likely to
arouse affect. Every morning my “google alert” based on the words “sex
education” sends me 3 or 4 articles from all over the world that either tells
me that sex education is dangerous, or that it is necessary but at risk of
being forbidden. It is well known that sex education arouses fear in
administrators and parents. So let’s riff on fear.
While we tend to see adolescents as brave explorers in this world, pro-
jecting our utopian hopes and delights in sex on them, we must be careful
not to deny them their fears, disappointments, and other negative affect.
They are – must be – afraid, also. Consider the boy Justin who appears in
an early chapter and how he might have been afraid. In other words,
when we call bullies “cowards,” we might have something there. Justin,
after a course questioning heteronormativity, a course meant to enlighten
and change youths towards a more just and inclusive attitude with regard
 Foreword ix

to their non-heterosexual peers, makes a bullying statement to a pre-

sumed gay peer. Quinlivan interprets this moment, at first, as a reversal,
a disappointment, a failure. The teachers, including Quinlivan, are
demoralized, angry, fearful that their approach hasn’t worked. The stu-
dents deny the affect that is palpable to the teachers. They are dismissive
of Justin’s statement which only serves to reinforce the feeling of failure
in the teachers. But if one follows all affects into new territories and old,
Justin might have been afraid. He might have been afraid of the feelings
evoked by the almost nude man in the ad the class considered, curiosity,
perhaps even desire. Isn’t that what an advertisement seeks to evoke in an
underwear ad when using oiled and buff men? Desire? To have him (the
man in the ad)? To be him? And then to buy some underwear? And might
Justin also be afraid that in the kill-or-be-killed jungle high school, that
if he did not attack first, he might be attacked? Might he also have been
afraid of the affects evoked in analysis, of a boy taking this seriously, of
being interested. If a boy is too interested, too eager, is he not a girl? A
generation of Harry Potter readers know that the girl is supposed to be
the eager student, the Hermione.
I know the tension Quinlivan speaks of well. In my own sexual ethics
class, after lessons on coercion and consent, a girl of color led the class in
blaming a young woman or girl featured in a story for her own rape given
she had been drinking. She was not respectable, she should have known
better, she will learn a good lesson from this. Why hadn’t she learned the
message of solidarity with other girls? Why was she holding herself and
inviting the other girls in the class to position themselves in a superior
position to the hypothetical drunk girl at a party. In the end I understood
that to talk about rape in a co-ed classroom was to make the girls feel
vulnerable. They needed to reassert themselves as invulnerable, and not
rapeable, particularly in front of the boys in the class.
This “failure” is revisited in Chap. 4 where Quinlivan maps the stu-
dents’ conversations through a process that elucidates the affects,
exchanges, and molecular “flights” between them. Rather than returning
to a power dynamic which always places girls on the bottom and boys on
top, positioning teachers as all knowing or inept, she steps out of these
constructions and discusses the affect produced by the boys, the girls, and
in herself. Rather than presenting the classroom as chaos, she follows and
x Foreword

alerts the reader to various affective flows, the spontaneity, and the sur-
prise, foreshadowing her Chap. 5 in which the Rhizome becomes the
metaphor for all that happens within the classroom and all that is felt
within.
Bodies and affects are never separated for Quinlivan and it is clear in
so many ways that the students in her class are aroused! But aroused in
what way? Through the possibility of dreaming new worlds (Munoz
2009), queer worlds? She writes of the “embodied expressions of pleasure
and exhilaration” that speak to the “joyful possibility of a utopic queerly
carnivalesque future” ever mindful that these arousals to dream big come
with big risks of disappointment. Of course, the promise of a full gaze
into the sex education classroom is the promise of all affect – even those
harder to touch affects like jealousy and hate.

Everyday Lives
And now a personal riff. As a teacher for 16 years now steeped in current
theories, Quinlivan does the invaluable polyphonic work of bringing
together theories and practice and does so not only to illuminate theory
but at times to destroy it, mindful always of Gilbert’s (2014) urgings to
make use of failure. Isn’t that just like jazz? Where there’s a theory that is
treasured and destroyed in the making? A melody made unrecognizable?
The focus on everyday lives is a reminder to scholars to put their theo-
ries to work and to make them work. In honoring youths as having every-
day lives, seeing their strengths, destabilizing their positions as learners,
Quinlivan recognizes the power they possess in activism, the way stu-
dents can lead us, rather us them. This is not a new idea. It’s been around
since at least the revolution of the 60s, represented by the book Summerhill,
when educators insisted on discussion circles, open classrooms, student
choice, and student presentations, democratizing the classroom and
unwittingly opening its arms to the current neoliberal reclaiming of such.
Today this honoring of youth and their “choices” is hard to theorise from
only a democratic education perspective. Students’ everyday lives are full
of their need to act, be, and engage and there comes Quinlivan’s honoring
and following their lead. Thankfully, in this volume, we are spared the
 Foreword xi

neoliberal chatter of students emphasizing their individual choices. And

we can lose ourselves in example after example of students finding their
freedom in community.
As I write young people in the U.S. are marching on Washington for
better gun laws, the purported entitlement of adolescents being put to
good use in activism. Teens from the Florida school in Parkland where 17
people were shot to death by a former student the education system had
failed, called for this march and hundreds of thousands of teens followed.
They are doing activism differently and surprisingly. For example, they
come out and say that politicians are trying to give them money in
exchange for publicity. They name the attempts to profit from their
voices. And they refuse it, exposing the structure of a corrupt system
whereby people make money from youths’ idealism. This march, along
with Quinlivan’s narrative and photos of her students’ activism, lead me
to ask, to what extent do we underestimate our own influences and
entanglements with youth? How do we allow them to find that small plot
of land to develop on their own?
And while I see the “group as a beautiful, aesthetic, affective and rela-
tional site of learning within the school” and, this group of teens protest-
ing, or Quinlivan’s group of adolescents, I have a reminder. While holding
precious, and treasuring youth, a lovely affect for both groups to share
(adults and teens). We should remember they can also be a pain! When I
behold their activism, I hope they are a pain in their legislators’ sides.
Tomorrow I may wish they are not such a pain in my classroom.
The events staged by Quinlivan’s group are characterised by affective
and relational expressions of humour, pleasure and quirkiness. Initiatives
such as the planting of a blossoming ‘Diversity tree’ within the grounds
of Tui High School humorously challenges and re-signifies deficit con-
structions of its label as a ‘lesbian’ tree at another school where such a tree
was originally planted.
The book’s look at the everyday lives of students promises to cut
through the positions of honoring affect as well as the chaos. One stu-
dent, Ruby, suggests that students value each other for ‘who’ rather than
‘what’ you they are in the RDG and that this can cultivate the emergence
of more holistic ‘beautiful’ subjects. Looking at people holistically is at
the heart of humanism. And in these moments, any posthumanism
xii Foreword

t­heorizing is sidelined by the everyday thinking and desires of the stu-

dents in all their particularity. Such statements from her students chal-
lenge the new materialism perspectives of the later chapters. There is
nothing post-­humanist about this. It is a reclaiming of humanism in the
face of neoliberalism and financialization of being.

Porn

And finally a riff on pornography. How does a sex educator compete

with pornography? How does the sex educator who ironically may have
seen far less of it than her students address the questions and issues porn
raises? Quinlivan has an answer and that is that looking at pornography
from unexpected angles enables more expansive possibilities to be con-
sidered than the positions of bad for us vs good for us, harmful/not
harmful. Coming in ‘slantwise’ as Ahmed (2006) suggests, or ‘coming in
sideways’ as Ivinson and Renold (2013) write allows for something new
to emerge.
Quinlivan asks students to look at art. Eschewing Courbet’s “Origin of
the World,” perhaps the porn of its day, she brings in paintings by Linda
James that students can engage with, paintings that capture something
about the eyes of the women posing in typical pornography. The art pro-
duces, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call deterritorialising affective
flows which can create possibilities for new and different responses to the
commodification of sexualities.
Through these paintings student engage with the commodification of
sex, undistracted by the commodification of sex in pornography. They
give students pause to uncover the implications of pornography in their
lives.
I take flight now to Austin Texas, reminded of the Arterotica show I
attended, put together to raise money for “friends and neighbors living
with HIV and AIDS, to help them in times of crisis, to pay for food, rent,
utilities, eyeglasses, and medicine not covered by health insurance”
(http://octopusclub.org/event/arterotica-2018/). The event, put on by
the Octopus Club, is 100% volunteer. Artists donate art and arrive as art.
 Foreword xiii

The drinks are free and paintings transform themselves from art to porn
and back again. Funny, shocking, inspiring, and ridiculous, the event
commodifies as it fights commodification and connects sellers and buyers
to the neighbors and friends that the government does not take care of.
An alternative community where the outrage of a piece that one doesn’t
care to look at reminds one, in context, of the outrage of health policy in
the US.
Quinlivan shows students James’ art, women posing as if in ads, as if
in porn. She writes that looking at this art gets at the heart of vulnerabil-
ity around sexuality and even around pornography. The fact that porn-­
like art can evoke surprising affects, makes it a humanistic project. Like a
molecular flight, like a reversal of a theme in jazz, it calls into question the
original purpose of the art, or porn. The original purpose of porn, to
primarily invoke a physical desire, is undone or made a small part of the
discussion of sex, pornography – what is human about looking, about
posing, about sex.

No More Riffing

As Quinlivan writes about rhizomes and posthumanism, she continues to
turn back into the lived experience of the classroom: “I feel uncomfort-
ably like a ‘stranger in a strange land’, and my ‘ineptitude’ in that space
produces students as authoritative guides. Connecting to broader sexual-
ity education assemblages over time, we are entangled together in ways
that, in some moments, appear to open us to myriad possibilities.”
The boring same old arguments of sexuality education, good or bad,
preventative or harmful, effective or not, can’t be where we as sex educa-
tors and theorists remain. It makes the fight the center of sexuality educa-
tion rather than the sex or the pleasure or the relationships. Like Quinlivan
we must move sideways and look at things slantwise, to include in sexual-
ity education the myriad of possibilities and connections that may change
not only how we conceptualise sex, but human. What Quinlivan has to
offer us lies in her statements about the “inseparability of theories in
practice” and how everyday lives of adolescents illuminate theory, destroy
xiv Foreword

our best theories, and suggest new ones. As in this book, we will then
open ourselves up to that which is “liberating, and exhilarating, especially
perhaps, in these constraining neoliberal times.”
Enjoy this exciting and rich volume.

Boston, MA, USA Sharon Lamb

References
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others.
Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: The Athione Press.
Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2013). Subjectivity, Affect and Place: Thinking with
Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs to Explore a Young Girl’s
Becomings in a Post-industrial Locale. Subjectivity, 6(4), 369–390.
Munoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
New York: New York University Press.
 Acknowledgements

To my mother Audrey, my first and best teacher, for her enquiring mind,
her passion for education, and her unflinching and ongoing support for
my endeavours from the very beginning. To Linda, for her intellectual
rigour and keen interest in understanding the way that worlds’ work, and
what creative labour can make possible in terms of doing them differently.
Thank you for your intellectual, emotional, and domestic support in
helping me seeing this project to fruition. Undertaking academic work
always involves standing on other people’s shoulders, and for this I am
grateful to Jean, Elody, MaryLou, Louisa, Jen, Jessica, Shanee, and also to
Sharon for her thoughtful and lively Foreword.
Versions of chapters from this book have been originally published
elsewhere. The author and publisher wish to thank the following for their
permission to reproduce copyright material.
Taylor and Francis for material from
Quinlivan, K., Allen, L., & Rasmussen, M. (2013). Afterword(s):
Engaging with the Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education: Affordances
and Provocations. In L. Allen, ML Rasmussen, & K. Quinlivan (Eds.),
The Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education: Pleasure Bound (pp. 186–
194). Routledge: New York.
Peter Lang Publishing for material from

xv
xvi Acknowledgements

Quinlivan, K. (2014). “Butterflies Starting a Tornado”. The Queer

‘Not Yet’ of a New Zealand School Based Queer Straight Alliance as a
Utopic Site of Learning. In E. Meyer & D. Carlson (Eds.), Gender and
Sexualities in Education: A Reader (pp. 272–283). New York: Peter Lang
Publishing.
 Contents


Introduction: Contemporary Issues in Sexuality
and Relationships Education with Young People: Theories
in Practice   1


Chapter 1 Queerly Affective Failure as a Site of Pedagogical
Possibility in the Sexuality Education Classroom  35

Chapter 2 “An Epidemic of Love”: Drawing on Students’

Lived Experiences of Challenging Hetero and Gender
Normalcy to Engage with Sexual and Gender Diversity
in the Classroom  67

Chapter 3 Engaging with the Politics of Porn: Coming

in ‘Slantwise’ with Contemporary Art in the Sexuality
Education Classroom  87


Chapter 4 Reconfiguring Sexuality Education
as an Assemblage: Exploring Affective Becomings in a
Research ‘Classroom’ 113

xvii
xviii Contents


Chapter 5 The Art of the Possible: Reconceptualising
Sexuality Education as Rhizomatic Experimentation 143


Afterword: Engaging with Theories in Practice in the
Sexuality and Relationships Education Classroom – Some
Ways Forward 177

Index 185
 List of Figures

Image 2.1 Mask parade photo 78

Image 3.1 ‘Out of the Chaos: Precious Lives, Love Song 2’ by Linda
James, 2007. Acrylic and oil on canvas 520 × 595 (Collection
of the artist) 100
Image 3.2 ‘Out of the Chaos: Precious Lives, Love Song 4’ by Linda
James, 2007. Acrylic and oil on canvas 750 × 595 (Collection
of the artist) 101

xix
 Introduction: Contemporary Issues
in Sexuality and Relationships
Education with Young People: Theories
in Practice

This book suggests approaches to learning and teaching sexuality and

relationships education in the high school classroom that can engage
more fully with the ways in which contemporary sexuality and gender
issues are being played out in diverse young people’s everyday lives. It
utilises a range of current theoretical and pedagogical perspectives to
explore how the sexuality and relationships education classroom can be
made more meaningful and relevant for students through foregrounding
their lived experiences, and exploring the diverse range of ways in which
they are already pursuing and imagining new horizons. While such an
approach has been advocated by sexuality education researchers for a long
period of time, classroom programmes continue to struggle with such an
orientation. As Graeme, a Year 9 high school student reminded me:

Graeme: you don’t really talk about relationships and that [in Health]…
Kathleen: … where do you learn …get that knowledge from, where does it
come from that that’s what you want?
Graeme: Oh I guess sort of like past relationships I’ve had and stuff…
[that I] don’t sort of want to really rush it and stuff, you always
[need to] take time and stuff.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. Quinlivan, Exploring Contemporary Issues in Sexuality Education with Young People,
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50105-9_1
2 K. Quinlivan

Kathleen: Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it? …you learn how to have relation-
ships having relationships?
Graeme: Yeah…
(Graeme, Year 9, f to f individual interview, November 30th,
2011)

Graeme’s approach to learning about how to have intimate relationships

makes perfect educational sense, As I get older, it’s certainly one that I would
concur with myself. And yet, for a range of complex and multifaceted rea-
sons sexuality and relationship education programmes find it challenging
to follow Graeme’s lead. I suggest that these challenges have left school
based sexuality and relationship programmes in something of a hiatus, and
that it may be timely to reimagine what more sexuality and relationships
education could become. To that end, I suggest that teachers and research-
ers working together can develop an awareness of the inseparability of the
extent to which theories in practice shape pedagogical practices in the
classroom, and the potential that contemporary theories hold for experi-
menting with what sexuality and relationships education ‘otherwise’ could
look and feel like. It must be acknowledged that foregrounding students’
lived experiences in the classroom requires a significant curricular and
pedagogical reconceptualization of teaching and learning about sexualities
and relationships, and of ‘common sense’ binary understandings of theo-
ries and practices. However, I suggest such approaches have the potential
to make sexuality education more meaningful for young people, and bet-
ter equip them to engage with, and more thoughtfully negotiate, contem-
porary sexuality and gender politics in their everyday lives.
In many ways this book documents what I have learnt about teaching
and learning with young people in schools through becoming a sexuality
education researcher in schools. After sixteen years as a high school
English teacher, I returned (nervously) to university in 1996 to learn how
to undertake research because I wanted to document the experiences of
young lesbian and bisexual students and teachers in high schools, and
experiment with what might be possible in terms of affirming sexual
diversity within them. Becoming a researcher after having taught in the
classroom for sixteen years has enabled me to engage with schooling
worlds from the outside in, instead of from the inside out, however my
 Introduction: Contemporary Issues in Sexuality… 3

teacher and researcher selves continue to inextricably intertwine with

each other as I continue to research with young people. Exposure to dif-
ferent ways of conceptualising differences and schooling, and experi-
menting with their pedagogical implications, has opened me up to
consider broader possibilities for what schooling encounters could
become. Over time I have begun to see that how worlds and everyday
realities are conceptualised and understood, will affect possibilities for
acting and engaging within them. I continue to find a range of inter-­
related ways of understanding and engaging with worlds generative in my
research with young people, and with teachers in schools. Becoming
aware of the often unacknowledged theories in practice shaping pedago-
gies/ methodologies as a teacher educator, lecturer and researcher, and
exploring what happens when putting a range of theories to work (Mazzei
& Johnson, 2012) with young people in research encounters, has encour-
aged me to experiment with ‘what else’ might be possible working with
young people. While as a researcher I am usually seen as a ‘knowledgeable
adult’ in schools by both students and teachers (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010), I
recognise that the demands placed on me differ from those of a classroom
teacher. However, seeing my ongoing researching experiences with both
students and teachers as sites of teaching and learning has provided
opportunities for exploring what more sexuality education could be if
teachers and researchers were to work more closely together with students
in schools to unpack tacit theories in practice, and their effects, and
experiment with exploring other conceptual frameworks in practice
(Ibid., 2009). What I have learnt from those (frequently discombobulat-
ing!) experiences are reflected in this book.
In the first part of this introduction I acknowledge the contested nature
of school-based sexuality education programmes in schools, and the
issues they inevitably raise in schools. Following that I highlight several
contemporary sexuality and relationship issues affecting young people,
and outline how research that utilises contemporary theory to engage
with young people’s lived experiences of sexualities and relationships can
be helpful in informing approaches to teaching and learning in the class-
room. In the final section I introduce how each of the book chapters and
the Afterword speak to the major theme of the book; how researchers and
teachers working together can create an awareness of the implications of
4 K. Quinlivan

theories underlying practices in the sexuality education classroom, and

experiment with using current sociological and philosophical theories to
explore contemporary issues in sexualities and relationships affecting
young people, through foregrounding students’ lived experiences.

 chool Sexuality Education Programmes

S
as Contested Sites
There are many paradoxes surrounding the provision of sexuality educa-
tion programmes in schools. It is globally accepted that young people
have a right to school-based sexuality education (WHO, 2010), and
there is general consensus from a public health perspective that school
programmes can play an important role in providing a reasonably safe
environment for legitimating learning about sexualities and relationships
amongst a diverse range of students, and in the wider school community.
Sexuality education programmes in schools are also often more intensive
and consistently structured than informal forms of sexuality education,
and are more likely to have been based on research and tested through
programme evaluations (Thomas & Aggleton, 2016). Despite the effec-
tiveness of school based sexuality education programmes from public
health perspectives, ongoing sociological and educational research sug-
gests that school based programmes have struggled over a long period of
time to bridge the gap between official sexuality education and diverse
young people’s lived experiences (Alldred & David, 2007; Allen, 2011;
Carmody, 2009; Fields, 2008; Fine, 1992; Kehily, 2002; McLelland &
Fine, 2014). Given the often controversial and highly contested role that
sexuality education plays within normalising school cultures, this should
not be surprising. As Gilbert (2014) suggests, sexualities will always push
schooling to its limits, and schooling will inevitably (but never totally be
successful in its attempts to) manage and contain sexuality. So how can
this conundrum be accounted for?
Foregrounding students’ everyday lived experiences of sexualities, rela-
tions, and gender politics challenges fundamental tenets that both his-
torically and currently have informed the conceptualisation and
enactment of both progressive and abstinence school based sexuality
 Introduction: Contemporary Issues in Sexuality… 5

e­ducation programmes. Prioritising the lived experiences of students

such as Graeme in the sexuality education classroom upends taken for
granted unspoken ‘rules’ of youth sexualities education and public school-
ing. Legitimating young people’s sexualities and relationships privileges
‘youth’ over ‘adult’ ways of knowing (Robinson, 2013), and involves
undertaking the challenging work of legitimating the traditionally deval-
ued knowledges of students’ bodies and emotions, rather than developing
safer and more privileged intellectual knowledges (Paechter, 2004). Such
orientations challenge powerful discourses of scientific rationality which
have historically informed sexuality education – namely that adults pro-
viding students with the correct and accurate information will enable
young people to make the ‘right’ healthy choices (Britzman, 2010; Fields,
2008; Fox & Alldred, 2013; Leahy, Burrows, McCuiag, Wright, & Penny,
2016; Lesko, 2010). Despite longstanding and ongoing research that
speaks to the inadequacy of that proposition (Allen, 2011; Alldred &
David, 2007; Fine, 1988; Kehily, 2002; McLelland & Fine, 2014), ongo-
ing contested debates related to what knowledges about sexuality educa-
tion are deemed suitable for what age group, and schools’ public roles in
what has been seen historically as the private family sphere of sexuality
education persist (Blake & Aggleton, 2017). The “charged emotional ter-
rain of teaching and learning in schools” (Gilbert, 2014, p. x) speaks to a
fundamental tension that exists between the wildness and unpredictabil-
ity of sexuality, and the attempts of schools to contain it. Informed by
adult/child, public/private binaries, the contested nature of school based
sexuality education programmes will inevitably continue to provoke
broader social anxieties. Having already decided what adults think stu-
dents need to know in most cases, and largely concentrating on the sub-
jectivities of students as they emerge within the classroom, young people
are largely expected to leave their lives outside the door (Fine &
McClelland, 2006; Ivinson & Renold, 2013a).
Anxieties about youth ‘at risk’ have been exacerbated in a neoliberal era
of commodification and consumption where digital technologies and
social media have become significant sites for learning about sexualities,
genders and relationships for young people outside school. Widening the
divide between official sex education and the lived experiences of ­students
(Ringrose, 2016), moral panics in relation to the perceived sexualisation
6 K. Quinlivan

of youth have resulted in a renewed call for school based sexuality educa-
tion programmes to provide the ‘right’ (adult) information to ‘correct’
these flammable issues (Garland-Levett, 2017; McLelland & Fine, 2014).
Sensationalist media reporting has exacerbated the issues, fueling neo-
conservative backlashes (Fitzpatrick & Powell, 2016).1 Such responses
have made the development of sexuality education curriculum pro-
grammes to address contemporary sexuality issues that young people are
negotiating both challenging and fraught (Fitzpatrick & Powell, 2016;
Renold, Egan, & Ringrose, 2015; Ringrose, 2016), and government’s
cautious and risk averse (Fitzpatrick & Powell, 2016; Ringrose, 2016).2
The pressure to get sexuality and relationships education ‘right’ is
intensified by neoliberal schooling contexts which are driven by assess-
ment, measurement and academic achievement, and underpinned by dis-
courses of intellectual technocratic rationality (Biesta, 2010; Elliott,
2014; Ivinson & Renold, 2013a; Quinlivan, 2017; Quinlivan, Rasmussen,
Aspin, Allen, & Sanjakdar, 2014). Classrooms driven by standards based
assessment, and individualistic notions of individual self maximization
and competition (Elliott, 2014; Quinlivan, 2017; Quinlivan et al., 2014)
make it challenging to engage with the feelings of vulnerability, uncer-
tainty and ambiguity that lived experiences of sexualities and relation-
ships evoke (Gilbert, 2014). Engaging in such affective labour challenges
traditional conceptualizations of rational intellectual classroom knowl-
edge, in particular the Cartesian privileging of the intellect and the mind
over bodies and emotion, and demands different orientations to
­knowledges of sexualities and relationships (Britzman, 2010; Gilbert,
2014; Lesko, 2010; Paechter, 2004; Quinlivan, 2013). The neo-liberal
classroom makes for a challenging context in which to develop and build
a climate of trust and interdependence necessary to undertake such sexu-
ality education and develop such dispositions (Lamb, 2013).
These difficulties are intensified by the historically marginalised status
of Health and sexuality education as subjects within the broader school
curriculum (Leahy et al., 2016; Tasker, 2004). As a component of the
Health curriculum, sexuality education is compulsory in state schools in
New Zealand only up to Year 10. While it is recommended that schools
allocate fourteen hours a year for effective sexuality education (Education
Review Office, 2007), it was noted that yearly time allocations for the
 Introduction: Contemporary Issues in Sexuality… 7

subject were substantially lower than that figure. Overall the 2007 ERO
report found that the majority of sexuality education programs were not
meeting diverse students’ needs effectively, or adequately assessing learn-
ing in sexuality education. In an era of intense market competition
between schools, the ongoing and complex range of issues that contrib-
ute to the contested nature of school based sexuality education, produces
nervousness in curriculum developers, governments, teachers and school
communities alike (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009; Education Review
Office, 2007; Quinlivan, 2017; Ringrose, 2016).
The considerable challenges and constraints facing school based sex-
uality education programmes in schools mean that it is perhaps easier
to critique their limitations than to imagine ways of engaging differ-
ently within them (Leahy et al., 2016; Wright, 2014). While recognis-
ing that there are no simple panaceas for this complex set of
circumstances, I suggest that it may be timely to consider ways in which
teaching and learning about sexuality with young people could respond
differently to contemporary issues of sexuality and relationships affect-
ing young people, both in terms of curriculum content and pedagogical
practices. Such a substantial undertaking requires a conceptual (un)
learning of sorts – of how sexuality education is understood, of teachers
and students as knowers, of the privileging of facts and the cognitive
over feelings and emotions, of ‘achievement’ and ‘ability’, and of the
individual over the relational within the admittedly normalising cul-
tures of classrooms and schools (Talburt, 2009; Youdell, 2011). In the
face of such complexities and demands, possibilities for conceptualising
and practising in the sexuality education classroom ‘otherwise’, are
worthy of consideration. While conceptually challenging, I suggest that
teachers and researchers working together could explore the implica-
tions of the theories in practice that are informing current approaches
to sexuality education, and then together experiment with the effects of
putting contemporary theories in practice in order to both understand
and negotiate diverse young people’s lived experiences of sexualities,
genders and relationships. Such approaches could be helpful in provid-
ing alternative directions that sexuality education programmes can
move in, and exploring pedagogical orientations for effecting such
experimental shifts.
8 K. Quinlivan

Having been both a secondary school teacher and now a teacher

educator and a researcher working in schools, my work continues to
involve working to unpack tacit and espoused theories in practice
across university and schooling spaces, and considering their implica-
tions. While requiring a challenging reconceptualization of binary
understandings of theories and practice, I would argue that it’s pre-
cisely in this somewhat uncomfortable space that I inhabit that
researchers and teachers can explore the possibilities of what else the
sexuality education classroom could become, both in terms of knowl-
edges and pedagogies. Researchers can provide a helpful bridge between
research that documents how diverse young people’s everyday lived
experiences of sexualities and relationships are being shaped by con-
temporary issues, and approaches to teaching and learning about sexu-
ality and gender politics informed by tacit (Sundaram, Maxwell &
Ollis, 2016) and contemporary theories (Renold & Ringrose, 2016;
Ringrose & Rawlings, 2015). Experimenting with what it might mean
to engage with contemporary issues in sexuality and relationships with
young people through drawing on contemporary theories conceptuali-
sations of worlds to engage with their lived experiences, requires curi-
ous and open teachers and researchers working together to create an
understanding of the implications of theories underlying pedagogical
practices, and a willingness to experiment with what the effects of other
theories in practice might make possible within the everyday spaces of
the classroom (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010).

 ontemporary Issues in Youth Sexualities:

C
Using Theories in Practice to Attend to Diverse
Young People’s Lived Experiences
In this section I outline several intertwined contemporary issues in youth
sexualities, and suggest that research using contemporary theory to fore-
ground diverse young people’s lived experiences of these issues opens pos-
sibilities to consider what else could be possible in the sexuality education
classroom. While demanding, engaging with such work could provide
 Introduction: Contemporary Issues in Sexuality… 9

ways of understanding gender and sexual politics that moves beyond

more commonly utilised notions of sex and gender difference, and ideas
about sex roles that inform sexuality and relationships education
(Harrison & Ollis, 2015; Haste, 2013; Sundaram et al., 2016).
Rather than attempt to cover the wide range of contemporary issues in
youth sexualities and relationships, I have chosen to highlight several
intertwined areas that the book chapters speak to in more depth. These
issues include: understandings of sex and gender politics underpinning
the ways in which youth sexualities and genders are being configured in
a neoliberal era of consumption and commodification, and attending to
the complexities of young people’s engagement with them through digi-
tal technologies; and exploring the lived complexities of sexual and gen-
der diversity in young people’s lives.

Hemi: I just think everything comes from the Internet these days… I think
people base their views on what they see on Facebook. Like, there’ll
be high traffic pages that have, like, a massive following, and then
their page will get shared around and everybody will start to see
those messages that they’re sharing.
(f to f focus group interview, June 4th, 2015)

Grappling with the complexities of the ways in which Hemi sees sexu-
alities and relationships are currently being configured in a neoliberal era
of digitally networked consumption and commodification, and the
implications of how young people are engaging with them, provokes high
levels of anxiety and panic amongst adults (Bragg & Buckingham, 2012;
Egan, 2013; Robinson, 2012). As such, this issue presents an inevitable
challenge to school based sexuality education programmes (Ringrose,
2016). I suggest that understanding the broader historical and contem-
porary societal shifts that are contributing to these changes, and the adult
anxieties they provoke in relation to young people, is important. Engaging
with research that documents, and in some cases works with, young peo-
ple’s contemporary lived experiences of learning about diverse sexualities,
genders and relationships in digital and online spaces is also helpful in
informing pedagogical directions that can more fully foreground stu-
dents’ lives in the sexuality education classroom.
10 K. Quinlivan

Children and young people’s sexualities have historically been a site of

normalisation and surveillance within the Anglophone West, and is
important to understand the particular forms this takes in a neoliberal era
of consumption and commodification (Renold et al., 2015). Broader
postwar western social shifts have seen struggles around the traditionally
private nature of sexuality increasingly move to the public domain, and
the creation of a consumer culture within which forms of subjectivity and
identity are configured and commodified through the pleasures of con-
sumption (Renold et al., 2015). Not surprisingly, the ways in which
embodied understandings of pleasure and desire are changing provoke
high levels of anxiety and moral panic when young people are added to
the mix (Buckingham & Bragg, 2004; Kehily, 2002; Papadopoulos 2010;
Ringrose, 2016). The commodification and adultification of the ‘prema-
turely’ sexualized girl – what is referred to as the sexualisation of culture
debates, and the proliferation of pornographic sites, are two illustrations
of these shifts. The (contested) sexualisation of culture issue has been
extensively mined in the media and in the popular press as well-­generating
policy interventions (American Psychological Association, 2007; Rush &
Le Nauze, 2006) and academic research (Buckingham & Bragg, 2004;
Renold et al., 2015; Vares, Jackson, & Gill, 2011). Bale (2011) observes
that the debates have produced a plethora of anxieties that are increas-
ingly affecting public health policies.
While recognising that anxieties over child and youth sexualities are
not new, Renold and Ringrose (2011) note the contemporary intensifica-
tion of a mainstreamed paedophilic gaze through the eroticisation of the
girl child, and blurred generational transitions and spatial boundaries
(primarily virtual) within which innocence and sexuality appear to be
increasingly intertwined. Renold et al. (2015) suggest that adult driven
anxieties and panics surrounding how ‘sexualisation’ has been responded
to and utilised requires critical engagement with, particularly in relation
to the ways in which ‘sexualisation’ discourses have shaped heteronorma-
tive gendered, classed and raced subjectivities for young women and
young men. The authors note that several of these issues include: victim-
ising and objectifying young women as ‘at risk’, reinforcing binaries of
passive feminine sexualities and active and predatory masculine sexuali-
ties; perpetuating binaries that juxtapose a white middleclass panic over
Another random document with
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 CHAPTER XXXVIII.
ALY TRANSFERS HIS SEAT OF GOVERNMENT TO KUFA.
AFFAIRS IN EGYPT.

A.H. XXXVI. A.D. 656, 657.

When Aly rode forth from Medîna in

pursuit of the insurgent army, a Companion Medîna abandoned as seat
seized his bridle;—‘Stay!’ he cried with of Caliphate.
earnest voice;—‘if thou goest forth from this city, the government will
depart therefrom, never more to return.’ He was pushed aside as a
crackbrained meddler. But his words were long remembered, and
the prophecy was true. Medîna, hitherto queen of the Moslem world,
was to be the seat of empire no more.
About the middle of the thirty-sixth year
of the Hegira, seven months after the Aly’s entry into Kûfa. Rajab,
a.h. XXXVI. Jan. a.d. 657.
death of Othmân, Aly entered Kûfa. The
first four months of his Caliphate had been spent, as we have seen,
at Medîna; the other three in the camp at Rabadza, in the campaign
ending with the battle of the Camel, and a short stay at Bussorah. No
Caliph had as yet visited Kûfa. It was now to be the seat of Aly’s
government. We find no mention of the manner of his entry and
reception; simply the fact of his arrival. No doubt the people were
flattered by the honour now put upon them. The city also had some
advantages; for there were in it many leading men, able, and some
of them willing, to support the Caliph by their influence. Moreover,
Aly might calculate on the jealousy of the
inhabitants towards Syria, in the Factious spirit there.
approaching struggle with Muâvia. But all
this was more than counterbalanced by the fickle and factious
humour of the populace. It was the focus of Bedouin democracy; and
the spirit of the Bedouins was yet untamed. What had they gained,
the citizens asked one of another, by the rebellion against Othmân?
The cry of vengeance on the regicides was for the moment stifled;
but things were fast drifting back again into the old Coreishite
groove. This was, in fact, the same cry as the Arab tribes were
making all around. ‘Aly hath set up his cousins, the sons of Abbâs,
everywhere—in Medîna, in Mecca, and in Yemen; and now here
again at Bussorah; while he himself will rule at Kûfa. Of what avail
that we made away with Othmân; and that we have shed all this
blood, fighting with Zobeir and Talha?’ So spoke the arch-conspirator
Ashtar among his friends at Bussorah; and Aly, fearful of the effect of
such teaching, took him in his train to Kûfa, where, indeed, among
the excitable populace his influence was even more dangerous.
Another uneasy symptom of the times was that the baser sort and
the servile dregs of Bussorah, breaking loose from authority, went
forth in a body, and took possession of Sejestan on the Persian
frontier. They killed the leader sent by Aly to suppress the
insurrection, and were not put down till Ibn Abbâs himself attacked
them with a force from Bussorah.
It was in the West, however, that the
sky loured the most. That was but a shorn Struggle in prospect with
Syria.
and truncated Caliphate which Aly
enjoyed, so long as his authority was scorned in Syria. A mortal
combat with Muâvia loomed in that direction. But, before resuming
the thread of the Syrian story, it is necessary first to turn to Egypt
and relate what was being enacted there.
When the band of conspirators set out
from Egypt to attack Othmân, we have Mohammed ibn Abu
seen that Mohammed son of Abu Hodzeifa Hodzeifa usurps Egypt.
Shawwâl, a.h. XXXV. April,
thereupon ousted Abu Sarh, Othmân’s a.d. 656.
lieutenant, and usurped the government.
This man’s father had been killed at Yemâma, and Othmân, adopting
the orphan, had brought him up kindly. Mortified at the refusal of the
Caliph to give him a command until he should have proved his
capacity in the field, Mohammed joined the insurgent faction, and
gained great influence in Egypt by an affected piety and by the
vehement denunciation of his former guardian. On the murder of
Othmân he succeeded in holding the government of Egypt for
several months. But he quickly paid the penalty of his ingratitude. On
the approach of the new governor, sent by
Aly, he fled to Syria, and there lost his life. Flies to Syria and is killed.
[522]

The follower whom Aly selected for the

heavy task of governing Egypt was Cays, a Cays appointed governor of
Egypt. Safar, a.h. XXXVI.
citizen of Medîna, son of that Sád ibn August, a.d. 656.
Obâda who, it may be remembered, was
the rival of Abu Bekr for the Caliphate. Of approved sagacity,
strength, and judgment, he was a loyal follower of Aly. He declined to
take an army with him, saying that the Caliph had more need of
soldiers than he; and preferred instead to be supported by seven
‘Companions’ of the Prophet, whom he took along with him. He was
well received by the Egyptians at large, who swore allegiance to him
in behalf of Aly. But a strong faction, as before observed, found
shelter in the district of Kharanba, and loudly demanded satisfaction
for the death of Othmân. Cays wisely left these alone for the present,
waiving even the demand for tithe. In other respects he held Egypt
firmly in his grasp.
With the prospect of an early attack
from the banks of the Euphrates, Muâvia Is supplanted by Muâvia’s
became uneasy at the Egyptian border machinations.
being commanded by so firm and powerful a ruler as Cays; whom,
therefore, he made every effort to detach from his allegiance to Aly.
Upbraiding him with having joined a party whose hands were still red
with the blood of Othmân, he reminded Cays that there was yet time
to repent, and promised that, if even now he joined in avenging the
crime, he should not only be confirmed in the government of Egypt,
but his kinsmen would be promoted to such office in the Hejâz, or
elsewhere, as he might desire. Cays, unwilling to precipitate
hostilities, fenced his answer with well-balanced words. Of Aly’s
complicity in the foul deed he had no knowledge; he would wait.
Meanwhile it was not in his mind to make any attack on Syria. Again
pressed by Muâvia, Cays frankly declared that he was, and would
remain, a staunch supporter of the Caliph’s cause. Thereupon
Muâvia sought craftily to stir up jealousy between the Viceroy and
his Master. He gave out that Cays was temporising, and spoke of his
treatment of the Kharanba malcontents as proving that he was one
at heart with them.[523] The report, assiduously spread, reached (as
it was intended) the court of Aly, where it was taken up by those who
either doubted the fidelity of Cays or envied his prosperity. To test his
obedience, Aly ordered an advance against the schismatics of
Kharanba; and when Cays remonstrated against the policy, it was
taken as proof of his complicity. He was
deposed, and Mohammed the regicide, Mohammed son of Abu Bekr
son of Abu Bekr, appointed in his room. appointed to Egypt.
Cays retired in anger to Medîna, where, as on neutral ground,
adherents of either side were unmolested. Finding no peace there
from the taunts of Merwân and his party, Cays resolved at last to go
to Kûfa, and cast himself on Aly’s clemency; and Aly, on the
calumnies being cleared away, took him back at once into his
confidence, and thenceforward kept him at court as his chief adviser.
Muâvia was grieved that Merwân had driven Cays away from
Medîna: ‘If thou hadst aided Aly,’ he wrote upbraidingly, ‘with a
hundred thousand men, it had been a lesser evil than is the gain to
Aly of such a counsellor.’[524]
On his own side, however, Muâvia had
gained a powerful and astute adviser in the Muâvia is joined by Amru.
person of the conqueror of Egypt. During
the attack on Othmân, Amru had retired from Medîna with his two
sons to Palestine. The tidings of the tragedy, aggravated by his own
unkindly treatment of the Caliph, affected him so keenly that he wept
like a woman. ‘It is I,’ he said, ‘who, by deserting the aged man, am
responsible for his death.’ From his place of retirement he watched
the struggle of Zobeir and Talha at Bussorah; and when Aly
conquered, he repaired at once to Damascus, and with his two sons
presented himself before Muâvia. In consequence of the unfriendly
attitude he had held towards Othmân, Amru was at first received
coldly. But in the end, the past was all condoned; friendship was
restored between the two chiefs, and thenceforward Amru was the
trusted counsellor of Muâvia.[525]
This coalition, and the false step of Aly in recalling Cays from
Egypt, now materially strengthened Muâvia’s hands. The success of
Aly at Bussorah brought at least this
advantage even to Muâvia, that it removed Weakness of Aly’s position at
Talha and Zobeir, the only other Kûfa.
competitors, from the field. On the other hand, the position of Aly, as
one of concession to the Arab faction, was fraught with peril. While
refusing ostensibly to identify himself with the murderers of Othmân,
it was virtually in their cause that he had taken up arms; and
therefore equally in the cause of the Arabs, as against the Coreish
and aristocracy of Islam. And Aly should have foreseen that the
socialistic element in this unnatural compromise must sooner or later
come into collision with the Caliphate.
The authority of Muâvia rested on a
firmer basis; his attitude was bolder, and Advantages of Muâvia’s
his position more consistent. He had from position in Syria.
the first resisted the levelling demands of the faction which rose up
against Othmân. He was, therefore, justified now in a course of
action which, pursuing these to justice, asserted in the pursuit the
supremacy of the Coreish. The influence of the ‘Companions’ had
always been paramount in Syria; and the Arab element (partly
because very largely recruited from the aristocratic tribes of the
south) was thoroughly under control. The cry for vengeance,
inflamed by the gory emblems still hanging from the cathedral pulpit,
was taken up by high and low. The temporising attitude of the Caliph
was in every man’s mouth as a proof of complicity with the regicides.
And though many may have dreaded Aly’s vengeance in the event of
his ultimate success, the general feeling throughout Syria was a
burning desire to avenge the murder of his ill-fated predecessor.
Still, whatever other motives may have
been at work elsewhere, the contest, as Aly and Muâvia in personal
between Aly and Muâvia, had now become antagonism.
a purely personal one. The struggle was for the crown; and many
looked to ‘the grey mule of Syria’ as having the better chance. A
possible solution of the contest lay, no doubt, in the erection of Syria
into an independent kingdom side by side with that of Persia and
Egypt. But the disintegration of the empire
of Islam was an idea which as yet had Unity of Caliphate still the
ruling sentiment.
hardly entered into the minds of the
Faithful. The unity of the Caliphate, as established by the history and
the precedents of a quarter of a century, was still, and long
continued, the ruling sentiment of Islam.
 CHAPTER XXXIX.
BATTLE OF SIFFIN.

A.H. XXXVI., XXXVII. A.D. 657.

After Aly had established himself at

Kûfa, there followed a short interval of rest. Aly’s envoy returns with
The lieutenants and commanders, from defiant message from
Muâvia. Shabân, a.h. XXXVI.
their various provinces, flocked into the January, a.d. 657.
new capital to do homage to the Caliph.
Towards one of these, named Jarîr, chief of the Beni Bajîla, Muâvia
was known to entertain friendly sentiments. Him, therefore, Aly
deputed to Damascus with a letter, wherein, after reciting the fact of
his election at Medîna to the Caliphate, and the discomfiture of his
enemies at Bussorah, he called on Muâvia to follow the example of
the empire, and, with the rest, to take also the oath of allegiance.
Like the former envoy, Jarîr was kept long in attendance. At last he
was dismissed with an oral message, that allegiance would be
tendered if punishment were meted out to the regicides, but on no
other possible condition. The envoy further reported to Aly, that
Othmân’s blood-stained garment still hung upon the pulpit of the
Great Mosque, and that a multitude of the Syrian warriors had sworn
that they would use no water to wash themselves withal, neither
sleep in their beds, till they had slain the murderers of the aged
Caliph, and those that sheltered them.[526] Ashtar accused Jarîr of
playing into the hands of Muâvia; and by having dallied for so long a
time at his court, of thus giving the Syrians leisure to mature their
plans and become hardened in their hostile attitude. Jarîr, disgusted
at the imputation, retired a neutral to Kirckesia, or, according to
others, went over to Muâvia.
Seeing that Muâvia was hopelessly
alienated, Aly resolved no longer to delay Aly invades Northern Syria.
Dzul Câda, a.h. XXXVI. April,
the attack upon Syria, and he proclaimed a.d. 657.
an expedition accordingly. At first the
people were slack in answering the call. But after a time, the Caliph
succeeded in gathering together from Bussorah, Medâin, and Kûfa,
an imposing force of 50,000 men. His plan was to march first by
Upper Mesopotamia, and so to invade Syria from the north. A
detachment was sent as an advance-guard up the western bank of
the Euphrates, but meeting with active opposition there, it was forced
to cross back again into Mesopotamia. Aly himself, with the main
body, marched across the plain of Dura to Medâin, and thence up
the Tigris. Then turning, short of Mosul, towards the west, he
crossed the great desert of Mesopotamia, and, outstripping his
advanced column, reached the Euphrates in its upper course at
Ricca.[527] An unfriendly population lined the banks of the river; and
it was not without sanguinary threats that Ashtar forced them to
construct a bridge. The army crossed near Ricca; and then marching
some little distance along the right bank, westward, in the direction of
Aleppo, they met the Syrian outposts at Sûr.[528]
On learning Aly’s preparations, Muâvia
lost no time in marshalling his forces, Muâvia, advancing, meets
which greatly outnumbered the enemy, Aly, on field of Siffîn.
and, having no desert to cross, were soon to the front. Amru was in
command, having his two sons, and his freedman Werdân, as
lieutenants.[529] Aly, desirous of averting bloodshed, had given
orders that, as soon as his troops came upon the enemy, they
should halt, and, confining themselves to the defensive, avoid
precipitating hostilities before opportunity had been given for friendly
overture. The vanguards of the two armies spent the first few days in
skirmishing. Ashtar challenged the Syrian officer to single combat;
but the challenge was declined, and Ashtar told that, having imbrued
his hands in the blood of the late Caliph, he could not claim the
privileges of honourable warfare. When the main armies came in
sight of each other, Aly found Muâvia so encamped as to cut him off
from the river, and reduce his army to straits for water. He therefore
brought on an engagement, in which Muâvia was forced to change
his ground, and occupy the ill-starred field of Siffîn.[530a] Some days
of inaction followed; after which Aly sent three of his chief men to
demand that, for the good of the commonwealth, Muâvia should
tender his allegiance. No mention is made of any offer (though
perhaps it may be presumed) on the part of Aly to confirm Muâvia, in
case of his submission, in the government of Syria. A scene ensued
of fruitless recrimination. On the one hand, Muâvia demanded that
the murderers of Othmân should be brought to justice; on the other,
the demand was stigmatised as a mere cat’s-paw covering ambitious
designs upon the Caliphate. This was resented as a base calumny
by Muâvia. ‘Begone, ye lying scoundrels!’ he cried; ‘the sword shall
decide between us;’ and, so saying, he drove them from his
presence. Finding all attempts at compromise to be useless, Aly
marshalled his army into seven or eight separate columns, each
under a Bedouin chieftain of note. As many separate columns were
similarly formed on the Syrian side. And every day one of these
columns, taking the field in turn, was drawn up against a
corresponding column of the other army.
Desultory fighting in this singular way was Desultory fighting, Dzul Hijj,
kept up throughout the month, there being a.h. XXXVI. May, a.d. 657.
sometimes as many as two engagements in a single day. But the
contest could not up to this time have been very earnest or severe,
since little mention is made of sanguinary results.[530] On both sides
they feared, we are told, to bring the whole forces out into a common
battle, ‘lest the Moslems should be destroyed, root and branch,’ in
the internecine struggle.
A new year, the 37th of the Hegira,
opened on the combatants, wearied by this Truce during final month of
endless and indecisive strife, and inclined a.h. XXXVII. June, a.d. 657.
to thoughts of peace. A truce was called, to last throughout
Moharram, the first month of the year. The interval was spent in
deputations; but these proved as fruitless as those which had gone
before. Aly, influenced by the anti-Omeyyad faction around him, was
not disposed even now to admit the injustice of Othmân’s having
been put to death. When pressed upon the point by the Syrian
envoys, he declined to commit himself. ‘I
will not say,’ was his evasive answer, ‘that Fruitless negotiations.
he was wrongfully attacked, nor will I say
that the attack was justified.’ ‘Then,’ answered the Syrians, ‘we shall
fight against thee, and fight likewise against everyone else who
refuseth to say that thy predecessor was not wrongfully put to death;’
and with these words they took their final leave. On his side, Muâvia
declared to the messengers of Aly that nothing short of the
punishment of the regicides would induce him to quit the field.
‘What?’ exclaimed some one; ‘wouldest thou put Ammâr to death?’
‘And why not?’ answered Muâvia; ‘wherefore should the son of the
bond-woman not suffer for having slain the freedman of
Othmân?’[531] ‘Impossible,’ they cried; ‘where will ye stop? It were
easier to bale out the floods of the Euphrates.’
[Renewal of hostilities, Safar, a.h. XXXVII. July, a.d. 657.]
So passed away the first month of the year. At the beginning of
the second, Aly, seeing things unchanged, commenced hostilities
afresh. He caused proclamation to be made along Muâvia’s front,
recalling the Syrians from rebellion to their proper allegiance. But it
only made them rally with the more enthusiasm around Muâvia; and
a great company took an oath, girding themselves in token with their
turbans, that they would defend him to the death. The warfare was,
however, carried on at the first in the same indecisive style as
before. Six leaders on Aly’s side took, in daily turn, the command
against as many captains on the other side.[532] But though still
desultory, the conflict was becoming severer and more embittered.
Many single combats were fought. One of Aly’s sons went forth on
the challenge of a son of Omar, but was recalled by his father.[533]
And so eight or nine days passed, one differing little from the other,
till the beginning of the second week, when Aly made up his mind to
bring on a general, and, as he hoped, decisive battle. The night was
spent by his followers in preparation, and (as the Abbasside
historians relate) in recitation from the Scripture, and in prayer. Thus,
ten days after the renewal of hostilities, both armies were drawn out
in their entire array. They fought the whole
day, but the shades of evening fell, and Battle of Siffîn. 11 and 12
none had got the better. The following Safar; July 29 and 30.
morning, the combat was renewed, and with greater vigour. Aly
posted himself in the centre with the flower of his troops from
Medîna; the wings were composed separately, one of the warriors
from Bussorah, the other of those from Kûfa. Muâvia had a pavilion
pitched upon the field; and there, surrounded by five compacted
lines of his sworn body-guard, watched the day. Amru, with a great
weight of horse, bore down upon the Kûfa wing. Before the shock it
gave way; and Aly, with his sons, was exposed to imminent peril, as
well from the thick shower of arrows, as from a close encounter.
Reproaching the men of Kûfa for their cowardice, the Caliph fought
sword in hand, and with his ancient bravery withstood the charge.
Ashtar, at the head of three hundred Readers[534]—the ‘Ghâzies’ of
the day—led forward the other wing, which fell with fury upon
Muâvia’s ‘turbaned’ body-guard. Four of its five ranks were already
cut to pieces, when Muâvia, alarmed, bethought himself of flight, and
had even called for his horse, when certain martial lines came to his
lips, and he held his ground. Amru stood by him, ‘Courage to-day,’
he cried; ‘to-morrow victory.’ The fifth rank repelled the danger, and
both sides again fought on equal terms. Feats of desperate bravery
were displayed by both armies. Many men of rank were slain. On
Aly’s side fell Hâshim, the hero of Câdesîya. Of even greater
moment was the death of Ammâr, now over ninety years, and one of
the leading regicides. As he saw Hâshim fall, he exclaimed to his
fellows: ‘O Paradise! how close thou couchest beneath the arrow’s
point and the falchion’s flash! O Hâshim! even now I see heaven
opened, and black-eyed maidens, all bridally attired, clasping thee in
their fond embrace!’[535] So, singing, and refreshing himself with his
favourite draught of milk and water, the aged warrior, fired again with
the ardour of youth, rushed into the enemy’s ranks, and met the
envied fate. It had long been in everyone’s mouth both in town and
camp, that Mahomet had once said to him: ‘By a godless and
rebellious race, O Ammâr, thou shalt one day be slain;’ in other
words (so the saying was interpreted), Ammâr would be killed
fighting on the side of right. Thus his death, as it were, condemned
the cause of the ranks against whom he fought; and so it spread
dismay in Muâvia’s host. When Amru heard of it, he answered
readily: ‘And who is it that hath killed Ammâr, but Aly the “rebellious,”
that brought him hither?’ The clever repartee ran through the Syrian
host, and did much at once to efface the evil omen.[536]
 The fighting this day was in real
earnest, and the carnage on both sides Battle still rages on morning
great. Darkness failed to separate the of third day, 13 Safar, July
31.
combatants; and, like Câdesîya, that night
was called a second ‘Night of Clangour.’ The morning broke on the
two armies still in conflict. With emptied quivers they now fought
hand to hand. Ashtar, the regicide, resolved on victory at whatever
cost, continued to push the attack with unflinching bravery and
persistence. Muâvia, disheartened, began to speak to Amru of
proposing to Aly a judicial combat, Goliath-like, with a champion on
either side. ‘Then go forth thyself, and challenge Aly,’ said Amru. ‘Not
so,’ answered Muâvia; ‘I will not do that, for Aly ever slayeth his man,
and then thou shouldest succeed me.’ Amru, indeed, well knew that
this was not in Muâvia’s line; and it was no time for continuing grim
pleasantry like this. All at once Amru
bethought him of a stratagem. ‘Raise aloft Hostilities suspended for
the sacred leaves of the Corân,’ he cried; arbitration by Corân.
‘if any refuse to abide thereby, it will sow discord amongst them; if
they accept, it will be a reprieve from cruel slaughter.’ Muâvia caught
at the words. And so forthwith they fixed the sacred scrolls on the
points of their lances, and raising them aloft, called out along the line
of battle: ‘The law of the Lord! The law of the Lord! Let it decide
between us!’ No sooner heard, than the men of Kûfa leaped forward,
re-echoing the cry: ‘The law of the Lord, that shall decide between
us!’ As all were shouting thus with one accord, Aly stepped forth and
expostulated with them: ‘It was the device,’ he cried, ‘of evil men;
afraid of defeat, they sought their end by guile, and cloaked rebellion
under love of the Word.’ It was all in vain. To every argument they
answered (and the ‘Readers’ loudest of all): ‘We are called to the
Book, and we cannot decline it.’ At last, in open mutiny, they
threatened the unfortunate Caliph, that, unless he agreed, they
would all desert him, drive him over to the enemy, or serve him as
they had served Othmân. Seeing that further opposition would be
futile, Aly said: ‘Stay wild and treasonable words. Obey and fight. But
if ye will rebel, do as ye list.’ ‘We will not fight,’ they cried; ‘recall
Ashtar from the field.’ Ashtar, thus summoned, at the first refused.
‘We are gaining a great victory,’ he said, ‘I will not come;’ and he
turned to fight again. But the tumult increased, and Aly sent a
second time to say: ‘Of what avail is victory when treason rageth?
Wouldst thou have the Caliph murdered, or delivered over to the
enemy?’ Ashtar, on hearing this, unwillingly returned, and a fierce
altercation ensued between him and the angry soldiery. ‘Ye were
fighting,’ he said, ‘but yesterday for the Lord, and the choicest
among you lost their lives. What is it but that ye now acknowledge
yourselves in the wrong, and the Martyrs gone to hell?’ ‘Nay,’ they
answered; ‘it is not so. Yesterday we fought for the Lord; to-day, also
for the Lord, we stay the fight.’ On this, Ashtar upbraided them as
‘traitors, cowards, hypocrites, and villains.’ In return, they reviled him,
and struck his charger with their whips. Aly interposed. The tumult
was stayed. And Asháth, chief of the Beni Kinda, was sent to ask
Muâvia ‘what his precise meaning in raising the Corân aloft might
be.’ ‘It is this,’ he sent answer back, ‘that we should return, both you
and we, to the will of the Lord, as set forth in the Book. Each side
shall name an Umpire, and the verdict shall be binding.’ Aly’s army
shouted assent. The unfortunate Caliph was forced to the still deeper
humiliation of appointing as his arbiter a person who had deserted
him. The soldiery cried out for Abu Mûsa, the temporising Governor
of Kûfa who had been deposed for want of active loyalty. ‘This man,’
answered Aly, ‘did but lately leave us and flee; and not till after
several months I pardoned him. Neither hath he now been fighting
with us. Here is a worthy representative, the son of Abbâs, the
Prophet’s uncle; choose him as your Umpire.’ ‘As well name thyself,’
they answered rudely. ‘Then take Ashtar.’ ‘What!’ said the Bedouin
chiefs in the same rough imperious strain, ‘the man that hath set the
world on fire! None for us but Abu Mûsa.’ It was a bitter choice for
Aly, but he had no alternative. The Syrian arbiter was Amru, for
whose deep and crafty ways Abu Mûsa was no match.[537] He
presented himself in the Caliph’s camp, and the agreement was put
in writing. As dictated from Aly’s side, it ran
thus: ‘In the name of the Lord Most Deed of arbitration, 13 Safar,
Merciful! This is what hath been agreed a.h. 665.
XXXVII. July 31, a.d.

upon between the Commander of the

Faithful, and ——’ ‘Stay!’ cried Amru (like the Coreish to the Prophet
at Hodeibia); ‘Aly is your Commander, but he is not ours.’ Again the
helpless Caliph had to give way, and the names were written down
of the contracting parties as simply ‘Aly and Muâvia.’[538] The
document went on to say that both sides bound themselves by the
judgment of the Corân; and, where the Corân was silent, by the
acknowledged precedents of Islam. To the Umpires, the guarantee of
both Aly and Muâvia was given of safety for themselves and for their
families; and the promise of the people that their judgment should be
followed. On their part, the Umpires swore that they would judge
righteously, so as to stay hostilities and reconcile the Faithful. The
decision was to be delivered after six months, or later if the Umpires
saw cause for delay, and at some neutral spot midway between Kûfa
and Damascus. Meanwhile hostilities should be mutually suspended.
[539] The writing, having been duly executed and signed, was
numerously witnessed by leading chiefs on either side. Ashtar alone
refused: ‘Never again,’ he said, ‘should I acknowledge this to be
mine own right hand, were it to touch a deed the like of this.’
And so the armies, having buried their
dead, quitted this memorable but Aly returns to Kûfa, and
undecisive battle-field. Aly retired to Kûfa; Muâvia to Damascus.
and Muâvia, his point for the present gained, to Damascus. As Aly
entered Kûfa, he heard wailing on every side. A chief man, whom he
bade to pacify the mourners, answered: ‘O Caliph, it is not as if but
two or three had been slain; of this clan hard by, alone, an hundred
and fourscore lie buried at Siffîn. There is not a house but the
women are weeping in it for their dead.’
The slaughter, indeed, had been great
on both sides.[540] And what gave point to Discord at Kûfa.
Aly’s loss was that the truce was but a hollow thing, with no hope in it
of lasting peace or reconciliation. The Arab faction, to whose insolent
demands Aly had yielded, was more estranged than ever. When the
men of Kûfa murmured at the compromise, all that he could reply
was this: that the mutinous soldiery had extorted the agreement from
him; and that having pledged his faith, he could not now withdraw.
He had thrown in his lot with traitors and regicides, and was now
reaping the bitter fruit. Muâvia alone had gained.
 CHAPTER XL.
THE KHAREJITES, OR THEOCRATIC FACTION, REBEL AGAINST
ALY.

A.H. XXXVII. A.D. 657.

The quick sagacity of Amru had never

been turned to better account than when The Arab faction taken in by
he proposed to the army of Kûfa that the appeal to Corân.
Corân should be the arbiter between them. To be judged by the Book
of the Lord had been their cry from the beginning. The sacred text
gave no countenance to the extravagant pretensions of the Coreish,
nor to their (so-called) empire of favouritism and tyranny. Its precepts
were based on the brotherhood of the Faithful; and the Prophet
himself had enjoined on his people the absolute equality of all.[541]
No sooner, therefore, was it proclaimed than, as Amru anticipated,
the Arab chiefs, caught in the snare, took up the cry, and pledged
themselves thereto.
Reflection soon tarnished the prospect.
They had forgotten how narrow was the Dissatisfaction of the Arab,
issue which the Umpires had to decide. or theocratic, faction.
The Bedouins were fighting not for one Caliph or the other, but
against the pretensions of the Coreish at large. It was this that
nerved them to the sanguinary conflict. ‘If the Syrians conquer,’ cried
Yezîd ibn Cays to his followers of Bussorah and Kûfa, ‘ye are
undone. Again ye will be ground down by tyrants like the minions of
Othmân. They will possess themselves as heretofore of the
conquests of Islam, as if, forsooth, these had descended to them by
inheritance, and not been won by our good swords. We shall lose
our grasp both of this world and of the next.’ Such were the evils
which they dreaded, for which they had slain Othmân, and from
which they had now been fighting for deliverance. By the
appointment of Abu Mûsa for their Umpire, what had they obtained?
It was theocratic rule they had been dreaming of, and now they were
drifting back to the old régime. The Umpires would decide simply as
between Muâvia and Aly; and, whatever their verdict, the despotism
of the past would be riveted more firmly than ever. Nothing of the
kind they really wanted had been gained, nor was there any prospect
of its being gained, by arbitration.
Burdened with these thoughts, a body
of 12,000 men fell out from Aly’s ranks on They draw off into hostile
their homeward journey; and, keeping the camp near Kûfa.
same direction towards Kûfa, marched side by side with the army, at
some little distance off in the desert. Loud and violent in their
speech, they beat about their neighbours in rude Bedouin fashion
with their whips, and reproached one another for having abandoned
the cause of Islam to the bands of godless arbitrators; while some
few amongst them were uneasy at having betrayed the Caliph on the
field of battle, and at having now separated themselves from the
body of the Faithful. In this frame of mind they avoided Kûfa, but
encamped in its vicinity, at the village of Harôra.[542] They chose for
themselves a temporary leader. But their resolve was, that when
they gained the ascendency, they would no longer have any prince
or Caliph, nor any oath of allegiance but to the Lord alone; and
would vest the administration of affairs in a Council of State. This
theocratic dream was not confined to the schismatics at Harôra, but
had widely leavened the factious and fanatical population of Kûfa.
Aly, aware of the danger, sent his cousin, Mohammed son of Abbâs,
to reason with the seceding body, but to no effect. He then
proceeded to their camp himself, and gained over their leader, Yezîd,
by the promise of the government of Ispahan. He urged, and with
good ground, that, so far from being responsible for ‘the godless
compromise,’ he had been driven to accept the Arbitration against
his better judgment by their own wayward and persistent obstinacy;
that the Umpires were bound by the terms of the truce to deliver their
decision in accordance with the sacred text, which equally with
himself the theocrats held to be the final guide; and that, if the
Umpires’ deliverance should after all turn out to be in disregard of it,
he would without a moment’s hesitation reject the same, and again
go forth at their head to fight against the enemies of the Faith.
 There was a strange mingling of
innocence and simplicity in these They are pacified by Aly.
Seceders, with a fanatical indifference to
the distinctions of vice and virtue, and a readiness to perpetrate any
crime, whether against the person or the State, so that it forwarded
the cause they had at heart, namely, ‘the Rule of the Lord,’ and the
setting up of that which they conceived to be His kingdom.
For the present they were pacified by
the assurances of the Caliph. They broke And retire to their homes.
up their camp and returned to their homes,
there to await the decision of the Umpires.