Muslim Sex Shop

(photo courtesy of yaznotjaz)

“Suffice it to say that the view of Galen and other Greek physicians was that a man’s abstinence from sexual intercourse as a rule results in his becoming melancholic, as soon as the putrid matter of the retained semen reaches his head.  This was then the medical explanation of why so many great lovers went insane, though it accounts only for the male. Rumi alludes to it in a great poem on the benefits of motion and on the damage of the lack of it, making use of the double meaning of hawa, air and concupiscence, in the following verse:

‘The air becomes putrified if closed up in a pit,
Look at separation, what damage the dirang-i hawa,
it caused by protraction of carnal desire!’”

- Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, p. 89

“”The Muslim view that the male semen was nothing until united with the woman’s to form an embryo was basic to the permission of contraception.  If contraception is permitted because it does not tamper with human life, then abortion of the pre-ensoulment foetus can be permitted on the same grounds.  Zaidi Islamic jurisprudence explicity stated that since the “unformed” foetus, like the semen, had no human life, abortion, like contraception, was unconditionally permitted.”

Also,

“This conclusion gains indirect support from the contemporary medieval Arabic secular literatures.  Medicine, materia medica, and popular literature all treated contraception and abortion as if they were two aspects of the same process: birth control.”

- Sex and Society in Medieval Islam, Basim Musallam, pp 58-59.

photo by yaznotjaz

“Al-Ala b Ziyad said: What does it matter? We used to do that when we were on expeditions.  Hasan al-Basri:  It is only your own water (=sperm). Let it go!  Mujahid: People used to teach this to their young men so they could avoid fornication. Ad-Dahhak and others declared it legal in the absence of any proof of its illegality.”

- Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, p. 35

(photo courtesy of yaznotjaz)

“A’isha [ Muhammad's favorite wife] reported [what follows]” The wife of ar-Rifa’a al-Qurazi came to the Prophet while I was sitting [in the room] and Abu Bakr [A'isha's father, the first calif] was present. She said: “O Messenger of God! I had been married to [lit., was under] Rifa’a and he divorced me and then I married Abdarrahman ibn az-Zubair, but, by God, he does not have, O Messenger of God, more than this fringe!”  ANd she showed the fringe of her trousers.  Her words were heard by Khalid ibn Sa’id who was [standing] at the door without being asked to enter, and he said to Abu Bakr: “Will you not prevent her from being so candid towards the Messenger of God?” But the Messenger of God just smiled and said to her: “You would like to return to Rifa’a, wouldn’t you, that you may taste his sweet honey (‘usaila) and he may taste your sweet honey again?” Henceforth it [the fringed trouser] because a custom (sunna).

The story shows that voices were raised against  this kind of candor from the very beginning. It has to be stressed here, however, that outspokenness may occur on quite different levels from such nasty dirt as exists in al-Azdi’s Story of Abu l-Qasim of Baghdad to the pointed and sometimes sarcastic frankness of a Jahiz up to the highly poetic and elegant metaphors with which Nizami and other poets describe the act of bodily union.

- Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, p. 82