Al-Wishah fi fawa'id al-nikah
Al-Wishāḥ fī fawāʾid al-nikāḥ (Arabic: الوشاح فی فوائد النکاح; literally: "The sash on the merits of wedlock") is an Arabic sexual education manuscript written by the Islamic writer Al-Suyuti in the late 14th century. It is the author’s main contribution to the genre of Arabic-Islamic sex manuals, a literary form that originated in 10th-century Baghdad and was influenced by Greek, Persian, and Indian sources on medicine and erotology,[1] while also just one of a number of such works written by Al-Suyuti dealing with sex, with others including Nawāḍir al-ayk fī maʻrifat al-nayk, Nuzhat al-mutaʾammil and Shaqāʾiq al-utrunj fī raqāʾiq al-ghunj.[2]
Composition
In Al-Wishāḥ, Al-Suyuti "attempts to reconcile the earliest erotological tradition with the Islamic sciences", resulting in "an extensive investigation of the sexual pleasures permitted for Muslims—particularly men, but also, to a certain degree, women", according to Pernilla Myrne,[1] who notes that Al-Suyuti was more successful in consistently renconciling earlier works than his predecessors. The female aspects of sexual behavior and obligations in Islam are also covered in greater detail by Al-Suyuti in Shaqāʾiq al-utrunj and Nuzhat al-mutaʾammil, both of which rely partly on the same sources as Al-Wishāḥ.[1]
Al-Suyuti acted largely as a compiler in the production of Al-Wishāḥ, arranging hadiths and historical anecdotes from earlier works while adding little commentary. However, in the arrangement of the material on the major themes, such as marital sex (faḍl al-nikāḥ), ideal masculinity, and ideal femininity, Myrne notes that Al-Suyuti's "focus on and combination of specific parts of the erotic heritage is quite unique".[1]
At its core, Al-Wishāḥ combines the input of two important but quite opposite works in the sex manual tradition: Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdhah (10th century) and Tuḥfat al-ʿarūs wa-nuzhat (or mutʿat) al-nufūs (14th century). The former, Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdhah, was a "quite libertine" work strongly influenced by Indian erotology and produced by an author with Shiite inclinations, while the latter, Tuḥfat al-ʿarūs, was a more traditional Islamic marriage manual based on hadiths. Al-Wishāḥ was an intermarriage of these two contradictory but overlapping source texts.[1]
One other frequently quoted source in the work is Rushd al-labīb ilá muʿāsharat al-ḥabīb, a 14th century by the Yemeni author Aḥmad ibn Falītah.[1]
Contents
Despite the salacious nature of some of the source material, and most notably Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdhah, Al-Wishāḥ addresses sex in the context of Islamic law and tradition and not sex for pleasure in general, and does not mention homosexuality or explicitly illicit relationships.[1]
The work is divided into seven parts, covering hadith and legal reports, sexual vocabulary, anecdotes and historical reports, anatomy, medicine and coitus itself.[1] The anatomy chapter includes concepts developed by Galen, such as that the uterus is an inverted scrotum, while much of the chapter on medicine is quoted verbatim from the sexual medicine work, Kitāb al-bāh, by Abu Bakr al-Razi.[1]
Publication
There is at least one book version of Al-Wishāḥ in the form of a 2001 work published by Ṭalʿat Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Qawī in Damascus based on an unidentified version of the manuscript.[1]
References
- Myrne, Pernilla (2018). "Women and Men in al-Suyūṭī's Guides to Sex and Marriage". Mamlūk Studies Review. The Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC) at the University of Chicago. XXI: 47–67. doi:10.25846/26hn-gp87. ISSN 1947-2404.
- Ghersetti, Antonella, ed. (2016). Al-Suyūṭī, a polymath of the Mamlūk period : proceedings of the themed day of the First Conference of the School of Mamlūk Studies (Ca' Foscari University, Venice, June 23, 2014). Leiden. ISBN 9789004334502. OCLC 956351174.