"We, the Sexologists . . .": Arabic Medical Writing on Sexuality, 1879-1943

Between 1895 and 1905 a bout a dozen letters were published in the Cairo-based periodicals al-Muqtataf (The digest) and al-Hilal (The crescent) about "the harmful habit," namely, masturbation. In one letter, a thirty-five-year-old man wrote that he learned from al-Hilal of the "frightening" perils of the habit and wished to know whether at his age he could still stop. The editor's reply was affirmative, and he recommended physical exercise, as well as serious reading rather than cheap love stories.¹ In another letter, a nineteen-year-old noted that it was advice he read in al-Hilal that helped him rid himself of the habit. This habit, he claimed, indeed caused mental and physical deterioration, weakness of memory, and jaundice. To regain his strength, al-Hilal again recommended physical exercise, good sleep, and a healthy diet.² In another instance, the editor denounced masturbation as a cause for the decline of nations, a maggot in the body of society and in the body of civilization itself.³

These published confessions and testimonials of self-discipline are not isolated incidents but are found within the context of mobility and translations of scientific discourses on sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also form part of an emerging middle-class identity within, between, and beyond the two main urban centers of the Middle East at the time—Beirut and Cairo—as both science and the printed press played a significant role in the formation and consolidation of middle-class visions of modernity. Finally, the subject of these debates was decidedly gendered, as the body of the young effendi (an emerging class of middle-class professionals) man became a site of discipline and self-discipline.

This article explores Arabic scientific discussions of sex written from the 1880s to the Second World War, a period considered as the heyday of scientific sexology. It looks at how medical doctors and their readership understood, interpreted, adopted, and adapted new concepts and discourses, ascribing new meanings to global ideas in a local context.⁴ Wilson Jacob, Joseph Massad, and Hanan Hammad have already examined instances of this debate, but not as a body of textual products inspired by European scientific sexology of the time.⁵

This article builds on and contributes to a growing body of literature on sexual science in translation that examines how medical doctors and social reformers translated this discourse into local practices. Most of this work, however, focuses on the European context.⁶ Born out of nineteenth-century colonial and racial discourses, scientific medicine of the time constituted the white male body as its norm and situated other bodies within a racial and gendered hierarchy in which those "others" were always found to be wanting.⁷ The examination of sexology outside of the European context that spawned it thus involves asking how it was read by those consistently described as deficient by this scholarship.

My work on sexology in the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine and, more notably, Sabine Frühstück's work on Japan have examined how Jews and Japanese, respectively, embraced scientific sexology and responded to the racial assumptions inherent in eugenics.⁸ In a similar vein, the emerging middle class in Middle Eastern cities was engaging with Western assumptions regarding their incompatibility with modernity. They responded, in part, by advocating reform of both the political and the domestic spheres, including the discipline of individual bodies.

In his work on sexual discourses in the Ottoman Empire, Dror Ze'evi argues that the encounter with Western prejudices about Islamic sexuality silenced multiple discourses that had existed for centuries. In creating counternarratives to traveler accounts that saw Ottoman sexuality as promiscuous, Ottoman writers presented their society's morality as based on gender segregation and a heterosexual ethic.⁹ Even medical texts, Ze'evi further argues, "seem to deny the existence of sexual drive and the possible implications of sexual discourse."¹⁰ I agree that sexual discourse was profoundly transformed in the late nineteenth century, but those varieties of discourse were not replaced by...