Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ ilm al-bah to erotology

This article is about the French, German, Italian, and English concept of erotology, which emerged in orientalist ¹ scholarship of the 19th century with reference to medieval Islamicate sexual medicine, or ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge. The term erotology was applied to ‘ilm al-bah by European doctors and psychiatrists writing about sexuality after the 1880s, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science, or sexology. This arrangement enabled European sexologists to underestimate the importance of earlier Islamicate sexual medicine and claim a completely novel role for themselves in history as representatives of the first branch of science or medicine that had ever approached sexual matters in a serious way that went beyond erotica. This broad-brushstroke term, which homogenised and minimised all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The focus of this article is on how European sexual science between the 1880s and the 1930s explained away medieval Islamicate sexual medicine by assimilating it to the new category of ‘erotology’, thereby denying its role in the history of medical descriptions of sexual anatomy, behaviour, and pharmacology.

‘Ilm al-bah, ars erotica, and scientia sexualis

To appreciate the extent to which sexological accounts of Arab ‘erotology’ were reductive, a brief consideration of the scope and character of the medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah tradition is needed. This pre-modern form of sexual medicine, which flourished throughout Middle Eastern cultures between the 9th and 17th centuries, had innovated a mode of description of erotic and reproductive physiology and pharmacology, known as ‘ilm al-bah, that was distinct from works of purely erotic literary style, about which numerous specialist scholars have now written (Akande, 2015; Bos, 1993, 1995; Bouhdiba, 2010; Bousquet, 1953; Myrne, 2018; Najmabadi, 2005, 2014; Newman, 2014; Peirce, 2009; Porman, 2009; Ragab, 2015; Semeridjan, 2006). Other works, of a somewhat different genre, referred to sexual matters not as bah but as nikaḥ (marriage manuals), with two forms sometimes overlapping in particular texts (al-Suyuti, 1900; Myrne, 2018). Many works of Hadith literature also emphasised the importance of sexual pleasure in marital life as a matter of health (Myrne, 2020: 83–6). Like later European sexology, the ‘ilm al-bah tradition included the anatomical description of women's external genital structures and their role in female pleasure; the description of sexual acts that were not reproductive, such as manual, oral, and anal sex; the description of same-sex relations in men and women; the description of gender-non-conforming ghulamiyyat and of intermediate sexes, or mukhannathun; and the description of sex outside marriage, of masturbation, and of pleasure per se as an important purpose of sexual relations (al-Kātib, 1921; al-Suyuti, 1900; Ibn al-Jᾱzzar, 1997). It also described a vast apothecary of pharmacological remedies used for a wide variety of sexual purposes (al-Nuwayri, 2016; al-Tụlsī, 2014; Ibn al-Baytạ̄r, 1877–81; Ibn al-Kindi, 1966). In all these domains, the medieval Islamicate traditions elaborated significantly upon and far exceeded (in terms of both the scope of the themes and the size of the source corpus) the few works that partly manifested some of these trends in earlier Greco-Roman sources and in Indus Valley and East Asian cultures – all of which influenced Islamicate medicine as well (Jacquart and Micheau, 1990; Watt, 1972: 30–43).

There is no doubt that modern European sexual science indeed represented a very specific way of knowing about sex, and numerous historiographic attempts to trace its emergence have converged on Western Europe in the long 19th century as a pivotal context in the formation of sexology's unique approach to sexual perversions, pathologies, and types of people (Bauer, 2015; Beccalossi, 2012; Bland and Doan, 1998; Chaperon, 2007; Crozier and Bonis, 2001; Cryle and Downing, 2010; Cryle and Moore, 2011; Davidson, 2001; Flore, 2020; Foucault, 1976; Gallagher and Laqueur, 1987; Leck, 2016; McLaren, 1997; Moore, 2016; Rosario, 1997; Sigusch, 2008). In broad surveys of its history, sexual science and medicine is generally described as a historically novel genre that first appeared in French, German/Austrian, Italian, and English contexts between c.1750 and c.1880, proliferating to numerous other cultural contexts between c.1880 and c.1930, then to Asian, Middle Eastern, South American, Australasian, and African cultures over the course of the 20th century (Bullough, 1997; Haeberle, 1995, 1997; Hekma, 1989; Nye, 1991). However, there has also been an important scholarly movement to consider more multidirectional global entanglements in the modern history of ideas about sexuality and gender generally, particularly those relating to Europe and the Middle East (El Shakry, 2020: 63–81; Leck, 2017; Massad, 2007; Najmabadi, 2005, 2014; Newman, 2014: 49–56; Surkis, 2019; Ze’evi, 2006). Some historians of sexology more specifically have also highlighted how European cultural translations of concepts derived from Middle Eastern, Asian, African, and North and South American indigenous cultures contributed to global ideas about inversion, perversion, and the enumeration of the sexes in the modern era, often with reference to colonial hierarchies and racist ideologies (Bauer, 2003, 2008, 2015; Chiang, 2018; Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017; Funke, 2015; Wiesner-Hanks, 2011).

A model that has been heuristically generative while being widely acknowledged as reductive and problematic is the dichotomy discussed by Michel Foucault between, on the one hand, the ars erotica style of description of the techniques of sexual pleasure applied to a range of ancient and early modern world cultures, and on the other hand, the scientia sexualis style of 19th-century European taxonomies of desire and typologies of perversion (Foucault, 1976: 76–84). Foucault was himself sceptical of this dichotomy, which he derived from the work of the mid-20th-century Dutch sinologist Robert Hans van Gulik (1910–67), though the British Sinologist Joseph Needham (1900–95) also referred to it (Needham, Ping-Yu, and Gwei-djen, 1959; Rocha, 2011; Van Gulik, 1974). In his own periodisation of sexuality in history, Foucault nonetheless appeared to accept implicitly the association of sexual science (with its focus on taxonomies of desire) uniquely with the modern West, and the association of pleasure techniques with all that preceded and exceeded it (Gautam, 2016: 21–2; Rocha, 2011). Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Claire Cosquer, Leon Rocha, and several others have complained that Foucault's ambivalent evocation of the ars erotica / scientia sexualis dichotomy reflected an orientalist flattening and homogenisation of different cultures throughout world history, thus itself evincing a colonial habit of thought in which the West is reductively distinguished from ‘the rest’ (Cosquer, 2019: 16; Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017: 6–8; Rocha, 2011; Stoler, 1995: 14–15; 2010: 146). Other scholars have also destabilised the dichotomy by showing how even in the peak era of Europe's supposed scientia sexualis moment – between 1860 and 1930 – there were also important literary and artistic genres presenting both eroticised and medicalised perspectives that, in turn, impacted the development of modern scientific discourses of sexuality, something Foucault himself acknowledged but did not explore in satisfactory detail (Bauer, 2009; Byrne, 2013; Cryle, 2008, 2018; Downing, 2002; Finn, 2011; Funke et al., 2017; Schaffner and Weller, 2012; Sutton, 2018). Scientia sexualis was a Latinised variation of the earlier Greek-derived erotology (eros + logos) evoked in 19th-century works describing non-European forms of sexual medicine and erotic description, later serving to delineate 19th-century European sexual science as something unprecedented and without debts of inheritance to any earlier or non-European traditions. But while the ars erotica / scientia sexualis dichotomy has attracted considerable critical appraisal by historians and sexuality studies scholars, the term erotology has not received anywhere near the same kind of attention and continues to be invoked with reference to non-Western and pre-modern formal knowledges of sex.

The concept of ars erotica has also been criticised as particularly inadequate for characterising the complexity of medieval Islamicate medical texts in the tradition of ‘ilm al-bah (Franke, 2012; Ragab, 2015; Semeridjan, 2006). This was a diverse intellectual tradition represented by a varied corpus of over 125 specialist works that all foregrounded sexual matters, fusing accounts of sexual technique, erotica, and artistry with the neutral description of sexual variations, the description of sexual anatomy and physiology, and a considerable sexual pharmacology that included aphrodisiacs and sexual inhibitors, contraceptives, remedies for venereal diseases, abortive remedies, and products to increase desirability (Akande, 2015: 31–2; Bouhdiba, 2010: 173–7; Myrne, 2020; Newman, 2014: 20–7). Pernilla Myrne (2020: 24) draws attention to the substantial ‘medicalisation of sexuality’ in the medieval Arabic source corpus, suggesting its clear relevance to the later emergence of European sexual science, without being in any sense assimilable to it. Notably, this earlier genre appears to have contained no major nosology of sexual pathologies or perversions similar to that which became so central in 19th- and early 20th-century European description, even if one rare text by al-Razi discussed by Frans Rosenthal referred to the passive recipient of male same-sex anal intercourse as bearing a shameful and distasteful ‘illness’ (Rosenthal, 1978). Sexually transmitted diseases were amply discussed by scholars such as Ibn al-Jᾱzzar (898–980) and countless others, particularly following the spread of syphilis from Europe to the Middle East during the 14th-century crusades (Ibn al-Jᾱzzar, 1997; Newman, 2014: 23; Serjeant, 1965), though, as some scholars note, it is unclear if the disease was already present in the region prior to this (Mitchell, 2011). Medical scholars such as Ibn al-Jᾱzzar, Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (801–73), Constantinus Africanus (c.1020–99), Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1138–1204), Ibn al-Bayṭār (1197–1248), Naṣir al-Din al-Ṭusi (1201–74), and Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (1279–1333) all provided a significant range of pharmacological recipes designed to stimulate erections in men, and others to increase both desire for sex and pleasure in men and women, though without suggesting that these were necessarily deficient or excessive in the first instance. Other remedies clearly did specify treatments to solve disorders of insufficient desire or erectile capacity, considering these conditions amenable to pharmacological treatment (al-Nuwayri, 2016; Bos, 1993, 1995; Ibn al-Kindi, 1966). As Myrne (2020: 35–6) has shown, while the dominant readership for this genre appears to have been elite men (referring to the sexual use of slaves and to the treatment of wives), some of the aphrodisiac, contraceptive, and abortive recipes described in the genre appear clearly directed towards women, referring to actions to be undertaken by a woman in preparation for sex or following it. Some Arabic and Persian scholars also discussed the healthful effects of sexual activity itself: the 13th-century Persian polymath Naṣir al-Din al-Ṭusi saw sex as the cure for 24 different conditions, with reference to humoral imbalances and melancholy (al-Ṭusi, 2014: 89). Nil Sari has found examples in Ottoman medical manuscripts of the 16th to 18th centuries that mention sexual diseases thought to be caused by mental disorders (namely syphilis), as well as descriptions of hysteria based on ancient Greek sources (Sari, 2005). However, while European sexual science by the end of the 19th century certainly had a very specific account of sexual perversions and pathologies that was not found in medieval Islamicate sources, modern European sexual science was not, as sexologists themselves claimed – and, indeed, as Michel Foucault (2018: 63) assumed – the first major world tradition to medicalise sexual matters.

Earlier forms of sexual medicine that circulated throughout Middle Eastern cultures between the 9th and the 17th century may even constitute an important antecedent that helped enable the later emergence of sexual medicine in the West, albeit over a long time frame, making this impact difficult to locate precisely (Burnett and Jacquart, 1994; Hehmeyer and Khan, 2007; Ragab, 2015). This is particularly so in relation to the description of sexual diseases, of women's sexual anatomy, and of aphrodisiac pharmacology (Moore, 2018; Moore and Pithavadian, 2021; Newman, 2014). Matters of sexual health and the neutral description of sexual acts and techniques also featured as normal topics within major generalist works of Islamicate medical thought circulating widely in Latin translation in the West from the early modern period onwards, notably the works of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), ben Maimon (Maimonides), and al-Razi (Rhazès; Burnett and Jacquart, 1994; Jacquart and Thomassaet, 1985: 160–92; Maimonides, 2018). While it is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate these suggestions of earlier influence, a substantial body of medievalist scholarship has indicated the importance of ‘ilm al-bah to the development of early modern European medicalisations of sexual matters (Bos, 1993, 1995; Jacquart and Micheau, 1990; Jacquart and Thomasset, 1985). Medieval Islamicate works still featured among the standard reading of medical students and scholars in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Amoreux, 1805: 37–9; Ibn Sīnā, 1889, 1903). However, in the major European faculties of the 19th century, Galenic humoralism was increasingly displaced by mechanistic and iatrochemical models of physiology and, in France particularly, by an emphasis on historical inheritances from Hippocrates over those from Galen (Cawadias, 1952: 307; Temkin, 1973). Since Ibn Sīnā was most often associated with Galenism in accounts of his work among European scholars, his reputation, and that of Arabic medicine generally, suffered by association with this increasingly discredited doctrine (Jacquart, 1996). In 1899, the Paris medical professor Édouard Brissaud described the holdings of Rhazès (al-Razi) and Avicenne (Ibn Sīnā) in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) as still bearing the dust that had first settled upon them two centuries earlier (Brissaud, 1899: 14). From the mid 19th century onwards, new French, English, and German translations of other Islamicate medical works discussing sexual matters began appearing (al-Suyuti, 1900; Ibn al-Bayṭār, 1840–2, 1877–81; Ibn Sīnā, 1889, 1903), but this did not result in any new recognition of these earlier texts as indicating a historically precedent medical tradition that European sexual scientists in this period of might consider pertinent to their own inquiries.

In discussing ‘erotology’, this article focusses on a range of late 19th-century French, German, Italian, and English works of sexual science describing Islamicate cultures, examining what role Islam and Arabs were made to perform in the sexological construction of historical civilisations and their purported sexual practices. It considers what 19th- and early 20th-century sexologists did actually know about medieval Islamicate sexual medicine, based on the few sources of this tradition to which they referred, particularly the early 16th-century work of Muḥammad ibn ´Umar al-Nafzāwī known as The Perfumed Garden, which circulated widely in several European languages and cultures from the mid 19th century onwards, eventually becoming a global icon of orientalist exoticisation encapsulated by the description of it as part of the newly named genre of ‘erotology’ (Colligan, 2010; de la Fuente, 2018: 84–108; Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1990; Larzul, 2016). The invention of the 19th-century neologism erotology is symptomatic of this broader conceptualisation that obscured the different magnitudes of world sexual knowledge traditions, minimised the sophistication of their medical seriousness, and homogenised their meaning according to a simplified exotic otherness.

19th-century erotology and the perfumed Orient

Both the French colonial role in North Africa after 1830 and the British colonial expansion into Egypt and the Levant between 1849 and 1882 constituted important contexts for the reformulation of ‘ilm al-bah as erotology, infusing perspectives on this earlier form of sexual medicine with new colonial hierarchies that positioned Europeans as both more sexually constrained and more scientific, entailing visions of Arab and Muslim cultures based on exoticist sexual stereotypes. During the colonial incursions of European powers in North Africa and the Middle East during the 19th century, orientalists relearnt of the existence of renowned Arabic works of sexual medicine and technique, accurately apprehending that this tradition represented something unlike anything they had seen before while also grossly underestimating the size and complexity of the source corpus (Bouhdiba, 2010: 177; Larzul, 2016: 118). From the last decade of the 19th century until the early 1920s, there were several Arabic and Persian works newly translated into French or English that would have permitted an appreciation of the depth and complexity of medieval Islamicate sexual medicine, including those of Ibn Sīnā (1889, 1903), al-Suyuti (1900), Semoül Ali (Neumeyer and Ali, 1913), al-Ghazālī (1917), and Ibn Naṣir al-Kātib (1921). Overwhelmingly, however, European sexologists’ interest in medieval Arabic sexual medicine fixated on just one text by the 16th-century Tunisian writer Muḥammad ibn ´Umar al-Nafzāwī, which fused elements of ‘ilm al-bah with comic literary content and bore the rhyming Arabic title al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir fi nuzhat al-ḫaṭir (The Garden Perfumed for the Pleasure of Hearts). This work was thereafter taken as representative of the entire Arab medical tradition (which it was not), resulting in repetitious attempts to render it into French, then English, then German, and subsequently numerous other languages. Many of these translations entailed substantial alterations that reduced the specificity of the Arabic text and assimilated it to other works of world erotica from East Asia and the Indian subcontinent that dealt with sexual technique, namely the ancient Sanskrit text by Vātsyāyana known as the Kama Sutra (Burton, 1883; Larzul, 2016: 111; Newman, 2014: 16–19).

Given the rich entanglements of European and Middle Eastern medical traditions both in the medieval / early modern worlds and in 19th-century colonial contexts, it is curious that there was not a greater interest in the earlier sexual medicine traditions of the Middle East among European doctors of sexual science between 1880 and 1930, especially considering the intense historical self-consciousness of 19th-century thinkers in relation to the mode of inquiry they were advancing (Blanshard, 2015; Moore, 2021; Orrells, 2015; Tobin, 2012). Instead, European scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries developed a distinctly exoticist erotic discourse about the Arab and Muslim worlds focussed on images of the harem and the moral question of polygyny (Kahf, 1999; Newman, 2014; Schick, 1999). This discourse too had older roots in the orientalist evocations of the Muslim harem in numerous 17th- and 18th-century paintings and literary and philosophical works (Schick, 1999: 102–94). But in the late 19th century, the discourse was given new life by the English explorer Sir Richard Burton's 1885–8 translations of both The Thousand and One Nights and The Perfumed Garden (Burton, 1886; Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1886). The latter text represents the most direct engagement of 19th-century European sexology scholars with the earlier Arabic ‘ilm al-bah tradition. Burton's translation of both these texts has attracted considerable critical scholarship due its methods of ‘estrangement’, which sought to draw attention to the cultural differences between European and Arab sexual mores while reinforcing orientalist clichés of Arabs as characterised by intellectual simplicity, hypersexuality, and propensity to rapture (Shamma, 2014).

The various French translations that circulated of this work between 1848 and 1880 were themselves based on different Arabic versions of the text by al-Nafzāwī. Burton's 1888 English translation, rendered as The Perfumed Garden, was not made directly from any of these Arabic manuscripts but from the French translation of an Arabic version attributed to a mysterious Baron R., described as a capitaine d’état-major (staff captain) of the French army in Algiers (Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1886; Newman, 2014: 15). This translator is identified as Auguste Regnault in a note written over the original 1848 handwritten unpublished manuscript, held by the BNF. ² Another handwritten reproduction of this unpublished translation, dated 1877, is also part of the BNF's Collection de l’Enfer and was likely the version that Burton consulted. ³ Historian of orientalism Sylvette Larzul identifies the Regnault in question as Louis Julien Auguste Regnault (1811–90), whose son Roland was responsible for the manuscript note claiming that the 1848 Baron R. manuscript matched his father's handwriting (Larzul, 2016: 127). This Regnault was indeed made a baron in 1843, had served in Algeria between 1845 and 1851, and was a colonel chef d’état-major in 1867. But, as Larzul notes, there is little else in the biographical record of Julien to indicate that he would have been sufficiently fluent in Arabic so early in his posting to Algeria to complete alone a literary translation that also required detailed knowledge of the Koran (ibid.: 127). Another French translation, made during the 1850s by Jean-Baptiste Campenon (1819–91), a French officer in Tunisia and in Algeria from 1852 to 1859, also appears to have informed the 1877 version attributed to Baron R., as Larzul's textual comparison demonstrates (ibid.: 119–20). ⁴

A third French translation of al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir was made in Algiers around 1860 by Antonin Terme, an amateur orientalist who became director of the Lyon Museum of Fabrics. He worked in collaboration with a woman identified as Nefissah ‘la Mauresque’ (the Moor [feminine]) based on a different Arabic manuscript to the one used by Baron R. Unlike the various other translators of the 19th century, Terme actually explained (in the accompanying essays included with the 1867 rendition of the translation) exactly how the French version came to be produced in 1860. This account is curious, since it suggests something of the intellectual processes likely responsible for other attempts to render versions of al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir into French during this period, which may help to explain the mystery around the identity of Baron R., who, like Terme, probably did not operate alone. The Terme/Nefissah translation had less influence in Europe than the Baron R./Campenon/Burton variants that proliferated in the late 19th century, since it remained unpublished and circulated only privately among orientalists. However, a 1935 edition published by the Parisian medical vulgarising press Jean Fort made it available to wider Francophone readerships thereafter, and a digitised version of this book is now freely accessible through the BNF (Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1935). Terme described how the translation was made through nightly meetings of a ‘little Arabic society’ in Algiers that included the bilingual Nefissah providing both a reading of the Arabic manuscript and an oral translation into French. Terme then rendered these translations into elegant written French. However, he also named two additional contributors to the enterprise. The first of these was Sid-El-Adj-Ali Ben Turqui, whom he described as a literate, pious, wise, and kind 70-year-old Muslim man from Turkey who had completed three pilgrimages to Mecca and now worked in the French administration in Algiers. His role was apparently to elaborate on the meaning of the Arabic text during Nefissah's reading of it with reference to supporting passages in the Koran (Terme, 1935: 10). There was also a fourth individual, le Crodja (secretary) Mohammed, a man of 30 years, implied also to be a government official of some kind, whose role was to elaborate on the layers of meaning in the Arabic text with reference to what was known about its original author (ibid.: 13).

Terme's remarks (which first appeared in the 1867 unpublished version of the translation) about the nature of al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir poignantly identified it as belonging to a genre apart that could be compared to early modern European works of notable obscenity, such as those of François Rabelais and of Pietro Aretino, but which differed importantly from these, both in its medical seriousness and in its attribution of divinity to the sexual pleasures it described. By way of example, Terme mentioned the description of female sexual organs in al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir, which referred to the intensity of sensation in the clitoris as a sign that God had fully intended for women to have sexual pleasure. He remarked that this revealed a commonality between the understanding of late 19th-century European scholars and medical views that had existed in Arab civilisation more than 300 years ago, indicating that Europeans should regret their failure to recognise the authority of this historical precedent on matters of sexual medicine and technique (Terme, 1935: 271).

The wide circulation of this source in several European languages in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the publication of several other translations of ‘ilm al-bah texts between 1889 and 1921, indicate that knowledge of earlier Middle Eastern sexual medicine was not unavailable to European sexology during its most formative period. The Perfumed Garden was cited in French, German, Austrian, and English medical works describing sexuality, where it was frequently taken to reveal things about a perverse, mysterious, exotic, and hypersexual Orient. The English sexologist Havelock Ellis referred to it repeatedly for a range of different purposes, among which were as demonstrating the sexually intoxicating qualities of exotic fragrances such as musk, and as demonstrating the use of sadistic love-biting in oriental sexual cultures (Ellis, 1904–31: Vol. 1, 63; Vol. 2, 94, 98, 218; Vol. 3, 85; Vol. 4, 94, 98, 218; Vol. 5, 93–7; 1931: Vol. 7, 185, 195). Magnus Hirschfeld, perhaps the most interculturally aware of all the early 20th-century sexologists, referred on numerous occasions to both medieval Arabic medicine and ancient Sanskrit knowledge as having their own forms of Sexualwissenschaft, or sexology, but his reading of both these traditions appears to have extended no further than The Perfumed Garden and the Kama Sutra (Hirschfeld, 1935: 307–8).

Later orientalists’ translations of Arabic sexual medicine texts appear to have been less concerned with keeping sexology apart from erotology in the manner of most sexual science scholars. A 1900 English rendition of a work by the late 15th-century Egyptian scholar Jalal-ad-Din al-Suyuti (1445–1505), which referred to the translator as ‘An English Bohemian’ – one of Richard Burton's self-designations – included a subtitle that referred to al-Suyuti's text as bearing ‘the secrets of oriental sexuology [sic]’ (al-Suyuti, 1900). But throughout the late 19th century, the more common term used to refer to the ‘ilm al-bah genre (when it was recognised as a genre at all) was not sexology or any variation of it, but erotology – a term that evoked the fusion of erotica with scientific knowledge of the kind very much displayed in al-Nafzāwī's text. It was in the 1886 version of The Perfumed Garden that Burton first referred to the work in its subtitle as a text of ‘erotology’, probably borrowing from the 1884 English translation of Karl Friederich Forberg’s 1882 Latin compilation of Roman erotic texts, De figuris Veneris. These were hardly similar works at all, De figuris Veneris containing nothing of medical content. The 1884 English translator of Forberg in turn had simply anglicised the French term érotologie, used by Isadore Liseux in his 1882 rendition of Forberg's work, here describing it as a ‘manuel d’érotologie’ (an erotology manual; Forberg, 1884, 1882). An 1833 German compilation of erotica from ancient cultures had used the term Erotologie as well (Rambach, 1833), but it seems more likely Burton took it from Liseux's rendition of Forberg's Latin compilation. Burton had already used this term in translating/mutilating Vātsyāyana's Kama Sutra, which in 1883 he had also labelled a text of ‘erotology’ (Burton, 1883; Doniger, 2016). Thus Burton assimilated what little was known in modern Europe of the immense Arabic ‘ilm al-bah medical tradition, as well as Roman and Vedic culturally specific knowledges of sexual matters, to a homogenous world compendium of ancient/oriental sexual exoticism. The 1907 Das erotische Element in Literatur und Kunst (The Erotic Element in Literature and Art) by the German publisher Willy Schindler similarly referred to this even broader genre as Erotologie (Schindler, 1907). This work contained little that might be compared to the ‘ilm al-bah medical descriptions of sexual physiology, and instead was largely a collection of erotic verses and stories.

Sexological views of Arabs and Muslims

On the surface, there is no reason to expect the neologism erotology to be more exoticist, dismissive, or reductive than Iwan Bloch's 1904 neologism Sexualwissenschaft (or the English renditions sexology and sexual science), but in practice the division effectively demarcated the West from the rest, the colonisers from the colonised, and serious medical science from titillating but irrelevant erotica. The orientalist Heinrich Conrad’s 1904 German translation from the 1848 Baron R. French manuscript referred to it specifically (in Latin) as an example of ars amatoria (the art of love), a precedent term similar to Van Guik's/Needham's later ars erotica, used to describe works of Chinese sexual technique (Conrad, 1904). A different French translation of al-Rawḍ al-’aṭir appearing in 1929 hinted more explicitly at the medical seriousness of the genre to which the work belonged, with the inclusion of a subtitle that referred to it as ‘la science de l’amour en Orient’ (the love science of the Orient), albeit while still not recognising it as something geographically, linguistically, or culturally specific, nor in any way important to the global historical development of modern sexual medicine (Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1929). Medical descriptions of sexual matters were sexology, or sexual science, if performed by Europeans with reference to concepts of perversion, pathology, degeneration, and civilisation; they were erotology, ars amatoria, or ars erotica if penned in non-European or ancient languages with reference to sexual divinity, pleasure techniques, aphrodisiacs, or sexual variations not subjected to hierarchical taxonomies of the kind recognisable to 19th-century medical and psychiatric models. All these terms effectively relegated the important corpus of medieval Arabic sexual medicine to the exotic margins of orientalist titillation, flagging it as of no particular interest for the understanding of sexology's own historical emergence.

This phenomenon was symptomatic of a broader tendency in European colonising cultures at this time that made most non-European cultures objects of exoticist fantasy for British and French writers – what Edward Said (1978) calls orientalism – evoking promiscuity, hypersexuality, and perverse barbarism, in contrast to the purported sexual constraint and moral rectitude of civilised Europeans (Bauer, 2008; Cryle, 2000; Teo, 2011). Burton also famously mapped same-sex practices, sexual excess generally, and the use of aphrodisiacs to a specific geographic ‘Sotadic’ zone that encompassed much of the world outside of Northern and Western Europe (Bland and Doan, 1998; Burton, 1886: 238–52). North Africa and the Middle East were included in Burton's schema, contributing to the Western homoerotic exoticisation of Arab and Muslim men during the first half of the 20th century (Colligan, 2010; Schick, 1999: 178–89; Shamma, 2014). In 1930, the English scholar of Renaissance literature and homosexual rights advocate John Addington Symonds collected all the fragments that Burton had ever written on the Sotadic zone theory, publishing them as a separate book, which appeared in multiple editions throughout the second half of the 20th century (Burton, 1930). By this time, too, Magnus Hirschfeld (1935: 235) was fond of characterising Arab and Muslim cultures as hypersexual and homoerotic while also acknowledging admiringly that sexuality and ‘religious feeling’ were ‘by no means alien to one another’ in Islamicate thought. In his 1926 sexological travelogue, Hirschfeld included numerous observations about Arabic and Persian medicine, and about the cultural practices of der Mohahammedaner, relating to circumcision and to eunuchs, but nowhere among these remarks did he mention any of the ‘ilm al-bah corpus, nor the role of sexual anatomy and pharmacology in the work of the great Persian physicians of the Middle Ages (Hirschfeld, 1926: 371, 406–9, 516–17).

Stereotyped views of cultural difference informed by colonial power relations underlay the new European fantasies of the Middle Eastern, African, Indian, South American, South-East Asian, and Pacific cultures that flourished in the 19th century (Arondekar, 2005; Colligan, 2006; McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 1995). A similar fascination with exotic bodies and sexual practices was reflected in major works of French, English, and German sexology published between c.1880 and c.1930, as several important scholarly endeavours have explored (Bland and Doan, 1998; Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones, 2017; Funke, 2015; Schick, 1999: 82–6). The renowned Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing epitomised this kind of approach to Muslim cultures in one of the most widely read works of late 19th-century sexual science (von Krafft-Ebing, 1903). In his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, Krafft-Ebing described the Muslim woman as ‘hindered in her intellectual and moral development’ by her position of subordination, since she ‘has ever remained essentially a means of sensual gratification and procreation’ as a result of polygamy (von Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 24). As Heike Bauer (2008) has shown, Krafft-Ebing viewed Islam primarily as a counterpoint to the civilised moral superiority of Christian Europe, contrasting the purported Muslim use of women as mere sexual ‘chattel’ with the Christian evaluation of women as homemakers, mothers, and companions. As Angela Willey (2017: 104) remarks, denigrations of Islamic polygamy serviced a legitimisation of sexology by positioning it ‘as a nation- and empire-building project’, separating ‘colonizers from colonized populations as ostensibly distinct types’. Indeed, Krafft-Ebing referred to cultures based on polygamous marriage as constituting a specific set of ‘races’ (von Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 24). In the opening pages of Psychopathia Sexualis, he flagged as important that Islam promised sexual rewards in heaven, while Christianity did not, but appeared not to wonder about the role that idea might have played in the historical development of Islamic sexual medical thought (ibid.: 5).

The Italian doctor and anthropologist Paolo Mantagazza (1831–1910) and the German sexologist and historian Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) both produced surveys of sexual cultures around the world and throughout history, making passing reference to Islamicate sexual medicine traditions while also referring to Arabs, Persians, and Muslims as superstitious, incestuous, polygamous, and valuing relations with prostitutes (Bloch, 1933a; Mantagazza, 1886: Vol. 1, 84–5, 98; Vol. 2, 12, 37, 87, 163–4, 192). Mantagazza even mentioned other works of historical erotic description produced in Roman antiquity and in ancient India and devoted a substantial discussion to the topic of aphrodisiacs, stating that ‘the Orient is master of this art’. Here at least he gestured to ‘the great Avicenna’, but beyond this he had no specific engagement with any Islamicate medical texts (Mantagazza, 1886: Vol. 1, 70, 118–20). The Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1914) wrote about the history of sexuality and studied contemporary Moroccan society and sexuality, and yet he appears not to have recognised the substantial medieval Arabic corpus of works of sexual medicine, referring instead simply to clichés of Muslim women as sexual slaves to their husbands (Leck, 2017; Moore, 2021; Westermarck, 1914: 265).

Iwan Bloch had a somewhat more sophisticated historical understanding in which he might have situated the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, but he made no mention of it in the final chapter of his 1907 Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit in seinen Beziehungen zur modernen Kultur (Sexual Life in Our Time in Relation to Modern Culture), where he discussed all the different historical genres of writing about sexual matters of which he was aware (Bloch, 1909: 729–39). Nonetheless, he appears to have recognised that medieval Islamicate cultures produced a broad array of texts discussing sexual variations, and in his 1902–3 Beiträge zur Aetiologie der Psychopathia sexualis (Contributions to the Aetiology of Sexual Psychopathology), he also cited the 10th-century scholar Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub as a source of historical information about what he called ‘Amazonian’ women of ancient societies, who had male slaves (Bloch, 1902–3: Vol. 2, 147). In his 1933 work Odoratus Sexualis, he discussed the massive Persian and Arabic poetic literature of scent and Middle Eastern cultural uses of musk and other spices (Bloch, 1933a: 246–7; 1933b). Remarkably, too, Bloch observed European erotic exoticisation of Indian, Persian, and Chinese visual aesthetics as itself an object of curiosity for sexological inquiry (Bloch, 1964: 51, 100). Of all the sexological writers of the early 20th century, he came the closest to appreciating medieval Islamicate sexual medicine on its own terms and most probably would have taken a considerable interest in it had he accessed more of the few translated works available to European scholars at the time. Much to his credit, Bloch gave little credence to views about homosexuality (like Burton's) that attributed it to particular geographic zones, and instead discussed the ubiquitous same-sex practices in ancient Greece and the medieval ‘Orient’ as indicating the inadequacy of existing scientific terminology for understanding how so many married men in these cultures were also attracted to other men and to boys, and how such arrangements were socially normalised within their own unique contexts (ibid.: 546–8).

In France, with its colonial regimes in Algeria and Tunisia formed between 1830 and 1881, as might be expected, exoticised discourses about Muslims and Arabs proliferated on a much wider cultural scale than in either Britain or Germanic Europe. As Ian Coller (2020: 10) has recently shown, French republican political debates from the end of the 18th century often made Muslims stand for the repression of women, against which the rights and liberties of French women were counterpoised. Judith Surkis (2019: 149–50) has demonstrated that the citizenship claims of Algerians under the Third Republic were continually problematised by French political elites with reference to polygamy and to sexual mores. Association of Muslims with aphrodisiacs also persisted in the early 20th century, and the image of the Middle Eastern merchant of aphrodisiacs became a standard trope of popular humour, as indicated in a comic pamphlet published as The Fakir's Powder. This told the story of a woman who sprinkled a fakir's aphrodisiac powder on a meal of sausages she intended to feed her husband, only to find that it caused all the sausages on the plate to stand erect (Plébus, c.1910). Another work, published in 1902 by the major publishing house Mercure de France, was a collection of Arabic erotic poems aimed at ‘lovers of the Latin countries’ who wished to receive ‘oriental lessons of love’. It discussed child marriages in the Arab world, speculating that these were more common in the warmer countries but not in Europe, because cooler weather retards sexual development – here combining 19th-century fascinations with the role of weather on sexuality and sexological fascinations with age differences in sexual relations (Fisher and Funke, 2019; Martino and Saroit, 1902: xi–xii).

Not all 19th-century scholars agreed with such conceptual arrangements of Arabs and Muslims as sexually symbolic, however. The French editor and diplomat Faustin d’Autremont, who during the 1890s and early 1900s held consular positions variously in Algeria, Belgium, and England (Bitsch, 1994: 60), also wrote an 1893 book about the resurgence of Islam as a global religion, comparing it to the modern fate of Christianity (d’Autremont, 1893). This work was sympathetic to Islamic scholarship and cognisant of the historical role of Middle Eastern cultures in the advancement of science under the medieval Abbasid caliphs. It criticised European myths about Islam that circulated widely in European cultures at the end of the 19th century. Firstly, there was the idea that Islam was especially dogmatic, stuck in the Middle Ages and resistant to cultural change, which d’Autremont claimed was patently false, as indicated by the religion's recent expansion into numerous different contemporary cultures themselves of various degrees of ‘civilisation’. He reproached Christianity in turn for its role in limiting scientific progress for much of the past 2000 years (following the myth of the Church as anti-scientific that held currency at this time) and claimed Islam had much less to answer for in these terms historically (d’Autremont, 1893: 66–75; Numbers, 2009). Secondly, he said there was a common view that Islam promoted polygamy, which he deflected by noting that such practices predated the rise of Islam and were not condoned by the Koran (d’Autremont, 1893: 67; Johnson, 2005). Thirdly, there was the claim that women were mere chattel with no social freedoms. D’Autremont did not deny that women circulated less freely in public life in Muslim societies compared to Europe, but he argued both that Islam had historically promoted better treatment of women than what had existed in Arab cultures prior to its emergence, and that this relative detriment was also offset by the Islamic banning of alcohol – the source of so much crime and violence directed against women in European societies (d’Autremont, 1893: 60, 75).

Partial recognition of the importance of medieval works of sexual medicine also appeared in late 19th- and early 20th-century works of medical history and of orientalist scholarship by scholars more deeply engaged with the medieval Islamicate source corpus. Joseph Nouridjan (Hovsep Nurican), in his 1876 book Aperçu historique de la médecine arabe (Historical Overview of Arab Medicine), discussed medieval Arabic and Persian sexual pharmacology such as in the work of the 12th-century Damascus physician Abu Muhammad Ibn al-Bayṭār (el-Beithar), who had detailed the use of aphrodisiacs and anaphrodisiacs, abortifacients, contraceptive remedies, and treatments for genital atrophy (Ibn al-Bayṭār, 1877–81; Nouridjan, 1876: 41–4). Nouridjan was a physician of Armenian origin who completed his medical training in Paris before returning to Constantinople, where he authored a book and taught a course on the deontology of medicine in the medical faculty during the last decades of the 19th century (Karakaya, 2017; Nouridjan, 1863). The Cambridge medical historian and Persian studies scholar Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926) was another erudite individual with much greater appreciation of the cultural and intellectual riches of the Islamicate medical past than that displayed by his contemporaries among the sexual scientists. Browne marvelled at the complexity of an 11th-century treatise on conception and gestation by Abu’l-Ḥasan Sa’id ibn Hibatu’llah, who was a court physician to the Caliph al-Muqtaḍi, and remarked that in ‘communing with the minds of these old Arabian and Persian physicians’, he was struck by the ‘realisation of the solidarity of the human intelligence beyond all limitations of race, space or time’ (Browne, 1921: 125–6). Other French, German, and English scholars of the history of Arabic and Persian medicine from the last decades of the 19th century also had a more complex humanistic understanding of the sophistication of medieval Islamicate science and of the place of sexual medicine within it. Johann Schlimmer, who was a multilingual German professor of medicine at the Persian Polytechnical College in Teheran between 1860 and 1875, produced a handwritten medico-pharmaceutical French-Persian list of terms that was immensely revelatory (Schlimmer, 1874). Adolf Mauritz Fonhan (1873–1940) was a Norwegian medical historian, active as a scholar after 1910, who published works in German and English on both Persian and Arabic medieval anatomy, in which he accounted for all the varying terms in these languages that referred to the clitoris (Fonahn, 1922: 32–45, 103, 150).

In the first decades after World War Two, Arabic and European accounts appeared, also informed by a wider reading of diverse works of ‘ilm al-bah. Consequently, these works considered the sexual past of Islamicate cultures in ways that moved beyond both the new characterisation of Islam as sexually prudish and the exoticist images of an undifferentiated hypersexual, fragrant Orient. This scholarship provided a more comprehensive and specific account of the larger Arabic source corpus to which The Perfumed Garden belonged, albeit often conflating marriage manuals and works of sexual medicine. However, the invocation of medieval Islamicate sexual medicine had also by this time begun to be instrumentalised by French colonial scholars keen to discredit new forms of religious sexual denial, both Catholic and Muslim, in the service of modern population control. The French Algerian economist and legal scholar George-Henri Bousquet (1900–78) had begun writing about Islam and matters of reproduction and sexuality in the mid 1930s (Bousquet, 1935), turning after 1950 towards a Malthusian concern with limiting Algerian population growth to levels comparable to those in Europe by encouraging contraceptive use and normalising non-reproductive sexual practices (Bousquet, 1950, 1953). Here he drew on the 12th-century Persian medical and mystical scholar al-Ghazālī to resist French Catholic influences on Algerian culture, referring to Bauer's 1917 German translation of al-Ghazālī to make the argument that limiting births was not sinful within Muslim marriage (Bousquet, 1950: 124; Musallam, 1983). Later he collaborated with the French Tunisian orientalist Léon Bercher on a translation of al-Ghazālī's Persian writings on marriage ethics into French (al-Ghazālī, 1989). Bousquet's forays into the Islamicate sexual past thus sought fodder for specific political interventions rather than approaching it as something of interest in its own right.

One explanation for the failure of modern sexual science to recognise the importance of earlier Islamicate forms of sexual medicine is that these earlier traditions had such a profoundly different sexual ethics that modern Europeans simply could not assimilate them at all. A form of this suggestion has been made by some historians according to which the normalisation of erotic impulses and pleasures in medieval Middle Eastern cultures indicates Islam was a broadly ‘sex positive’ religion that contrasted to the West (Bullough, 1976: 205–44). Such views have been criticised for their own reductive exoticism, since it is hardly appropriate to judge medieval sources according to the values of late 20th-century sexual liberation politics (Peirce, 2009). Lacking ground as a historical perspective on account of being a presentist projection onto the past, such a view fails to take account of the medieval Islamicate contexts in which such texts themselves were produced, where elite men dominated authorship of the ‘ilm al-bah works within a slave-owning system and where a large percentage of people of all sexes were slaves (Ali, 2010). Nonetheless, women most likely were among the readers of the ‘ilm al-bah works, if not contributors to them, particularly those of the jawārī class of literate slave women, who were themselves often poets (Gordon and Hain, 2017; Myrne, 2020: 111, 171). It is certainly the case that medical and religious sources throughout the early history of Islamicate societies did not reduce the purpose of sexual relations purely to their reproductive function, deny the importance of women's pleasure, or pathologise specific sexual practices and tendencies – three of the most central complaints of modern sexual liberationists about Western cultural legacies. Certainly, too, recent Islamic sexology has leaned upon this cultural heritage in the legitimation of sexual pleasure for Muslims today (Akande, 2015; Dialmy, 2010; El Feki, 2013), while currents of recent Islamic thought that have depicted sex as a source of moral corruption have sought to repress access to historical knowledge of medieval ‘ilm al-bah (Abdulssalam, 2006; Amer, 2009; Azam, 2013; Najmabadi, 2014).

It is perhaps not surprising that sexual scientists in Europe (who were primarily clinicians) paid so little attention to the work of Islamic studies scholars and medical historians, who operated in entirely different institutional contexts within elite universities or as free agents of aristocratic privilege in an inner circle of erudition. Nonetheless, it is also noteworthy that modern sexologists ignored ‘ilm al-bah when thinking about the origins of their discipline, given the intense historical fascination they brought to the consideration of ancient Greece and Rome as instructive for the development of ideas about sexual norms as non-universal (Leck, 2016; Orrells, 2015). One thing that was probably difficult for many European sexologists to accommodate (if ever they did read any of the increasingly available ‘ilm al-bah translations in their lifetime) was the fusion of the sexual and the sacred in many works of Islamicate sexual medicine. For both Krafft-Ebing and Mantagazza, the role of religion was to constrain and regulate sexual impulses, certainly not to act as a vehicle or inspiration for them (Mantagazza, 1886: Vol. 1, 67; von Krafft-Ebing, 1894: 5–8). For Sigmund Freud, writing in 1939 just before his death, monotheistic religions all represented an infantile sublimation of libido into submission to a symbolic father (Freud, 1939). The ‘ilm al-bah fusion of eroticism and spirituality was one of the features of the Jardin parfumé that Auguste Regnault had signalled in his 1850 introduction to the first French translation of the work. Regnault remarked that while al-Nafzāwī's text might be compared to obscene early modern Italian and French works, such as those of Pietro Aretino and of François Rabelais, it nonetheless had a unique quality both in the seriousness with which it treated its subject matter and in the appeals to the Koran and Islamic faith threaded throughout its description of sexual physiology. He gave as an example the description of women's sexual organs, including the clitoris, in Arabic sexual medicine, which referred to their God-given quality, construed as an indication that Allah had intended women to have pleasure. ⁵ More complex scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine clearly was available to the generations of sexual science scholars that included Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Edward Westermarck, Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, and Alfred Kinsey, and yet none of these scholars appears to have apprehended these new advances in European humanistic knowledge of the Islamicate past. Aside from Hirschfeld's unusual preparedness to accord non-European pre-modern works the status of ‘sexual science’, most European sexology writers between 1880 and 1930 tended to see themselves as novel historical innovators in the assimilation of sexual desires and practices to medical and psychological description. In 1933, the French psychoanalytic sexologist Angélo Hesnard (1933: 7) described sexology as ‘une science toute récente’ – an entirely recent science. As Sylvie Chaperon remarks, Hesnard was wedded to a view of teleological progress in which knowledge of sexuality had evolved from a moral religious frame to one of psychological normalisation, as espoused in his 1954 work Morale sans péché (Morality Without Sin; Chaperon, 2002; Hesnard, 1954). From such a perspective, the medieval Arabic refusal to bifurcate divinity from medicalisation was incomprehensible.

In the same period – from the end of the 19th to the mid 20th century – as European sexual scientists continued to ignore medieval Islamicate sexual medicine, Middle Eastern cultures performed their own active occlusion of the ‘ilm al-bah from accounts of Islamic history. As Joseph Massad, Dror Ze’evi, and Khaled El-Rouayheb have all shown, Persian and Ottoman diplomats had since the late 17th century been acutely aware of the sexual stereotypes about Muslims that Europeans entertained, according to which polygamy indicated debauchery and barbarous sexual excess, as well as their tendency to view Middle Eastern same-sex relations through the lens of Christian sodomy, and later through that of medical pathologisation (El-Rouayheb, 2005; Massad, 2007; Ze’evi’, 2006). Ottoman envoys had regularly visited European courts since the 16th century, often themselves finding European sexual mores shocking, with reference to women exposing their heads, necks, and cleavages, to men and women dancing with their bodies pressed against one another, and to open practices of courtship and flirtation (El-Rouayheb, 2005: 1–6). Aware that Europeans viewed them in turn as sexually excessive and barbarous, political elites of 20th-century Middle Eastern nation states, emerging in the struggle against European colonial incursions of the 19th century, developed novel forms of sexual censorship, often claiming these as traditionally Islamic (Ze’evi, 2006: 149–72). In the first decades of the 20th century, medieval ‘ilm al-bah texts were published only clandestinely in Arabic, or else in heavily abridged versions with much of their sexually explicit content expunged. As Sahar Amer, Boyda Johnstone, and Daniel Newman have all remarked, many of the medieval Arabic medical manuscripts describing sexual matters have been subject to censorship in their modern Arabic publication, or worse, destroyed altogether, while often being subject to exoticist mutilation when they have been translated into European languages by orientalists (Amer, 2009; Johnstone, 2019; Newman, 2014).

Conclusion

Modern European sexual science was indeed novel in its delineation of sexuality as a specific field of meaning divorced from divinity and from other forms of pleasure, in its focus on sexual pathologies and its description of types of people according to new categories of desire, and in its mapping of sexual perversions to teleological concepts of historical progress and degeneration. This article is by no means an attempt to collapse modern sexual science with medieval ‘ilm al-bah; these were clearly distinct and unique expressions of thought occurring in profoundly different cultural contexts. However, it is striking that modern sexual science paid so little attention to the earlier Arabic and Persian traditions of sexual medicine and the description of sexual practices, except to assimilate them to an array of homogenous world examples of exotic ‘erotology’. ‘Ilm al-bah was by far the largest historical precedent of a complex medical corpus of texts pertaining to a wide array of sexual matters well beyond the description of reproductive anatomy found in ancient Greek medicine. But it is perhaps more surprising still that as historians of sexual science, we have not given more thought to how medieval Islamicate sexual medicine may have impacted the emergence of European medical ideas about sexual matters, and how Islamicate sexual concepts were themselves transformed by the French and English colonial invasions of North Africa and the Middle East in the 19th century (Najmabadi, 2014).

European sexologists were ignorant of the history of Islamicate sexual medicine not merely in the sense of ‘not knowing’ about it, but also in the sense of failing to accept the challenge it posed to their ideas, since clues to the existence of historical precedents of modern sexual medicine were indeed at least partly available from the end of the 19th century onwards (al-Ghazālī, 1917; al-Suyuti, 1900; Ibn al-Bayṭār, 1840–2, 1877–81; Ibn al-Nafzāwī, 1886; Ibn Naṣir al-Kātib, 1921; Ibn Sīnā, 1889, 1903). Nonetheless, these texts would have been difficult for modern European sexologists to recognise for their earlier epistemological innovation in the context of the new materialist commitments, evocative exoticism, and teleological views of sexual progress that prevailed in 19th- and early 20th-century habits of medical thought about sexuality. Sexological views of cultural difference were grounded in racial and colonial concepts that made it difficult to recognise that their own knowledge had important historical forerunners among some of the very cultures Europeans now claimed to be civilising.

Since the late 20th century, a substantial body of new scholarship on this immense Islamicate sexual medicine tradition has become undeniable, beginning with Abdelwahab Bouhdiba's doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1978, which appeared just two years after the publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (Bouhdiba, 2010). Foucault's subsequent volumes of The History of Sexuality all moved far back into the Greco-Roman and Patristic periods, before the emergence of Islam or the rise of Arabic and Persian medicine. It therefore may not be appropriate to assume that he necessarily viewed the Western history of sexuality as emerging without relation to the Middle East (Moore and Elden, 2021); but nor should this give us licence for such omissions in our own accounts of the long history of sexual medicine. Even fairly recent forms of historicisation of sexology among German scholars have demonstrated a similar Eurocentrism to that of the early 20th-century accounts: Erwin Haeberle proclaimed in 1997 that ‘Italy was the mother country of modern sex research’ (Haeberle, 1997: 13), and even an entire 2008 monograph on the history of sexual science by the German psychiatrist and sexologist Volkmar Sigusch (2008) treated it as a wholly modern Western phenomenon with no older world influences. Even in 2010, an article written by two urologists in the Journal of Sexual Medicine claimed that sexual medicine of any kind had really begun only in 18th-century Europe with the emergence of anti-masturbation works, even as the authors acknowledged briefly that the medieval Persian scholar Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) had described differences between men's and women's orgasms (Schultheiss and Glina, 2010: 2038). Since the final decades of the 20th century, there have been new English translations of several other Arabic sexual medicine texts from the large corpus, as well as numerous modern Arabic print editions of even more. Substantial bibliographies of these works can now be found in Pyrnilla Myrne’s (2020: 205–9) monograph, Habeeb Akande (2015: 315–31) monograph, and Daniel Newman’s translation of al-Ṭusi's 10th-century aphrodisiac text (al-Ṭusi, 2014: 183–98; Newman, 2014). In situating modern sexual science in the larger global context of sexual medicine traditions in long historical time, new possibilities await us for distinguishing the complex and multidirectional intercultural entanglements of Europe and the Middle East.