Hispano-Arabic homoerotic poetry
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There is a recurrent presence of homoerotic poems in Hispano-Arabic poetry. Erotic literature, often of the highest quality, flourished in Islamic culture at a time when homosexuality, introduced as a cultural refinement in Umayyad culture,[1] played an important role.
Among the Andalusi kings the practice of homosexuality with young men was quite common; among them, the Abbadid emir Al-Mu'tamid of Seville and Yusuf III of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada wrote homoerotic poetry.[2] The preference for Christian male and female slaves over women or ephebes of their own culture contributed to the hostility of the Christian kingdoms.[3] Also among the Jewish community of al-Andalus homosexuality was even normal among the aristocracy.[4]
The contradiction between the condemnatory religious legality and the permissive popular reality was overcome by resorting to a neoplatonic sublimation, the "udri love", of an ambiguous chastity.[5] The object of desire, generally a servant, slave or captive, inverted the social role in poetry, becoming the owner of the lover, in the same way as happened with courtly love in medieval Christian Europe.[1]
The homoeroticism present in Andalusian poetry establishes a type of relationship similar to that described in ancient Greece: the adult poet assumes an active (top) role against an ephebe who assumes the passive (bottom) one,[6] which came to produce a literary cliché, that of the appearance of the "bozo",[7] which allows, given the descriptive ambiguity of the poems, both in images and grammatical uses, to identify the sex of the lover described.[1] Much of the erotic-amorous poetry of the period is devoted to the cupbearer or wine pourer, combining the bacchic (خمريات jamriyyat) and homoerotic (مذكرات mudhakkarat) genres.[8]
It began to flourish in the first half of the 9th century, during the reign of Abderraman II, emir of Córdoba.[9] The fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the eleventh century and the subsequent rule of the Almoravids and the division into the Taifa kingdoms, decentralized culture throughout al-Andalus, producing an era of splendor in poetry.[10] The Almohad invasion brought the emergence of new literary courts in the 12th and 13th centuries. The greater female autonomy in this North African ethnic group led to the appearance of a greater number of female poets, some of whom also wrote poems that sang of feminine beauty.[11]