…sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois…
Michel Foucault
I
Once upon a time: Bedouin shepherd marries into early-
Medieval mercantile city-dwellers of Arabia. Freed
from the bondage of work, he lazes in caves, imagines
god. His urbane wife, connoisseur of comfortable life
hates deserts, caravans and camels; the first convert
to his way of imagining god. But how to exalt, distinguish
the new path from the old idols’? The middle class lady
knows best: something some pagan Persian princesses do
to mark affluence, exceptionality; shrouding their ‘beauty’
(face and hair) from the gaze of commoners and slaves. So
the Prophet’s wife, the first Muslim woman, fashions
the hejab. Yet the effect of the loose covering surpasses
class, overlaps ‘gender’. Why? The Crusaders, centuries later
camped in the Middle East to battle ‘the heresy of Islam’;
Norman brigands, Goth marauders and Nordic rapists
see Woman as the raison d’être of Man’s Fall from Heaven
hear erotic Sufi poetry, return to their castles to inaugurate
Chivalric Romance, etc: the interminable Western obsession
with what (Muslim) Woman wears/shouldn’t wear. ‘Woman’
herself reinvented, characterised by the appearance of body
being covered or not, modified or not, desirable or not. But
don’t confuse sexuality with ars erotica. Gallant knights riding
forth to fight for a Faire Lady didn’t pine for the pleasures
of sex. Phallic lances clashing over the chatelaine’s kerchief
a class struggle: between the up-and-coming page boy/squire
and the aging chevalier – burgeoning Gentry vs. expiring
Nobility. We call this Modernity: the ascendancy of the West.
Yes, Islam was finally subjugated by the steam-engined navies
of Enlightened bourgeois Christians; Egypt, Palestine,
Mesopotamia carved up by the Anglo-French armies. Now
the Islamic veil, the sign of a beaten civilisation, and then
a fixed attribute of an inferior species of colonised beasts.