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'I know it when I see it': Dis/similarity in Medieval Muslim Determinations of Paternity Kathryn Kueny (Draft)Before blood tests, DNA testing, and close record keeping, resemblance was often utilized as the means through which paternity was secured. However, on what basis does a child look like his father? The answer to this question is dependent upon an ever-shifting set of criteria and authoritative voice, all of which affect the child's physical appearance. This paper explores the rich rhetorical strategies medieval Muslim physicians and scholars adopt to establish paternity through the generation and determination of like features between fathers and children. I argue such strategies are informed by broader assumptions about male/female anatomy, wayward parental behavior, notions of piety, and the inherent fragility of masculinity and the patriarchal household. Observations for this discussion are drawn from a variety of medieval Muslim medical texts, bestiaries, ?adith collections, and other legal and theological treatises.In 1964, a U.S. Supreme Court decision came down involving the showing of the French film, The Lovers, which the state declared obscene. Jacobellis v. Ohio became famous for an opinion put forth by Justice Potter Stewart, who claimed the Constitution protected all obscenity except for “hard-core” pornography. In trying to delimit what hard-core pornography might be, Stewart wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that short-hand description . . . but I know it when I see it.”The subjective nature of Justice Stewart’s criteria applies to medieval Muslim standards for identifying paternity. While maternity is rarely disputed (as even midwives may validate a child’s exit from his mother’s body before a judge), a father’s relationship to his son or daughter remains tenuous. Telemachus in the Odyssey illustrates this point quite poignantly when he says, “My mother says that I am his. But I don’t know. Does anyone really know his father?”. Clearly, in this example, the mother’s word is dismissed as less than trustworthy and that leaves no surefire way to prove paternal lineage. Before the onset of blood tests, DNA testing, and close record keeping, resemblance was most frequently utilized as the means through which paternity was secured. However, the determination of resemblance is slippery business. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is paternal resemblance. After all, on what basis does a child look like his father? By what features might he be compared? What happens when a child looks nothing like his father, or, more disturbingly, exactly like the neighbor? And, of course, who sets the criteria and makes the final evaluation of who belongs to whom? The answers to these questions are highly dependent upon an ever-shifting set of criteria and authoritative voice.This paper explores the rich rhetorical strategies a cross section of medieval Muslim scholars and physicians adopt to establish paternity through the generation and determination of like features between fathers and children. An exploration into the ways in which these medieval voices reinforce, but also, when necessary, deconstruct, paternal resemblance reveals a profound desire to mask the inherent fragility of male control over unbridled female sexuality and deadbeat dads, to question the moral behaviors and intentions of the mother (and, to some extent, the father) when the reproductive process strays from normative expectations, and to assert the centrality of the patriarchal family over rival permutations in medieval Muslim society.The Role of Female Desire in Assuaging Paternal AnxietiesConcerns about the tenuous nature of paternity due to a lack of congruity between children and their fathers are rooted in a common trope that appears in Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim literatures. The trope in question provides a face-saving way for fathers to accept offspring who look nothing like them. As a result, women are protected from accusations of adultery and children are given a legitimate identity. The basic structure of the tale, which subsequently fans out in a variety of forms, extends as far back as the fifth century BCE, when Empedocles (d. 430 BCE), a pre-Socratic poet, is quoted as asking, “How do offspring come to resemble others rather than their parents?” Empedocles answered this question by suggesting that fetuses are shaped by the imagination of the woman around the time of conception. He mused that often women fall in love with statues of men or with images right before the sexual act, and produce offspring that resemble those objects or visions. These statements assume the desirous female eye fastens upon an image, and then that image works its way down through her body until it is stamped upon the embryo. In Empedocles’s example, the child, at least in theory, would have resembled the father had not the wife’s desire become the more powerful force in shaping the form and features of the child produced.Soranus (d. 138 CE), a Greek physician from Ephesus who practiced medicine in Alexandria and Rome during the first and second centuries CE, drew upon the same narrative structure as Empedocles—with slight shifts in emphasis—to argue how misshapen men may ensure they engender perfected children by compelling their wives to look at beautiful statues during intercourse. In this version, men—at least in theory—consciously choose not to resemble their children because they wish to engender more perfected progeny. In sharp contrast with Empedocles, Soranus maintained men will determine whom or what their offspring ultimately resemble by insuring the woman’s wandering eye focuses solely on those images they alone select and approve. Here, the object the wife gazes upon still affects the form of the child; however, the husband ultimately determines what form may grace her vision, and thus how the child will appear. Many medieval Jewish versions take a similar tack by giving even more authority and power to the father to assert control over a woman’s unbridled desire and wandering eye to ensure paternal resemblance. For example, in the medical writings of Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (d. 1204 CE), the famous twelfth-century rabbi, physician, and philosopher who was born in Córdoba, Spain, and flourished in Morocco and Egypt, the husband contracts a painter to create a stunning image of a boy. The husband places the portrait in front of his wife during foreplay, and then instructs her to gaze upon it without blinking or moving her eyes to the left or right. Lo and behold, she conceives a handsome son who resembles the boy in the painting rather than the husband. Here, a father’s success in producing such a perfected child who, incidentally, looks nothing like him, ironically proves his ultimate authority over his wife and the family as a whole rather than exposes to ridicule his inability to master, tame, and channel her lustful desires, which may threaten the integrity of the patriarchal family.Other Jewish examples use this same narrative trope more explicitly to exonerate women from accusations of adultery. A midrashic version relays how the king of Arabia exclaims, “I am black and my wife is black, yet she gave birth to a white son. Shall I kill her for having played the harlot?” To this Rabbi Akiba retorted: “Are the statues in your house black or white?” The king answered, “white.” Then Rabbi Akiba assured him by saying, “When you had intercourse with her, she fixed her eyes upon the white figures and bore a child like them.” Clearly, the poor man is shown to be totally ineffectual when it comes to controlling his wife’s sexual desires. Despite this rather obvious defect, however, he can still be assured that the white-skinned child is his.Each of these versions of the basic narrative, extending over a period of a millennium, provides alternative sets of venues for asserting paternity when a child emerges from his mother’s womb not as a “chip off the ole block” but rather taking after someone other than the presumed father. In these examples, obvious incongruities between father and child, and the almost tortured authoritative efforts to dismiss them, reveal hidden doubts about the extent of male control over the reproductive process, a lack of knowledge about genetics and reproduction, and perpetual anxieties about female sexuality, desire, and morality that may be revealed through the features of child. In each of these cases, male elites mask doubts, anxieties, and uncertainties about children who bear no resemblance to them with bald assertions of paternal authority and control over the household despite nagging evidence to the contrary. Assuaging Paternal Anxieties through Appeals to HeredityMedieval Muslim scholars also provided their own variants of the basic narrative, which, unlike the Greek, Roman, and Jewish examples noted above, privilege the role heredity plays in determining the features of the child. As in the examples of the mother’s desirous gaze, arguments from heredity also attempt to assuage the uncertainties that plague fathers whose children look nothing like them by limiting the vagaries of maternal impressions. For example, ninth-century Persian physician ‘Alī ibn Sahl Rabbān al-?abarī (d. 870 CE) in his Firdaws al-?ikma (Paradise of Wisdom), related a story of a woman who bore a girl from an Ethiopian man. When his daughter reached puberty, she was married to a white man and she bore him a black child. Rather than referring to a mother’s wayward gaze upon an image, Rabbān al-?abarī reported the child has taken on the color of the grandfather. Here, even though the child looks nothing like the father, he still falls safely under the patriarchal, familial umbrella due to ancestral reference. In this example, there is no need for the husband to question the behaviors or to control the desirous gaze of his wife--the dissonance is simply attributed to fluctuations in inherited features.The ninth-century Persian collector of ?adith, Abū `Abdallāh Mu?ammad Yazīd al-Qazwīnī ibn Māja (d. 887 or 889 CE), in his Sunan, also related information similar to Rabbi Akiba’s midrashic advice to a white woman who gave birth to a black child. In this example, the prophet Mu?ammad explains this rather unusual phenomenon through appeals to heredity. The fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar Mu?ammad ibn Mūsā al-Damīrī (d. 1405 CE), in his ?ayāt al-?ayawān al-kubrā (Great Book of Animals), likewise recorded a number of tales where white women give birth to black sons, even though their husbands are also white. Like Rabbān al-?abarī, Damīrī surmised that the sons must take after a distant grandfather. This grandfather does not appear proximate and is never named, but rather resides more abstractly in the recesses of communal memory. To further emphasize this point about inherited traits, Damīrī related how a wife gives birth to a son who is both black and white. Astoundingly, he is white just from his head to his belly button, and black down the rest of the body. A Turk cries out, “Hey, my own grandfather looked exactly like that!” In these medieval Muslim examples, there is no mention whatsoever of a woman’s lustful gaze upon statues, portraits, or other men to explain such reproductive anomalies, as imagination would too closely border on idolatry. In addition, since Islamic law prohibits the display of statues or pictures in the home, no such references to any type of image is given as they would cast a dark shadow over the pious integrity of the entire household. Based on the fact that their children look nothing like their lawful husbands the women in these examples are simply accused of having committed adultery without mention of their inner desires latching onto an external image. Fortunately, at least for these women, the rational voice of science in the form of inherited traits exonerates them, and the child is awarded a paternal identity.What is unique to the Muslim versions is a fairly developed understanding of heredity, which refers to the argument that traits from distant relatives may skip generations and then suddenly appear in subsequent offspring. A child, therefore, may look nothing like her dad but rather her distant Uncle Harry, an observation that may never be proven one way or another since Uncle Harry—quite conveniently, perhaps—has long been dead. And certainly, we find no photographs on the mantle that can be used to resolve the issue one way or another. Here, arguments from heredity, like those of the gaze, are the community’s attempt to assuage a father’s suspicions that he might not have sired the child that exits his wife’s womb. The desire to avoid frequent and overt accusations of adultery and to protect the integrity of the child as well as the authority of the father, here secured through arguments from heredity, underscore a number of Qur’anic passages that also serve to protect the private sexual affairs of both men and women, and to promote equal gender responsibility for the child. For example, while the Qur’an condemns both adultery and fornication and calls for one hundred lashings as punishment for sex outside the confines of marriage, it stipulates that four witnesses must be supplied to prove them (Sūra 4:15–16). To further shore up the sexual rights of men and women against public gossip and wrongful accusation, Muslim jurists have concluded likewise that the four witnesses must be upstanding individuals, that they must have viewed the precise moment of penile penetration, and that they must have captured that image not by design but by chance. Falsely accusing a woman of sexual misconduct also carries with it a harsh penalty, which most likely curbed a man’s impulse to deny paternity out of a jealous rage or fear of economic hardship. The protective arguments from heredity, which suggest an offspring does not have to look like its biological father or even its parents, therefore reflect the Qur’anic position that men should always err on the side of accepting paternal responsibilities even when they may have doubts or suspicions about their wives’ fidelity. In other words, the Qur’an emphasizes that the integrity of the family unit should be preserved if at all possible and that the child should be granted firm paternal identity, care, and protection except under the most egregious of circumstances. In other words, denying the responsibility of having fathered a child should be the exception not the rule. The Qur’an, however, still provides an outlet for those who truly believe they are not the fathers of their wives’ children, without laying the blame on women. This practice—referred to as li`ān—allows for marriages to be dissolved quickly and quietly within the confines of the home, and without legal consequence for either the accused or the accuser. According to Sūra 24:6–9, if a man is completely convinced his wife has been impregnated by another man, he can testify to this fact before God four times. On the fifth statement, he calls the curse of God upon himself if he is a liar. That said, however, the wife has an equal opportunity to protect her own virtue and honor by testifying four times that her husband is falsely accusing her. She, too, calls upon the wrath of God on the fifth claim that if what she utters is not true. After both parties have borne witness, they are separated forever without punishment or culpability. Interestingly, this practice would not only provide a convenient way for fathers to shirk paternal ties and responsibilities without consequences but also for mothers who, for a variety of reasons, may have wished to defeat their husbands’ presumption of paternity, that is, that the child of the marriage is legally presumed to be the child of the husband. Whatever the case, at least ideally, in situations where the husband is convinced of his wife’s infidelity but cannot prove it without a doubt, the Qur’an provides both spouses a fair and equal opportunity to maintain their virtue and status in the public eye; after all, only God knows the truth of who is right and who is wrong.However, given the acceptance that inherited traits are inherently volatile, the seemingly high tolerance for dissonance among offspring, and the many Qur’anic passages that promote the welfare of the child and the rights of all parties involved to claim or deny parental heritage, it is perhaps surprising that an abundance of medieval Muslim sources insisted how paternal resemblance should still serve as the primary criterion used to determine the rightful heritage of the child. However, as the examples below show, the issue of who belongs to whom becomes more complicated when no such direct resemblance exists between the child and the husband of the mother. In these cases, dissonance is either explained through reproductive deviations that may be readily supported through scientific fact or through a woman’s adulterous or other wayward sexual acts and desires. Strikingly, whether appeals are made to scientific fact or acts of adultery seem to depend solely on a woman’s perceived moral character. Good women bear different-looking children who take after the distant and long-dead Uncle Harry. Bad women are more likely to deliver children in the exact likeness of the neighbor down the street, or in the exact likeness of a particular iniquity. Clearly, the “objective” criteria used to establish paternal resemblance are fashioned by more nebulous, subjective assumptions about male and female anatomies, a woman’s sexual indiscretions, and the strength of a man’s masculinity and ability to control his household.Resemblance Negotiated through Descriptions of Reproductive ProcessesThe penchant to accept volatile inherited traits is rooted in the very anatomical paradigms many Muslim scholars privileged to explain how reproduction takes place. In general, most medieval Muslim medical scholars embrace the Hippocratic two-seed theory, which argued that semen comes from all parts of the body of each parent and goes to all parts of the body of the child. In other words, both male and female partners contribute similar reproductive material to the formation of the fetus. According to Hippocrates, semen is formed as a result of sexual excitation, when the heat sparked by lust causes all the bodily fluids and organs of the body to release particles from their essence that may duplicate their own likeness in the child. To account for why the child resembles one parent or another or both, Hippocrates stated, “the child will resemble in the majority of its characteristics that parent who has contributed a greater quantity of sperm to the resemblance, and from a greater number of body parts.” Either the male or the female may contribute greater quantities of sperm to the process. Practically speaking, the more female sperm that is derived from the particles of a woman’s nose, for example, as opposed to the male sperm that is drawn from the father’s, will give the offspring its mother’s nose. However, the child’s eyes may still look like her father’s if the male sperm dominates in that regard. Hippocratic reproductive theories contrast sharply with those held by Aristotle, who supported the view that males alone provide the fetal “form” and “principle of movement” while females supply only the matter that contributes to the body of the fetus. However, in terms of explaining resemblance, there is not much difference between the Hippocratic and Aristotelian models. For Aristotle, when the form completely mastered the matter, the child would be male and look like his father. Males who look like their mothers, females who look like their fathers, and females who look like their mothers, distant ancestors, or appear as monstrosities (which can be defined as anything that looks like something other than its parents), all reflect the relative failure of the male form to master stubborn and defiant female matter. Practically speaking, if the child does have its mother’s nose, the male sperm must have failed to overcome the mother’s matter in that particular area. What differed in the Aristotelian model was the overriding belief that the child should have its father’s nose, at least in an ideal world.The Hippocratic paradigm, as opposed to the Aristotelian model, was most likely more popular among medieval Muslim scholars because it reflects Qur’anic statements on reproduction, which emphasize the role of both male and female in the generation of life. For example, Sūra 92:3 asserts the “male and the female” (al-dhakara wa al-unthā) together serve as signs of God’s creative power. In similar fashion, Sūra 42:11 notes how God “has made pairs (azwājan) for you among yourselves, and of the cattle pairs (azwājan), multiplying you thereby.” In addition, Sūra 86:6–7 refers to God creating the human being (al-insān) from a sperm drop (mā’in dāfiqin) going out from between the backbone (al-?ulbi) and the ribs (al-tarā’ibi). Sūra 76:2 refers to the role of mingled sperm (nu?fatin amshājin) in the creation of life, an idea that again underscores both the belief that semen generated from both male and female sources mixes together in the womb to reproduce life. The Qur’an, however, is silent on the issue of how children may or may not come to resemble their parents; its ultimate position is that God creates whatever he pleases in the womb, which may either conform to, or go against human desire, action, or intent. If a child looks nothing like its parents, it is because God caused it to be.Following Qur’anic and Hippocratic thought when it comes to reproductive theories, the majority of medieval Muslim traditionalists asserted males and females both emit seeds that carry traits inherited by offspring. For example, in the Muwa??a’ of eighth-century Medinan scholar Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795 CE), Umm Sulaym, one of the earliest female converts to Islam, asked the prophet Mu?ammad if a woman should take a bath after an erotic dream. `?’isha, the prophet’s youngest wife, said to her, “Silly, does a woman also have an emission?” However, the prophet retorted, “May your right hand be dust-laden! From where, then, comes the similarity of features?” As late as the fifteenth-century CE, Egyptian scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyū?ī (d. 1505 CE) also emphasized the necessity for male and female contributions to the reproductive process. In his ?ibb al-nabawī (Medicine of the Prophet), Suyū?ī argued resemblance will depend on the quality of the sperm emitted. He notes how “Ibn `Abbās related the hadith that the fluid of a man is white and thick, and that the fluid of a woman is thin and yellow. The family resemblance of a child depends on whichever of these two fluids is more subtle or more fine.” In these traditional statements that defy Aristotelian views about the limited reproductive role of women and confirm the Qur’anic position, both seeds, the male’s and the female’s, carry the traits that shape a child’s features in often random ways.Despite such persistent (and revelatory) views about the equal role of men and women in the reproductive process, and the randomness of inherited traits, many Muslim scholars and physicians still posit the male has a more naturally dominant role in determining inherited traits than does the female. Simply put, children should look like their fathers on some fundamental level, despite the fact that God may or may not cause such a resemblance to be. For example, Abū Zayd ?unayn ibn Is?āq al-`Ibādī (d. 872 CE), an Assyrian Nestorian Christian who was the personal physician of the ‘Abbasid caliph Mutawakkil in the ninth-century CE, and was, most likely, very much influenced by Aristotle, declared what is in the womb must fully reach the shape and form of the father in order to be called offspring. Like ?unayn ibn Is?āq, many Muslim scholars similarly rejected Hippocrates’s two-seed theory to suggest that males alone produce the life-form of the child. Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795 CE), for example, relates how `Abdallāh ibn `Umar disapproved of castration because “the completeness of the created form is in the testicles.” These examples illustrate, perhaps, the continued competition between the Aristotelian privilege of male dominance during the reproductive process, and the more egalitarian view espoused by both the Qur’an and the Hippocratics that suggests males and females contribute equally to the production of life. The idea that the father alone imparts hereditary traits, or that his traits necessarily dominate the mother’s, is likewise conferred through depictions of animal husbandry practices. For example, tenth-century Baghdadi intellectual Abū ?ayyān al-Taw?īdī (d. 1023 CE), in the zoological section of his Kitāb al-imtā` wa al-mu’ānsa (Book of Enjoyment and Conviviality), noted that if the veins under the tongue of a male ram are white, the ewes will give birth to white lambs; if the veins are black, the females will drop black lambs. Here, the male’s traits are always dominant; it is his characteristics that determine the features of the offspring. Analogously to the animal world, while both men and women may produce the sperm that mingles together to generate life, it is still the father’s that naturally reigns over the mother’s to dictate the child’s appearance.In order to explain how children come to look like their fathers, most medieval Muslim physicians, like their ancient Greek counterparts, came to favor a biological model based on the cultural practice of competition, which envisions a stronger, more potent sperm emerging to assert control over a thinner, weaker sperm. For example, Persian physician Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925 CE), in his tenth-century Kitāb al-dā’ al-khafī (Book on the Hidden Illness), proposed that within the confines of the womb, one of the two sperms emitted by either the male or the female eventually comes to dominate (mu?īl) the other (musta?īl), and then transform it according to its own inherent characteristics. The idea that one sperm must come to dominate the other is reinforced through medieval discussions of reproductive anomalies. For example, if one sperm fails to overcome the other, scholars proposed a hermaphrodite (khunthā) results, which for them is a form that deviates from the norm. In most cases, medieval doctors argued the more powerful sperm will depend on its superior quantity and/or quality. Muslim physicians projected a variety of scripts to account for why one seed might be “superior” over another. One suggestion is that the child takes after the first parent to reach orgasm. Here, the force of the orgasmic experience empowers and strengthens the first sperm out of the gate, allowing it to dominate the weaker. In theory, the male or the female could have more abundant or better quality sperm, and therefore the child could resemble the mother or the father. However, encoded in these discussions lurks an underlying Aristotelian belief that in an ideal world, male sperm should naturally dominate the female sperm, essentially because in its optimal form, it is better, hotter, stronger, thicker, and quicker. In an ideal world, then, children would always resemble their fathers. However, medieval physicians understood that the world humans live in is far from ideal: children exit the womb looking nothing like fathers, mothers, or even distant relatives. Therefore, elite male scholars spend much time explaining why a man’s sperm deviates from its optimal form, and how he may rectify the problem. For example, the tenth-century physician from Spain, `Arīb ibn Sa`d (d. 980 CE), in his Kitāb khalq al-janīn (Creation of the Embryo), emphasized the importance of foreplay before sex, as passion is key to abundant sperm production. `Arīb ibn Sa`d explained—quite conveniently perhaps—that the more pleasure a man experiences, the more sperm will empty out of him, which, of course, increases his chances of producing offspring that, in theory, would look more like him. In order to rectify the problem of thin, weak, or minuscule amounts of sperm, a man is instructed to shower his wife with affectionate words, fondle her hand, lick her body, gaze upon her, and refrain from any grievance he might have against her. He should even pursue peak environmental conditions by making sure there is no southerly wind blowing during his act of coitus, as it produces lazy souls, or it generates delicate, soft, unformed seed that lacks enough maturity to mate. Men are encouraged to exercise caution in choosing a suitable partner for sexual relations. They are taught never to have intercourse with a woman who has refrained from sexual relations for a long period of time, nor with a sick woman, as her condition might impact his ability to produce a sound child.In general, scholars asserted healthy men generate healthy seed; old, sick, lazy, or diseased men put forth deficient or weak seed. Even one’s mood can affect the quality and quantity of sperm produced. `Arīb ibn Sa`d, referring to Hippocrates, professed that men do not ejaculate sperm in one state every time; rather, sperm changes with the conditions of both the soul and the body. A happy soul strengthens the body, and a stronger body gives rise to more robust sperm. Likewise, sad, sick souls only yield weak, thin sperm that will most likely be dominated by the mother’s. If men work to become happier, healthier sperm producers, they will more likely than not replicate offspring in their own image. The potential is there; they just need to realize it.Medieval Muslim scholars asserted further how the most powerful of all sperm will even impress the sex of the father upon the child, while weaker sperm spawns females that would take after the mother. In this scheme, females who look like their mothers would be the product of “sad,” old, or diseased male sperm, since it would inevitably be dominated by the female’s. In order to determine what kind of child they would prefer their wives to bear, men can discipline their minds and bodies in particular ways to produce the desired results. For example, `Arīb ibn Sa`d, via Galen, argued that men can strengthen their bodies and ease their minds if they want to fortify their sperm to replicate their own image, and weaken themselves (“by the strength of God,” presumably because that act would defy their inherent, masculine natures) to produce females that may or may not resemble them. In contrast to the Qur’an’s emphasis on equal partnering in the generation of offspring, and its assertions that God creates in the womb what he wills, medieval scholars assumed that men alone—with little help from women or even God—become the primary manufacturers of both fetal sex formation and resemblance within the womb.In these examples, men can work on adjusting their diets, habits, or dispositions to ensure their sperm will overpower their wives’. Tenth-century Muslim physician Abū Ja`far ibn Abī Khālid Ibn al-Jazzār al-Qayrawānī (d. 979 CE), for example, identified a number of foods men can consume that are known for their abilities to yield larger, healthier quantities of sperm: chickpeas, beans mixed with something that adds warmth, moist meat, egg yolks, pine nuts, and peppercorns. The ?ibb al-a’imma, a collection of medical hadith attributed to the Shī`ite imams, recommended hot, tender endive, for it increases semen, improves the color, and multiplies the number of males one can produce. The Shī`ite imams also proposed a meal of parched barley (sawīq) for the begetting of strong, healthy children. Some scholars also suggested men who excessively masturbate easily lose their erections when it comes time for intercourse, or the semen they will emit when needed to reproduce will be less than potent. The key here, of course, is for them to stop pleasuring themselves or at least aim for less frequency if they wish for sperm that is thick, quick, abundant, and can easily impose itself upon the women’s. Medieval physicians also suggested men may fail to produce children that resemble them because a mother’s womb may be corrupt and distort the father’s sperm. Ninth-century scholar Abū `Uthmān `Amr ibn Ba?r al-Jā?i? (d. 868 CE), for example, noted that while most children are born in perfected form, physical deformities may be caused by ailments in the womb or in the tissues from which the fetus is composed, “just as an imperfection in the wool or in a tool prevents the craftsman from making something correctly, as he intends.” Often, medieval physicians believed little can be done to correct the innate weaknesses of the womb, and are satisfied simply to identify and catalog its flaws. `Arīb ibn Sa`d, for example, noted women most capable of conceiving must be of normal weight and size; heavy woman will have a hard time reproducing, as fat cuts off the mouth of the womb, which prevents male seed from entering. Rabbān al-?abarī, citing Hippocrates, proposed very cold women do not get pregnant because coldness solidifies the seed and the very hot also do not get pregnant because heat burns the seed. Likewise very dry and wet women fail to reproduce because their dryness shrivels the seed and their wetness causes it to slide out. Here, no diets or special recipes can counter such detrimental bodily imbalances that freeze, burn, dry, or drown healthy male seed. In each case, male scholars depict the female body as a hostile barrier to persistent, well-intentioned, and optimal male efforts to replicate themselves in their own likeness.These examples suggest that the most ardent, healthy, happy, and manly lovers who are skilled at coitus will be more likely capable of producing robust seed that may completely dominate the mother’s to reproduce male offspring that take after her husband. This, of course, is in an ideal world. In the real world, there is no indictment against the father if his child looks nothing like him because bodies often defy even the best of intentions, and God will create in the womb what he desires. Embedded within these medical discussions is a recognition that the vagaries of a man’s own thoughts, health, and well-being, or his choice in partner, will generate, more likely than not, a child with a mixed assortment of qualities, characteristics, dispositions, and features. From these discussions, we can ascertain that scholars and physicians entertained a high tolerance for variation in a child’s features. Such incongruities are easily rooted in the capriciousness of male health, thought, and behavior, or in a woman’s inherent biological weakness. However, in order to secure both the father’s and community’s acceptance of the child’s paternity in the face of such glaring incongruities, a woman’s moral behavior can only be stellar and beyond disrepute.Bad Women and Their Maternal ImpressionsWhen a woman’s moral behavior is suspect, scholars tended to suggest dissonance is not due to her defective womb or a man’s lazy sperm; rather, her illicit desires and actions become impressed upon the child’s external features so much so that the child will not resemble the husband and may, in fact, indict the lover. Here, there is no tolerance for variation. As in the examples of the gaze, which often exposes the woman’s hidden lusts, a child who is the product of an immoral coupling or deviant sexual practice comes out of the womb resembling its parents’ basest iniquities. For example, Damīrī narrated the woeful tale of how a Jew fornicated with a Christian woman, who then gave birth to an offspring with a human body and the face of an ox. The child in this case embodies the taboo of humans crossing faith boundaries during an act of illicit sexual intercourse.Similarly, ninth-century Persian scholar Abū Mu?ammad `Abdallāh ibn Muslim ibn Qutayba (d. 885 CE), in his Kitāb `uyūn al-akhbār (Book of Choice Narratives), stated that the child of a masculine female and effeminate man will be wicked and have a worse nature than that of the mule. In this example, mothers whose copulation practices stray too far outside the accepted taxonomic group produce offspring that reveal their transgressions. Similarly, in the Tafsīr, attributed to Andalusian mystic Mu?yā al-Dīn ibn `Arabī (d. 1240 CE), we find that parents who have consumed unlawful foods may produce children with souls that are dark, filthy, and evil. Ibn `Arabi used a modified Hippocratic argument to speculate that the children’s souls become corrupt because the sperm that generated them is formed out of unlawful nourishment and nurtured by a tainted soul. Here again, the child’s natural composition reveals the inherent iniquities of the parents.In many instances, suspect conceptual circumstances impress themselves directly upon a child’s features. For example, a child’s appearance inevitably points a finger at his biological father, who may be someone different from his mother’s husband. In contrast with those children with variegated traits born to upstanding parents, a bastard child will always look exactly like the man who sired him, no matter what this man ate, drank, felt, or thought before intercourse, no matter how infirm the woman’s womb. Ibn Qutayba, for example, related a story where the second Muslim caliph `Umar ibn al-Khattāb (d. 640 CE) must determine the paternity of a child whose mother had sex with two different men. She was unclear about which of the men had fathered him. In order to resolve this issue, `Umar calls upon two qā’ifs to ask their opinion, and they reply that both men shared in begetting him. A qā’if appears to have been a professional who was capable of determining resemblances between fathers and sons. `Umar was astounded at this answer; he could not believe this situation to be possible at first. But then he exclaims, “It never occurred to me that such a thing could happen, although I knew that if several dogs leg one bitch she brings forth young resembling the various males who leaped her.” The comparison in this example between women and dogs underscores the heinous nature of the mother’s wanton sexual behavior. According to Ibn Qutayba, dogs are well-known for their hypersexuality and promiscuity; it is noted female dogs menstruate every seven days. Dogs are also rendered impure to eat because, Abū ?ayyān noted, they are known to lap blood with their tongues. In this example, resemblances between women and dogs are carried out further in the features of offspring that reveal without a doubt the face of each adulterer, as well as the mother’s appetite for having sex with great numbers of men. In these examples, there are not enough distant Uncle Harrys in the world to account for physical variance.Other scholars confirmed that both the sexual iniquities of the mother and the identity of the adulterer are always impressed upon the child produced. Revered ninth-century Persian collector of canonical hadith, Mu?ammad ibn Ismā`īl al-Bukhārī (d. 870 CE), suggested point-blank that one can prove adultery if the child does not look like the father. Muhammad ibn `Abdallāh Kha?īb al-Tabrīzī’s fourteenth-century Mishkāt al-ma?ābī? (A Niche for Lamps), a handbook of authoritative Sunnī hadith, also recorded how the prophet Mu?ammad uses paternal resemblance to determine whether a woman committed adultery, a position that directly counters the need for four witnesses mandated by the Qur’an to prove cases of illicit sexual intercourse.A number of Shī`ite scholars also stressed the fact that the child conceived through an adulterous affair takes on the traits of the adulterer. For example, eleventh-century theologian Abū al-Qāsim `Alī ibn ?usayn al-Sharīf al-Murta?ā (d. 1044 CE) argued those created from adulterous sperm will never choose a good and virtuous road. Likewise, eleventh-century transmitter of Shī`ite hadith, Abū Ja`far al-?ū?ī (d. 1045 CE), asserted that marriage with a child of an adulterer is not recommended, and if it does occur no children should be produced, in theory so that despicable traits are no longer passed down through the generations. In these examples, children bear the indelible marks of their parents’ trespass. In other examples, if there is any sort of transgression to be found, it will certainly show up in the child’s features just as, according to many old wives’ tales, a strawberry mark appears on a child whose mother craved strawberries while pregnant. In yet another example from Damīrī’s ?ayāt al-?ayawān, the prophet Muhammad tells the story of a white man who begets a black and reddish son. The man wonders why this could be, and the prophet notes it occurred because the man’s own father was leprous, a secret the man had wished to conceal but was revealed through the body of his own son. In another example, the prophet Muhammad chastises a woman for trying to use nonresemblance to sever her husband from his children. Bukhārī reported how Muhammad accuses the woman of lying when she states that her husband is impotent based on the fact that her children look exactly like him. The prophet declares, “By God, these boys resemble [their father] as a crow resembles a crow!” In this example, resemblance is established by an outside party to protect a husband’s relationship with his sons, and to guard against women denying their husbands’ paternal rights.What all these examples show is that medieval Muslim scholars often take two very different approaches to the problems presented by the birth of a child who looks nothing like his legitimate father, that is, the husband of his mother. On the one hand, Muslim accounts stress the need for men to accept the often-unexpected vagaries of inherited traits, since refusal to do so could create an insurmountable social crisis—in other words, a plethora of fatherless children. Such a perspective conforms to the Qur’anic position that accusations of adultery should not be made without considerable proof. Clearly, such a phenomenon where children would be readily abandoned by insecure men would undermine the cornerstones of the faith: the Muslim family and the umma (community). Damīrī, for example, reported how the prophet Muhammad explicitly advises fathers not to disown sons who look nothing like them, because children frequently receive hereditary traits (naj`a `irq) from distant ancestors, just as red camels oftentimes produce ashy colored offspring that resemble prior relatives. The concern here is for fathers who were too quick to neglect their children because of deep insecurities about their own paternity or an unwillingness to care for a child and her mother, financially, emotionally, or otherwise. In order to make their case for paternal ownership and responsibility, Muslim scholars emphasized heredity and the unpredictable nature of inherited traits, and the many biological explanations for why children often end up looking nothing like their presumed fathers. In each case, men must assert socially their position as heads of household by accepting responsibility for their children and the mothers who bore them. Here, paternity is conferred through the very structure of the patriarchal family, which depends, in many ways, upon the impeccable piety of both husband and wife.On the other hand, Muslim scholars determined that when the patriarchal household does breakdown as the result of a woman’s adultery or her participation in other sorts of disreputable acts, the iniquities that caused such destruction become readily impressed upon the image of the child for communal evaluation. Here, it is not enough for the couple to separate amicably, via li`ān, with God serving as the ultimate judge over their actions. The child’s features serve as an undeniable and open testimony to the hidden threat to the patriarchal family structure, a phenomenon that allows for the household’s restoration only through communal recognition, punishment, and sanction. Despite the fact that medieval Muslim explanations drawn from biology and inherited traits seem to represent a scientific advance over appeals to the desirous and sexual power of the wayward maternal gaze to determine a child’s features so vividly underscored in Greek, Roman, Christian, and Jewish traditions, such power refuses to be squelched as perceived male control over the reproductive process is shown to come down to smoke and mirrors. The fact that male scholars and physicians assert to know paternity “when they see it” reveals all too clearly the shaky foundation upon which a man lays claim over his own household, in particular, his wife’s sexuality and reproductive power, which inevitably results in more forceful efforts to conceal it. ................
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