Mubādala or Both: On Versatility and Language

A Guest Post by Denis Ferhatović

Sorry I’ve been away a minute: I had a big deadline over December. However, that is now past & I have a post in progress, which should soon follow. At any rate enjoy a guest post from my good friend and collaborator Denis Ferhatović. Here he offers thoughts on the multilingualism of queer sociolects in Arabic.

Mubādala or Both: On Versatility and Language

(A sort-of review of: The Queer Arab Glossary / Al-Mu‘jam al-‘Arabi al-Kuiri, ed. Marwan Kaabour, with essays by Hamed Sinno, Saqer AlMarri, Adam HajYahi, Nisrine Chaer, Sophie Chamas, Rana Issa, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, and Abdellah Taïa [London: Saqi, 2024])

You probably remember, dear reader, when you first encountered a reference to male same-sex erotic contact from the past. Maybe it was Classical Mediterranean: Greek or Roman. Maybe it was Islamicate: Arab or Persian. Whatever the case, soon, in your further reading or—for the less shy of us—in the classroom, you received a warning by a stern scholar. What seemed to you like (relative) openness and queerness was just another example of social hierarchy. This homoeroticism, the scholar would continue, was all about anal sex when it was not merely about exalted feelings in a gender-segregated society. It was about who penetrated and who was penetrated, or, in our terms, top and bottom. This pairing corresponds to the older, rather infelicitous terms, the active and passive participants. (They wouldn’t know a power bottom if one fell on their….) This binary then links up with others like older and younger, master and slave. Men at the top of the social pyramid could have anyone, of any gender, but only as the insertive partner. Here again is that stern scholar who has never dared practice any of the things he reads and writes about—or maybe he keeps his library hermetically sealed from his bedroom; he is smirking in a corner of your mind. He wants to tell you that the past is no place to find any exhilarating possibility in gay male sex.

But the past is long, and far more varied than the stern scholar could imagine, and not exhausted by the surviving archives and official discourses. The long history of versatility—of being capable and willing to act as both receptive and insertive partner—asserts itself even in the extant record. I am not claiming that versatility is necessarily liberatory or revolutionary, but simply that it complicates the idea that the top/bottom binary defines all gay encounters in the Islamicate world of the past and present. When you can flip-fuck, the usual social hierarchies are a little harder to impose on positionalities during intercourse. Sahar Amer, in her “Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women” (2009), lists a number of terms for male and female homosexual behavior, including “bidal or mubadala (taking turns in active and passive homosexuality)” (p. 224). Derived from the same root, bīdal means “substitute” or “alternate,” and mubādala means “exchange” (the definitions are from Hans Wehr/ J. M. Cowan’s Arabic-English Dictionary). I do not sense any particular judgment in these expressions.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the most notorious and prurient nineteenth-century Orientalists, provides another term for vers in a footnote to the story “Abu Nowas with the Three Boys and the Caliph Harun al-Rashid” within his own translation of The Arabian Nights. (He will use the same phrase in his notorious essay on the “Sotadic zone,” calling the activity “puerile.”) Glossing the line “And have each other turn by turn | Shampooing this my tool see,” Burton explicates, “It refers to what Persian boys call, in half-Turkish phrase, ‘Alish Takish,’ each acting woman after he has acted man” (Volume V; the entirety of Burton’s translation is available on Project Gutenberg). Both elements of the phrase appear Turkic pace the glossator, and they translate to “taking-(and)-sticking,” which sounds like the Modern Turkish for shopping, alış veriş, literally, “taking-(and)-giving.” It is interesting that the presence of Turkic expressions in Persian to signify a homosexual act reveals that even in premodern times, language for queerness could be borrowed.

Clearly, we can find linguistic attestation for sexual versatility in the Islamicate world of the past, in Arabic and other languages. What about today? The Queer Arab Glossary, compiled by Marwan Kaabour, gives us several possibilities. Shawwāya, used in Morocco and Tunisia, means “grill rack” and “refers to versatile gay men who flip over during sex, like meat on a grill” (p. 82; because the glossary is organized by regions of the Arabic-speaking world rather than alphabetically). On the next page, the readers see a playful illustration of the concept by Haitham Haddad, who contributed all the other images as well. Between the labels shawwāya written in Arabic and English letters, two softly butch persons take the position of sixty-nine. They are nude except for socks with turquoise blue stripes on top. The hair of the partner on top, whose head is visible and placed in the crotch of the other, sports short hair of the same hue. The couple lies amidst pink and black flames on top of a gigantic grill rack with a handle that matches the color of the hair and sock stripes. It is not a pleasant image, but neither is it totally unpleasant. Something defamiliarizing, perhaps wicked, emerges from the illustration. Haddad harnesses and shrinks the infernal flames for barbeque purposes in a campy gesture par excellence. The implication of the metaphor leaves no space for doubt: meat needs grilling on both sides for the utmost deliciousness.

While shawwāya is a native Arabic word, the two other expressions for sexual versatility from The Queer Arab Glossary, which I will mention here, contain components borrowed from foreign, colonial languages. The glossary defines both, recorded in Kuwait, as “Arabisation of ‘both’: refers to gay men considered ‘versatile’ with their sexual partners” (p. 44). Used in Egypt, another “Arabisation,” the phrase dūbl fās/ dabl fīs comes from either French or English—or, appropriately, both—“double face,” with the first given Arabization reflecting the former and the second the latter language pronunciation. Kaabour defines it as “a versatile or switch in the coded slang of Cairo homosexuals” (p. 67). Apparent foreign Western terminology in postcolonial environments might cause controversy. If we claim that queerness appears in all cultures and is not a Euro-American importation (“an egregious myth, adopted by many conservative elements of our own communities,” as Kaabour defines this belief on pages 12–13 of his Introduction), why do we encounter English (and French) words in queer jargons of the Arab world? The simple answer is that the local and global, as self and Other, are not mutually exclusive. Sexual versatility exists in both contexts, so why should the words for this concept not derive from both? Besides, what can be considered foreign about both and double face is the origin of the components but not their usage or combination within the phrase. As far as I am aware, these exact expressions exist neither in English nor French. If an Arabic speaker combines two foreign words to create a new meaning in Arabic, do the terms remain foreign, or are they hybrid in some significant way? Why would the “coded slang of Cairo homosexuals” appropriate these terms if their meaning were obvious in certain Egyptian bilingual or trilingual settings? Fittingly, we have a double act of coding for “double face”: first, the foreign elements, and second, their combination. A monolingual, potentially homophobic Arab would not be able to decode the phrase, but neither would a homophobic bilingual/trilingual Arab or a homophobic monolingual European or American.

Kaabour’s The Queer Arab Glossary provides opportunities for us to expand on our idea of the past and the present of queer life, linguistic and artistic expression (and I have not yet had the chance to reflect on the accompanying essays, which are the real treasures of the compilation). The top/bottom binary is not the be-all, end-all for gay male eroticism now, as it was not in the past. Some ancestors flip-fucked. The glossary further confirms what we know about queer jargons from other sources, such as Rusty Barrett’s scholarly article “Speech Play, Gender Play, and the Verbal Artistry of Queer Argots” (2018). The way we speak and write about our sexual lives reflects not only the need for secrecy, construction and maintenance of an in-group, but also the drive to play, laugh, and create locally and globally alike.

Works Cited

Amer, Sahar. “Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 215-236.

Barrett, Rusty. “Speech Play, Gender Play, and the Verbal Artistry of Queer Argots.” Suvremena lingvistika 86 (2018): 215-242.

Burton, Richard Francis, trans. “Abu Nowas with the Three Boys and the Caliph Harun al-Rashid.” In The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, Vol. 5. 64-69. Burton Club, 1885.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54257/54257-h/54257-h.htm

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Bridget J. Pupillo for her expert editing. All the mistakes are mine.

Denis is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Connecticut College. He is the author of Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse (Manchester UP, 2019) and “How to Say Bussy in Another Language: Sociolingvistička rasprava i lični osvrt,” Inter Alia: A Journal of Queer Studies 18 (2023) as well as numerous articles on Old English & Old French poetry. He can be reached at dferhato@conncoll.edu.