Sexuality and Islamic Spirituality in Early Malay Writings: A Textual History of Sex and Gender

It is argued here that before the extensive formalization of sharia laws from the late nineteenth century onwards, Islam was prominently influenced by elements of enchantment and mysticism, mirrored in its textual portrayal of passionate and sexual relations.

This book’s analysis is based on Malay manuscripts and texts about the body, sex, and sexuality. These include religious guidebooks on sexual techniques and etiquette, of which some are translated from the original Arabic or Persian, but almost all of which have been adapted for local Malay relevance. Also analyzed are collections of Malay erotic poetry from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and the only known female-authored early twentieth-century text on sex and women’s sexual pleasure.

Over the centuries changing sexual norms and attitudes in the Malay world has disengaged sex and sexuality from being a crucial component of faith and spirituality-gradually receding into the discreet margins of contemporary discourse on gender relations.

Maznah Mohamad is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. She previously worked at the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia and with the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of The Divine Bureaucracy and Disenchantment of Social Life: A Study of Bureaucratic Islam in Malaysia (2020) and co-authored Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia: An Unsung (R)evolution (2006). She has researched and published on Malaysian feminism, Islamic marriage and divorce, and gender and electoral politics.