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What would you do if you were allowed to go inside the Kabah? For al-Ḥākim al-Astarābādī, a leading 11th c. Shāfiʿī scholar, this was an opportunity for him to ask God for a greater capacity to read the Quran (expected), but ALSO a greater sexual prowess since…why not?
His prayers were answered: apparently he was able to spend the whole day writing whilst simultaneously completing a full khatm of the Quran without one task distracting him from the other. This leads me to wonder what he was able to pull off in the bedroom…
It’s pretty great that out of the three lines Ibn Kathir gives him in his Tabaqat, this is way he chose to memorialize his predecessor.
But it also tells us a lot about how sex and piety were so closely intertwined in premodern Islam, reinforcing
@ccsahner 's very apt characterization of early Islam as ushering in the “second sexual revolution of Late Antiquity”…
@ccsahner 's very apt characterization of early Islam as ushering in the “second sexual revolution of Late Antiquity”…
which valorized virility, rather than chastity. See his excellent article on early Islamic ascetic ideals: “The Monasticism of My Community is Jihad”: A Debate on Asceticism, Sex, and Warfare in Early Islam, Arabica 64 (2017)
In my dissertation, I view this as one part of a broader transformation in attitudes towards the "vita activa" in the Late Antique world, with Islam exhibiting a certain worldliness (valorizing the body, the political, labor, etc.) largely absent in the Christian context...
which accounts for some of the crucial differences between the Christian and Islamic conceptions of the religious/secular distinction (the Islamic dichotomy being far less oppositional, to mention just one important element).
