Close Relationships

Abstract

The two taboo concepts of incest and inbreeding are not so easy to detect in classical Arabic literature. True, a persistent reader of classical Arabic literature, whether belletristic or historical, is bound to meet unexpectedly rude remarks on the incestuous habits of one historical figure or the other (most often a non-Muslim) while reading a scholarly discussion on historical events. Nevertheless, the sources do not address incest and inbreeding in a straightforward manner. Centuries of pious and even sanctimonious discourse may have covered these topics with a thick layer of dust, a layer that Geert Jan van Gelder toils to remove in his comprehensive monograph Close Relationships. As an illustrious specialist in classical Arabic belles-lettres, van Gelder recruits his command in the vast scope of sixth- to nineteenth-century Arabic literature to reveal a surprisingly large amount of stories, anecdotes, and sayings about incest and inbreeding hidden in the well-known canonical literature. By doing so, he proposes a resolution to the presupposed contradiction between strict taboos against incest in pre-Islamic and Islamic societies and the role that incest played in reality. By drawing selectively from the written sources, he produces an uneven but still convincing conceptual blend showing the reciprocal relationship between literature and life. What may perplex the reader is the author's perspective of literature overlapping reality, or vice versa. One of van Gelder’s motivations for writing the book is to analyze ancient customs in pre-Islamic and Islamic societies by adopting psychological, anthropological, and literal perspectives. He locates himself in relation to modern interpreters of incest, like Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, B. H. Stricker, Edward Westermarck, and Edward William West, just to mention a few. Whereas on the one hand he seeks ideas behind the texts of belles-lettres, historical fragments, myths, religious and legal texts, on the other he revels in a strong language of jests, anecdotes, songs of semivernacular and vernacular origin, thus brilliantly building up a sort of reality of his own. Van Gelder is cautious enough to discourage the reader from taking this seriously: “Literature is never a true mirror of society and reality” (p. 185) ...