Surviving Every Empire

The flames prescribed at Nablus were not the end of the story. For centuries afterwards, male homosexual desire continued to possess a remarkable visibility across much of the Muslim world. Arabic, Persian and Ottoman literature preserved poems addressed by men to beautiful men and boys. Love, admiration, physical attraction and sexual desire circulated through literary cultures perfectly capable of recognising what one man might feel for another.

Khaled El-Rouayheb has reconstructed this world in extraordinary detail for the Arabic-speaking Ottoman lands between 1500 and 1800. His sources include poetry, biographies, medicine, religious texts and dream interpretation and together they reveal the persistence of a rich culture of male same-sex eroticism many centuries after the Crusades. Religious prohibitions remained part of that world, as did moralists, jurists and periods of greater severity. Yet homosexual desire retained a cultural visibility that would become increasingly difficult to sustain as the Muslim world entered the modern period.¹

A long tradition begins to close

The transformation was gradual and uneven. It occurred differently in Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Tunis, Algiers and the many other societies that cannot simply be collapsed into a single “Muslim world.” Yet from the 19th century onward, historians can observe an increasingly powerful movement towards new forms of sexual regulation, embarrassment and silence.

Dror Ze’evi has traced this transformation across four centuries of Ottoman sexual discourse. Medical treatises, legal records, religious writings, popular theatre and other sources reveal an earlier world in which sexuality could be discussed through multiple intellectual traditions. During the 19th century, many of those older ways of speaking about sex began to recede. New languages of sexuality emerged alongside modern medicine, administrative reform, changing religious thought and increasingly intense contact with Europe.

Male homosexual desire became caught within that transformation. The poetry remained, as did the manuscripts, Abū Nuwās and centuries of men writing about the beauty of other men. What increasingly changed was the cultural ease with which that inheritance could be acknowledged. During the 19th and 20th centuries, reforming intellectuals and political authorities sought new forms of modernity and respectability, religious reform movements developed new approaches to morality and modern states acquired more powerful mechanisms for regulating their populations. European medical and sexual classifications circulated internationally while nationalism promoted changing ideals of family, masculinity and social order.

European imperial power entered this already changing landscape 

The West arrives with its own sexual morality

By the 19th century, the balance of power between Europe and much of the Muslim world had changed dramatically. Europeans arrived as diplomats, travellers, missionaries, scholars, soldiers, administrators and colonial rulers. They brought technologies and institutions, but they also brought moral assumptions about sex, gender, family and civilisation.

European travellers had long been fascinated by what they perceived as the sexual freedoms of Muslim societies. Male homosexuality became one of the recurring subjects through which Europeans imagined the East. What medieval Christians had described through the language of Muslim sensuality could now be reframed through ideas of civilisation, degeneration, morality and sexual respectability. The irony is striking: the West that had once imagined the Muslim East as dangerously tolerant of sex between men was now powerful enough to participate in reshaping that East according to European standards of sexual order.

Ze’evi identifies the encounter with European modernity as an important component of the transformation of Ottoman sexual discourse. Older languages of desire did not disappear overnight, but they became increasingly difficult to reconcile with emerging forms of modern respectability.² Western influence was one force among several. Muslim intellectuals, jurists, religious reformers, governments and communities remained active participants in their own transformations and no single explanation can account for developments extending across numerous societies over two centuries.

Colonialism nevertheless changed something fundamental. European sexual ideas no longer travelled only in books, sermons, medical theories and the observations of travellers. They could now travel with police forces, judges, bureaucracies and penal codes.

But Europe did not export one single legal model.

Britain and France deserve particular attention here not because they were the only European colonial powers to reshape the societies of the Muslim world, but because together they governed an exceptionally large share of Muslim-majority territories subjected to European rule and embodied two strikingly different legal relationships to homosexuality. Other European empires also mattered, but these two cases reveal particularly clearly how different colonial mechanisms could be 

Britain exports its laws against homosexuality

The British Empire provides the clearest example. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 made “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” a criminal offence under Section 377. Versions of this prohibition, sometimes through the Indian model and sometimes through distinct colonial codes, travelled through British administrations across Asia, Africa and parts of the Middle East. The process was extensive rather than universal and the precise legislation varied between territories, but in many places the resulting prohibitions survived independence.³

Here the relationship between colonialism and modern anti-homosexual legislation is unusually direct. British rule did not merely bring European attitudes towards sexuality. It provided police, courts and penal codes capable of transforming those attitudes into an enduring machinery of state repression.

The reversal is extraordinary. Homosexuality is now sometimes denounced in former colonies as a foreign Western import. Yet in a considerable number of those countries, important parts of the modern penal machinery used to persecute homosexual acts were themselves imported by Europeans.

But Britain was not Europe 

The French paradox 

France presents a revealingly different case. Revolutionary France removed consensual sodomy from its criminal law in 1791 and the Penal Code of 1810 did not restore it. This should not be mistaken for an early French acceptance of homosexuality. The revolutionary reform belonged to a much broader transformation of criminal law in which certain offences understood primarily as matters of religion, sin or private morality ceased to be crimes punished by the state. Legal decriminalisation did not mean social acceptance of homosexual men. Police surveillance and repression could continue even in the absence of a specific crime of sodomy.⁴

It nevertheless produced an important legal difference. France entered the great age of European imperial expansion without an equivalent of Section 377 to reproduce systematically across its empire.

Yet French colonialism was hardly neutral in matters of sexuality. It carried European ideas about civilisation, race, masculinity, family and sexual respectability and embedded them within colonial administration, education and social regulation. French imperial influence could therefore transform sexual cultures without simply copying a metropolitan sodomy statute that no longer existed. 

Sometimes the contradiction went further.

Under the French protectorate, Tunisia’s Penal Code of 1913 introduced Article 230, punishing sodomy with three years in prison even though no equivalent offence existed in metropolitan France.⁵ The contrast is remarkable. More than a century after revolutionary France had removed sodomy from its own criminal law, a penal code created under French colonial rule could criminalise it in Tunisia.

This apparent contradiction makes sense only if colonialism is understood as more than the geographical extension of metropolitan law. Colonial administrators governed populations through assumptions about civilisation, race, religion and the supposedly distinctive sexuality of colonised peoples. Colonial law could therefore become more sexually restrictive than the law operating in the colonising country itself.

Article 230 survived Tunisian independence in 1956. A provision created within a colonial legal order acquired a long postcolonial life of its own.

Colonial influence without a colonial copy

Elsewhere the genealogy was different again.

Algeria’s present prohibition of homosexual acts belongs to its Penal Code of 1966, four years after independence. Morocco’s current Article 489 likewise belongs formally to its post-independence Penal Code of 1962, although the extent to which its criminalisation of homosexual acts developed from legal structures and provisions established under the French protectorate remains a matter of historical interpretation. The Lebanese prohibition of sex “contrary to the order of nature,” often described simply as a French colonial relic, has an equally complicated history involving local Christian legal and theological traditions as well as European influence.⁶

These cases matter precisely because they prevent colonialism from becoming an explanation so convenient that it obscures history. Not every modern anti-homosexual law in a former colony was written by the coloniser and handed unchanged to the independent state. Colonial governments transformed legal institutions, social categories and mechanisms of surveillance. Local Muslim and Christian traditions continued to operate within those transformations. Independent states then retained, discarded, modified or created laws of their own 

Colonial genealogy and postcolonial responsibility can coexist.

The comparison between Britain and France therefore reveals two very different mechanisms. Britain frequently exported criminal prohibition directly, although never through one perfectly uniform imperial code. French influence operated less consistently, sometimes through colonial legislation and sometimes through administrative, religious and cultural transformations that cannot be reduced to the copying of French law.

Not simply East against West

The Ottoman case reminds us how carefully this history must be told. It is often claimed that the Ottoman Empire simply “decriminalised homosexuality” in 1858 when it adopted a new penal code influenced by European models. Elif Ceylan Özsoy has demonstrated why that formulation is misleading. Earlier Ottoman law did not organise homosexual behaviour according to the modern Western category of homosexuality, so the reform of 1858 cannot simply be inserted into a Western narrative moving neatly from criminalisation to decriminalisation.

The larger transformation is more revealing than any single law. Muslim societies possessed their own religious prohibitions and legal traditions long before European conquest. Colonialism did not invent sexual prohibition. Nor, however, can modern repression simply be projected backwards as the unchanged continuation of timeless Islamic morality.

Across the 19th and 20th centuries, older traditions encountered European legal concepts, colonial bureaucracies, modern medicine, nationalism and new ideas about sexuality. The resulting systems were neither purely Islamic nor simply European imports. 

Colonialism was one of the forces that changed the language, institutions and power through which homosexuality could be regulated and punished.

History performs an extraordinary reversal

During the 20th century, the direction began to change again. Homosexual men in many Western societies organised politically, published, demonstrated, challenged psychiatry and medicine, contested criminal laws and demanded recognition of their relationships and eventually their families. Across much of Europe and North America, laws criminalising consensual homosexual relations were repealed, gay men became increasingly visible and legal recognition expanded until, in a growing number of countries, marriage itself became available to two men.

The transformation constitutes one of the most remarkable reversals in the history we have been following. Societies whose legal and religious traditions had once permitted men to be executed for sex with men became capable of legally recognising the love between them.

The West therefore occupies no simple moral position in this story. It persecuted homosexual men. It exported some of that persecution. It also became one of the places where homosexual men eventually organised successfully against it.

That reversal contains something profoundly hopeful because it demonstrates that cultures can change. Religious traditions can be reread, laws can be repealed, inherited prejudices can lose their authority and forgotten histories can be recovered. Societies can become more generous than their past.

The story can travel again

For Muslim societies today, greater acceptance of homosexuality need not mean abandoning their history in order to imitate the West. Their own history contains centuries of poetry about male beauty, men writing about their desire for men, sophisticated discussions of love and attraction and periods in which homosexual desire possessed a cultural visibility that later became much more difficult.

Recovering that history requires neither idealising the medieval or Ottoman Muslim world nor transforming it into a modern gay paradise. It means recognising that tolerance, accommodation and the cultural expression of homosexual desire also belong to its inheritance.

That recognition changes the direction of the story.

The West need not appear at its conclusion as a teacher arriving to instruct Muslim societies in tolerance. History gives it no such privileged position. Western Christianity contributed to centuries of persecution and European empires participated in transforming sexual regulation across the societies they controlled. British colonial governments exported criminal prohibitions with extraordinary efficiency. French colonialism followed a different and more contradictory course.

The freedoms achieved much later in Western societies were themselves the result of struggles against parts of that inheritance. What the modern West possesses is therefore not an ancient moral superiority but evidence that profound change is possible.

That evidence belongs to everyone.

Back beneath the flowers

After this long journey, we can return to the two men with whom we began. The knight is still standing beneath the flowering arch, his fantastic golden armour partly embracing his body. The monk remains pressed against him, his hands upon his lover’s naked chest while the knight’s hand rests in his hair. Perhaps the armour is being put on for departure. Perhaps it is coming off for one last night together. Their suspended moment still contains both possibilities.

They cannot know the history that will follow them: the Crusades, Nablus, the tightening and loosening of prohibitions, the movement of laws and prejudices across continents and the long survival of homosexual desire beneath them all. We do and that knowledge allows us to see their embrace differently. Their hands upon one another belong to a much longer human history in which desire survives armies, religions, laws and empires.

Ideas have always travelled between East and West. Poetry travelled, science travelled, religion travelled and laws travelled. Ways of loving travelled too. Prejudices travelled, sometimes with terrible consequences.

And now freedom can travel.

Perhaps what once travelled from West to East was sometimes intolerance. What can travel now is freedom.

If greater freedom for homosexual men continues to grow across Muslim societies, it need not arrive as something foreign brought from the West. It can also become a recovery of something contained within their own long and complicated history.

The poems are still there.

So are the lovers.

For centuries, ideas, beliefs and prejudices have passed between East and West. Poetry and science crossed borders. Laws followed empires, sometimes with terrible consequences.

Homosexual men survived every attempt to condemn, silence or erase them. The future can secure what history so often denied: dignity, equality and the freedom to live and love without fear.

Curiosity Piqued?

1. Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). El-Rouayheb reconstructs the extraordinarily rich sexual culture of the Arabic-speaking Ottoman world through poetry, biographical dictionaries, medicine, theology, mysticism, dream interpretation and legal literature. His sources reveal societies capable of distinguishing sexual acts between men from falling in love with a man, admiring male beauty and writing poetry about it. The book is fundamental to this section because it demonstrates the persistence of culturally articulated male homosexual desire alongside religious prohibitions. It also cautions against projecting modern categories of sexual identity and modern patterns of social intolerance unchanged into the past.

2. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Ze’evi follows changing ways of understanding sexuality across four centuries of Ottoman history through medical texts, religious writing, legal records, popular theatre and other sources. Particularly important here is his treatment of the 19th century, when older Ottoman languages of sexuality increasingly encountered European medicine, administrative reform and new classifications of sexual behaviour. His work prevents the story from becoming a convenient morality tale in which a tolerant Muslim world suddenly becomes intolerant because Europeans arrive. Internal transformations were already taking place, but European modernity became an increasingly powerful force within them. It is an essential source for understanding how profound cultural change can occur without being reducible to either indigenous tradition or foreign imposition.

3. Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, “British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 27, no. 2 (2014): 268–288; Human Rights Watch, This Alien Legacy: The Origins of ‘Sodomy’ Laws in British Colonialism (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008). Han and O’Mahoney provide comparative evidence for the unusually strong relationship between British colonial rule and the later existence of laws criminalising homosexual conduct. Human Rights Watch reconstructs the legal machinery behind that relationship, beginning with Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and following related provisions through different parts of the British Empire. Together the studies also make an important qualification possible: there was no single statute mechanically imposed upon every British possession. Some territories received legislation derived closely from the Indian model while others were governed by differently worded colonial codes. The pattern was therefore extensive rather than universal. What connects these histories is the repeated use of imperial criminal law to regulate sex between men and the remarkable survival of many such provisions after independence.

4. Michael David Sibalis, “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789–1815,” in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr., eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 80–101; Thierry Pastorello, “L’abolition du crime de sodomie en 1791 : un long processus social, répressif et pénal,” Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, nos. 112–113 (2010): 197–208; Andrew Delatolla, “The French Empire and Its Legacies: Sexual and Gender Histories Exemplified in the Middle East and Africa,” in Colonialisms and Queer Politics: Sexualities, Genders, and Unsettling Colonialities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026). Sibalis provides the essential legal and social background to the French paradox. The disappearance of consensual sodomy from revolutionary criminal law in 1791 did not amount to an early acceptance of homosexuality. Although “crimes against nature” ceased to be criminal offences, revolutionary and Napoleonic authorities continued to regard male homosexual behaviour as morally and socially troubling and men suspected of it could remain subject to police repression and surveillance. Pastorello places the abolition within a longer 18th-century transformation: prosecutions for sodomy as a capital crime had already become extremely rare while policing increasingly displaced prosecution and the “sodomite” was becoming a socially stigmatised type. Delatolla then follows the problem into the colonial period, examining how a France without a general metropolitan sodomy offence could nevertheless reshape sexuality, gender, family and respectability through imperial administration and colonial power. Together these studies connect the legal rupture of 1791 to the central paradox of French colonialism without confusing decriminalisation with tolerance 

5. Ramy Khouili and Daniel Levine-Spound, Article 230: A History of the Criminalization of Homosexuality in Tunisia (Tunis: Avocats Sans Frontières, 2019). This archival and legal investigation makes Tunisia an unusually revealing test case for the French colonial paradox. Article 230 entered the Tunisian Penal Code in 1913 under the French protectorate and punished sodomy with three years in prison even though metropolitan French law had contained no equivalent offence since 1791. Particularly fascinating is the discrepancy between the French and Arabic formulations associated with the provision: the French text speaks specifically of “sodomie” while the Arabic terminology has been interpreted more broadly in relation to homosexuality. Khouili and Levine-Spound investigate how such a prohibition could emerge within a French colonial legal order without pretending that it was simply copied from France. Their research brings colonial administrators, Tunisian institutions, assumptions about indigenous sexuality and interpretations of Islamic law into the same history. Article 230 survived independence in 1956, demonstrating how a provision created within a colonial legal environment could acquire a postcolonial life extending far beyond the regime that produced it.

6. Andrew Delatolla, “The French Empire and Its Legacies”; Ivan Strenski, “On the Jesuit-Maronite Provenance of Lebanon’s Criminalization of Homosexuality,” Journal of Law and Religion 35, no. 3 (2020): 380–406; Morocco, Code pénal, Dahir no. 1-59-413 of 26 November 1962, art. 489; Algeria, Ordonnance no. 66-156 du 8 juin 1966 portant Code pénal, art. 338. Reading these cases together reveals why the phrase “colonial law” must be used carefully. Algeria’s current prohibition was enacted in 1966 after independence. Morocco’s Article 489 appears formally in the post-independence Penal Code of 1962, although sources differ over how much of its genealogy should be traced to legal structures and provisions developed during the French protectorate. Lebanon presents a different complication. Strenski challenges the familiar description of Article 534 as simply a French colonial import and traces its language of acts “against nature” through Maronite moral and legal traditions shaped partly by Thomistic and post-Tridentine Catholic theology transmitted through Jesuit institutions. These examples do not diminish colonial influence. They reveal how colonial institutions, European ideas, local religious traditions and postcolonial legislation could interact rather than forming a single chain of legal copying.

7. Elif Ceylan Özsoy, “Decolonizing Decriminalization Analyses: Did the Ottomans Decriminalize Homosexuality in 1858?,” Journal of Homosexuality 68, no. 12 (2021): 1979–2002. Özsoy dismantles one of the most attractive simplifications in popular queer history: the assertion that the Ottoman Empire straightforwardly “decriminalised homosexuality” in 1858. Earlier Ottoman law regulated particular sexual acts through categories that do not correspond neatly to the modern concept of homosexuality. The disappearance or alteration of particular offences in the 1858 Penal Code therefore cannot automatically be understood as the Ottoman equivalent of modern gay decriminalisation. This article is especially valuable at the end of our colonial discussion because it prevents the argument from simply reversing an older Eurocentric narrative. Neither “Islam persecuted homosexuals until the West liberated them” nor “Islam tolerated homosexuality until the West criminalised it” adequately describes the historical record. The transformations occurred through interactions among indigenous legal and religious traditions, Ottoman reform, European influence, colonial government and eventually the choices of independent states.

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