‘Because he is so tender and pretty’: sexual deviance and heresy in eighteenth-century Aleppo.

How did the shari‘a courts treat cases of illicit intercourse between men? This study answers that question by examining a successful conviction of a youth named Muhammad accused of sexual liaisons with men resulting in his expulsion from his neighbourhood in 1735. Placing this unique case into its socio-legal context, two readings are possible. One argues that this case represents a form of neighbourhood policing of possible male prostitution. However, policing of same-sex intimacy was rare and, as this article shows, within the Hanafi tradition, jurists failed to achieve scholarly consensus on the status of sodomy. A second reading suggests that anxieties over the use of beardless boys (amrad) in Sufi boy gazing ceremonies (sama‘) spurred contemporary critics to charge Sufi mystics with both sexual deviance and heresy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]