Pleasure of Her Sex, Part 4

Part 4

Medical Philosophy and Practice

Medical philosophy and practice, perhaps not surprisingly, also addressed the importance of sexual satisfaction to maintaining health, and this included health of the spirit as well as the body. For example, in Ibn Sina’s early eleventh century “A Treatise on Love” he explores “sacred and profane” love, treating the different types of love and the objects of love, including “higher” or divine love and love “in the animal substances” (211). It should be noted that in this treatise, Ibn Sina often quotes the Prophet as part of his discourse, including in relation to animal desire which, when expressed, can result in “vice and is harmed in his rational soul.” That said, whenever “he loves a pleasing form with an intellectual consideration…this this is to be considered as an approximation to nobility and an increase in goodness” (221). This particular text expresses the philosophical nature of the hierarchy of love which we find in other texts that address the “art of love” (including Ibm Hazm’s Ring of the Dove, among others). He establishes a hierarchy in which divine love, of course, ranks highest, but he also articulates that “every single being loves the Absolute Good with an inborn love, and that the Absolute Good manifests Itself to all those that love it” (225), which suggests that all expressions of love, including animal “substance” and “faculty” (211) are ultimately of the highest order. 

     In terms of treatment and practice, we find in Ibn al-Jazzār’s tenth century Zād al-musāfir wa-qūt al-ḥāḍir, Provisions for the Traveler and Nourishment for the Sedentary, Book 6, a treatise significant to the history of sexuality. Ibn al Jazzār was a Tunisian born physician, from a family of physicians, who trained with famous Jewish physician and philosopher Ishaq b. Sulayan al-Isra’ili. He worked as a physician and authored numerous books, many on medicine. This particular series of texts is, contrary to its title, “ a systematic medical handbook, discussing the different diseases and their treatment a capite ad calcem (from head to toe) in a concise form” (Bos, 5-8). His work was translated into Latin by Constantine the African in 1124 (Viaticum peregrinantes), and this was later adopted by the famous medical school of Salerno (in the thirteenth century), and became “one of the most influential medical handbooks in medieval Europe” (Bos 10). Ibn al Jazzār’s chapter on melancholy and its discussion of ‘ishq (passionate love) and, I suggest, his work on sexual desire and women’s diseases, had a significant influence not only on Western gynecological medicine and treatments of lovesickness, but also on literary representations of lovesickness.

     Ibn al Jazzār’s Book 6 addresses a range of topics related to the sexual body over the course of twenty chapters. They included sexual diseases among men (chapters 1-8) and women (chapters 9-18), and sciatica (chapter 19) and gout (chapter 20). While Book 6 of Ibn al Jazzār’s Provisions largely focuses on assuring male potency through aphrodisiacs and other remedies that cure impotence, it also recognizes women’s right to pleasure. The chapters on women’s sexual disease focus on issues related to menstruation, hysterical suffocation, and other gynecological subjects, including, interestingly, contraception (which itself has, as we have seen, a relationship to women’s right to pleasure). 

     Of interest to the questions of a woman’s right to pleasure is in his introductory chapter when he describes the purpose and importance of pleasure in intercourse:

          When the Creator, to Whom belong glory and greatness, wanted [to ensure] the survival of the species of animals,           He created procreative organs for all of them, which provided with an innate power characteristic to them and                   creating delight. [By this] He evoked in the soul which has these organs at its disposal, the love and ardent desire             to use them. He endowed the act of sexual intercourse with an unfailing and never absent sense of great pleasure,             so that the species of animals would survive, and mankind would not hate sexual intercourse. (Bos 239)

Of note here is the idea of “innate power” found in the procreative organs, and the “delight” and the “unfailing and never absent sense of great pleasure” that comes along with sexual intercourse. This “innate” characteristic for pleasure is present in both sexes, and in fact, as is also found in Ibn Sina’s “Treatise on Love” and al-Jawziyya’s later Medicine of the Prophet, is also connected to the soul’s desires: “He [God] evoked in the soul which has these organs at its disposal, the love and ardent desire to use them” (239) (this description is based on Galen’s description of pleasure in sexual intercourse in is De usu partium (The Usefulness of Parts) (Bos 19).

Ibn al Jazzār notes that, in addition to the various medical recipes to aid in the stimulation of sexual desire (in men), there are 

          other means as well which, when applied together with the remedies mentioned by us above, strengthen the sexual           lust and increase [sexual] activity, such as to relieve the heart of anxiety and to be always joyful…for he [Firasa]             said that there are various incentives which excite sexual lust…these include affectionate words showing passion,           kissing the cheeks, fondling with the hand, licking with the tongue, joy over the sight of the beloved, expressing               one’s devotion to the beloved and refraining from dwelling on grievances [against her]. (Bos 249)

While this is clearly intended as aid and remedy for the man, it does, as we saw in al-Ghazali’s text, ultimately benefit the women in also having pleasure (he’s describing what we have come to call “foreplay”). 

     And this pleasure in intercourse is not entirely for the purpose of procreation as is indicated by chapter (17) devoted to contraceptives and abortifacients. Bos notes that, based on Chapter 17 and another work, Tibb al-fuqara, Ibn al Jazzār projects a “neutral” attitude towards contraception and abortifacients (60-61), and that this attitude “is in conformity with that of Islam, since the use of contraceptives and abortifacients as a way of birth control was permitted in Islamic society, and was sanction by Islamic law” (61). The “numerous discussions of contraception and abortion in different genres of Islamic literature, such as medical, legal, erotic, and popular, are clear proof of this” (Bos 61). One might argue that this is also the case with a women’s right to pleasure, that the many places where discussions about the importance of sexual pleasure generally, and women’s pleasure in particular (either explicitly or implicitly), suggest that it was largely accepted in the culture.