Star poets and enslaved singers, trained in Medina, were bid for by the caliph or the Barmaki for vast sums ‘like football transfers’, writes Hugh Kennedy. ‘Girls would be traded up gaining in value in each transaction.’ These enslaved superstars, part courtesan, part artiste, played men off against each other, wrote poetry and often enjoyed the sex in ways that would be unthinkable in today’s Islamic world.*
Haroun was devoted to his mother Khayzuran and happy with his wife Zubaida, who behaved and dressed like an empress, wearing bejewelled boots and slippers, travelling with an escort of eunuchs and concubines. Khayzuran ruled the
Boredom must have played a large part in the life within the harem, boredom vying with desire: there are tales of Haroun’s girls keen to party even if they were risking their lives, and there are hints of lesbian consolations in the niches of the
‘Lift the cover!” said Caliph al-Hadi.
And there were the heads of two slaves. And by God I have never seen more beautiful faces or lovelier hair. Jewels were entwined and the air was fragrant with their perfumes.
‘Do you know what they had done?’ asked the caliph. ‘They fell in love with each other, meeting for immoral purposes. I sent a eunuch to watch them. He told me they were together. I caught them under a quilt making love and killed them.’ Then he said, ‘Take away the heads, boy,’ and carried on the conversation as if nothing had happened.
Zubaida, the definition of virtuous Arab beauty, was sometimes alarmed by Haroun’s love affairs, once giving him ten new girls to distract him. Haroun and Zubaida had one son together, al-Amin, who was thus a double member of House Abbas. He had other children by twenty-four of the girls. When the concubine Marajil died young, Zubaida adopted her son, the future caliph al-Mamun.
Haroun had to have the best slave singers, paying a colossal 70,000 dirhams for ‘the Girl with the Mole’. But he then insisted on her telling him if she had slept with her former master. When she admitted ‘just once’, he gave her away to a governor. Sometimes even he could not get every singer he wanted. The star of the day was the gifted Inan. Haroun sent his African eunuch Musr to pay 100,000 gold dinars for her, but the owner would not sell, driving the caliph to such distraction that his mother intervened. He claimed he only wanted Inan for her poetry, in which case, it was pointed out to him, why not sleep with a male poet? Haroun laughed.
Haroun wasn’t the only one in love with Inan. Abu Nuwas (Son of the Dangling Locks) was an outrageous bisexual literary rock star who craved Inan: ‘Find pity for a man yearning for just a small drop from you?’ Inan replied:
Is it
that you mean by this?
Be off with you! Go and masturbate!
And he answered:
If I do that, I fear,
You’ll be jealous of my hand.
Abu Nuwas celebrated the seduction of girls and boys with verses depicting sexual antics and impotent failures. The wantonness of Baghdad women intimidated him. ‘I found myself in the middle of large sea,’ he wrote, unable to cope with this lubricious enthusiasm. ‘I cried out to a young man “Save me.” If he hadn’t thrown me a rope, I’d have fallen to the bottom of that sea. After this I swore … I’d only travel on backsides.’ He was happier with male lovers: ‘He prized open the boy’s arse with the edge of his sword … Show pity and compassion only where fitting. Squeeze his balls gently.’ He relished male beauty: ‘How lucky is the one who can land a kiss on him, and garner what his trousers hold!’ He recounted nights of drinking and gay sex, favouring court eunuchs and Christian monks:
Auspicious stars had risen on the night
When drunkard assaulted drunkard
We passed the time kowtowing to the Devil
Until monks sounded the bells at dawn
And the youth left, donning delightful robes
Stained with my iniquitous behaviour.
He loved the company of showgirls, recalling four of them discussing sex: ‘My vagina is like a split pomegranate,’ said one, ‘and smells of ground amber. Lucky the one who gets me when I’m shaven.’
Haroun refused to be the poet’s patron. Instead Abu Nuwas became the lover of al-Amin, the heir, who was less interested in concubines than in boy eunuchs, leading his mother Zubaida to dress her young servant girls in turban, male tunics and sashes with hair done up in bangs and sidecurls. This sparked a fashion for gamine page girls known as
