ʾAbū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī; (c. 896–956) was an Arab historian, geographer and traveler. He is sometimes referred to as the " Herodotus of the Arab World". He was a prolific author of over twenty works on theology, history (both Islamic and universal), geography, natural science, and philosophy, his celebrated magnum opus Murūj al-Dhahab wa-Ma’ādin al-Jawhar combines universal history with geography, social commentary and biography. There is an English translation that I have not yet been able to find.

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In December 895, Abū al-Jaysh Khumārawayh, the son of Ahmad b. Tūlūn, was slaughtered in Damascus...while he was drinking that night in his palace in the company of Ikhshīd Tugh. Those who carried out that murder were some of their eunuchs.... In our book Kitāb al-Zamān we wrote exhaustively about the eunuchs belonging to various races: Sudanese, Slavic, Greek, and Chinese. In that book it was stated that the people of China castrate many of their own children as the Greeks do to their own children. There were also mentioned the contradictory traits characterizing the eunuchs, which result from the cutting off of their penis, as well as the changes caused to them by nature, as an outcome of castration. This is according to what people told about them, and said about their attributes.

Al-Mada’ini said: Mu’awiya b. Abi Sufyan entered once the living quarters of his wife Fakhita – who was a woman of brains and determination – together with a eunuch, at a time when she was bare-headed. When she saw the eunuch coming together with him, she covered her face immediately. Mu’awiya said: “But he is only a eunuch.” She answered: “O Commander of the Faithful! Do you think that his mutilation absolved him from what God had forbidden him?” Mu’awiya retreated, convinced that she was right. Thenceforward no eunuch entered his women’s quarters unless he was very old and worn out. [Other sources tell of only allowing young eunuchs, up to the age when they would have entered puberty if they had not been castrated, to enter into the women’s quarters.]

People spoke about eunuchs and mentioned the difference between those of them whose penis were completely cut off and those who were only deprived of their testicles and their reproductive capability. They were also said to have been men among women and women among men. This is a wrong and false talk. For eunuchs are men, and the absence of one member of their body does not justify their classification as other. Neither does the absence of their beards transform them from what they were destined to be. Whoever claims that they are more similar to women, say in fact that the deed of the Exalted and Sublime creator was changed, for He created them men and not women; males and not females. They crime against them does not alter their original substance and does not eliminate God’s reaction of them.

We spoke also there in that book about the defect of the absence of bad odor emitted from the armpits of the eunuchs. In our previous books we mentioned what the philosophers said about this subject, for it is only rarely that the armpits of the eunuchs will give off bad odor, and this is one of the merits of the eunuchs.

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‘Abū al-Hasan ‘Alī b. al-Husayn al-Mas’ūdī, Murūj al-Dhahab wa-Ma’ādin al-Jawhar. Ed. A.J.B. Pavet de Courteille and A.C. Barbier de Meynard. Paris: Societe Asiatique, 1861-69.

The Guidebook for Obtaining Divine Favors and Avoiding Divine Punishment (Kitāb mu‘īd al-ni‘am wa mubīd al-niqam)

Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Naṣr ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Subkī (1327– 1370) was one of the most renowned and influential jurisprudents of the Mamlūk period. His career, however, in Damascus and in Cairo, was a troubled one and included a period of imprisonment on a charge of misappropriation of funds. Tāj al-Dīn wrote books in multiple genres: theology, jurisprudence, biographical dictionaries, and the teachings of the Prophet. His works are still considered to be authoritative by modern Muslim scholars.

The Mu‘īd, however, is in a very different genre from al-Subkī’s other works.

We might describe this book as a cross between: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People and a self-help manual for Medieval Muslim men. Al-Subkī structures his manual according to a political and social hierarchy of categories of people, each with its own assigned office or job. Al-Subkī’s purported goals are to provide guidance to each category (114 in total) on obtaining Divine favor and avoiding Divine punishment; and to offer advice on bearing the loss of Divine favor, despite one’s best efforts. He begins with the Caliph and Sultan and concludes with street beggars.

Each category has its own chapter or exemplar. The key to obtaining Divine Favor, in al-Subkī’s moral schema, is to do your job well, in your own station in life. But some categories of people, by virtue of their occupation or their very identity, appear to be in danger of divine punishment. These include three categories of male slaves. The first category he lists are wardrobe pages to the wealthy, generally adolescent boys or eunuchs. Their danger is giving in to sexual advances of their owner. For cupbearers, younger boys or eunuchs, there is the danger both of giving in to their owner’s sexual advances and to serving alcohol to their owners. The third category that al-Subkī describes are the eunuchs.

The Twenty-Eighth Example: The Ṭawāshiyya [The Eunuchs]

Eunuchs during the Mamlūk Sultanate in Egypt (1250-1517) were castrated slaves. They were almost always first-generation slaves who had been castrated by slave traders as young children, before puberty and before their sale into the Muslim world, although some were castrated by their owners after purchase, something that happened more frequently in other parts of the Muslim world. During the Mamlūk period, the most common sources of eunuchs were East Africa (modern Ethiopia) and the Greek-speaking parts of Anatolia (modern Turkey).

Al-Subkī does not place the eunuchs where they belong in his book, at the top of the political hierarchy in the Cairo Citadel, the Mamlūk imperial center. Instead, he places them after the wardrobe attendants and the cupbearers to the wealthy. Al-Subkī’s imagined eunuch bears no resemblance to the powerful, respected and often pious historical eunuchs we find represented in chronicles and biographical dictionaries. But some of the themes in al-Subkī’s polemic against the eunuchs do resonate with representations of eunuchs in Medieval Arabic literature, especially in satirical writings and in gendered polemics. Al-Subkī’s eunuch is a polemicized version of the “literary” eunuch, a type rather than a historical individual. Eunuchs were far more important in Mamlūk government and society than al-Subkī’s text indicates.

Al-Subkī only mentions two of the many offices held by eunuchs in the Cairo Citadel. It is perhaps not a coincidence that al-Subkī chose the two offices that he could best represent as sexualized. He makes no reference to the eunuch supervisor of the Sultan’s treasury, to the eunuch head of the household servants (who were mainly women or eunuchs), or to the “eunuchs of the prophet,” the wealthy and much venerated eunuchs who served as ritual guardians of the Prophet Muḥammad’s tomb in Madina. Al-Subkī certainly knew respected, well-educated eunuchs and was aware of the multiple roles they played in the Cairo administration, in provincial capitals, in the sanctuary of Madina and in civilian households, including the homes of Islamic jurists and scholars. But he chose not to represent these individuals.

When the Mamluk Caliphate fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1517, of the 12,000, or so, inhabitants of the Cairo Citadel, the only intact males were the Caliph and his immediate family. All other occupants were women or eunuchs.

Translated from the Arabic by Shaun Marmon. Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Naṣr ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Subkī, Kitāb Mu‘īd an-Ni‘am wa-Mubīd an-Niqam, The Restorer of Favours and the Restrainer of Chastisements, edited by David W. Myhrman (London: Luzac, 1908), 54-56. Edited by Jesus A.

[AlSubki begins with differentiating three types of eunuchs.] Know that the mamsūḥ is the one whose two testicles and penis have been completely removed. Most of our colleagues are inclined to the permissibility of his looking on sequestered women. (http://medievalslavery.org/middle-east- ... chs/#_ftn1) But there is another opinion, from the school of Abu Hanīfa and Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal, may God have mercy on them both, that this is ḥarām [absolutely forbidden]. for the khaṣīy, he is the one whose testicles have been removed, but not his penis; and the majbūb is he whose penis has been removed, but not his testicles. And the correct opinion is that it is not permissible for either one of these two types of eunuchs to look at a sequestered woman. This is all there is about the gaze of the eunuch on women. As for his gazing upon his mistress, most of our colleagues agree that the gaze of a slave, even if he has penis and testicles, on his mistress is permitted. Even if this is so, the gaze of the eunuch, as opposed to intact slaves, is more permissible.

But the correct opinion according to the Imām al-Shāfi‘ī and to many jurists is that the gaze of an intact male slave on his mistress is absolutely forbidden. This is the truth. For how can it be allowed that handsome adolescent boys, who inflame passion with their beauty, gaze upon their mistresses? For women are deficient in reason and religion. But if the slave is both a eunuch and a slave in the ownership of his mistress, this is closer to permissible than is the gaze of one who does not combine both of these two qualities. For that matter, Mālik permitted the gaze of a woman on a ṭawāshī if he were her slave or her husband’s.

Among the eunuchs is the zimām. He is the one who specializes in women (and supervises the inner court). It is his right to cast his eye on what concerns them; and to advise the master of the house and let him know of any suspicious thing that he [the eunuch] is unable to remedy. He must prohibit the agents of debauchery, such as old women and others, from visiting the women under his care. [Al-Subkī is not unique in his fear that old women, itinerant peddlers, might convey messages from lovers or arrange secret rendezvous for secluded women.]

Among the eunuchs is the muqaddam and he is the one who is responsible for watching over the adolescent boys. It is not permissible for him to have immoral relations with them. And he must not permit one of them to cuddle up with another in the same bed. Pimping for their master and for others is very common in this category of individuals. [The Sultan’s minor military slaves, while they were in training, lived in relative seclusion, as did the women and children of his household. In both cases, eunuchs played important roles as guardians, go-betweens and tutors. Given the assumptions that male erotic desire for young boys was both natural and dangerous, eunuchs were often responsible for protecting boys from adult male sexuality.]

Similarly, in regard to the zimām, pimping is very common among them. That is because of the nature of eunuchs: their lack of intelligence and their resemblance to women. It is even said: a eunuch does not mix with women without telling himself that he is a man; and not with men without telling himself that he is a woman. It is said: The eunuchs are the harshest of people in their jealousy and the most inclined to corrupting and pimping those under their charge, whether woman or adolescent boys.

It is disapproved but not forbidden to take eunuchs into service, because it encourages castration which is forbidden. [Castration of human beings is theoretically prohibited in Islamic law but most Muslim jurists had no objection to purchasing eunuch slaves or to employing manumitted eunuchs. Contrary to a popular belief, children were not only castrated on the borders of Islamic lands, in supposed compliance with Islamic law. Enslaved boys were castrated in Islamic territories. In the Ottoman Empire, they might even be castrated in the palace by the royal physician. We know of specific eunuchs who achieved high rank in the Ottoman Empire who had been castrated within the palace.]

I think Bravo should have a series "Real Women of the Sultanate" and have an episode where they share their views on castration.