Eunuchs in the Sunnī Legal Discourse: Reflections on the Gender of Castrated Men

Tolino, Serena (2022). Eunuchs in the Sunnī Legal Discourse: Reflections on the Gender of Castrated Men. Studi Magrebini, 20(2), pp. 117-136. Brill 10.1163/2590034x-20220071

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In this paper I focus on how Muslim jurists gendered and discussed castrated men – eunuchs. Eunuchs were a common characteristic of many pre-modern societies, well beyond Islamic contexts. Far from being only “harem guardians”, they had a very important role in court politics and in dynastical decisions but also in the military and the administrative sphere. Numerous sources confirm that their presence in several Islamic courts must have been impressive. This seems in contrast to the fact that castration is seen as strongly prohibited in Islamic law. The fact that eunuchs were usually enslaved and then castrated outside the Islamic world, where Islamic law did not apply, or on its borders, where the caliphal control was less strong, contributes to explaining this apparent contradiction. Given their presence in the dār al-Islām, Muslim jurists took them for granted and, even though not so extensively as in the case of the ḫunṯā, or intersex person, they also were confronted with the issue of their gender. In this article I focus on the question of how Muslim jurists gendered them. In the first part of the article I will focus on how castration was practiced, as this allows us to see how the surgery had an impact on the body of the eunuchs, but also how the different forms of castration had an impact on how castrated men were categorized by Muslim jurists. In the second part of the article I investigate how Sunnī Muslim jurists gendered eunuchs, focusing in particular on scholars from the 9th to the 14th century.

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