Mideast Piece

Today you will meet a semi-ancient gay Arab poet, and get a taste of his adoration for the same Mideast pieces we lust after.

Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman was born at the end of the 14th century in Egypt. He was a devout and highly educated man, and for people of his class, the erotic and the divine were closely linked. I cannot find direct mention of this man being an “out” homo, but, then again, in those days societies were not as obsessed with this black-and-white binary worldview (”You are either gay or straight, pick one!”).

Back then, as you can see below in al-Nawaji’s poems, men could worship the male physique and mystique without always having to worry about what others thought of their “sexuality.” Check out these steamy “gay” Arabic poems more than 600-years old:

For a milkman:

Ever since I bound myself
In passion
To a milkman,
The very picture of seduction,
I tell him over and over,
“Be generous and grant me
A swallow of you,
O delectable milkman.”

For a pretty seller of cucumbers:

God! How beautiful, this young
Cucumber seller, and a face to make
The sun itself blush at noontime.

The day he agreed to a tender meeting
I was overwhelmed.
Ah, how I savored
That mouthful of cucumber.

For a Turk:

I have chosen from among the sons of the Turks
A young male gazelle.
In my burning desire to possess him
I have consumed my life to no purpose.

I asked him one day
“What will put out the fire
That you have lit in me,
O, most fearsome of men?”
He answered, “My lips.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Art, Too Cute, Too Sexy, Photos, Food, Gay, Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.