Close Relationships Incest and Inbreeding in Classical Arabic Literature by Geert Jan van Gelder (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. 278 pages.)

Abstract

The two taboo concepts of incest and inbreeding are not so easy to detect in
classical Arabic literature. True, a persistent reader of classical Arabic literature,
whether belletristic or historical, is bound to meet unexpectedly rude
remarks on the incestuous habits of one historical figure or the other (most
often a non-Muslim) while reading a scholarly discussion on historical
events. Nevertheless, the sources do not address incest and inbreeding in a
straightforward manner. Centuries of pious and even sanctimonious discourse
may have covered these topics with a thick layer of dust, a layer that
Geert Jan van Gelder toils to remove in his comprehensive monograph
Close Relationships.
As an illustrious specialist in classical Arabic belles-lettres, van Gelder
recruits his command in the vast scope of sixth- to nineteenth-century Arabic
literature to reveal a surprisingly large amount of stories, anecdotes, and sayings
about incest and inbreeding hidden in the well-known canonical literature.
By doing so, he proposes a resolution to the presupposed contradiction
between strict taboos against incest in pre-Islamic and Islamic societies and
the role that incest played in reality. By drawing selectively from the written
sources, he produces an uneven but still convincing conceptual blend showing
the reciprocal relationship between literature and life. What may perplex
the reader is the author's perspective of literature overlapping reality, or vice
versa.
One of van Gelder’s motivations for writing the book is to analyze
ancient customs in pre-Islamic and Islamic societies by adopting psychological,
anthropological, and literal perspectives. He locates himself in relation
to modern interpreters of incest, like Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, B.
H. Stricker, Edward Westermarck, and Edward William West, just to mention
a few. Whereas on the one hand he seeks ideas behind the texts of
belles-lettres, historical fragments, myths, religious and legal texts, on the
other he revels in a strong language of jests, anecdotes, songs of semivernacular
and vernacular origin, thus brilliantly building up a sort of reality
of his own. Van Gelder is cautious enough to discourage the reader from
taking this seriously: “Literature is never a true mirror of society and reality”
(p. 185) ...