Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, a queer history podcast.

I'm Alice.

I'm Hamish.

I'm Eli.

On the first and 15th of each month, one of us will talk about a person, place or topic

from queer history.

Today we're talking about queer women in medieval Arab literature.

Just a few content warnings for this episode.

There's brief mentions of murder, a lot of explicit discussions of sex, and one swear swear word in a quotation.

The historical context for this episode is that we're going to be talking about the Islamic

Golden Age, which was a flourishing of art, culture, and learning in the Islamic world, so the Middle East, Spain and North Africa, centered around Baghdad.

The dating on this period, it's like trying to date the medieval period for Europe.

It's pretty broad and vague.

We're talking from about the 8th century through to the 14th century or even the 15th or 16th century,

just pending on what scholar

you're reading. Most of our sources for this episode will date from the early 10th century

through until the 14th century. Before I start, I will give us a bit of terminology that we're

going to be using throughout the episode. I'd like to apologize in advance because I'm not

an Arabic speaker. I'm going to say a lot of Arabic words in this episode and I can't promise I'm saying the correctly, but I'm doing my best. So the word for lesbian

in Arabic in the period, which I don't think is the word for lesbian anymore, was Sahika.

There's also Sahaka and Musahika. So when you say the word for lesbian, what do you mean by that?

The word Sahika, Sahaka and Musahika come from the root SHQ, so they all have those three

...