'I know it when I see it': Dis/similarity in Medieval Muslim Determinations of Paternity Kathryn Kueny(Draft)
Before blood tests, DNA testing, and close record keeping, resemblance was often utilized as the means through which paternity was secured. However, on what basis does a child look like his father? The answer to this question is dependent upon an ever-shifting set of criteria and authoritative voice, all of which affect the child's physical appearance. This paper explores the rich rhetorical strategies medieval Muslim physicians and scholars adopt to establish paternity through the generation and determination of like features between fathers and children. I argue such strategies are informed by broader assumptions about male/female anatomy, wayward parental behavior, notions of piety, and the inherent fragility of masculinity and the patriarchal household. Observations for this discussion are drawn from a variety of medieval Muslim medical texts, bestiaries, ḥadithcollections, and other legal and theological treatises.
In 1964, a U.S. Supreme Court decision came down involving the showing of the French film, The Lovers, which the state declared obscene. Jacobellis v. Ohio became famous for an opinion put forth by Justice Potter Stewart, who claimed the Constitution protected all obscenity except for “hard-core” pornography. In trying to delimit what hard-core pornography might be, Stewart wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that short-hand description . . . but I know it when I see it.”[1]
The subjective nature of Justice Stewart’s criteria applies to medieval Muslim standards for identifying paternity. While maternity is rarely disputed (as even midwives may validate a child’s exit from his mother’s body before a judge), a father’s relationship to his son or daughter remains tenuous. Telemachus in the Odyssey illustrates this point quite poignantly when he says, “My mother says that I am his. But I don’t know. Does anyone really know his father?”.[HLM1][2]Clearly, in this example, the mother’s word is dismissed as less than trustworthy and that leaves no surefire way to prove paternal lineage.
Before the onset of blood tests, DNA testing, and close record keeping, resemblance was most frequently utilized as the means through which paternity was secured. However, the determination of resemblance is slippery business. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is paternal resemblance. After all, on what basis does a child look like his father? By what features might he be compared? What happens when a child looks nothing like his father, or, more disturbingly, exactly like the neighbor? And, of course, who sets the criteria and makes the final evaluation of who belongs to whom? The answers to these questions are highly dependent upon an ever-shifting set of criteria and authoritative voice.
This paper explores the rich rhetorical strategies a cross section of medieval Muslim scholars and physicians adopt to establish paternity through the generation and determination of like features between fathers and children. An exploration into the ways in which these medieval voices reinforce, but also, when necessary, deconstruct, paternal resemblance reveals a profound desire to mask the inherent fragility of male control over unbridled female sexuality and deadbeat dads, to question the moral behaviors and intentions of the mother (and, to some extent, the father) when the reproductive process strays from normative expectations, and to assert the centrality of the patriarchal family over rival permutations in medieval Muslim society.
The Role of Female Desire in Assuaging Paternal Anxieties
Concerns about the tenuous nature of paternity due to a lack of congruity between children and their fathers are rooted in a common trope that appears in Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim literatures.[3]The[KK2] trope in question provides a face-saving way for fathers to accept offspring who look nothing like them. As a result, women are protected from accusations of adultery and children are given a legitimate identity. The basic structure of the tale, which subsequently fans out in a variety of forms, extends as far back as the fifth century BCE, when Empedocles[HLM3] (d. 430 BCE), a pre-Socratic poet, is quoted as asking, “How do offspring come to resemble others rather than their parents?” Empedocles answered this question by suggesting that fetuses are shaped by the imagination of the woman around the time of conception. He mused that often women fall in love with statues of men or with images right before the sexual act, and produce offspring that resemble those objects or visions.[4] These statements assume the desirous female eye fastens upon an image, and then that image works its way down through her body until it is stamped upon the embryo. In Empedocles’s example, the child, at least in theory, would have resembled the father had not the wife’s desire become the more powerful force in shaping the form and features of the child produced.
Soranus[HLM4] (d. 138 CE), a Greek physician from Ephesus who practiced medicine in Alexandria and Rome during the first and second centuries CE, drew upon the same narrative structure as Empedocles—with slight shifts in emphasis—to argue how misshapen men may ensure they engender perfected children by compelling[HLM5]their wives to look at beautiful statues during intercourse.[5] In this version, men—at least in theory—consciously choose not to resemble their children because they wish to engender more perfected progeny. In sharp contrast with Empedocles, Soranus maintained men will determine whom or what their offspring ultimately resemble by insuring the woman’s wandering eye focuses solely on those images they alone select and approve. [HLM6]Here, the object the wife gazes upon still affects the form of the child; however, the husband ultimately determines what form may grace her vision, and thus how the child will appear.
Many medieval Jewish versions take a similar tack by giving even more authority and power to the father to assert control over a woman’s unbridled desire and wandering eye to ensure paternal resemblance. For example, in the medical writings of Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides[HLM7] (d. 1204 CE), the famous twelfth-century[HLM8]rabbi, physician, and philosopher who was born in Córdoba, Spain, and flourished in Morocco and Egypt, the husband contracts a painter to create a stunning image of a boy. The husband places the portrait in front of his wife during foreplay, and then instructs her to gaze upon it without blinking or moving her eyes to the left or right. Lo and behold, she conceives a handsome son who resembles the boy in the painting rather than the husband.[6] Here, a father’s success in producing such a perfected child who, incidentally, looks nothing like him, ironically proves his ultimate authority over his wife and the family as a whole rather than exposes to ridicule his inability to master, tame, and channel her lustful desires, which may threaten the integrity of the patriarchal family.
Other Jewish examples use this same narrative trope more explicitly to exonerate women from accusations of adultery. A midrashic version relays how the king of Arabia exclaims, “I am black and my wife is black, yet she gave birth to a white son. Shall I kill her for having played the harlot?” To this Rabbi Akiba retorted: “Are the statues in your house black or white?” The king answered, “white.” Then Rabbi Akiba assured him by saying, “When you had intercourse with her, she fixed her eyes upon the white figures and bore a child like them.”[7] Clearly, the poor man is shown to be totally ineffectual when it comes to controlling his wife’s sexual desires. Despite this rather obvious defect, however, he can still be assured that the white-skinned child is his.[8]
Each of these versions of the basic narrative, extending over a period of a millennium, provides alternative sets of venues for asserting paternity when a child emerges from his mother’s womb not as a “chip off the ole block” but rather taking after someone other than the presumed father.[9][HLM9]In[KK10] these examples, obvious incongruities between father and child, and the almost tortured authoritative efforts to dismiss them, reveal hidden doubts about the extent of male control over the reproductive process, a lack of knowledge about genetics and reproduction, and perpetual anxieties about female sexuality, desire, and morality that may be revealed through the features of child. In each of these cases, male elites mask doubts, anxieties, and uncertainties about children who bear no resemblance to them with bald assertions of paternal authority and control over the household despite nagging evidence to the contrary.
Assuaging Paternal Anxieties through Appeals to Heredity
Medieval Muslim scholars also provided their own variants of the basic narrative, which, unlike the Greek, Roman, and Jewish examples noted above, privilege the role heredity plays in determining the features of the child. As in the examples of the mother’s desirous gaze, arguments from heredity also attempt to assuage the uncertainties that plague fathers whose children look nothing like them by limiting the vagaries of maternal impressions. For example, ninth-century Persian physician ‘Alī ibn Sahl Rabbān al-Ṭabarī (d. 870 CE) [HLM11]in his Firdaws al-ḥikma (Paradise of Wisdom), related a story of a woman who bore a girl from an Ethiopian man.[10] When his daughter reached puberty, she was married to a white man and she bore him a black child. Rather than referring to a mother’s wayward gaze upon an image, Rabbān al-Ṭabarī reported the child has taken on the color of the grandfather. Here, even though the child looks nothing like the father, he still falls safely under the patriarchal, familial umbrella due to ancestral reference. In this example, there is no need for the husband to question the behaviors or to control the desirous gaze of his wife--the dissonance is simply attributed to fluctuations in inherited features.
The ninth-century Persian collector of ḥadith,Abū `Abdallāh Muḥammad Yazīd al-Qazwīnī ibn Māja[HLM12] (d. 887 or 889 CE), in his Sunan, also related information similar to Rabbi Akiba’s midrashic advice to a white woman who gave birth to a black child. In this example, the prophet Muḥammad explains this rather unusual phenomenon through appeals to heredity.[11] The fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Damīrī (d. 1405 CE), in his Ḥayāt al-ḥayawān al-kubrā (Great Book of Animals), likewise recorded a number of tales where white women give birth to black sons, even though their husbands are also white.[12] Like Rabbān al-Ṭabarī, Damīrī surmised that the sons must take after a distant grandfather. This grandfather does not appear proximate and is never named, but rather resides more abstractly in the recesses of communal memory. To further emphasize this point about inherited traits, Damīrī related how a wife gives birth to a son who is both black and white. Astoundingly, he is white just from his head to his belly button, and black down the rest of the body. A Turk cries out, “Hey, my own grandfather looked exactly like that!”[13]
In these medieval Muslim examples, there is no mention whatsoever of a woman’s lustful gaze upon statues, portraits, or other men to explain such reproductive anomalies, as imagination would too closely border on idolatry. In addition, since Islamic law prohibits the display of statues or pictures in the home, no such references to any type of image is given as they would cast a dark shadow over the pious integrity of the entire household. Based on the fact that their children look nothing like their lawful husbands the women in these examples are simply accused of having committed adultery without mention of their inner desires latching onto an external image. Fortunately, at least for these women, the rational voice of science in the form of inherited traits exonerates them, and the child is awarded a paternal identity.
What is unique to the Muslim versions is a fairly developed understanding of heredity, which refers to the argument that traits from distant relatives may skip generations and then suddenly appear in subsequent offspring. A child, therefore, may look nothing like her dad but rather her distant Uncle Harry, an observation that may never be proven one way or another since Uncle Harry—quite conveniently, perhaps—has long been dead. And certainly, we find no photographs on the mantle that can be used to resolve the issue one way or another. Here, arguments from heredity, like those of the gaze, are the community’s attempt to assuage a father’s suspicions that he might not have sired the child that exits his wife’s womb.
The desire to avoid frequent and overt accusations of adultery and to protect the integrity of the child as well as the authority of the father, here secured through arguments from heredity, underscore a number of Qur’anic passages that also serve to protect the private sexual affairs of both men and women, and to promote equal gender responsibility for the child. For example, while the Qur’an condemns both adultery and fornication and calls for one hundred lashings as punishment for sex outside the confines of marriage, it stipulates that four witnesses must be supplied to prove them (Sūra 4:15–16). To further shore up the sexual rights of men and women against public gossip and wrongful accusation, Muslim jurists have concluded likewise that the four witnesses must be upstanding individuals, that they must have viewed the precise moment of penile penetration, and that they must have captured that image not by design but by chance.[14]
Falsely accusing a woman of sexual misconduct also carries with it a harsh penalty, which most likely curbed a man’s impulse to deny paternity out of a jealous rage or fear of economic hardship.[15] The protective arguments from heredity, which suggest an offspring does not have to look like its biological father or even its parents, therefore reflect the Qur’anic position that men should always err on the side of accepting paternal responsibilities even when they may have doubts or suspicions about their wives’ fidelity. In other words, the Qur’an emphasizes that the integrity of the family unit should be preserved if at all possible and that the child should be granted firm paternal identity, care, and protection except under the most egregious of circumstances. In other words, denying the responsibility of having fathered a child should be the exception not the rule.
The Qur’an, however, still provides an outlet for those who truly believe they are not the fathers of their wives’ children, without laying the blame on women. This practice—referred to as li`ān—allows for marriages to be dissolved quickly and quietly within the confines of the home, and without legal consequence for either the accused or the accuser.[16] According to Sūra 24:6–9, if a man is completely convinced his wife has been impregnated by another man, he can testify to this fact before God four times. On the fifth statement, he calls the curse of God upon himself if he is a liar. That said, however, the wife has an equal opportunity to protect her own virtue and honor by testifying four times that her husband is falsely accusing her. She, too, calls upon the wrath of God on the fifth claim that if what she utters is not true. After both parties have borne witness, they are separated forever without punishment or culpability.
Interestingly, this practice would not only provide a convenient way for fathers to shirk paternal ties and responsibilities without consequences but also for mothers who, for a variety of reasons, may have wished to defeat their husbands’ presumption of paternity, that is, that the child of the marriage is legally presumed to be the child of the husband.[17] Whatever the case, at least ideally, in situations [HLM13]where the husband is convinced of his wife’s infidelity but cannot prove it without a doubt, the Qur’an provides both spouses a fair and equal opportunity to maintain their virtue and status in the public eye; after all, only God knows the truth of who is right and who is wrong.
However, given the acceptance that inherited traits are inherently volatile, the seemingly high tolerance for dissonance among offspring, and the many Qur’anic passages that promote the welfare of the child and the rights of all parties involved to claim or deny parental heritage, it is perhaps surprising that an abundance of medieval Muslim sources insisted how paternal resemblance should still serve as the primary criterion used to determine the rightful heritage of the child. However, as the examples below show, the issue of who belongs to whom becomes more complicated when no such direct resemblance exists between the child and the husband of the mother. In these cases, dissonance is either explained through reproductive deviations that may be readily supported through scientific fact or through a woman’s adulterous or other wayward sexual acts and desires. Strikingly, whether appeals are made to scientific fact or acts of adultery seem to depend solely on a woman’s perceived moral character. Good women bear different-looking children who take after the distant and long-dead Uncle Harry. Bad women are more likely to deliver children in the exact likeness of the neighbor down the street, or in the exact likeness of a particular iniquity. Clearly, the “objective” criteria used to establish paternal resemblance are fashioned by more nebulous, subjective assumptions about male and female anatomies, a woman’s sexual indiscretions, and the strength of a man’s masculinity and ability to control his household.