Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (67 page)

m (d. ca. 1708), composed pederastic love poetry despite the apparent ruling of their school on the matter.
¹⁵⁸
Indeed, the above-mentioned jurist Zayn al-Di
n al-ʿA
mili
concluded his discussion of the religious-legal status of love poetry by making the following point:

The condition that the poet should not specify the identity of the beloved was, as has been shown in the previous chapter, often disregarded. Jurists were aware of this fact. Ibn Hajar al-Haytami
, for instance, wrote that “some libertine poets set up hints which lead to identification [of the beloved] and this is undoubtedly like [straightforward] specification of identity.”
¹⁶⁰
The previous chapter also gave examples of religious scholars who themselves composed such love poetry: ʿAbd al-Ghani
al-Na
bulusi
composed a poem with his colleague Ahmad al-Ṣafadi
in which they gave away the identity of the beloved Raba
ḥ al-Khayya
ṭ; the Iraqi scholar ʿAbdallah al-Suwaydi
alluded to the name of the youth from Mosul—Ṣa
liḥ—to whom his petition in rhymed prose and verse was dedicated. Other examples are not hard to come by. The Egyptian scholar and poet Yu
suf al-Ḥafni
(d. 1764) taught at the Azhar college in Cairo, and was the younger brother of the Rector of the institution, Muhammad al-Ḥafni
  (d. 1767). His
Di
wa
n