Mustarjil

If you read widely enough, you're bound to find things that surprise you.  To the best of my knowledge, homosexuality is a crime in most Muslim countries, in some countries punishable by death.

So it came as a surprise to me that, in practice, in at least one place, there was sympathy for people who felt that they were born the wrong sex.

This passage, from The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger, was published in 1964.  The marsh Arabs were people who lived in the marshes of Iraq before Saddam Hussein drained those marshes to drive out the Shia Muslims who lived there.

One afternoon, some days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland.  The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his mudhif by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist.  He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side.  In the past all the Madan wore their hair like that, as the Bedu still did.  After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara asked, "Did you realize that was a mustarjil?"  I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.

"A mustarjil is born a woman," Amara explained.  "She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man."

"Do men accept her?"

"Certainly.  We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif.  When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her.  We never do that for a woman.  In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman."

"Do they always wear their hair plaited?"

"Usually they shave it off like men."

"Do mustarjils ever marry?"

"No, they sleep with women as we do."

Once, however, we were in a village for a marriage, when the bride, to everyone's amazement, was in fact a mustarjil.  In this case she had agreed to wear women's clothes and to sleep with her husband on condition that he never asked her to do women's work.  The mustarjils were much respected, and their nearest equivalent seemed to be the Amazons of antiquity.  I met a number of others during the following years.  One man came to me with what I took for his twelve-year-old son, suffering from colic, but when I wanted to examine the child, the father said, "He is a mustarjil."

...

Previously, while staying with Hamud, Majid's brother, I was sitting in the diwaniya when a stout, middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment.  She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ.  "Will you cut this off and make me into a proper woman?" he pleaded.  I had to confess that the operation was beyond me.  When he had left, Amara asked compassionately, "Could they not do it for him in Basra?  Except for that, he really is a woman, poor thing."

So there is some wiggle room for people who are different.  All that said, it is a shame that normal women are treated so badly under Islam.