Albanian Virginity, Times Front Page

Followup: Muslim Virginity, Times Front Page

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On June 25, the New York Times published another non-news socio-cultural front page feature article that addressed the gradual disappearance of sworn virgin institution among Muslim and Christian Albanians. Here is the description of the practice:

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father's death.

The new article addressed Muslim conceptions of sexuality as did the previous story entitled Surgery Offers Muslim Women Illusion of Virginity, but this time the Muslim aspect was deemphasized and mentioned only in a single paragraph on the second page:

In Albania, a majority Muslim country in the western Balkans, the Kanun [or traditional Code of Conduct of Leke Dukagjini] is adhered to by Muslims and Christians. Albanian cultural historians said the adherence to medieval customs long discarded elsewhere was a byproduct of the country's previous isolation. But they stressed that the traditional role of the Albanian woman was changing.

Another paragraph on the article's first page indirectly indicates that some Albanian Muslims follow this practice:

Ms. Keqi lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders. She said living as a man had allowed her freedom denied other women. She worked construction jobs and prayed at the mosque with men. Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without their "uncle's" permission.

Even though the New York Times is a questionable source for information on sociology and cultural anthropology, the material in this report provides evidence both of

• the diversity within the Muslim world with regard to sexuality and also of 
  
• the crossing of religious boundaries by various practices and customs associated with gender.

The earlier article discussed hymenoplasty and revirgination within an essentialist framework that implicitly denigrated Muslim attitudes or behavior

• assumed to be uniform or undifferentiated throughout the Islamic world and
  
• supposed to be completely distinct from Christian or Jewish beliefs and practices.

In contrast, the analysis of sworn virgins refrains from the usual NY Times disparagement of Muslims and Islam probably because of the apparent similarity of "sworn virgin" customs to transvestitism and transgender ideals vociferously defended by the Gay International, which is a term used by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad to describe Western homosexual politics in his recently published book entitled Desiring Arabs.

Modern Western gay politics has almost certainly no connection to the very ancient and once fairly common institution of sworn virgins. Greek myths associated with Artemis and Atalanta are almost certainly based in legends of sworn virgins while the Biblical story of Sarah probably contains some core elements associated with a related sworn virgin mythology.

Remnants of the "ideology" associated with sworn virgins seem to have persisted in both Christian and Jewish cultures in the respect and honor accorded to the British virgin queen Elizabeth I and to Channa Rachel Werbermacher, the Maid of Ludmir, who functioned as a Hassidic Rebbe during the nineteenth century.

Queen Elizabeth eschewed marriage in order to avoid losing authority to a male king while Judaism generally rejects the combination of scholarly authority and marriage for women as indicated by Rashi's account within his commentary on Babylonian Talmud tractate Avodah Zarah 18b of the suicide of the second century CE Talmudic sage Beruriah after she was seduced by one of her husband's students.

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