Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) B. F. Musallam - Sex and Society in Islam_ Birth Control Before the Nineteenth Century-Cambridge University Press (1983).
187 Pages
Preface
The difference between man and the other animals is that only man practises contraception.* Jahiz made this distinction in the ninth century when he discussed human and animal sexuality in his Book of Animals, a classic of medieval Arabic literature. Some of his readers may not have shared his belief in the primacy of the distinction, but they would have understood it, for they lived in a society where contraception was viewed as an ordinary part of life.
Medieval Arabic discussions of contraception and abortion in Islamic jurisprudence, medicine, materia medica, belles lettres, erotica and popular literature show that birth control was sanctioned by Islamic law and opinion. The sanction had wide distribution and was articulated in terms of social, economic, personal and medical needs. Knowledge of effective methods of birth control was also available throughout pre-modern times, in scientific and popular literature alike. All of these categories of material reflect the same historical reality, each in its own way.
Birth control evidence in the pre-modern Arabic sources presents an embarrassment of riches, and a major problem of this study was one of selection. This book does not pretend to deal with all the problems which the evidence raises. Its principal task is to establish birth control as a pattern in medieval Islam. But even where the book argues against historical demographers who posit that pre-modern populations did not practise birth control, it relies heavily on the vividness of the picture it has drawn of a society which expressed its involvement in birth control through almost every medium except the statistical.
The first two chapters rely heavily on Islamic jurisprudence (Arabic fiqh). This literature was the most characteristic achievement of classical Muslim civilization. Jurisprudence dealt with everything relevant to religious and social life, from religious obligations such as fasting and prayer to the organization of the market place.
When we identify a certain society as Muslim, if we do not mean that Islamic law has informed to a recognizable extent its social institutions, we mean nothing at all. It was jurisprudence which gave Islamic religious practice its form and guaranteed its continuity and coherence. Jurisprudence regulated the most material aspects of religion in society: marriage, divorce, birth, death, inheritance. The attempts of Muslims to come to terms with the problems of their society and history are reflected in it throughout.
The association between contraception and modernity is very strong, and may lead some to belittle the medieval juridical evidence. We should remember, however, that our evidence for medieval marriage or divorce is not any better than that for contraception. The evidence for all of these practices exists in the same sources, and to the same extent or limit. There is nO more reason to believe that a medieval Muslim had more than one wife or could divorce her at will, than to believe that he practised contraception.
Many of the sources for Chapters 4 and 5 were in manuscript form, and had to be edited and translated before they could be used. These texts are central to my argument; they will be published in a separate monograph now being prepared (“Contraceptive Medicine in the Medieval Middle East’’). The essential information on birth control techniques of some texts is included in tables which accompany their discussion below (pp. 77-88, 101-4).
The Introduction considers the major ideas in historical demography regarding pre-modern fertility and the place of birth control in history. It is my attempt to integrate the findings of this book into the body of current knowledge. Chapter 6 explores the extent to which birth control evidence can be integrated into what is known about Middle Eastern demographic history in general.
Without statistical data, it is difficult to gauge the impact of birth control as a factor in demographic change. But the absence of such data for pre-modern times should not make us abandon the effort. I believe that mortality was the more important factor, grosso modo, in determining population size in the medieval Middle East. But even if birth control had a very small impact on the ultimate numbers (we cannot tell for sure), it deserves special attention in social history, simply because it is the most directly volitional factor. Observations made by some individuals in medieval Middle Eastern society, to the effect that birth control was a proper reaction to the perilously shifting conditions of life, reveal a temperament which must have affected behaviour in other areas of social and economic life. Factors like death by war or plague can never have this kind of reach.
In the years of work on this book I have received much help and support, and it is an honour to acknowledge it. David S. Landes and Roger Revelle convinced me to begin my study and, together with Joseph Fletcher, Jr, Albert Hourani, and Sharon A. Lefevre, made me realize that it was possible. Ansley Coale, John T. Noonan, Jr, Etienne van de Walle, and Michael Cook read various versions of the whole manuscript and made generous and valuable criticism.
I am indebted for support in the period of writing this book to the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies and its Director, Muhsin Mahdi; the Harvard Center for Population Studies and its Director, Roger Revelle; the Princeton Office of Population Research and its Directors, Ansley Coale and Charles Westoff, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and its Director, Thomas Naff. I am grateful to the Ford Foundation for an Individual two-year grant to study population and Middle Eastern history, and to the American Philosophical Society for a grant to study medieval biological theory.
Introduction
Birth control and pre-modern populations
The study of past populations, although it has only recently come into its own, has been flourishing, nurtured as much by scientific and historical curiosity as by the grave anxieties of our time. Economic historians, demographers and family planners have all contributed to our knowledge of past populations. Nevertheless, this knowledge is still very sketchy, and what is known has not always been used with precision. Some of the confusion doubtless results from the disparate interests and perceptions of the varied groups of scholars who have studied population questions.
Aside from formal demography, there have been two major currents of interest in population studies. One is historical: research into the past of European populations. The other is political, in the widest sense of social and economic planning: the solution of the problems posed by the growth of non-European, third-world populations.
European economic historians have dealt with population, but they have had their own axe to grind. Their work, though important, has dealt primarily with the relationship between industrialization and demographic change. Did the Industrial Revolution create its own labour force, or was an expanding population one of the causes of the Revolution?! In other words, the work of economic historians was restricted mainly to the eighteenth century in Europe, which was characterized by the decline in mortality rates; they have done less work on the later, and, with reference to the present-day problem of world population growth, more relevant phase, when the European birth rates adjusted themselves to the lower mortality rates.?
The demographers, of course, have been interested in population per se. Demography is ‘‘the statistical study of population’? and _ historical demography is the same endeavour applied to past population.* Both of these concerns are “formal demography’’, the study of the data necessary to account for population size, nature, and movement. As we move to the study of causes, effects, and interpretations of population movement or change, we enter the realm of demographic history (as opposed to historical demography). Demographic history is historical writing that narrates and explains demographic events.°
Demographers have achieved near-miracles, creating new and impressive methodologies based on limited and difficult data (family reconstitution, for example). They have paid less attention to the ideas that help form their views on the character of past populations. And of all the different aspects of population studies, demographic history has prospered least.
In its genesis and concerns, historical demography is pre-eminently a Western, or more accurately, a West European discipline.6 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the theory of “demographic transition” which has been historical demography’s most comprehensive and pervasive idea.” The theory of demographic transition holds that (1) all human populations in pre-modern times maintained themselves or slowly expanded under conditions of high mortality balanced against high, essentially uncontrolled fertility — that is, fertility which is free from the volitional control of birth within marriage; (2) mortality started to decline during the Industrial Revolution, while fertility remained high and “‘traditional’”’, as above, with the result that populations in the West experienced rapid growth; and (3) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fertility declined in the West as a result of the deliberate control of birth within marriage. The “demographic transition” was a movement from a condition of high mortality and fertility to one of low mortality and fertility.’
As an attempt to order our information about European population change over the last two hundred years, the theory of transition has been very useful. But there is no historical foundation for the assumption that pre-modern populations did not practise birth control to any significant extent. Nevertheless, it was generally believed that all pre-modern populations, not just Europeans, had high, essentially uncontrolled fertility, and that the impact of modern Western science, medicine, and public health has lowered mortality while fertility has remained “‘traditional’’. Population growth in underdeveloped lands today has been viewed as essentially a repetition of the same process that occurred in the West a century or so ago.
Some early formulations of the theory (Notestein (1953), for example) did not deny the presence of pre-modern contraception. Still, in the last two decades, the theory of transition with its implicit denial of pre-modern contraception has been an unfortunate and rarely questioned orthodoxy.
Some historical demographers have recognized that the theory of transition has serious limitations. David Glass, for example, has explicitly challenged its relevance for the study of contemporary societies:
The theory of transition does not, in its present form, provide an adequate framework for the study of contemporary societies. It could hardly do so, since it is rather mechanistic and, in addition, is beset by too many apparent deviations as well as by gaps in essential information.1°
Glass has, furthermore, devoted a valuable paper to the development of these criticisms.!! In a review of the facts relevant to an explanation of the population increase in eighteenth-century Europe, he discusses critically the questions of changing marriage patterns and mortality and fertility trends. He makes reference to Hollingsworth’s work on the British peerage, Hajnal’s on the “European marriage pattern”, McKeown and Brown’s on medical factors, Irish demographic developments, and French demographic history.!2 But even in questioning the relevance of the transition theory for the study of contemporary societies, and by these he means the underdeveloped countries, Glass’ criticism and modifications of the theory rest on exclusively European evidence. Although Glass’ effort is valuable within the framework of European demographic history as such, in the final analysis the theory of transition has little relevance for third-world populations unless it is tested by information about their past and experience.
It is perhaps no accident that interest in historical demography showed remarkable vitality in the period following the Second World War, when the population problems of the underdeveloped world thrust themselves upon Western consciousness. In any case, a major argument used by the demographers for the utility of their research on historical (European) populations has been the urgency of present-day (third-world) population problems.!5
The discovery of the third world’s ‘population explosion” has resulted in the creation of important national and international agencies to deal with it. The “family planners’’, that is, all those who have applied themselves to checking the “population explosion”, whether demographers, social and behavioural scientists, biologists, physicians, statisticians, international public servants, or public health workers, have drawn upon the historians’ and demographers’ findings about European populations for their ideas about population in general. There has been an anomalous situation where would-be managers of the Egyptian or Indian populations knew more about the past trends of British or French populations than about the history of the third-world populations they were trying to change.
Perhaps it is fair to say that since the present condition of the non-European populations lies at the root of much of the interest and planning, then the past of these populations themselves also requires investigation. It would be wrong to assume that the past of third-world populations is not relevant to understanding their current problems. All those who have applied themselves to the solution or understanding of population problems in the third world have held ideas about the character and behaviour of “‘traditional’’, “pre-modern’’, ‘“‘pre-industrial’’, or “‘agri-cultural”’ populations. Such ideas have always influenced their questions and approach and have thereby affected and will continue to affect population planning and policy. Moreover, these ideas are rooted in historical knowledge, for they mostly originate in the work of historical demographers on European populations. As long as we cannot escape using ideas rooted in historical knowledge, there should be agreement about the importance of the past. In any particular context the question should be: which is the more relevant past?
A priori there is not a sound basis for believing that European population experience has universal applicability and meaningfulness, and there is good evidence to suggest the opposite — that the past of the Europeans may very well have been unique or different, with no necessary relevance to population behaviour elsewhere.!14 In any case, historical information about Europe is no substitute for historical information from the third world.
The fundamental element which is used, both implicitly and explicitly, to explain the modern movement from high to low fertility in the West is volitional birth control within marriage.!5 In the same way, the high fertility rates of pre-modern and “traditional” populations are assumed to result from the absence of birth control. To follow Louis Henry’s definition, pre-modern populations had a regime of “natural fertility”, unaffected by volitional factors. Henry contrasted natural fertility with modern, ‘‘controlled fertility’:
We can term as natural the fertility which exists or has existed in the absence of deliberate birth control . . . Control can be said to exist when the behavior of the couple is bound to the number of children already born and is modified when this number reaches the maximum which the couple does not wish to exceed.16
As a description of fertility behaviour, Henry’s definition is very precise regarding certain modern populations whose fertility is governed by the practice of birth limitation within marriage linked to parity (the number of children already born). This means that contraception is systematically used after the desired number of children is achieved; it is also used meanwhile to space births. Demographers have found in Henry’s distinction between natural and controlled fertility a useful tool for identifying populations with a “modern” (that is, controlled) fertility behaviour. The spacing of children, and the systematic prevention of pregnancy after the desired number is achieved, produces an easily identifiable statistical pattern: ‘Control is indicated, crudely, by a steeply declining age-schedule of marital fertility, and more precisely by such clues as a substantially earlier age at the birth of the last child for women who married under age 25 than for those who married over 30.7!” If the statistics show, for example, that women married at age 25, had their first child at age 26, a second child at age 29, and a third and last child at age 33, then demographers can safely assume that birth control had been practised to space children and to prevent pregnancy after the birth of the last child. One of the great virtues of Henry’s model, and the source of its great appeal to historical demographers, is that it dispenses with the need for non-statistical evidence to establish the presence of birth control. In most cases such evidence is absent or difficult to interpret.
But the distinction between natural and controlled fertility is not entirely satisfactory to the historian, for the statistical pattern of controlled fertility can be produced by means completely different from the one (birth control) which Henry assumed. Japanese demographic data from the Tokugawa period produce a statistical pattern which fits Henry’s model most accurately:
The childbearing span was short; i.e., in Fujito, it covered no more than a dozen years on the average. In this village, the mean age at which women, who married between 1825 and 1841 and whose marriages lasted until they were 44, bore their last child was 35.7 (average age at mid-year). For women married after 1841, the average age was 35.1. With a three-year birth interval, the result was a mean completed family size of just over three children . . . and this family size seems to have prevailed . . . for other areas in Tokugawa Japan.'8
Can we surmise, because both European and Japanese fertility behaviour in the nineteenth century produced the same statistical pattern, that the two populations achieved it the same way?
Literary, non-statistical, evidence (the only true reliable evidence on the question of means and ends) shows that the Japanese used infanticide to limit their families (Susan Hanley, who studied the demography of Tokugawa Japan, called infanticide ‘“‘post-partum birth control’’).19 The demographer, as statistician, may not be disturbed by linking contraception and infanticide together as instruments of control. The historian must distinguish between them for the sake of complete accuracy. The distinction may also be important in showing differences between the lives and ideas of different societies.
There is also a question of demographic methodology. “Infant mortality” has been a major element in all demographic analysis. Demographers place data relating to live birth under “‘fertility”’, and that relating to deaths after birth under “‘mortality”’. To accept the Japanese data as indicating the same pattern of fertility behaviour, following Henry’s model, is to measure fertility by data which are used normally to measure mortality. Susan Hanley has anticipated this objection, and has forcefully argued that “babies who were deliberately killed at birth, or ‘returned’ as the Japanese put it, should not be confused with babies who were intended to live but died in the early days or months of life’’.2° The first go under “‘fertility’’, the second go under ‘“‘mortality’’.
This argument is based on the intentions of the parents, and derives from literary evidence. The statistics as such do not reveal any difference between the infant who died naturally and the one who was killed in the first days after birth.
But Henry’s model has been powerful precisely because it promised to dispense with the need for arguments about intentions and means, which can only be based on treacherous literary evidence. European demographic historians would be truly at a loss if they were to be burdened with’ the requirement to support their statistical procedure with direct, literary evidence about the means of control and the intentions behind it.
While Henry’s model assumes contraception and perhaps also abortion as the instruments of control, he does not name them explicitly. The definition of “controlled” fertility skips over this important element because everyone in Europe knows that the modern secular decline in Western fertility has been the result of contraception within marriage. Putting culture-bound historical experience and literary evidence aside, if one were to look at a European statistical pattern of controlled fertility from a purely Tukugawa Japanese perspective, would not one assume that the Europeans limited their families by using infanticide?
“Natural fertility” is a concept which attempts to describe the fertility behaviour of the largest possible number of human populations — that is, all the historical populations before modern times, and most of them during the last two hundred years. It is different from controlled fertility in this very important sense: it does not claim that populations which are characterized by natural fertility have the same fertility pattern. On the contrary, there are significant variations among the fertility rates of pre-modern populations, sometimes as great as those between “controlled” and “‘natural”’ fertilities, and all fertility rates fall below the rates biologically possible.2! Demographers, until recently, have avoided suggesting that birth control may have had something to do with these variations.
How, then, to account for the variations? Henry was aware of this rich variety and has attempted to take (nearly) full measure of it, attributing these differences to a long list of biological and institutional restraints. Biological restraints are factors like the age of menarche, lactation length, the duration of post-partum amenorrhea, relative fecundity, sterility, and pregnancy wastage. Institutional restraints include a variety of social customs and regulations which determine the probability of exposure of women to sexual intercourse, such as taboos against intercourse during lactation or the so-called “European marriage pattern’’, observable in Western Europe from the sixteenth century on, in which late marriage was the norm and a large percentage of the population remained unmarried.
All fluctuations and differences in birth rates between pre-modern populations were explained away by the institutional and biological factors mentioned above. Contraception was conspicuous by its absence, and has been reserved for ‘“‘modern’’ populations.22
The only thing that populations with natural fertility have in common is the absence of modern fertility behaviour — that is, they lack the pattern which shows control linked to parity. This does not mean anything more than that, in their fertility behaviour, fourteenth-century French or ninthcentury Syrian, or nineteenth-century Indian, or eighteenth-century Chinese populations are different from the twentieth-century French population (and from each other). This is important to recognize, but it does not begin to say something meaningful about the nature of these populations. “Natural fertility’ has been nothing more than a negative definition which has served to provide a background for “controlled fertility”, the modern pattern which was Henry’s primary interest.
Theoretically, there is nothing in Henry’s definition that precludes the possibility that contraception was practised among populations with natural fertility. That is, practised now and then, haphazardly, inconsistently, and practised by a minority. Such practice would of course influence fertility, but not enough to produce the modern pattern of control linked to parity.
The demographer might object that such behaviour is not important enough to take seriously in demographic analysis. Nevertheless, it is important enough for the historian if he wants an accurate description of a particular population, and it is important in historical demography when we address the question of how the modern pattern evolved. Was contraception present before modernity or was it a modern invention?
Whatever validity the notion of a regime of “‘natural fertility” has, it has for pre-modern Europe, and even there it has been challenged, as we shall see below. The truth is that we know next to nothing about pre-modern populations outside Europe, and the idea that pre-modern populations did not practise birth control was simply part of the equipment of European scholars, whose own historical experience taught them that “‘the control of marital fertility by contraception, as we know it today in the Western countries, is without doubt a fairly recent development’. Louis Henry himself became interested in historical populations as a result of “his need to estimate the levels of fertility in populations in which birth control was not practised to any sizable degree’’.24 To find what he needed he went to pre-modern populations.
Later research on some pre-modern European populations has cast doubt on the theory of natural fertility. Demeny, Livi-Bacci, and Goubert have questioned it, their main argument being that biological and institutional factors are not enough to account for contemporaneous variations in birth rates between different regions or for fluctuations occurring in the same region over time. The data can be explained, they add, only if one posits birth control within marriage.
It should be borne in mind that these “revisionist” views are meant to apply not to pre-modern Europe proper — that is, Europe before the eighteenth century — but to the period of transition to lower fertility (the eighteenth century in France, the eighteenth to nineteenth century in Spain, and the nineteenth century in Austria~Hungary). In the first place, they argue that the transition from high to low fertility occurred a few years or decades before the accepted dates, but that it nevertheless occurred among populations considered by the transition theory to be pre-modern, with a regime of ‘“‘natural fertility’’.25 This has led at least Livi-Bacci and Demeny to a tentative revision of the theory of transition by suggesting that the movement from high to low fertility may not have been as revolutionary and sudden a phenomenon as is generally believed, but that it may have involved to a greater degree the diffusion and spread of old contraceptive habits as populations adjusted themselves to new conditions.”¢ In other words, births in at least some pre-modern European populations were checked not only by biological and institutional restraints, but also by contraception.
These scholars based their conclusions solely on data which show marked differences in fertility, and they have posited birth control as an explanation even though they have no direct evidence of birth control itself. On birth control European sources are remarkably silent: “The possibility of fertility control within marriage was hardly ever mentioned, even in France, before the second half of the nineteenth century.’’27
Some demographers have voiced doubts as to whether birth control was absent in pre-eighteenth century populations:
It might be thought that, before the age of general use of contraceptives, fertility was always high and always about the same, at a level close to the maximum physically possible. This is much too naive a view. It seems probable that births have been controlled in practice by one means or another since the dawn of civilization, and there is an unanswered question of how it was done and how much, in every historical society and at every period.”
On the whole, although these doubts have sometimes been seriously expressed, they have not been seriously pursued. On that score we are still where Norman E. Himes, in his classic Medical History of Contraception (1936), left us.
Middle Eastern birth control evidence has serious implications for population studies, for it is doubtful that the idea of a “natural fertility” applicable to all pre-modern populations would have been formulated had Christianity, for example, permitted contraception. If Christian theologians had rationalized birth control within marriage in terms of economic, social, and personal needs and motives; if every pre-modern European medical book had included a sound discussion of contraceptive and abortifacient methods; if popular erotic books written by churchmen and other estimable leaders of European society, and published in the vernacular languages of Europe, had included chapters on birth control; if the pharmacological lists of medicines sold by druggists in medieval European towns had included contraceptive and abortifacient recipes: and if, in addition, there were evidence for the actual use of birth control, and Europe had experienced a population depression lasting several centuries, then the idea would surely have been held that birth control was a significant factor in pre-modern populations.
That every condition mentioned above is true of the pre-modern Islamic Middle East may be difficult to accept, for the association between birth control and modernity is very strong. Demographers, armed with knowledge about the high fertility rates of pre-modern Europe on the one hand, and the high fertility rates of contemporary third-world populations on the other, have associated “‘pre-modern” with “‘traditional’’ and have not suspected that the high fertility rates of some of the underdeveloped countries may be as recent as the low fertility rates of the modern West. For fertility rates in “traditional” societies may not have always been the same, and we cannot pretend that such populations were always static. We know that European populations have changed, and we should seriously entertain the possibility that third-world populations may have changed also, and in more ways than the decline in mortality rates which they so obviously manifest. How, when, and why are questions to which historical research can seek answers.
Birth control is not simply an aspect of modernity, nor is it necessarily alien to pre-modern societies. It is known that the remarkable secular decline in Western birth rates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was first achieved through the use of traditional, that is ‘medieval’, contraceptive methods, such as coitus interruptus, which any motivated male can use, whether in nineteenth-century France or fourteenth-century Damascus.
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