This book's analysis is based on Malay manuscripts and texts about the body, sex, and sexuality. These include religious guidebooks on sexual techniques and etiquette, of which some are translated from the original Arabic or Persian, but almost all of which have been adapted for local Malay relevance.

Also analyzed are collections of Malay erotic poetry from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and the only known female-authored early twentieth-century text on sex and women's sexual pleasure. Over the centuries changing sexual norms and attitudes in the Malay world has disengaged sex and sexuality from being a crucial component of faith and spirituality-gradually receding into the discreet margins of contemporary discourse on gender relations.

More information about the book

Sexuality and Islamic spirituality in early Malay writings. Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing. 

Authors

Maznah Mohamad is Honorary Fellow at the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore where she was Associate Professor and served as its Head of Department from 2019 to 2023. She has taught, researched and published extensively on the themes of gender, Islam, politics, sexuality and Malay manuscript traditions. She is co-author (with Syahairah Rasheed) of Sexuality and Islamic Spirituality in Early Malay Writings (I.B. Tauris, 2025). Her forthcoming books are Visual Interrogations of Femininities in the Malay World: Camera, Chimera and Colonisation (with Bahar Gursel and Suriani Suratman, Routledge, 2026) and World-Making with Malay-Indonesian Manuscripts: Connection, Contestation and Circulation (co-edited with Sher Banu Khan, NUS Press, 2026). 

Syahirah Rasheed earned her PhD in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore. Her PhD research was an interdisciplinary study of the history of bidan midwifery and a critical medical anthropology of medicalised childbirth in contemporary Singapore. Her research fields are medical anthropology, sexual and reproductive health, and feminist epistemology. As an affiliated fellow at KITLV, Syahirah is continuing her research in the connections between obstetric biomedicine and Malay women’s indigenous knowledges of sexuality and reproduction.

Discussant

Pernilla Myrne is professor of Arabic at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where her teaching encompasses Arabic literature and history. Her research examines Arabic manuscript culture and history of ideas, with a focus on sexuality and gender. She is the author of Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World published by I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury 2020.

Moderator

David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia and Malaysia), working as a senior researcher at KITLV. His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 5 February from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET).  

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Book cover Sexuality and Islamic spirituality in early Malay writings.

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