“Not Too Close!”: Distancing Tactics in Scatological Scholarship

Bodily excreta is a prevalent theme in premodern Arabic literature, particularly within the genre of sukhf; a mix of “obscenity, vulgarity and folly.”Footnote ⁸ Despite its frequency, scatology remains at the overlooked periphery of modern Arabic studies. Contemporary Arabist scholarship on the subject is remarkably sparse; while Sinan Antoon’s monograph on Ibn al-Hajjaj offers a vital intervention, it remains largely tied to Western theoretical frameworks.Footnote ⁹ Consequently, this monograph fails to fully map the local scatological tradition that enabled Ibn al-Hajjaj’s style or the subsequent literary figures who followed him.

Beyond this, the field is limited to isolated studies: two papers on flatulence in The Rude, the Bad and the Bawdy, a section on coprophagy in Geert Jan van Gelder’s Of Dishes and Discourse, and a few cursory references relegated to the footnotes of Zoltan Szombathy’s Mujun. Footnote ¹⁰ Although the literary genres of mujūn and sukhf share a subversive obscenity, Szombathy distinguishes the latter by its tendency to “luxuriate in disgusting, naturalistic images of bodily emissions.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet, in an instance of “unwanted nearness,” he pushes these visceral accounts to the margins, noting: “A few texts that were truly revolting to my own taste, I have preferred not to quote, relegating them to the status of a reference in footnote—anyone is free to consult the sources.”Footnote ¹² By distancing himself from the “revolting” nature of these materials, Szombathy redirects the reader to the footnotes rather than engaging with the texts directly—an editorial choice that betrays an intolerance for the very subversiveness that defines the genre.

Beyond studies of humor or sukhf, the anthology Islamic Sensory History provides critical perspectives on the premodern Islamic sensory landscape, specifically regarding the status of bodily emissions. Across several chapters, the work treats excreta as a serious scholarly subject. For instance, the third chapter explores sensory experience in the afterlife, where Paradise is envisioned as a realm of purity. There, the “higher” senses of sight and hearing enjoy limitless beauty, unburdened by bodily excreta. Conversely, the damned suffer primarily through the “lower” senses—the touch and taste of impure substances.Footnote ¹³ This theological topography establishes a hierarchy of reward and punishment that aligns precisely with the sensory proximity framework, where the most intimate contact is reserved for the most intense torment.

A commonality among these foundational works is their composition in English, a reflection of the prolific output of scatological studies in Europe and North America since the 19th century. I focus here on four pioneering texts to demonstrate how they resonate with Arabic literary traditions. The earliest, Bibliotheca Scatologica (1849), is a satirical, multilingual bibliography published pseudonymously in Paris by “Messiere LUC (à rebours)”—a name that, read backwards, reveals the French cul (“ass”). The authors warn readers to “block their noses” before proceeding.Footnote ¹⁴ While its satirical tone complicates its bibliographic reliability, it remains an ambivalent masterpiece: both a mock-bibliography and a legitimate repository of “valuable bibliographical references.”Footnote ¹⁵ This satirical approach to the corporeal finds a late 19th-century Arabic parallel in Hasan al-Alati’s (d. 1889) understudied literary compendium Tarwih al-nufus wa-mudhik al-ʿAbus (The Cheerer of Souls and the Book to Cause Those Who Frown to Laugh). Produced in Cairo, this multi-volume work features a dizzying array of parodies and nonsensical scatology, most notably a mock-letter dismissing a “contractor of the latrine’s filth” (multazim awsākh l-adabkhāna).Footnote ¹⁶

While the Bibliotheca Scatologica used anonymity to subvert 19th-century decorum, John G. Bourke’s (d.1896) Scatological Rites of All Nations took the opposite path. An ethnologist, Bourke utilized the ideology of a “clean” West to categorize “primitive” religion and magic, drawing heavily from colonial travelogues and “Eastern” thought.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite claiming to encompass “all nations,” the work reinforces a sharp divide: it treats Western scatology as an ancient and medieval relic, while presenting non-Western scatology as a contemporary reality.Footnote ¹⁸ By filtering these accounts through a gaze that views itself as inherently distant from filth, Bourke links “magical thinking” and uncleanness to colonial subjects. This exercise in Orientalism mirrors the rhetorical strategy of al-Tawhidi, who weaponized visceral filth to assert superiority over social rivals. Such tactics are a staple of travelogues that depict the “Other” as disgusting—a notable example being the account of the Abbasid-era physician Abu l-Hasan Ibn Butlan (d. 460/1063). In his description of the Rusiyya (the Vikings), he characterizes them as “roaming asses” and “the filthiest of all God’s creatures. They have no modesty when it comes to defecating or urinating and do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity. They do not even wash their hands after eating.”Footnote ¹⁹ Here, Ibn Butlan speaks both as a refined diplomat shocked by the uncleanness of others and as a Muslim with a pre-defined religious concept of purity. It is a form of poetic justice that this account reflects how the East viewed the West in the 10th century.

In the 20th century, Norbert Elias’s (d. 1990) The Civilizing Process utilized post-Reformation European books of manners to track the shifting “modes of behavior” expected by society.Footnote ²⁰ Elias observed that European societies increasingly privatized “natural functions” by “suppressing the positive pleasure component” of these acts in favor of socially enforced revulsion and secrecy.Footnote ²¹ This trajectory toward privatization reached its peak in the age of modernity, explaining both the anonymity of the Bibliotheca Scatologica and the colonial projection of filth onto distant geographies. However, a similar privatization of the body—and the resulting sense of shame—appears in adab manuals for boon-companions as early as the 4th/10th century. The physician and polymath Abu al-Fath Kushajim (d. 360/970), in his Adab al-nadim, advises the ẓarīf (refined man) to perform his oral hygiene in private. The author’s justification—that “one is pained to see such things in oneself, let alone in others” (inna al-marʾ la-yataʾadhdhā an yarā dhālik fī nafsih, fa-kayfa min ghayrih)—stands as a strikingly honest testament to early self-disgust.Footnote ²² This anxiety regarding the “other’s gaze” and the potential for the body to provoke revulsion is also apparent in more intimate matters. Jawamiʿ al-ladhdha, the oldest surviving erotica manual (likely written at the end of the 4th/10th century), opens its rules on sexual etiquette by advising partners against staring at one another during intercourse.Footnote ²³ The text argues that the face, in the heat of the act, reaches a state of “ultimate ugliness” (ghāyat al-qabāḥa), even to the point of inciting hatred (muqt).Footnote ²⁴ These examples suggest that the “civilizing” impulse toward secrecy was not a modern European invention. Rather, it appears to be a functional, cross-cultural response to the inherent threats of bodily proximity and the persistent anxiety of becoming an object of disgust.

Similar to Elias, Mikhail Bakhtin (d. 1975) also returns to the past, but instead of analyzing official or aspired manners, he looks to the streets and markets to trace the generative power of “those parts of the body that are open to the outside world.”Footnote ²⁵ For Bakhtin, the mouth, genital organs, breasts, and nose are sites where the body overcomes its limits through eating, copulation, and defecation. Bakhtin’s reading is unique, yet it raises the question of whether his celebratory view is merely temporal romanticism—the fascination of a 20th-century Russian with a past sufficiently distant to remain sterile. Had Bakhtin actually traversed the unhygienic streets he glorifies, he might have adopted a more relativistic stance, perhaps seeking beauty within ugliness while retaining the solemnity and dread of physical immersion. A poignant counterpoint to Bakhtin’s detachment is Loay Hamza Abbas’s Kitab al-Marahid (The Book of Toilets), which examines defecatory spaces amidst the alienating brutality of the Iran–Iraq War. Abbas, whose perspective was forged as a soldier in the conflict, anchors his focus on excreta in the traumatic sensory experience of the battlefield: the stench of corpses and the sight of grotesque, scattered limbs.Footnote ²⁶ Though predominantly somber, his narrative occasionally pivots toward a poetic meditation on the “sweet pleasure” of relief, a sensation he identifies with Adam’s first defecation.Footnote ²⁷ This reading subverts the standard pietistic traditions that associate the event primarily with sin and shame. By reimagining a happy Adam, Abbas presents ugliness as a facet of beauty, suggesting that the confrontation with waste is ultimately a matter of perspective.Footnote ²⁸

The preceding literature, though limited, reveals an intricate intersection of history, politics, ideology, and decorum that governs even the most natural daily actions. Ranging from harmless humor to serious Othering—and, at times, overt racism—these works demonstrate how a simple biological act can be weaponized to dwell on the undignified state of the self or to assert superiority over the “Other.” Aside from the reflections of Abbas and the brief observations in Adab al-nadim, most scholarship treats excreta as an attribute of the Other or a relic of a distant past, effectively exempting the authors themselves from the very biological cycles they analyze.

Another remarkable commonality is that reflections on disgust and excreta are almost exclusively associated with modernity, urbanity, or the ideal of Paradise—all of which share a foundation of comfort and sanitization. The only work to break this condition is Abbas’s Kitab al-Marahid. Writing from the extreme absence of order, logic, or hygiene he experienced as a soldier in the Iran–Iraq war, Abbas employs disgust as a last resort to retrieve his own humanity; after all, as Miller argues, “disgust is human and humanizing.”Footnote ²⁹

In the following sections, I adopt the temporal distancing tactic utilized by the scholars discussed above, and return to the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries. During this era, the urban comfort of the Abbasid period allowed scholars to dwell on—and frequently laugh at—the bodily excreta of both fictional characters and themselves. By employing a sensory proximity framework, I show how distance from one’s waste influences one’s theoretical perception of it and the specific physical and psychological effect it exerts upon us.

Sight: The Fecal Spectacle

The influential Abbasid scholar al-Jahiz, to whom almost all interesting literary topics are attributed, frequently discussed the five senses in his works.Footnote ³⁰ One of his remarkable sensory observations appears as a digression in his chapter on flies in Kitab al-Hayawan (The Book of the Living). There, al-Jahiz explores human beings’ profound repulsion at the sight and smell of feces, a phenomenon he describes as an enduring and unique form of disgust:

Ever the master of contradictions, al-Jahiz does not conclude that excrement is simply and universally foul. His statement is strategically positioned within a larger, more complex argument. He first lists the various benefits of excrement, noting its utility as a food source for animals, a weapon, and even a building material, before concluding that “goodness [khayr] is derived from feces [khurʾ].”Footnote ³³ Only after establishing this positive, practical side does he pivot to the human perspective of disgust. Then, with characteristic wit, he immediately shifts the focal point from a human’s aversion to a fly’s attraction, revealing the subjective and relative nature of revulsion and fascination. It is at this point that he adopts a fictional narrative voice to proceed:

The imaginary traveler in al-Jahiz’s story is a figure defined by his desire for privacy. He retreats to evade the social gaze, seeking to control what others see of him—much as Kushajim would have advised—yet finds himself subject to his own involuntary perception when his “eye falls upon his excrement.” Al-Jahiz presents this act not as a deliberate inspection, but as a compulsory glance, fully aware of the social and personal foulness attached to the object. It is in this involuntary turn that the traveler’s focus shifts to the spectacle of flies materializing from thin air in quest of their target: excrement. Indifferent to the foulness that repels the man, the flies become the focal point of fascination. The contrast between the reserved human and the determined flies is a trademark of al-Jahiz’s style, using opposing perspectives to assert that everything is a matter of viewpoint—that even the foulest of things can attract committed admirers who will follow it into a dead, empty desert.

Had al-Jahiz concluded his discussion by limiting the fascination and usefulness of excrement to animals and its foulness and disgust to humans, his account would have been a far too simplistic, un-Jahiz-like. To push the paradox further, he shifts in Kitab al-Bukhalaʾ (The Book of Misers) from the private, socially conscious traveler to the publicly unashamed miser Abu Qutba, who endures living with his overflowing waste, even when it harms passersby, to save a few coins. As al-Jahiz narrates:

Like other misers in al-Jahiz’s work, Abu Qutba is both eloquent and unapologetic. Unashamedly, he stares at the sweepers cleaning his cesspit and reflects aloud on the cyclical, mundane nature of eating and eliminating, saying:

By staring directly at the waste, Abu Qutba forces a collapse between the high art of gastronomy and the low reality of excreta, using the fecal spectacle to justify his frugality. His gaze serves as a tool of demystification; by tracing expensive duck and poultry to the same grey sludge as cheap leeks, he strips away the social prestige of the luxury meal. For the miser, sight does not lead to disgust, but rather to a radical, almost nihilistic, common sense. While his words defend his meanness, they also represent a reflective—and surprisingly public—acceptance of the body’s natural functions. This lack of inhibition in pointing to his own waste as the sewers are cleaned in broad daylight is a bold act, perhaps enabled by his temporal distance from the initial act of defecation. This willingness to confront the repulsive and transform it into an observation, combined with al-Jahiz’s entertaining narrative, aligns with Miller’s argument that the repulsive “has an allure; it exerts a fascination which manifests itself in the difficulty of (…) not checking out the quantity and quality of our excretions.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Ultimately, Abu Qutba performs a triple maneuver: he protects his wealth, adopts the persona of a contemplative intellectual, and turns his personal filth into a public spectacle.

Abu Qutba’s nonchalance stands in stark opposition to the logic of 19th-century “nuisances prevention” acts. Though the specific bylaw I examine originated in Newcastle, Australia, it reflected the global reach of English sanitary legislation designed to regulate “night-soil men.” These laws strictly mandated the hours for emptying cesspits: “No person shall empty any privy, cesspool, or remove any night-soil within the city, or shall permit, or suffer such to be done (…) except between the hours of eleven o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning.”Footnote ⁴¹ By restricting collection to the dead of night, the law sought to shield the householder from public humiliation and the visual intrusion of their own waste, much like Adab al-nadim and Jawamiʿ al-ladhdha had advised a millennium earlier. The text reveals a telling linguistic bias: the verb “suffer” is attributed to the residents rather than the cleaners. This suggests that the “sufferer” is defined by the financial and psychological burden of waste removal, as if the true legal grievance lies in the presence of excreta rather than the grueling labor required to remove it. Consequently, night-soil men are denied a normal sleep schedule to serve as a sensory buffer, ensuring that the employer’s sense of decorum remains undisturbed by the visceral reality of the process they have set in motion.

The blindness toward the suffering of waste cleaners is not exclusively Western or modern. Already in the 4th/10th century, the anonymous Rasaʾil Ikhwan al-Safaʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), while discussing animals drawn to odors that humans find repellent, relates an anecdote of a street cleaner who faints after smelling musk in the market. He is only revived when the scent of dung is brought to his nose.Footnote ⁴² This story is ostensibly justified by humorism—suggesting the cleaner’s constitution has been fundamentally altered by his profession. Yet, this narrative choice effectively denies the cleaner the capacity for disgust and, in doing so, denies him a full share of humanity, proving once again that disgust is “human and humanizing.” Paradoxically, while night-soil men, street cleaners, and dung collectors are the only active agents in the management of waste, they are treated as the source of the filth rather than its remedy.

By channeling the eye—whether that of the private traveler or the shameless miser—toward the fecal spectacle, al-Jahiz transforms excreta from a source of social shame into a site of intellectual inquiry. However, when the visual proximity to waste moves from the literary to the literal street, it often collapses into the dehumanization of the laborer. Even al-Jahiz, who tirelessly addresses diverse perspectives—including those of flies—fails to notice the cesspit cleaners, focusing instead on the discomfort of the passerby. This social injustice toward cleaners and night-soil men finds a glimpse of solace when viewed through Abbas’s conception of toilets as “secret archives.”Footnote ⁴³ Within the latter framework, it is perhaps perversely comforting to consider the night-soil men as the ultimate archivists. Through their unique proximity, they witness a truth that the householder attempts to hide; the fecal matter—its consistency, volume, and stench—does, in a sense, “talk” and scandalize its owners.

Hearing: The Talking Turd

The anecdote of Dugha bint Mughnaj found in the pseudo-al-Jahiz’s al-Mahasin wa-l-addad (Merits and Their Opposites) moves from sight and smell to emphasize hearing. Dugha bint Mughnaj is a woman so proverbially foolish that she earned her tribe the name of Banu al-Jaʿraʾ (the sons of dry turd). The tribe received this infamous name from the following incident:

Upon reflection, this anecdote presents a number of logical contradictions. It suggests a magical birth, seemingly unannounced by a growing belly, hormonal shifts, or any of the other typical signs of a nine-month pregnancy. Furthermore, the mother’s cleverness seems to appear only in her witty response, not in any prior guidance. In the realm of humor, such contradictions, exaggerations, and illogicalities are expected tools used to provoke laughter. Nevertheless, the fact that the heroine is a woman—the “perfect other” to the male-dominated adab circle—gives the laughter a bitter aftertaste today. Clearly, not all humor ages well.

Setting aside its logical inconsistencies, Dugha’s story masterfully captures the uncanny moment of expulsion, when a part of the body suddenly becomes an external object, triggering an instinctive need for a safe distance. This visible, tangible, odorous, and loud entity—lying independently on the ground, a mattress, or a toilet seat—demands an immediate reaction: to, bury, clean, or flush. In Dugha’s case, however, the entity requires a more profound and lasting response: a lifetime of caring and nurturing. The young, confused Dugha initially walks away, but when the “turd” opens its mouth, she is compelled to stop and turn her head. She hears a cry and instinctively responds with one of her own, calling for her mother’s help to make sense of this new form of excreta.

Dugha’s confusion is rooted not in the inexplicable nature of the object that came out of her, but rather in its capacity to make noise and draw attention. When Dugha runs to her mother, her question is about the sound of what she has produced, the fact that it opened its mouth and screamed, not its sight or smell. This scream transforms a private act of elimination into an undeniable public event. The mother’s witty reply provides no solace; it only intensifies the problem. This is no mere noise. The “talking turd” will eventually make sense, make demands, and call for its father, forever entangling her secret act with the social world.

The overwhelming nature of bodily fluids—their power to scandalize and provoke repulsion—explains why premodern Arab writers created such a vast array of euphemistic expressions to establish linguistic distance between themselves and the body’s disgusting emissions. These were necessary to allude to bodily waste without offending the sensibilities of the addressee or confronting the stark explicitness of certain terms. The prolific Abbasid intellectual Abu Mansur al-Thaʿalibi (d. 429/1038) compiled an entire book, al-Kinaya wa-l-taʿrid (Euphemism and Insinuation), dedicated to the euphemisms and metonymies needed to address all unspeakable and embarrassing substances and acts related to the human body. He explains the reason for this endeavor as follows:

Al-Thaʿalibi’s project is guided by a distinct sociolinguistic principle. His primary concern is the social performance of words—specifically, how language navigates the sensibilities of noble listeners and the anxieties of timid addressees. By mapping the boundaries of social decorum, al-Thaʿalibi identifies the most provocative subjects requiring indirect address, organizing them into seven thematic chapters:

Through this structural arrangement, al-Thaʿalibi maps a landscape of social anxieties that, while rooted in his own era, remain remarkably universal.Footnote ⁴⁶ His hierarchy of the “unspeakable” is anchored firmly in the lower stratum of the body: it begins with sex and defecation, progresses through sickness, and concludes with the excesses of consumption and gluttony. Remarkably, the material al-Thaʿalibi collected aligns almost perfectly with psychologist Paul Rozin’s list of the most disgusting things: body products, including feces, vomit, saliva, mucus, sweat, urine, and blood (especially menstrual blood); inappropriate sexual acts; poor hygiene; death; and violations of the ideal body’s “envelope” or exterior form (e.g., gore, deformity, and obesity).Footnote ⁴⁷

Al-Thaʿalibi positions defecation before ugliness, sickness, and death. This arrangement suggests that defecation serves as the threshold for all that is weak, ugly, and unhealthy in the body—a conceptual framing that explains Dugha’s visceral reaction to her “talking turd.” The prioritization of sex and defecation at the very opening of al-Kinaya is highly significant; it marks them as the ultimate taboos, requiring the greatest degree of linguistic distance. This hierarchy reveals a fundamental entanglement in the human psyche: the perpetual link between the erotic and the excremental. This connection can be traced to their physical proximity in what Bakhtin calls the “lower bodily stratum,” and the unsettling closeness between the organs of voiding and childbirth. Yet, despite the constraints of social decorum and the anxieties of self-discipline, a fascination with excreta persists—perhaps most notably when viewed through the vast temporal distance of our biological origins.

Smell: The First Turd

Unlike Dugha, whose confusion is confined to a speaking turd, Adam, the central figure of monotheistic traditions and the supposed father of all humans, is associated with far more instances of horror, disgust, and confusion concerning bodily waste. His downfall from heaven is not merely metaphorical; it is also a physical descent. The senses that once enjoyed spiritually elevated experiences now descend to the lowest bodily functions, experiencing pain, hunger, thirst, and, worst of all, defecation.

In his work, ʿArāʾis al-majālis fī qisas al-anbiyāʾ (Lives of the Prophets), which combines both serious and playful tales from the Qurʾan, Hebrew scriptures, and early Christian traditions, Abu Ishaq al-Thaʿlabi (d. 427/1036) begins the chapter on Adam’s fall with a lengthy and detailed account filled with sensory imagery. The story recounts how, after being cast out of heaven, Adam managed to keep his foot on top of the mountain Serendib and his head in the sky. This allowed him to continue observing the angels, listening to their prayers, and smelling the aroma of heaven. Adam’s lingering connection was short-lived, as the angels eventually told God. Consequently, his height was diminished to sixty cubits, cutting him off from hearing, smelling, and seeing heaven.Footnote ⁴⁸

Standing on a high mountain with his head still in the heavens, Adam savored his final moments of belonging to the celestial realm. This privilege was expressed in both his geographical elevation and the physical hierarchy of his body. With his eyes, ears, and nose located on his head—the highest point of his body—he was positioned to experience the most sophisticated pleasures. His nose could smell the divine aroma of heaven, his ears could hear the chants of angels, and his eyes could witness the angels encircling God’s throne. The absence of food and eating from this account is noteworthy. While it may be due to the forbidden fruit being the catalyst for his punishment, it more likely serves to avoid any reference to the lower stratum of the body. The latter would become the primary focus of all subsequent stories once Adam was reduced to human size and cut from his last link to the sky.

This transitory scene told on the authority of Ibn al-ʿAbbas is followed by another in which Adam surrenders and sits on the ground accepting his human condition:

Al-Jahiz maintains that the nose is the organ expressing “pride [al-nakhwa] and arrogance [tajabbur].”Footnote ⁵¹ It is therefore unsurprising that the nose becomes a focal point for Adam’s disgrace and humiliation during his first moments on Earth. Having previously enjoyed a life of pleasure with his nose in the sky, he is now introduced to the dark side of his body, experiencing involuntary physical reactions such as sneezing and bleeding, as well as the horrifying sight of darkened blood. These initial physical terrors are, however, just the beginning of Adam’s descent, which continues to explore even baser functions of the body.

Al-Thaʿlabi’s narrative carefully charts Adam’s descent from the realm of the elevated senses to the humiliation of the lower bodily stratum. After recounting the last pleasures of the upper body and the emotional anguish of the heart, the text shifts to a detailed, pages-long depiction of Adam’s suffering from hunger, a pain he describes as “creeping like the creeping of an ant between my flesh and my skin.”Footnote ⁵² This new agony demands immense physical labor, forcing Adam to break wood, plow the earth, and prepare his food, an act that stands in stark contrast to his effortless past. This descent continues with the unfamiliar torment of thirst, which necessitates long digging, before finally arriving at the most humiliating pain of all:

In monotheistic traditions, Adam’s sin was eating from the forbidden tree. The punishment for such a transgression could only be its logical and corporeal conclusion: defecation. This consequence offers a beautiful, if sarcastic, illustration of the principle “what goes around, comes around.” The fall from heaven is thus compounded by a second descent into the lower functions of the body, specifically into the mechanics of bowel movements and the anus. In paradise, Adam experienced pleasure without consequence; he ate without the need for earthly digestion and its unpleasant aftermath. On Earth, however, every substance consumed must be processed—a cycle that inevitably concludes with a foul stench.

The bleeding and hunger scenes both conclude with a divine intervention to bring relief. Unlike the angel in the bleeding story who provides psychological comfort to Adam after forty years of sadness, the second angel is invasive, cutting open Adam’s body to provide only physical relief. Yet Adam’s sadness and agony continue with no further divine intervention. In the second story, the archangel Gabriel first acts as a mentor, showing Adam how to farm the land, make bread, and find water. Yet when it comes to defecation, Gabriel is confused and at a loss for words. Coming from the heavens, Gabriel can understand hunger and thirst, since he has a heavenly reference for food and water. However, he has no such reference for defecation, making it an unfathomable and inexplicable act. This ultimately marks defecation as the most impure and animalistic of all actions, one so vile that it makes no sense to those in heaven.

The baseness of defecation and its banishment from the spiritual realm explains why the Sufis used Adam’s first elimination as a cautionary tale. Almost a century before al-Thaʿlabi wrote the above account, the Sufi mystic Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 386/996) told the same story, yet with a more emphatic conclusion on the impurity of defecation and its explicit relationship with sin:

In this version, the archangel Gabriel’s role shifts from a mentor to a condemner. He does not share Adam’s confusion about fecal matter, instead emphasizing the lasting repugnance of his punishment. Like Dugha’s mother, who interpreted the body’s realities for her daughter, Gabriel is an authoritative voice explaining the inexplicable to Adam. The raw reality of bodily waste is so unfathomable that it requires external mediation. Gabriel offers no comfort; he reproachfully brands the excrement as the tangible manifestation of khaṭīʾa (sin). This connection between sin and excrement is deeply embedded in the Arabic language. The Abbasid scholar al-Raghib al-Asfahani (d. 502/1108), for instance, links the linguistic terms for feces (ʿadhira), excuse (ʿudhr), and forgiving (ʿadhara), concluding that to forgive is to cleanse someone of their najāsa or impurity (“al-ʿudhr min al-ʿadhira wa-hwa al-sayʾ al-najis […] ʿadharta fulān: azalta najāsata dhanbih bi-l-ʿafw”).Footnote ⁵⁶

Ultimately, both al-Thaʿlabi and al-Makki deny Adam solace in their accounts of the first defecation. While both are clear about the inherent foulness of feces, al-Makki weaponizes this stench as a moral threat—a didactic warning to control the senses and learn from the sin of the forefather. Al-Thaʿlabi, conversely, foregrounds the physical and emotional agony Adam endured, inviting an empathy rooted in our shared biological burden. Yet, rather than asserting this commonality directly, al-Thaʿlabi utilizes temporal distance as a shield, protecting himself and his readers from a direct confrontation with a shame as ancient as the body itself. As with al-Jahiz, perspective remains the primary arbiter of the “fecal spectacle.” The ultimate impurity is transformed through this lens; it is excused and even enjoyed when transposed from a private source of degradation into a curated, public show.

Taste: The Breaking Point

Unlike the previously analyzed instances—where literati managed self-disgust through fiction, euphemism, humor, and the distant past to make a safe distance—the literary genre sukhf is built upon deliberate transgressiveness and self-deprecation. It transforms fecal matter into fertile material used to shock, challenge social etiquette, entertain, and even generate profit. To achieve true transgression, the sakhif drops the masks of decorum and breaks the safe distances of disgust. By adopting the personal pronoun “I,” the sakhif assumes the full responsibility and “stench” of his own words. This brings excreta into ultimate proximity: reaching the point where it is re-inserted into the body to be tasted.

The first to take the bold move of confessing a “desire for filth” was the 3rd/9th-century poet al-Fadl Ibn Hashim, who famously boasted of his ability to consume stinking feces and rats, drink pus, and sip “thin shit” (salḥ).Footnote ⁵⁷ Ibn Hashim’s choice of dietary conduct was borne not of an inability to feel disgust, but of a profound awareness of how shocking his act appeared to his audience. The certainty of their revulsion was the very basis of his haughty, boastful tone. By performing the undoable and consuming the unconsumable, he asserted a radical uniqueness, declaring that “God did not create anyone like him” (allāhu lam yakhluq khalqan ka-ana).Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet, was Ibn Hashim truly as unique as he claimed? While he boasted of eating feces and drinking pus, he offered no sensory evidence to support these claims. The specific taste of these substances is never described or even mentioned. This omission suggests that the taste is either indescribable or, more likely, a fabrication. Furthermore, his opening verse—”If you saw me” (fa-law tarānī)—betrays the fact that no one actually witnessed this coprophagic spectacle.Footnote ⁵⁹ The performance is narrated as a past event, devoid of detail and unsupported by eyewitnesses. The rhetorical spectacle thus collapses, revealing the verses to be nothing more than a list of “impossible” acts the poet claims others cannot endure.

Ibn Hashim’s bold verses did not go unchallenged by his contemporaries. Ibn al-Jarrah records two instances where the poet’s outlandish claims were put to the test. In the first case, an unnamed caliph threatened to force the poet to eat the very filth he so readily celebrated. Ibn Hashim’s simple, honest apology—”my soul is repulsed by it” (nafsī taʿāfuh)—was enough to get him off the hook. But a second, more insistent challenge from Caliph al-Wathiq (r. 842–847) proved more difficult to evade. The demand for a public demonstration compelled the poet to craft a more elaborate apology, one that openly admitted his profound disgust (in the meter al-munsariḥ):

Although Ibn Hashim seemed to “own his shit”—adopting the personal pronoun to boast of breaking all limits and collapsing the distances mentioned earlier—when put to the test, he proved to be no different from anyone else. He was fundamentally disgusted by his own excreta, preferring death to even looking at it, let alone consuming it. He, too, relied on the buffers of humor, imagination, and exaggeration to maintain a safe distance from the very effluent nature he claimed to embrace. By his own admission, his transgression was purely linguistic. Ultimately, he tasted excrement only with his literary tongue, never his literal one.

However, as the Qurʾanic verse goes, poets are known to “say what they do not do,” so one cannot truly fault Ibn Hashim; he simply had to admit his limits when he reached the breaking point of sensory proximity.Footnote ⁶² By playing the fool and the subversive, he pioneered Arabic “shiterature,” seeding a long lineage of heirs who used fecal matter to parody established genres and create new ones. This tradition includes Yusuf al-Shirbini’s mock-commentary, Ibn Daniyal’s shadow plays, Ibn Sudun’s absurd dream interpretations, and Hasan al-Alati’s maqāma-like treatises. Standing above them all is the most famous heir of this legacy: Ibn al-Hajjaj, the master of sukhf, who—as the infamous anecdote goes—was forced to literally eat his own excrement after his wife discovered his soiled undergarments.Footnote ⁶³

Conclusion: Shiterature as a Laboratory for the Mind

Anxiety, the drive to distance ourselves from bodily excreta, and the visceral fear of becoming an object of disgust are universal preoccupations. These sentiments are not confined to premodern “shiterature” or the specialized gaze of modern scatology scholarship; rather, they scale with proximity. The less distance separating us from the object of abjection, the more the dread of contamination intensifies.

Any child who has woken to soiled sheets knows this primal fear: the frantic need to conceal the “crime scene” and the hot blush of shame when the secret is inevitably uncovered. This same confusion and disgust shadow our relationship with all bodily waste—menstrual blood, earwax, sweat—and demonstrate that concealing our effluent nature is a permanent concern of the human mind. Where premodern adab works and post-Reformation books of manners sought to manage this through rigid codes of etiquette, modernity has provided an arsenal of tools for this concealment: night-soil by-laws, sewage systems, water-closets, toilet paper, and tampons. Yet the fundamental discomfort remains, for we know that our bodies can betray us at any moment; expose us. A drop of blood on a white dress, an errant noise in a silent room—these small failures of containment instantly strip away our composure, revealing the messy truth of our shared humanity: that we are all, inescapably, oozing, exuding, bleeding, and defecating creatures.

Although making distance, either intellectually or sensorily, was the focus of this paper, shiterature and scatology can also be viewed through the lens of breaking distance. Thanks to the imaginative, playful, and speculative nature of shiterature, bodily excreta exist here as a concept rather than a physical threat to the senses. In this literary space, only the eyes are engaged; the body remains protected from smell, touch, and taste. Shiterature thus becomes a laboratory for the mind—a controlled environment in which to negotiate biological anxieties or to experience a virtual encounter with the “untastable.” It provides a synthetic resolution between fascination and revulsion, upholding the civilizing function of disgust while permitting a safe transgression of its borders.