Unrecorded Persian sexual treatises with Pahlavi provenance

Abd al Majid, Muhammad / al-Farjani, Zakariya Shakti (pseud.). Four Persian treatises on Sexuality: Khitna-yi Zanan va tashrih-i mukhtan-i anan; al-Mudayaqa fi’l-Musahaqa; Zara’if va Lata’if; Miftah al-Faraj fi ma ulija fihi va ma laj.

€ 75.000,00

Formerly in the collection of Prince Shahram Pahlavi Nia: a unique dated North Indian manuscript of startling explicitness, preserving four sections that form a compilation on female anatomy, circumcision, lesbian desire, and erotic anecdote.

Originally part of a larger codex on sexuality, these four treatises appear to have circulated separately as short manuscript fascicles, each titled seperately. Their focus on sexual practice and genital anatomy points to a restricted readership, probably within learned medical, courtly, or otherwise private circles. The traces of use, together with the illumination, suggest that they were valued objects within a cultivated milieu rather than ephemeral or openly circulated erotic texts.

The opening section, "Khitna-yi Zanan va Tashrih-i Mukhtan-i Anan", turns directly to female circumcision and the anatomy of the clitoris, under the Arabic title "Tahdid al-Nazar fi Khafd al-Bazr" ("Determining the Legal and Medical View on Female Circumcision"). Here erotic curiosity is joined to juridical argument: al-Bayhaqi is cited not as a writer of erotica, but as a legal and hadith authority brought into the most intimate field of bodily practice.

"Al-Mudayaqa fil Musahaqa" preserves a rare Persian treatment of female-female sexuality, before the manuscript passes into "Zara’if va Lata’if", an erotic-adab sequence of witty, courtly, and transgressive encounters involving kings, princes, and lovers. These sections place sexual knowledge within the world of anecdote and polished literary entertainment, where desire is made memorable through repartee and exemplary (if scandalous) narrative.

"Miftah al-Farj fi ma Ulija fihi wama Laj" announces itself as a "key" to the sexual body and to acts of penetration and entry. The pseudonymous attribution to "Sheikh Shakti Farjani" throughout the works sharpens the erotic charge of the compilation: a punning name that combines Arabic and Indian sexual vocabulary, joining "farj" with the generative feminine force of "Shakti".

These fascicles belong to a Persianate world in which medicine, law, adab, and desire were not separate intellectual provinces; alongside al-Asma'i, Saadi Shirazi, and Ata Allah Ijaz Harawi, the manuscript gathers legal authority, Arabic philology, Persian poetry, and erotic lore into a single learned sexual miscellany. Its surviving leaves offer an unusually bold witness to how female sexuality, anatomical knowledge, same-sex desire, and courtly erotic storytelling could be transmitted, excerpted, reframed, and preserved in manuscript form.