Ahmad bin Qasim al-Hajari al-Andalusi, Nasir al-Deen ‘ala Qawm al-Kafireen: pp. 50–52.
One day, I read in the front page of his [a man in Paris whom bin Qasim had met] copy of the Qur’an, written in Frankish, the following words: “Based on this, the Muslims condone sodomy.” I asked him: “Who told you that it is condoned among us?” He answered that it was apparent in this verse: “Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields whence you please” (Cow : 223).*
I said: “For us, sodomy is a worse sin than adultery, for if a married man commits adultery, he is stoned unto death; and if he is unmarried, he is given a hundred lashes and is driven out of his country and is jailed for a year. But if a man commits the act of Lot’s people, whether he is married or unmarried, by religious law, he is stoned to death. How do you presume to interpret the Qur’an while those who interpret it require knowledge in numerous disciplines, and you know neither the Arabic language nor its grammar, nor other things?”
So I said to him: “Erase what you have written.” But he refused to erase what he had written on the book. He had mentioned that in a certain church there were Arabic books. So I told him: “I like to read them.” So we walked and found a big cupola, and found chairs and books lined on the shelves. Every book was tied by two iron rings and an iron chain passed through all the books. All this was done so that the books would neither be lost nor stolen. And the books were in every language.
We searched until we found an Arabic book and we opened to read it. We came across the place where there was a commentary on the verse that had been written on the front page of his book, “Women are your fields.” I had not intended the verse, but God had guided me in His might to prove what I had said to the Christian. The information in the commentary about the verse included a few lines of poetry, so I took a pencil, and I wrote, the Christian being present, a few lines of verse, which were later improved for me by the learned sheikh al-Ajhouri:
Virtuous women are for breeding and for confirming religion.
God gives virtuous women to whomever He chooses,
But their wombs are our fields to plow;
We plant, and God nurtures.
The Christian said: “What have you written”? I answered: “Some commentary on the verse which you had written on the front page about condoning intercourse from the rear.” I told him the meaning of the poem in his language. And then I said to him the words of God almighty, “Women are your fields.” He said: “Yes.” I said to him: “Have you seen or heard of anyone who plants his seed in stone”? He said: “No.” I said: “Nobody plants his seed except in the place of planting and seeding, and women are the planting place for men, just like plants, whether she was facing the man or turning her back to him.” Then he took his pencil and erased what he had written in …….[blank] the verse. The sheikh al-Ajhouri reported about our Seyyid Malek [bin Anas, a jurist] that some credited to him that he had condoned sexual intercourse from the rear, so he told them: “What uncouth bedouins you are! Can you plant seeds other than in a place of planting”?
As for this heinous deed [sodomy], it is widespread among Muslims so much so that the Christian imagined that it was condoned in our religion, because it is so widespread and because it is not punished. It has been said that some keep boys specifically for this purpose, and they do not remember that it is forbidden in the religion of Islam and that God almighty grew so angry because of this deed that he destroyed four cities with all the people in them.
*The translation is by N. J. Dawood, The Koran (Penguin Books, 1990).