lust.'" Some Westerners noted pederastic tendencies of in the Middle East. The Englishman Joseph Pitts, a sailor who was captured and sold into slavery at Algiers in 1678 noted: "This horrible sin of Sodomy is so far from being punish’d amongst them, that it is part of their ordinary Discourse to boast of their detestable Actions of that kind. ’Tis common for Men there [Algiers] to fall in Love with Boys, as ’tis here in England to be in Love with Women". The French traveller Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, who visited Egypt between 1777 and 1780, made a similar observation: "The passion contrary to nature . . . the inconceivable appetite which dishonored the Greeks and Persians of antiquity, constitute the delight, or, to use a juster term, the infamy of the Egyptians. It is not for the women that their amorous ditties are composed: it is not on them that tender caresses are lavished; far different objects inflame them.” While of perhaps only of anecdotal interest, the reactions of Muslims visiting Europe lend further credence to the claim of this distinct cultural difference. [T]he Moroccan scholar Muhammad al Saffār, who visited Paris in 1845– 46, wrote: "Flirtation, romance, and courtship for them take place only with women, for they are not inclined to boys or young men. Rather, that is extremely disgraceful to them". The Egyptian scholar Rifāah al Tahtāwī, who was in Paris between 1826 and 1831, noted: "Amongst the laudable traits of their character, similar really to those of the Bedouin [arab], is their not being inclined toward loving male youths and eulogizing them in poetry, for this is something unmentionable for them and contrary to their nature and morals. One of the positive aspects of their language and poetry is that it does not permit the saying of love poetry of someone of the same sex. Thus, in the French language a man cannot say: I loved a youth (ghulām), for that would be an unacceptable and awkward wording. Therefore if one of them translates one of our books he avoids this by saying in the translation: I loved a young female (ghulāmah) or a person (dhātan).” At the end of his book Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Khaled El-Rouayheb concludes, “Falling in love with a teenage youth and expressing this love in verse were not punishable offenses, and a significant number of Islamic