The meditation known in Arabic as Naẓar ila'l-murd (Arabic: النظر إلى المرد), "contemplation of the beardless" is a Sufi practice of spiritual realization.
Peter Lamborn Wilson claims this as the use of "imaginal yoga" to transmute erotic desire into spiritual consciousness.
Richard Francis Burton's translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (commonly called The Arabian Nights in English) included collections of stories that were often sexual in content and were considered pornography at the time of publication. In particular, the Terminal Essay in volume 10 of the Nights contained a 14,000 word essay entitled "Pederasty" (Volume 10, section IV, D) in which Burton speculated and opined that male homosexuality was prevalent in an area of the southern latitudes named by him the "Sotadic zone". Rumors about Burton's own sexuality were already circulating and were further incited by this work.
Criticism
Conservative Islamic theologians condemned the custom of contemplating the beauty of boys. Their suspicions may have been justified, as some dervishes boasted of enjoying far more than "glances", or even kisses. Nazar was denounced as rank heresy by such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), who complained, "They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!"
The real danger to conventional religion, as Peter Lamborn Wilson asserts, was not so much the mixing of sodomy with worship, but "the claim that human beings can realize themselves in love more perfectly than in religious practices." Despite opposition from the clerics, the practice has survived in Islamic countries until only recent years, according to Murray and Roscoe in their work on Islamic homosexualities.