Dec 19, 2018
Remember the ghulamiyyat? Those cross-dressing tomboy slave girls I go on about? I just found out what their favourite fashions and perfumes were. Or, more specifically, *whose* rakish clothes and perfumes they liked to imitate, to be the very images of attractive, young courtiers.
Guess who this trendsetter was?
Ja'far ibn Yahya al-Barmaki, that's who.
#i have no words#history#ja'far ibn yahya#barmakids#ghulamiyyat#drag drag drag#persia#the golden age of islam#reference#thief of bagdad#he was a fucking genderbending icon#in medieval persia#and then they cast a genderbending icon as the first film incarnation of the guy#i...#i just...#remember when i bemoaned the fact i'd accidentally made jaffar wear a female perfume in one of my stories?#bc i didn't yet know it was supposed to be a women's perfume?#WELL#history has just turned that around for me#it wasn't that he wore tarty slave girl perfumes#the slave girls wore tarty vizier perfumes#clucking bell#i'm not joking i'm browsing a book on medieval genderbending and the abbasid essay quotes an abu nuwas poem#where he says she wears a barmakid perfume#and another girl is described as being pretty 'in the barmakid fashion'#and wearing the sorts of sashes/tunics he would wear#oh gOD#disney was all wrong! they should've drawn him like a bishie!
