Homosexuality in Islam

Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims

Scott Siraj Al-Haqq Kugle

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781780740287
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Homosexuality is anathema to Islam – or so the majority of both believers and non-believers suppose. Throughout the Muslim world, it is met with hostility, where state punishments range from hefty fines to the death penalty. Likewise, numerous scholars and commentators maintain that the Qur'an and Hadith rule unambiguously against same-sex relations. This pioneering study argues that there is far more nuance to the matter than most believe. In its narrative of Lot, the Qur'an could be interpreted as condemning lust rather homosexuality. While some Hadith are fiercely critical of homosexuality, some are far more equivocal. This is the first book length treatment to offer a detailed analysis of how Islamic scripture, jurisprudence, and Hadith, can not only accommodate a sexually sensitive Islam, but actively endorse it.

Chapter 1

Islam on Trial: A Case Study

When the earth quakes her violent shakings
And the earth bears forth her weighty burdens
The human being declares, “What is with her?”
That day, she speaks of what’s happened with her
All that her Lord has inspired to her
That day people come forward, each differently
To witness their deeds
So whoever does an atom’s weight of good
Sees its consequence
And whoever does an atom’s weight of harm
Sees its consequence

Qur’an 99:1–8

There comes a day in every life when the unwanted truth bursts forth, with dire consequences that send us into upheaval. We usually try to avoid that day, sometimes with indifferent negligence, sometimes with strategic silence, sometimes with lying avoidance. Nevertheless, the truth comes. The Qur’an insists that the day of truth comes, so it is better that we face the consequences now and live up to our responsibilities to God and to our neighbors than to wait until death overtakes us.

In this brief chapter, Surat al-Zilzal or “The Earthquake,” the Qur’an describes the cataclysm of cosmic accountability that will overshadow each of us, surely after death but also certainly, in small forerumblings, in our lives. Events have a way of piling up so that what we strive to avoid comes to slap us in the face and we are shaken violently, suddenly made aware “to see our deeds.” This chapter was one of the earliest revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and it conveys a core teaching of Islam: the inevitable accounting of facing God directly – without intermediary, without helper, without excuse.

This chapter is the first of the Qur’an that I remember having read, long before I could read its powerful rhyme in Arabic or understand its potent play of gendered pronouns that give the earth its personified role in the cosmic cataclysm. Reading this single chapter, just eight tense verses, laid the seeds that would later grow into the love of learning Arabic, branch into becoming a professor of Islamic studies, and eventually, many years later, flower into the spiritual aspiration to become a Muslim.

However, I really didn’t understand the verse, despite its importance to me, until the day I was called to testify in court in the summer of 2002. Fortunately, I was not standing accused, but was rather called upon as an expert witness. The case was at an immigration court in Arlington, Virginia. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the U.S. (I.N.S.) was seeking to deport a Moroccan man, twenty years old, whom we will call “Mehdi” in order to keep his identity anonymous. He had overstayed his year-long visa to enroll in college, and was arrested on his community college campus, only weeks after having begun his first semester, only days after the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11). After spending many months in an I.N.S. holding facility, Mehdi applied for political asylum to stay in the U.S., as a homosexual, “because he had been persecuted and abused with the acquiescence of the Moroccan government on account of his sexual orientation.”¹ He charged that he fled Morocco after having suffered past persecution and can establish in court “a well-founded fear of future persecution based on his membership in his social group as a homosexual” such that he could appeal against I.N.S. deportation back to Morocco under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, known as the “Convention against Torture.” The case was complicated, and the U.S. does not have a positive track record on allowing asylum on the basis of homosexuality. Questions arose not only about the veracity of his story but over the status of homosexuality in Islamic law and culture as it is practiced in Morocco. I was called upon in the case to speak about Islam as a religion and Islamic culture in Morocco, for I had lived and studied there for several years, was writing a book on Islamic law and ethics in Morocco, and taught an undergraduate course on gender and sexuality in Islamic cultures. In addition, I served on the shari‘a advisory board for an advocacy group that works to support gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Muslims in the U.S., Al-Fatiha Foundation. It was an honor to be called to witness in court, but the experience was a bit of an earthquake for me and shook me from my complacency.

I was accustomed to wearing jeans in a university classroom, but now I was wearing a suit. I was used to having an hour to explain a point about Qur’anic interpretation or Islamic legal reasoning in all its ambiguity and detail, but now I had to answer in sound bites. I took it for granted that students could listen to provocations in my lecture and come back tomorrow to ask for clarification or counter-argument with “the real truth” constantly questioned and refined, but now I had only one chance to speak before a decision was made. Before, I hoped my words would convey information mixed with a little wisdom, but now my words were operations of power, upon which a life depended. I had written about jurisprudence (both Islamic and Western) safely from a scholarly armchair, but now I was implicated from the witness chair in the very exertion of power that I had sought to understand from an observer’s safe distance.² It was as if the world had been overturned in an upheaval that revealed some truths that were weighty to bear.

The case in court and my role in it inspired me to write this book. The case brought up many questions that the courtroom proceedings could not address adequately. This book seeks to address them in great detail and in the widest context, for the way we Muslims treat homosexuality and transgender experiences in our communities reveals much about our religious tradition, our practical interpretation of Islam, which may or may not live up to its essential principles and high ideals. In fact, it reveals how we Muslims have allowed many distortions of Islam to conform to cultural prejudices that are deeply ingrained but not inevitable.

The Trial

However discomforting it was for me to be in court, it was far, far worse for the young man whose hearing it was. After all, he was on trial, not me. Mehdi’s own day of upheaval had occurred long before, not in court but in the apparent safety of his family home in a modern city of industry and trade in northern Morocco. He had grown up in a prosperous family, as the only son with four sisters. His father was a merchant marine captain who was a respected community member – both religiously pious and politically conservative – with friends well placed in government and the civic elite. Mehdi grew up hiding his homosexual orientation, owing to fear that revealing it would be dangerous and result in family strife, social ostracism, and bodily harm. In his testimony, Mehdi said, “I never disclosed my sexual orientation to my friends because I knew they would despise me. My friends openly spoke of their desire to kill anyone who was gay, and my personal experiences told me that these were not simply idle threats.”³ However, at age thirteen, his mother found him in a compromising position with a friend, a boy his own age. “As punishment, my mother slapped me twice across the face and held me forcibly while she heated a fork over the stove, which she then pressed against my hand, causing excruciating pain and leaving a scar that I still have. My mother told me that I had committed a very shameful sin, and she threatened to tell my teacher so that everyone at school would know of my sin and, more frighteningly to me, she said that if I met my friend again that she would tell my father.” At fifteen, he had a sexual relationship with another adolescent male, a friend of a friend who was visiting his city for the summer. At the end of the summer, the friend left and Mehdi managed to repress his sexual feelings while continuing his schooling.

All this while he heard stories of young gay or lesbian people in his town and how they were treated. When he was thirteen, a teenage girl in his neighborhood was murdered while her parents were gone for the weekend. On going to the scene of the crime, “I noticed that the iron bars had been removed from one of the windows and the phone cable had been cut. I overheard some neighbors talking and saying that the victim was a lesbian woman … I also overheard that the police knew it wasn’t a robbery because nothing had been taken.” Because no one was ever arrested for the murder, he concluded that the victim had been murdered for being a lesbian: an “honor killing” that her own family might have engineered. Three years later, another incident drove the danger of his situation home more clearly. The elder brother of one of his neighborhood friends, like many Moroccans, went to college in Germany and he used to return every summer for vacation. One summer, this friend’s brother did not return from Germany. The other college students who came back “told everyone they saw that [he] hadn’t returned because they had discovered that he was gay. I heard them say that they were afraid to do anything to him in Germany and that they wished he would return because ‘it would be easy to get him in Morocco.’” Everyone knew that the police would look the other way and that in situations of violence directed at gay or lesbian Moroccans “The police would not protect me from violence at the hands of my family or others.”

Despite this adverse social climate, or perhaps because of it, Mehdi threw himself into schoolwork. He excelled in math and physics to the point that his family rewarded him with his own bank account and passport in preparation for adulthood. At age seventeen, his parents gifted him a tourist visa to the United States, to spend a summer in New York and broaden his horizons. At this point, he felt confident enough to tell his mother that he was gay: the reasons for this confession were not clear, but could have come from discussion about future marriage plans, from discussion of his past “indiscretions,” or simply from a sense of integrity in desiring adult honesty with one’s mother. “My mother’s reaction was dramatic. She turned bright red, hit me in the face, and screamed at me for bringing disgrace to the family. When she prepared to leave the house, I knew that she was going to tell my father, and that terrified me.” He took his clothes, wallet, passport, and all the money from his checking account and fled, staying for ten days at the home of a school friend while making plans to fly to New York.

But it was not so easy to escape confrontation. His father tracked him down and intercepted him in an airport in Europe. The father could not convince him to return to Morocco, so they agreed that they would travel together to New York and complete his trip as planned, then return together to Morocco later. “I was terrified because I could tell that he was angry and intended to punish me, but I did not know what to do. Therefore I let him take my money, my passport, and my return ticket.” But on the second night in New York, he decided to flee a second time. He removed his papers and money from his father’s wallet and hid out in a mosque in Queens. He spent the night at the mosque and then traveled further from New York. He has not seen his father since.

After some months in the U.S., he tried to contact his family indirectly, through the school friend with whom he had stayed upon setting out from home in Morocco. That friend answered the phone, yelled “Faggot!” and hung up. “I realized then that I could never go home to Morocco. My family had ‘outed’ me to the world. If my family were still considering whether to accept me again, they would not have told anyone else of my sexual orientation. The fact that my friend knows that I am gay means that my family has made the decision that I have brought shame on the family that cannot be ignored. I am certain that my family will do whatever it can to rid itself of this shame.” In his deposition to the court, he concluded, “If I am deported to Morocco, my family will find me and punish me, and the authorities in Morocco will not protect me. Apart from the punishment I would suffer at the hands of my family, I know that if I am deported to Morocco I would also be persecuted by the government.”

The role of government and police in the persecution of gay men and lesbian women in Morocco and other Muslim-majority states is controversial. The situation is made more complex by the ambiguous role of religion in law and state. An analysis of the written laws is not enough to understand the actual situation, however, because the police sometimes enforce an unwritten code of morality that is deeply influenced by conservative interpretations of Islam. Further, the police would not interfere with extended families, neighborhood associations, or conservative religious parties who assert moral order at a local level without reference to national law and without the restraint of legal requirements.

Mehdi’s lawyer asserted, “The Moroccan government’s history of persecuting homosexuals and its refusal to prevent or prosecute such persecution by non-governmental actors demonstrates that my client’s fear [of persecution based on sexual orientation] is well founded.” The lawyer contended that Mehdi could never take refuge with the police, for gay people are regularly exposed to “humiliation and harassment, at least” and would most likely be handed over to the family patriarch, “to be tortured or killed” at the family’s discretion, and called this “state-sanctioned homophobia.” Because homosexual sex acts are a crime that is “actively prosecuted in Morocco,” homosexuals cannot seek protection from the police, because to do so may lead to arrest and prosecution on charges of homosexuality. “Apart from the danger of imprisonment, most police officers in Morocco are unwilling to protect homosexuals and may even participate in the anti-homosexual violence by committing physical and sexual assault against those suspected of being gay. Once arrested, homosexuals are often subject to physical and sexual assault by the police officers that arrest them, the prison guards who detain them, and even other detainees.”

The lawyer’s case spelled out the situation in absolute terms, in quick strokes of black and white. This was quite necessary, as under U.S. immigration law, it is very difficult to apply for asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lawyer would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mehdi, if deported back to Morocco, would face torture or persecution leading to bodily harm either directly by government agents or indirectly with the connivance of government agents. U.S. law in general does not recognize homosexual orientation as grounds for legal protection against discrimination, so applications of asylum must be judged on the grounds of exposure to torture or cruel and inhuman punishment in the home country. Mehdi had not been publicly exposed as gay in Morocco and had not been arrested or suffered systematic discrimination outside his family. Therefore, his lawyer argued that Morocco’s social climate, governmental system, and religious tradition are such that Mehdi would suffer bodily harm if deported.

The case raises important questions about how Islam as a religious tradition treats homosexuality. Or, more exactly, how Muslims as religious agents treat homosexual women and men in a systematically negative way that could be categorized as an infringement of their inalienable human rights. The seemingly simply question, “What does Islam say about homosexuals?” is not easy to answer. Islam, after all, has no voice. Only Muslims have voices. Only they speak in the name of Islam, and Muslims speak from distinct social and political contexts that shape how they practice and represent their religious tradition. Islam is a complex tradition with many variations, internal contradictions, and creative ambiguities. This is true even if those who discuss homosexuality do not normally admit any ambiguity or variation, whether condemning homosexuals or protecting them. I was called to testify in the court hearing to clarify the nature of Islam, its stance on homosexuality, and variations in Islamic practice among Moroccan Muslims.

In my university classes, public speeches, and published writings, I usually assert that Islam does not inherently and essentially condemn homosexuals, especially if homosexuals as people are distinguished from particular sexual acts commonly associated with them. I take this stance because I believe it to be true, and also because this stance can further the cause of internal reform in the Islamic tradition based upon its own intellectual resources and moral principles. However, in the courtroom I found myself answering questions in ways that led to the opposite conclusion: that Islam is deeply patriarchal and enshrines profoundly anti-homosexual sentiments and enforces legal rulings that severely curtail the welfare and human dignity of homosexuals in Muslim communities. My intellectual and moral position against saying that Islam’s condemnation of homosexuals is essential to the religion is a response to universal concerns; in response to particular concerns, my testimony in Mehdi’s case was that Islam as practiced in Morocco can easily lead to curtailed freedom, systematic discrimination, and bodily harm sanctioned by religion and perpetrated by the state. In court, it did not matter what Islam essentially is or could become in the future – what mattered was how Islam was practiced here and now by one Moroccan youth’s family and community. In the interest of justice, one life deserved protection even if it meant seriously simplifying my presentation of Islam. The Qur’an warns us that no life is dispensable: Whoever kills an innocent life, it is as if he had killed all of humanity. And whoever gives life to one, it is as if he had revived all of humanity (Q. 5:32).

Reflecting upon this experience, I decided to write this book. It addresses many issues raised by Mehdi’s court hearing. These issues came up in court in a highly rhetorical way, to establish whether the U.S. government should offer Mehdi asylum, rather than to determine the true character of Islam in all its complexity. This book aims to determine the true character of Islam, as seen through the experiences of lesbian, gay, and transgender Muslims, people like Mehdi and other activists who advocated for his legal protection. Their experiences urge us to reexamine the Qur’an and other foundational texts that Muslims consider sacred or authoritative in their theological and legal tradition, to determine if Islam is inherently and unavoidably against homosexual or transgender people.

There is an unprecedented new context for this detailed attention to Islam and homosexuality. Since 9/11, the public has grown increasingly aware of the violent agenda of Muslim extremists, an agenda that consistently includes upholding a death sentence for homosexuals in Muslim communities, whether or not this is stipulated in the national legal code where these communities reside. These events have accelerated discussions between Muslim groups about whether Islam condones such violence, what the real Islamic beliefs and ethics are, and how Islam accords with “secular” notions of universal human rights. At the same time, transgender, gay, and lesbian Muslim activists have begun to speak out more clearly and to establish organizations to encourage new thinking on the issue and support the welfare of vulnerable members of Muslim communities.

There is currently an international network of advocacy and support groups for lesbi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Islam on Trial: A Case Study
• 2. Liberating Qur’an: Islamic Scripture
• 3. Critiquing Hadith: Islamic Oral Tradition
• 4. Assessing Fiqh: Islamic Legal Reasoning
• 5. Reforming Shari‘a: Islamic Ethics of Same-Sex Marriage
• 6. Reviving Spirit: Islamic Approaches to Transgender Experience
• Conclusion: Embracing Islamic Humanism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index