Chapter 17 (Volume 1)

The Queer Intersectional Subject of LGB Muslims

Momin Rahman

1. Introduction……………………………….………………………………………..

2. Research on LGB Muslim Experiences and Identities………………………..

3. Muslim Homohopbia, Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Islamophobia…………………………………………………………………

4. Challenging the Triangulation of Homocolonialism and Making the Queer Muslim Possible………………………………………..

5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..…..

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1. Introduction This chapter provides an overview of research on lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) Muslim sexualities1 through a focus on three key contexts: i. cross-cultural differences and similarities in Muslim sexual diversity; ii. contemporary Muslim homophobia and its relationship to colonialism and Islamophobia; and iii. the recent internationalization of LGB rights and the dangers of imposing western versions of identity and equality politics on non- western contexts - a triangulated process of homocolonialism. Throughout, it is argued that understanding LGB Muslims requires a theoretical framework that is both epistemologically intersectional and ontologically queer in order to fully grasp these complicated socio-political contexts for LGB Muslims. Their identities are best understood as ‘queer intersectional identities’ because they are the ‘impossible’ subjects2 whose very existence disrupts the ontological coherence of dominant identity categories and political strategies of both ‘LGB’ and ‘Muslim’. This chapter draws on the formulations of queer theory that emphasize how non- normative sexualities present a constant disruption to normative categories of gender and sexual identity.3 It combines this analysis with intersectionality theory and its focus on a standpoint epistemology that demands attention to the experiences of those located at significant intersections, because their experiences contest dominant ways of understanding oppression and politics. The concluding sections discuss how we might move beyond the triangulation of homocolonialism in order to make the subject of LGB Muslims more possible, both in western and Muslim consciousness.

2. Research on LGB Muslim Experiences and Identities In the context of the vast amount of research on sexualities, evidence on Muslim same-sex identities and experiences is relatively scarce. Nonetheless, there are key similarities with broader sexualities research in that the social constructionist approach underscores both the historical studies and the more contemporary research into Muslim same-sex sexualities, directing our attention primarily to cross- cultural differences in identities and experiences.

While our concerns here are more with contemporary evidence, the historical research is important because the studies confirm homoerotic traditions in Muslim cultures and therefore undermine the contemporary claims of fundamental cultural incompatibility between Muslim cultures and sexual diversity that appear in both Muslim and western political discourses.4 For example, there is evidence of status

1 LGB is the term used for homosexual and bisexual identities in common with the rest of this volume, but the vast majority of empirical research discussed is focused on lesbians and gay men rather than bisexuals or trans. 2 Ibrahim Abraham, “‘Out to Get Us”: Queer Muslims and the Clash of Sexual Civilization in Australia,” Contemporary Islam 3, no. 1 (2009): 79-97. 3 Steven Seidman, ‘Introduction,’ in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 11-13. 4 Momin Rahman, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 43-48.

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differentiated and gender variant homosexualities across a range of locations and historical periods.5 The former was apparent in homo-social male cultures, such as the Mamluk military elite who were a slave class for various Muslim Sultans in Egypt6. Homosexual behavior existed in these intensely homo-social contexts, wherein slaves had both regular access to their supervisors and some status within the relevant court, leading to relationships between masters and slaves. Gender variance is illustrated in relation to both men and women. For example, Westphal- Hellbusch describes the Mustergil role that women took on in southern Iraq in the mid-twentieth century, where they chose to live as men and enjoy the privileges of the male patriarchal culture without marrying, and Peletz work describes gender variant male sexualities in south east Asia.7

These brief examples illustrate two key issues for contemporary understandings of Muslim same-sex identities. First, the existence and social acceptance of homosexual behaviors is structured primarily by heteronormativity because the prevailing gender hierarchy provides the framework for much of the homoeroticism discussed in Islamic societies. In contemporary times, the structuring power of heteronormativity remains for all non-heterosexual identities, including Muslim ones. Second, there is no historical evidence of the social and public identity of exclusive homosexuality that developed in the west from the 19th century, and now dominates western and international understandings of homosexuals as exclusively ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ individuals. Thus, the current developments of Muslim LGB identities are occurring in a very different context from historical Muslim cultural traditions, in that the main framework for understanding homosexuality has become the western version of an exclusive, many would argue essentialist, public and individual identity. This cultural difference in development of sexualities appears as a constant in the extant research on contemporary experiences of LGB Muslims, discussed below.

In Muslim majority nations, the research is limited to a small number of studies which are all relatively small scale. Some important examples are contained in Habib’s collection covering Malaysia, Pakistan, Iraq and Singaporean Malay Muslims.8

5 Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (eds.), Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, eds., Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Michael G. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 2 (2006): 309-340; Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 6 Stephen O. Murray, “Male Homosexuality; Inheritance Rules, and the Status of Women in Medieval Egypt: the Case of the Mamluks,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, eds. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 161-173; Stephen O. Murray, “Homosexuality among Slave Elites in Ottoman Turkey,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, eds. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 174-186. 7 Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times”; Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch (trans. Bradley Rose), “Institutionalised Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, eds. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 233-243. 8 Max Kramer, “Sexual Orientation: The Ideological Underpinnings of the Gay Advance in Muslim- Majority Societies as Witnessed in Online Chat Rooms,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 133-162; Badruddin Khan, “Longing, Not Belonging, and Living in Fear,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa

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These and other studies illustrate that there is a widespread cultural opposition between Muslim cultures and being publicly homosexual. For example, Boellstorff’s studies on gay men in Indonesia demonstrate that it remains difficult to be publicly and exclusively gay in this Muslim culture, with a variety of strategies employed ranging from marrying women to living as privately gay.9

Recent research from Turkey suggests that western versions of gay identity are becoming more common but that they are a minority choice in comparison to the gender variant understanding of homosexual behavior in Turkish culture that is tolerant of homosexual behavior in private.10

It is not accurate, however, to frame this difference as fundamentally divergent versions of cultural sexual ‘development’. Indeed, that assumption would simply reinforce the idea that there is an irresolvable incompatibility between Muslim cultures and LGB identities. Rather, a more accurate assessment of the research points to a more complex development of Muslim same-sex identities that is negotiated at the intersection of western and eastern sociological resources. The research demonstrates that there are more traditional versions of gender variant homosexualities in Muslim cultures, but also that western conceptualizations of LGB identities can be an important resource for local and national developments of queer identities, although they are not necessarily the rubric for how sexual diversity and politics will develop in non-western cultures.

Blackwood’s research on Indonesia demonstrates this transnational intersectionality: lesbians use western discourses in combination with local and national ones to create their identities and communities.11 A recent narrative from Pakistan illustrates the differences of being lesbian in a culture where there is no social category for such identities but also indicates the spread of such western categories and how they are gradually shifting culture towards a binary world of sexual identities.12 Hossain’s research shows how hijra13 Muslims in Bangladesh do not conform to dominant categories of Muslim, male, or homosexual,14 and Wong’s ethnography on Malaysian

Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 23-36; Michael T. Luongo, “Gays under Occupation: Interviews with Gay Iraqis,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 99-110; Walter L. Williams, “Islam and the Politics of Homophobia: The Persecution of Homosexuals in Islamic Malaysia Compared to Secular China,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 1-22. 9 Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, Princeton University Press), 2005; Tom Boellstorff, “Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia,” American Anthropologist 117, no. 4 (2005): 575-585. 10 Tarek Bereket and Barry Adam, “The Emergence of Gay Identities in Contemporary Turkey,” Sexualities 9, no. 2 (2006): 131-151; Tarek Bereket and Barry Adam, “Navigating Islam and Same- Sex Liasions Among Men in Turkey,” Journal of Homosexuality 55, no. 2 (2008): 204-222. 11 Evelyn Blackwood, “Transnational Sexualities in One Place: Indonesian Readings.” Gender and Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 221-242. 12 Nighat M. Gandhi, “Siraat-e-Mustaqeem or the Straight Path,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 468-484. 13 A common term across South Asia for trans individuals, usually referring to male to female. 14 Adnan Hossain, “Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra in South Asia,” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012): 495–513

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lesbians who adopt masculine roles shows how they are developing new forms of female masculinity that are sometimes tolerated, sometimes regulated.15

Contemporary same-sex Muslim eroticism is not exclusively eastern or consistent across Muslim cultures, but rather these identities are created in intersection with the increasingly globalized discourse of western LGB political identity and in the specific national contexts of Muslim traditionalism that overwhelmingly casts public homosexuality as inimical to its cultural traditions. The research on LGB Muslims focuses attention on those who are both Muslim and queer and thus are located in both sides of the apparent dialectic and are at the intersection between political and social cultures.

An intersectional analytical perspective, demands that we do not reduce oppression to one variable or hierarchy,16 and is therefore the most logical framework for understanding this position between cultures. LGB Muslims are caught between cultural and political Islamophobia, Muslim homophobia and an increasingly monolithic understanding of LGB identity and equality that is derived from western experiences. Intersectional approaches also demand attention to the standpoint of oppressed subjects and suggest that this evidence will challenge our assumptions of how oppression is structured and how it affects specific groups. This is where queer theory’s analysis of the instability of identity categories adds some relevant explanatory power, because the lived experiences or standpoint of LGB Muslims illuminates their identities as always ontologically deferred from the dominant identity categories of ‘gay’ and ‘Muslim’ and this ontological query is a central analytical contribution of queer theory:

I suggest that gay Muslims are similarly located inside/out because they are at an intersectional location in full measure, challenging both the category of Muslim (which is itself subordinately located along national identity, ethnic and often class hierarchies) and the category of gay (again, located subordinately in the ‘heterosexual matrix’) … The ‘impossibility’ of gay Muslims is exactly their power in resistance; in researching their lived experience we should be engaged in the intersectional illumination of a marginalized standpoint, but with a keen sense in which this lived experience is disruptive to established identity categories.17

Research on LGB Muslims living in the west illustrates this framework of queer as intersectionality even more keenly. Key issues in this research are the dangers of homophobia from Muslim families and communities, particularly in reaction to adopting a public and exclusive homosexuality. There is also the related perception of exclusive homosexual identity as a negative western ontology, testifying to the perceived cultural incompatibility that LGB Muslims both inhabit and disrupt through

15 Yuenmei Wong, “Islam, Sexuality, and the Marginal Positioning of Pengkids and Their Girlfriends in Malaysia,” The Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 435-448. 16 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 2nd edition, 2000). 17 Momin Rahman, “Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities,” Sociology 44, no. 5 (2010): 952.

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their intersectional location between these cultures.18 For example, American-Iranian Khalida Saed discusses her mother’s reaction when she came out:

The most compelling argument she came up with was that I was far too Americanized and that my sexuality was an offspring of the American values I had internalized. This last argument may or may not have a ring of truth to it. I’m not sure I would have had the balls to discuss my sexuality at all, or even consider it, if my American side hadn’t told me I had the right.”19

The perceived cultural opposition means that the process of coming out is distinct for LGB Muslims, as evidenced in Jaspal’s studies of gay Muslim men that demonstrate a heightened experience of negative emotions around being Muslim and gay, largely due to the existence and internalization of Muslim homophobia.20 Nonetheless, research on coming out confirms the evidence from Muslim majority cultures that shows that western versions of queer identity are used as resources by LGB Muslims in the west but in more complex ways that an unrefined adoption of the public subject positions of ‘LGB’. In particular, it seems that many LGB Muslims do not reject their heteronormative ethnic or kinship networks outright, partly because of the need to remain close to an ethnic community in the face of wider racism, and more specifically, the increasing western cultural exclusions of Muslims21.

A final theme that emerges from this research is the attempt to develop a specifically religious Islamic LGB identity. This is evident in Yip’s research which details strategies for managing the contradictions and conflicts of lived experience with a consistent theme in the data on ‘queering religious texts’. These are individual attempts at re-interpretation, from rejecting orthodox interpretations of the story of Lot (which provides the main prohibition in the Qu’ran) to arguing that religious texts need to be read in the context of contemporary culture rather than accepted as eternally relevant. This theme is consistent in the two major studies done by Kugle.22

18 Didi Khayatt, “Toward a Queer Identity,” Sexualities 5, no. 4 (2002): 487–501. Omar Minwalla, B.R. Simon Rosser, Jamie Feldman and Christine Varga, “Identity experience among progressive gay Muslims in North America: A qualitative study within Al-Fatiha,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 7, no. 2 (2005): 113-128. 19 Khalida Saed, “On the Edge of Belonging,” in Living Islam Out Loud, ed. Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005), 86-94. 20 Rusi Jaspal, “Coping with Religious and Cultural Homophobia: Emotion and Narratives of Identity Threat among British Muslim Gay Men,” in Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Everyday Life, eds. Peter Nynas and Andrew K.T. Yip (Farnham, Surrey; Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 71-90; Rusi Jaspal and Marco Cinnirella, “Identity Processes, Threat, and Interpersonal Relations: Accounts From British Muslim Gay Men,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 2 (2012): 215–240; Rusi Jaspal and Asifa Siraj, “Perceptions of ‘coming out’ among British Muslim gay men,” Psychology & Sexuality 2, no. 3 (2011): 183–197. 21 Abraham, “‘Out to Get Us”: Queer Muslims and the Clash of Sexual Civilization in Australia”; Khan, “Longing, Not Belonging, and Living in Fear.” 22 Asifa Siraj, “I Don’t Want to Taint the Name of Islam”: The Influence of Religion on the Lives of Muslim Lesbians,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 449–467; Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslims (Oxford, Oneworld Press, 2010); Asifa Siraj, Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslims (New York, New York University Press, 2014); Andrew K.T. Yip, “Embracing Allah and Sexuality? South Asian Non-Heterosexual Muslims in Britain,” in South Asians in the Diaspora, eds. Knut A. Jacobsen and P. Pratap Kumar (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 294-310; Andrew K.T. Yip, “Queering Religious Texts: an Exploration of British Non-heterosexual Christians’ and Muslims’ Strategy of Constructing Sexuality-Affirming Hermeneutics.” Sociology 39, no.1 (2005): 47-65 ; Andrew K.T. Yip,

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Moreover, this theme speaks to the absence of community, leading individuals to attempt re-interpretive strategies in their own way and within whatever limited Muslim LGB communities they can find.23

3. Muslim Homophobia, Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Islamophobia There is plenty of evidence of Muslim homophobia in both majority nations and minority populations. The 2015 report from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) shows that 31 out of a total 47 Muslim majority countries criminalize homosexual acts, contributing nearly half of the 77 nations that criminalize same-sex acts.24 Although eight of these only criminalize male/male sex, all five of the states in which homosexuality is punishable by death, are Muslim majority nations.

Data on attitudes demonstrate lower levels of acceptance of homosexuality in Muslim majority cultures,25 and this is mirrored in the evidence on immigrant Muslim minority populations. For example, a Gallup survey found that none of the 500 British Muslims interviewed showed any acceptance of homosexuality. This can be contrasted with 58% of the general population who did. In Germany only 19% showed acceptance, compared to 68% of the general population, and in France only 35% of Muslims showed acceptance in comparison to 68% of the general population.26

Another survey found that 61% of Muslims in the USA thought homosexuality should be discouraged compared to 38% of the general population, and Canadian Muslims’ attitudes to homosexuality indicate that only 10% expressed strong agreement with same-sex marriage (legal in Canada) while 58% expressed strong disagreement.27

Studies that use a qualitative approach are quite limited but repeat these themes. For example, in her research on heterosexual Muslims in Scotland, Siraj concludes that their attitudes to homosexuality are influenced mainly by religiosity, with educational levels, age and gender showing no moderating effect, although the vast

“The Quest for Intimate/Sexual Citizenship: Lived Experiences of Lesbian and Bisexual Muslim Women,” Contemporary Islam 2, no. 2 (2008): 99-117. 23 However, the existence of some support groups is important and regularly mentioned in this research on the USA is Al-Fatiha, which is web based but has some local organizers across North America; Salaam, based in Toronto (http://www.salaamcanada.org), and the Safra (www.safraproject.org) and Naz (www.naz.org.uk) projects in the UK. 24 Aengus Carroll and Lucas Paoli Itaborahy, State Sponsored Homophobia: a World Survey of Laws; criminalisation, protection and recognition of same-sex love, May 2015, accessed February 15, 2016, http://old.ilga.org/Statehomophobia/ILGA_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_2015.pdf. 25 Amy Adamczyk and Cassidy Pitt, “Shaping attitudes about homosexuality: The role of religion and cultural context”, Social Science Research 38, 2 (2009): 338–351, Tilo Beckers, “Islam and the Acceptance of Homosexuality: The Shortage of Socioeconomic Well-Being and Responsive Democracy,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 57-98; Pew Research Center,The Global Divide on Homosexuality, accessed March 28, 2015, http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/. 26 Gallup, Gallup Coexist Index, 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations, accessed March 27, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/118273/canada-show-interfaith-cohesion-europe.aspx. 27 Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, accessed March, 2015, http://religions.pewforum.org/affiliations; Momin Rahman and Amir Hussain,“Muslims and Sexual Diversity in North America,” in Faith, Politics and Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States, eds. David Rayside and Clyde Wilcox (Vancouver: UBC Press; 2011), 255-274.

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majority of her respondents were highly educated28. In their comparative study of adolescents in Canada and Belgium, Hooghe et al. found that Muslims were less accepting of gay rights activism than other religious groupings29. In most of this data, Muslim homophobia, is overwhelmingly explained by the lack of modernization on the part of Muslim cultures and populations. In this sociological explanation of political beliefs, Muslim culture is seen as the bedrock for individual attitudes and that culture is characterized as at more ‘traditional’ stage of dominant belief systems, largely because of the lack of economic and institutional development in Muslim nations. Specifically, the thesis argues that economic development leads to the emergence and subsequent wider acceptance of issues of individual ‘self-expression’ whereas less developed countries emphasize patterns of economic survival that correlate with a focus on material survival and thus less tolerant attitudes.30

More broadly, sociological processes that have been taken to symbolize modernization in the west, namely economic development, democratization and secularization, are understood as the foundational basis for the social emergence and political equality of LGB identities and politics. At a very broad level of explanation, the modernization thesis seems useful in explaining Muslim homophobia because the evidence confirms that higher levels of class and education produce more tolerance so the broader social equality in rich western capitalist societies, and this seems to be an important contextual factor.

There are, however, two major problems with this argument. First, although the model of progress is derived from western experiences of modernity, we also know that evidence from these societies suggests important complexities and variations within each of these categories, when accounting for attitudes to homosexuality.31 Thus, the foundational elements of socio-economic wealth, democratic governance and secularization must be understood in their national or regional context outside of the west as well. In short, while global attitudes to homosexuality do show a divide between western and non-western countries, particularly Muslim majority nations, there are complexities that are not attended to The more qualitative evidence on lived experience, discussed above, indicates these complexities in some measure, and a more detailed body of research is needed to flesh these out, and by doing so, to challenge a monolithic understanding of Muslim culture and its relationship to Islamic proscriptions on homosexuality. Minority populations are also explained with an emphasis on the influence of Islamic culture on their attitudes, but again, more complex investigation shows that we need a more nuanced understanding because Muslims in the west seem to value equality regimes and discourses as well as

28 Asifa Siraj, “The Construction of the Homosexual ‘Other’ by British Muslim Heterosexuals,” Contemporary Islam 3, no. 1 (2009): 41-57. 29 Marc Hooghe, Yves Dejaeghere, Ellen Claes, and Ellen Quintelier, “Yes, But Suppose Everyone Turned Gay?”: The Structure of Attitudes toward Gay and Lesbian Rights among Islamic Youth in Belgium,” Journal of LGBT Youth 7, no. 1 (2010): 49-71. 30 Ronald Inglehart and Wayne Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000):19–51; Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 31 Jurgen Gerhards, “Non-Discrimination towards Homosexuality: The European Union’s Policy and Citizens’ Attitudes towards Homosexuality in 27 European Countries,” International Sociology 25, no. 1 (2010): 5-28.

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disapproving of homosexuality.32 While this first objection is not necessarily a fundamental challenge to the premise of modernization, the following objection may well be.

The second major problem with the argument that lack of modernization explains attitudes to homosexuality amongst Muslims, is a consequence of epistemology. Attitude surveys are ultimately positivist tools of knowledge gathering, and so cannot account for complex historical social formations or how these have come to underscore contemporary political discourses. Certainly there has been a shift towards the acceptance of LGB rights over the last 20 years, primarily in the west, but also in some global south regions. We also know from the historical literature on Muslim homoeroticism that same-sex traditions have existed in the past, but that they have not transformed into western versions of LGB identities during the era of modernity. While the modernization thesis can account for contemporary outcomes, it cannot account for the complexity of this divergence.

Homosexuality as an identity, was initially brought into being through the shift to scientific but essentialist ways of categorizing normative and deviant sexualities in sexology, medicine and law, and thus its initial existence was as a regulated deviant category. The sociological basis of gay liberation in the west began with political organizing using these identity positions to resist stigmatized understandings of sexuality. This became much more viable because of the de-traditionalization of gender divisions and their institutions in the second half of the 20th century in rich western cultures.

The more recent shift towards a more accepting culture is a complex interaction of specific political opportunity and sociological change in gender regimes, as well as a broader social emphasis on individualism in capitalist societies. The various interdependent and non-linear processes of modern homosexuality have produced one main consequence in terms of understanding and explaining homosexuality as an exclusive type of person. This is the individualized, psychologized, essentialist understanding of sexual identity, at first stigmatized but subsequently ‘liberated’, partly through the neat convergence of this individualized identity with the individualist rights strategies available in the west. Thus, despite its negative origins, this dominant framework of exclusive, essentialist individual identity underscores politics. For example, the 2012 UN report on LGB rights adopts this framework for understanding sexuality.33

Modernization theorists are correct when they assume that Muslim cultures have not experienced these processes in the same way, but they ignore the interdependent nature of modernity and particularly, western colonialism as foundational to the economic and social divergence between the west and the ‘rest’. Here, the intersectionality theory can provide some insight, because it emphasizes that complex lived experiences are partially the instantiation of socio-historical

32 Gallup, Gallup Coexist Index, 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations; Pew Research Center, The Global Divide on Homosexuality. 33 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Born Free and Equal: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in International Human Rights Law, accessed March 28, 2015, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Discrimination/Pages/LGBT.aspx.

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circumstances. Modernization arguments are unable to understand the socio- historical intersectionality of the development of modern sexualities

This western understanding of normative and non-normative gendered sexual identities was often deployed in colonialist dialectic to both regulate sexuality within ‘home’ nations into a hegemonic form of ‘respectable’ middle-class, and then to use this ideal as the superior standard in comparison with the perceived sexual license of colonized others, thus justifying the western civilizing mission.34 For example, Murray argues that the developing regulation of public homosexuality in Muslim cultures was due to the impact of Christian framed colonialism that focused on ‘eastern’ sexual depravity to justify western moral superiority, not just in Muslim cultures but across colonial south east Asia and India.35

Massad’s analysis of the transformations in 19th and 20th century Arab literatures on sexuality also illustrates the transformations from local understandings and acceptance of sexual diversity in behaviours, towards the colonial western definition of normative and deviant identities, something repeated in Afary’s study of sexual politics in Iran.36 Western colonialist technologies have therefore been widely implicated in both transforming traditional understandings of sexuality in non-western contexts and in producing the dominant political and social version of LGB that we know today. A central component of contemporary Muslim homophobia, therefore, is a colonial inheritance of western stigma directed towards homosexuality. Moreover, if the long term process of modernization removes the stigma for homosexuality, as is suggested for the recent success of LGB politics in the west, then it is entirely Eurocentric to focus on the lack of development of Muslim cultures, as if the west’s colonial history is not implicated in that under-development. Colonial powers did not permit the development of the free economic activity and democracy that are seen to underpin the modernization thesis.37 We therefore cannot ignore the consequences of colonial control and bequest of economic and political structures in explaining non- western ‘under-development’.

Furthermore, modernization fails to understand the differences in contemporary conditions for LGB politics. Sexual diversity cannot emerge in the same way in non- western countries as it has in the west. This is because the discourse of LGB rights is now promoted within intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and Commonwealth, and within some western countries policies towards development aid. In addition, there is now global LGB visibility as a result of popular cultural technologies such as the internet and broadcast media. None of these conditions existed in the crucial period of western LGB political identity formation. They provide a fundamentally different set of conditions for Muslim LGB identity formation. Again,

34 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (2nd edition) (Harrow: Longman, 1989). 35 Stephen O. Murray, “The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexualities,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, eds. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 14-54; Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times”; Vanita and Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. 36 Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 37 Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: a History (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

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if we consider the qualitative evidence discussed above, we see that these distinct contemporary conditions play an important role in the specific intersectional formation of Muslim same-sex identities.

Modernization arguments are therefore epistemologically unable to account for these historical intersections of colonialism and modernity. Their failure is compounded by some postcolonial perspectives, when we consider the contemporary political situation, despite their ability to break out of the Eurocentric paradigm. Some scholars argue that the impact of colonialism on sexuality continues in postcolonial times, because current western frameworks of sexual identity are being deployed in international contexts.38However, this analysis is flawed because it ignores the investment that postcolonial national elites have in continuing the regulation of sexuality, often folded into a broader discourse of resisting the contemporary economic and political dominance of the west. As such, postcolonial arguments that emphasize the western origin of LGB identity and politics are in danger of reinforcing a new Eurocentricism that denies the agency and heteronormativity of postcolonial cultures. For example, Abdulhadi discusses the historical emergence of Muslim homophobia in relation to colonialism but demonstrates that the post-colonial era furthered colonial regulation with the deployment of more rigid gender/sexual moralities as part of national liberation strategies.39 [A1]

This point is supported by Peletz’s analysis of contemporary Burma and Malaysia and Blackwood’s research on the different phases of regulation by the Indonesian state, and in contemporary research on Muslim state homophobia in Iran.40 The complex historical interaction of colonialism and post-colonialism has produced a regulation of sexuality that is not simply the imposition of a western colonialist morality, but a complex deployment of gendered and sexual discourses as part of civilizational, national and ethnic identity from both sides of the colonial divide.

This is not to dispute, however, that western frameworks are certainly the blueprint for the contemporary internationalization of LGB politics. Rather it is to recognize that these are part of the historically distinct contemporary conditions for the development of sexualities discussed above and so Muslim resistance to homosexual equality is occurring in a different context than western resistance. In particular, LGB rights are being deployed regularly within the Islamophobic civilizational discourse that has

38 Sarah Bracke, “From ‘saving women’ to ‘saving gays’: Rescue narratives and their dis/continuities,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 2 (2012): 237-252; Massad, Desiring Arabs; Paul Mepschen, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Evelien Tonkens, “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands,” Sociology 44, no. 5 (2010): 962-980, Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Rahman, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity. 39 Rabab Abdulhadi, “Sexualities and the Social Order in Arab and Muslim Communities,” in Islam and Homosexuality, Vols 1 and 2, ed. Samar Habib (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 463-488. 40 Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran; Elizabeth M. Bucar and Faegheh Shirazi, “The “Invention” of Lesbian Acts in Iran: Interpretative Moves, Hidden Assumptions, and Emerging Categories of Sexuality,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 416–434; Blackwood, “Transnational Sexualities in One Place: Indonesian Readings”; Katarzyna Korycki and Abouzar. Nasirzadeh, “Homophobia as a Tool of Statecraft: Iran and its Queers,” in Global Homophobia: States, Movements and the Politics of Oppression, in eds. Meredith M. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013) 174-195. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times”.

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become a dominant aspect of western culture, contributing to the Orientialist framing of Muslims as too ‘traditional’ but also providing a specific marker perceived incompatibility of LGB rights and Muslims.41

The formation of Muslim resistance to LGB politics must therefore be considered within the context of Islamophobia, not simply as a pre-existing component of Muslim ‘otherness’ to modernity. This complicated intersectional history and contemporary political context provides the conditions for current Muslim same-sex identities, who are caught between a cultural traditionalism that is, in fact, a relatively modern version of Islamic views of gender and sexual normativity, that are a combination of colonialist legacies and post-colonial adaptations of those legacies. On the other side, the social conditions for sexual diversity formation and politics are almost wholly identified with western societies, framing a widely perceived incompatibility between LGB people and Muslim cultures.

4. Challenging the Triangulation of Homocolonialism and Making the Queer Muslim Possible Drawing on Puar’s description of a western ‘homonationalism’ that stigmatizes non- western populations,42 and Massad’s critique of the ‘gay international’,43 but with an explicit acknowledgement that Muslim homophobia is also part of this orientalism, this chapter argues that LGB politics, Muslim homophobia and western modernity are part of a triangulated process of homocolonialism, as depicted in Figure 1 below.

LGB as western exceptionalism, pinktesting, universalist identities and rights

‘homocolonialism’

Western modernity, Muslims, homophobia, inconsistent and postcolonial homonationalism, resistance Islamophobia

Figure 1: The triangulated process of homocolonialism

41 Sarah Bracke, “From ‘saving women’ to ‘saving gays’: Rescue narratives and their dis/continuities”; Massad, Desiring Arabs; Mepschen et al., “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands”; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Rahman, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity. 42 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 1-36.. 43 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 160-190.

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This process of homocolonialism is one of political positioning: LGB politics are placed at the vanguard of western civilization, illustrating its ‘cutting edge’ credentials in development and progress, and thus validating the exceptionalism of western modernity as a social formation, which forms another point of the triangle.

The third position is Muslim culture and populations, distinct, outside of the west and its modernity, and also distinct from it’s the vanguard position of LGB identities. This positioning also begets a triangulated process, whereby the internationalization of LGB rights from the west provokes resistance from Muslim cultures, both towards LGB rights specifically, but also contributing to the other dimension of more direct resistance to western dominance or neo-colonialism. In turn, this confirms the legitimacy of Islamophobia from the west, and the validity of respect for LGB rights as a marker of western superiority.

This triangulated process thus flows in both directions at the same time, and Muslim postcolonial religious resistance, and western universalist queer politics compound the assumption that there is only one possible form of sexual diversity, that which has already been achieved in the west and now stands as its exceptional vanguard. In this process of triangulation, both the subject of LGB Muslims and the possibilities of LGB Muslim subjectivity are rendered invisible. The important question thus becomes, how we are to challenge the fact that LGB Muslim subjectivity is rendered impossible by these contemporary political discourses.

We must begin with a queer intersectional perspective that focuses on the standpoint of LGB Muslims, because such research will challenge the perceived impossibility of the LGB Muslim subject, as illustrated in the studies cited above. First and foremost, we must recognize the dangers of assuming that western LGB identity and politics are the only possible form of LGB ontology and equality, and avoid an unreflective and unintended homocolonialism. The route into this reflection is to consider the process and positioning above, and ask whether our specific tactics and strategies reinforce this closed loop of triangulation or disrupt it.

The research cited throughout this chapter indicates that a huge variety of Muslim homo-erotics have been rendered invisible through both colonialism and postcolonial reformations of the sexual and gendered order. This historical and contemporary invisibility limits the resources available to LGB Muslims in negotiating their sexualities individually and within the contexts of families and communities who similarly have no knowledge of Muslim homoerotic traditions. This is an issue of both cultural and religious heritage. Kugle’s work, Homosexuality in Islam represents a thorough religious discussion in which he acknowledges that confronting sexual diversity for Muslim communities is a difficult task, largely because of religious frameworks. 44 However, it is a necessary task for LGB identified Muslims, and this is supported by the variety of research cited in this chapter that demonstrates the importance of such reformulations to individual homosexual identity.

The specifically religious issue of reinterpreting Islamic prohibitions speaks to a wider cultural issue of whether Muslim traditions are able to become more ‘progessive’ in a

44 Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam – Living Out Islam.

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range of ways that embrace gender equity and sexual diversity. This in itself is a contentious issue because calls for a ‘reformation’ in Islam are often seen to be a call for ‘modernization’ based on western experience. However, Safi argues that we must understand this issue as one of recovering a pluralism that has always existed within Muslim thought and politics.45 The issue of Muslim same-sex sexualities connects here to Muslim feminism, since the regulation of sexual and gender diversity is universally related to the maintenance of gender normativity, however culturally differentiated that normativity may be. The question of pluralism of gender identities and status, specifically for women, will fundamentally underpin any changes that may come in the significance and regulation of Muslim homosexualities.

5. Conclusion This chapter has briefly reviewed the existing research on Muslim same-sex sexualities in Muslim majority and Muslim minority contexts and argues that we need to adopt a queer intersectional perspective on the subject of LGB Muslims to better understand the conditions for their subjectivity in the contemporary socio-historical and political climate of Islamophobia and Muslim homophobia.

While there are historical traditions of Muslim homoeroticism, it is important to recognize that contemporary conditions for Muslim LGB sexualities remain distinct from both these traditions and from western formations of LGB identity. This is largely because of the current internationalization of LGB rights discourses and identities, and the subsequent deployment of these within various manifestations of Islamophobia. In order to challenge this process of homocolonialism, we need far more empirical research on same-sex Muslim sexualities to provide more evidence for understanding their intersectional identity formations and thus render our subjectivities visible and, ultimately make the subject of LGB Muslims possible both within dominant western versions of LGB politics and within Muslim communities.

45 Omid Safi, “Introduction: the times they are a-changin’ – a Muslim quest for justice, gender equality and pluralism” in Progressive Muslims: on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2003), 1-32.

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