Let LGBTQ Muslims Breathe
Junaid Jahangir
By Junaid Jahangir and Hussein Abdullatif
11 January 2021
The discourse in Muslim online spaces is often led by
straight cisgender Muslim men, who grew up in the West or who converted to
Islam and have a mass following. In either case, in search for an identity,
their entire narrative is that of one upmanship. An illustration of this
appears in a YouTube video where a loud Muslim spokesman compares his biceps
with that of his opponent. Their discourse is reactionary, so that every issue
is dissected from the point of view of establishing the superiority of Islam.
All of this is less about the need to fulfill genuine spiritual needs that
happens without riya (showing off) and more about a boisterous attempt to
validate themselves by dictating how other Muslims should lead their lives. It
is less about Islam and more about celebrity cults where their followers, like
Trump’s minions, ignore their rape jokes, sexual harassment allegations and
even violent rape charges.
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Also Read: Why Accommodating Gay Rights within Islam is a Challenge?
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Much of their narrative revolves around the concerns of
women and sexual minorities. Instead of coming up with original narratives on
addressing the pressing issues of the environment that is engendering
pandemics, the exacerbating inequality under a capitalist system gone awry, or
for that matter creating better institutions against corruption that is rife in
Muslim majority countries, they focus on how they can better control, monitor,
suppress and marginalize the bodies of women and sexual minorities. This
narrative includes an extensive article on how a past exegete upheld the death
texts on liwat (male anal intercourse) despite their being rejected by a vast
majority of past and contemporary Hadith experts. In other words, they sustain
their “majority” position by recourse to minority positions. Their prejudice is
manifest when they claim that texts that make you “cringe” cannot be attributed
to the Prophet but then find nothing cringeworthy in killing off men involved
in consensual sexual conduct in horrific ways. When some begin to adopt a
“middle of the road” self-serving approach by arguing that Muslims can support
the civil rights of the LGBTQ community, so that the civil rights of the Muslim
community to live according to their “traditional norms” is respected, they are
attacked by the more hardcore spokesmen. Such intra community conflict
sometimes includes “vulgar epithets.”
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More recently, a paper was published in which two cis Muslim
men, straight and gay, go to town on addressing transgender issues. The gay man
is a physician who rejects the gay identity and instead identifies himself as
SSA (struggling with same-sex attraction) and does not have the integrity or
courage to use his real name. Enjoying the privileged life of a physician,
without naming himself lest the professional medical, psychological and
psychiatric authorities should peer review their skewed narrative, he validates
himself by attacking a minority within a minority, that is amongst the most
vulnerable and faces perpetual social ostracism let alone cold-blooded murder.
He is reminiscent of Rasheed El Din, another closeted man, who about a decade
ago would run this website “Eye on Gay Muslims,” where his ilk would engage in
backbiting against Imam Daayiee Abdullah and other pioneering gay Muslim
activists. Indeed, some of the worst homophobic abuse comes from self-loathing
closeted Muslim gay men, who are struggling with themselves. Instead of forging
a narrative to help build an affirming community away from the narcissism in
gay subcultures and the repression in Muslim spaces, such closeted men remain
miserable and inflict that misery upon others.
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Also
Read: To Sustain an LGBTQ Affirming Islamic Discourse,
Lateral Violence Must End
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Their paper takes the same approach of upholding their
“majority” position by recourse to minority opinions. For instance, they
sideline the majority Shia Ithna Ashari position that allows gender
reassignment surgery (GRS) to uphold the minority Shia position that forbids
it. On several issues in Islam, one can find opinions ranging from prohibition
to detestability to outright permissibility. Take for instance the issue of
masturbation, there are texts that depict masturbators as residents of Hell,
opinions that allow it under duress, as well as texts that show that the
Companions allowed their youth to practice it in a very casual manner. This means that the choice to uphold one
strand of texts over others reflects more about the bias of the wielder of the
texts than anything else.
The paper is quite long winded and seems like a collection
of fringe opinions in the fields of medicine and psychology. The orientation
seems closer to Protestant fundamentalism than Islam. Yet, even if the authors
collect such fringe opinions to create the impression of the preponderance of
their views, such a viewpoint would be rejected by professional Pediatric, Psychological
and Psychiatric bodies as skewed and harmful. In fact, Muslim medical and
psychological professionals including the Lebanese Medical Association for
Sexual Health (LebMASH) may need to do a critical peer review of this
narrative. So far as the Islamic section of this paper is concerned, it follows
the same pattern of using a strand of particular opinions that rejects GRS in
opposition to other opinions that allow it.
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Also
Read: Why Gay Muslims Are Upheld To Standards That Not Even
Prophets Fulfil?
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Opposing GRS, the paper underscores that the legal maxim
that ‘necessity trumps prohibitions’ is restricted to extenuating
circumstances, which cannot be “sufficiently proved.” It also highlights another maxim that “one
harm cannot be removed by another harm.” However, if extenuating circumstances
or Darura (necessity) cannot be legally proven then the legal maxim
becomes Abth (useless). Moreover, the maxim on necessity has been
applied to the lesser Haja (needs, that which make life better), as in
the case of interest-based mortgages. Though, opposition to such fatwas often
arises from younger Muslim males who adopt a stricter outlook on issues.
Regardless, the second maxim on not removing harm by another harm also has to
be properly understood for there are cases where Imam Ghazali (d. 1111) argued
that Muslims could, under extenuating circumstances, safeguard the lives of the
majority of Muslims by firing at Muslims used as shields by the enemy. This
indicates that between the option of two harms, the lesser of the two is
adopted. In short, copy pasting legal maxims without nuance and playing games
with the lives of trans folks, who have the highest rate of suicide ideation
and attempted suicides amongst the entire LGBTQ spectrum, and to cast them
towards further harm by ignoring the position of professional medical and
psychological bodies and by perpetuating irresponsible scholarship is callous
to say the least if not outright criminal.
The paper upholds the gender binary in Islam. However, past
jurists did not have sleepless nights trying to figure out the innate gender of
the gender non-binary folks. They did subsume them into the binary for the
purpose of marriage, inheritance and funeral rites but otherwise let them be in
the non-binary state. Their mannerisms and disposition, as in the case of the Khawaja
Saras of South Asia, were not targeted save by a few scholars whom the
current straight cis males try to latch on to support their worldview, which is
ironically more conventionally western than Islamic. Additionally, past jurists
could only rule on the manifest and left hidden matters to Allah. That is why
the Hanbali jurist Kharqi left the decision of gender to the khuntha mushkil
(indeterminate gender) themselves, for none other than they themselves could
know about that very intricately private and innate constitution. The Qur’an itself mentions the gender
non-binary in verses 42:49-50 that Allah pairs males and females, which can be
construed extrinsically for two people or intrinsically within the same person.
Additionally, it states on various occasions that Allah creates whatsoever He
wills. What cis straight males are doing to validate themselves is to place
restrictions on Allah in His grand design of multiple permutations of gender
and sexual orientation.
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Also
Read: The Quran on
Homosexual Relations
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Finally, the paper goes into the verse and Hadith that
caution against changing God’s creation. However, mutilating human bodies like
self-castration to get jobs in the imperial palaces or mutilating animals for
cult activities or financial gains are a far cry from circumcisions, correcting
cleft palates, orthodontic work, piercings, tattoos, and in the present
context, gender reassignment surgeries. A glaring lack of appreciation for this
nuance indicates naivety in the face of social changes that are increasingly
liberating vulnerable individuals from the oppressive institutions that
predominately serve those at the apex of the social hierarchy - the straight
cisgender males.
To conclude, none of the narratives of straight cis Muslim
men is about uplifting LGBTQ Muslims. Their approach is about stigma and
sacrifice, which countenances no facility to a people trying to live a very
short life fraught with immense social prejudice and discrimination. In fact,
when was the last time, any one of them stood up to speak against the
imprisonment of LGBTQ folks in Egypt or helped out the LGBTQ refugees who
escape state persecution in places like Iran? They don’t even offer a platform
to LGBTQ Muslims to be part of their panel for a balanced discussion and when someone
does, all hell breaks loose in social media. They can’t even tolerate seeing a
trans person on an Islamic forum let alone support their God given human
rights. Instead, they are making countless videos dictating the lives of LGBTQ
Muslims with their respective frameworks of thought only to validate
themselves. With their thousands of online followers, their celebrity cult
status, their privileged lives where they don’t have to worry about being
stalked or killed, unlike many trans folks, they still play the victim,
perpetuate the narrative of victimhood and continue to keep a stranglehold on
the lives of those LGBTQ Muslims, who do not necessarily have the tools to push
back in the specialized language of Islamic law. The metaphor here is that of
the supremacist cop with all the powers at his disposal and his knee on neck
hold on a vulnerable George Floyd. All LGBTQ Muslims want is for these cis
straight Muslim men to let them breathe.
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Junaid Jahangir and Hussein Abdullatif are the co-authors
of Islamic Law and Muslim Same-Sex Unions.
URL:
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism