Abstract
Modernity, colonialism, and late-stage capitalism have changed dramatically the configurations of Muslim sources of religious authority. Unlike in the pre-modern period, when scholarly and legal opinions and interpretations were clearly distinguishable as normative discourses from always more diverse practices, today’s religious debate among US Muslims – including that on gender and sexuality – takes place in a porous Muslim American public square. As patriarchal Muslim scholars position themselves as gatekeepers for a “real Islam,” they construct an Islamic tradition that insists on the patriarchy as God-given and rejects any revisions toward supposedly pre-modern gender and sexual norms as a threat to the existence of “Islam” and the stability of Muslim communities and societies. Their specific arguments and hermeneutical methods “against homosexuality” therefore warrant the close analysis provided in this essay. Muslim responses to modernity appear on a spectrum and patriarchal Muslim ideas about sexuality constitute but one such response. Recognizing this allows us to appreciate the spectrum itself and read debates about sexuality as various contributions to, and positions on that spectrum. This redefinition of the place of patriarchal Islam denies its proponents a hegemonic position and allows for continued conversation.
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Notes
- 1.
Most of the scholars I analyze here reside in the United States; however, on occasion, debates about sexuality involve scholars from or in Canada, so there is a bit of slippage in my usage of the word “American” between meaning US American and North American including Canada.
- 2.
In the book, I define this ethic of non-abuse in these terms: “This ethic of non-abuse prioritizes change through praxis over change through discursive engagement. It is an ethic that is non-negotiable as a foundation, even though their notions of what constitutes non-abuse, which is more than the absence of violence, are more multivalent and complex” (Hammer, 2019b, p. 10).
- 3.
- 4.
Below I reference a blog article by Garrett Kiriakos-Fugate that offers an analysis of Yasir Qadhi’s opinion on homosexuality based on Kiriakos-Fugate’s presentation at the American Academy of Religion conference in 2019. He and I presented at a workshop on “Sex, Sexuality, Sexual Diversity in Islamic Thought and Practice” at Duke University in 2016 on the same panel, which was also my first foray into considering LGBTQI + sexuality issues in my research (Kiriakos-Fugate, 2019).
- 5.
- 6.
See the important theoretical work of Megan Goodwin (2020) and Jasbir Puar (2017). Goodwin employs the term “contraceptive nationalism” to explore the supposed sexual deviance of minority religious communities including Muslims, and Puar develops the idea of “homonationalism” to juxtapose the supposed LGBTQI + inclusiveness of the United States with the homophobia of Muslims. On gendered anti-Muslim hostility see also Hammer, 2013, 2019a.
- 7.
- 8.
The scholars and preachers in question do not themselves use that description, but I would wager that they do not mind the association with patriarchy.
- 9.
There are too many works and scholars to list here.
- 10.
This essay was first published on the website Muslim Matters in 2016 (https://muslimmatters.org/2016/07/11/can-islam-accommodate-homosexual-acts-quranic-revisionism-and-the-case-of-scott-kugle/; consulted online on 11 November 2020) and then as a journal article in AJISS in 2017. Page numbers refer to the AJISS print version.
- 11.
Note that the title of the article can be read as engaging in a further reduction of male homosexuality to the act of male-male anal penetration made even more problematic by his use of the term “sodomy” which references the same biblical/Qur’anic events (in Sodom) surrounding the prophet Lot.
- 12.
- 13.
Shakir (2018). The description reads: “Imam Zaid Shakir discusses Islam’s stance on the LGBTQ issue and limits as Muslims, and in regard to the LGBTQ community. How Muslim youth should interact with the LGBTQ community, including when their own Muslim friends identify as LGBTQ. He also explains how youth can be ambassadors of Islam while still respecting other communities.”
- 14.
I am aware of one text that specifically addresses lesbian desire, published very recently: Dingle (2020). Not surprisingly, it counsels against following those urges and uses all the other arguments outlined in this essay.
- 15.
In 2003 he wrote: “The term ‘queer’ allows for a more descriptive and complex analysis of a variety of sexual orientations and practices that are very distinct, but united in their common difference from hetero-normative sexuality. ‘Queer’ is also a literal translation of the Arabic term shudhudh which is currently applied to the phenomena of homosexuality in humanistic studies and journalism. Shudhudh literally means ‘odd’ in the sense of numerically unusual or rare. ‘Queer’ also has a further merit, in that even heterosexual and normative sexual practices of the past may seem ‘queer’ to heterosexuals in the present. For instance, the notion that Islamic law and prophetic example permitted sexual relationships with slaves who were ‘owned’ rather than ‘married’ appears to many contemporary Muslims very strange and even shameful (since most Islamic communities today do not habitually own slaves any more, with some exceptions). Investigating queer people of the past makes us realize the general ‘queerness of the past’” (Kugle, 2003, pp. 199–200).
- 16.
Nadeem Mahomed and Farid Esack have pointed out that the debate about queer rights and same-sex intimacy is embedded not only in contemporary anti-Muslim hostility but also in the historical depth of colonial domination and disempowerment of Muslims, at least partly based on their inferior and deviant notions of sexuality. They argue that the struggle for sexual liberation can be and has been manipulated to advance neo-colonial and neo-liberal domination. “To choose between either sexual liberation or political/religious cultural repression is not a worthy choice. What is required is a ‘multidirectional critique’ of both homonationalism and the heteronormative structures of the West and postcolonial societies. In this way, a politics that has as its subject the marginalized, particularly the marginal queer subject, is given prominence rather than a politics of partial protest that privileges certain oppressions and dominations as more important than others” (Mahomed & Esack, 2017, p. 240).
- 17.
In a video clip from 2010, Hamza Yusuf calls male same-sex desire a “condition”(Yusuf, 2010). In another, posted on YouTube in 2011, but probably recorded in the early 2000s, he compares it to the impulse to steal (Yusuf, 2011). At an event in 2008, I saw Hamza Yusuf describe it as an affliction similar to how some people are born blind or lame (his words) and thus as a test from God.
- 18.
For example, Mobeen Vaid cites the media debate on whether scientists have found a “gay gene” and what such a discovery would mean for the debate about the origins of homosexuality (Vaid, 2017, p. 87, note 20).
- 19.
See, for example, Ovamir Anjum’s editorial for the AJISS special issue, in which he uses the term “homonormativity” to warn that “[t]he decades-long ideological shift has made homosexuality not merely an issue of personal choice, but also the newest frontier of human rights, the decisive definition of what it means to be on the right side of history. Late-modern capitalism and its favored ideology of liberal humanism have finally moved to banish the last remnants of interdiction, sanctity, and prohibition from the sovereign path of individual desire” (Anjum, 2017, p. vii).
- 20.
See Anjum (2017), who engages with such philosophers and thinkers as he considers notions of the self and of consent as the basis for a capitalist sexual ethic of individualized desire and pleasure as consumable goods.
- 21.
See, for example, the writings of Daniel Haqiqatjou on topics of sexuality and Islam, especially his “Debating Homosexuality,” in Muslim Matters, July 20, 2015, https://muslimmatters.org/2015/07/20/debating-homosexuality/. I hesitate to include his works here because of their aggressive and dismissive content and writing style, which can be even more triggering to readers with trauma history.
- 22.
One example is Suhaib Webb’s response to a question by someone who wants to become Muslim and identifies as homosexual. Webb invites the person to Islam but cautions that he has to shoulder the responsibility of struggling “against evil thoughts and desires,” in which he includes homosexual desire (Webb, 2007).
- 23.
I have argued elsewhere that a good portion of the Muslim debate about homosexuality responds to developments in US society and law (Hammer, 2021).
- 24.
See Hammer (2021) for a more fully developed argument about the affective nature of the debate about LGBTQI+ acceptance vs. a stable Islamic tradition.
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Hammer, J. (2023). Against Homosexuality: Patriarchal Islam, US Muslims, and Religious Debate. In: Ulfat, F., Ghandour, A. (eds) Sexuality, Gender And Religion In Contemporary Discourses. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41945-5_3
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