Abstract
A project such as this has no conclusion, given that it can only be a beginning to navigating the opposition of Muslim cultures and homosexuality. To paraphrase that unrepentant colonialist Winston Churchill1 — this concluding chapter is therefore neither the end, nor the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning; an attempt to think through the practical implications of the preceding arguments for the continued pursuit of sexual diversity politics without contributing to either Islamophobia or Muslim homophobia. I accept that there is much cause for pessimism in the sense that the sociological and political formations of contemporary sexualities and Muslim identities make it highly unlikely that we can find an easy ‘solution’ to the oppositional understandings of homosexuality and Muslim cultures. Nonetheless, we need some beginnings, some navigation points for a way forward that, at the very least, delivers some better experience of being queer and Muslim, and may perhaps deliver more when we consider the implications for the politics of identity and belonging for Muslim groups and for Western queer groups.
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Notes
See Richard Toye’s history (2010), Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and The World He Made, for his account of the great man’s love of empire.
See, for example, De Leeuw and Van Wichelen on the Dutch Integration Exam (2012), Muhleisen et al., (2012) on the use of sexualities within Norwegian immigration testing, and Michalowski’s analysis of the variable content of citizenship tests and promotion of social norms within Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and USA (2011).
See Puar’s discussion of Israeli pinkwashing in her account of the censorship she suffered after accusations of anti-Semitism at a conference in Germany, 2010 (2011).
This process is much broader than Muslim cultures and therefore cannot be reduced to an exclusively Islamic response, although there are numerous Muslim examples such as the organized resistance to SOGI rights at the UN. Canada’s current Foreign Affairs minister regularly condemns other nations on queer rights issues, as have the US and British Governments. Lennox and Waites cite the negative response of the Ghanian President to such demands made by the British Prime Minister in the context of the Commonwealth, demonstrating precisely that such interventions reiterate the process of triangulation of Western exceptionalism and so reify the discrete positionality of Western and non-Western nations on this issue (2013a: 37–38). See other examples of this process in the rest of the collection by Lennox and Waites (2013c), particularly those focused on the Caribbean, and various chapters in Weiss and Bosia (2013a), particularly the one by Kaoma on African examples (2013).
Even in the case of the EU, no sanctions have been used to impose queer rights, but rather a combination of hard law mandates, ‘soft law’ policies, elite socialization and transnational activist dialogue have furthered the mainstreaming of queer issues and policy change (Kollman, 2009).
Modood details the institutional processes that this would involve in much more detail than I have space for (see chapter 4, 2013), but his preference is for active civil society development, rather than a state led, top down, incorporation of religious groups. I support this view because the former is much more likely to produce more Muslim groups centered on gender and sexuality.
I am conscious that I am not detailing the huge debates around gender and multiculturalism, particularly the central issue of whether some rights, such as gender equality, override the recognition of cultural practices that undermine those rights. My position is that rights of non-discrimination are the fundamental ones, but that cultural recognition that does not contravene these are part of the framework of social justice, drawing broadly on Phillips position of multiculturalism as primarily protecting individual rights of difference (2007) but with Modood’s qualification that we are, in fact, recognizing group rights if, in practice, we are recognizing religious-ethnic claims for funding and autonomy (2013).
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© 2014 Momin Rahman
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Rahman, M. (2014). Beginnings. In: Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002969_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002969_8
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