Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (46 page)

A new and evolving
Shari‘ah
is a politically and religiously necessary project. It would offer Muslim-majority national states in post-colonial situations a way of resolving many of the contradictions created by European colonialism’s imposition of modernity through violence and domination, without having to destroy the nation state or reject some of the more valuable innovations of modernism. It would offer immigrant or indigenous Muslim communities in North America and Europe a way to reconcile their religious faith and community aspirations with the reality of living as minorities in states that enshrine secular legal traditions and cultural values. The new South Africa will be an important test case, since it has recently emerged from the apartheid regime with a politically active Muslim community. South Africa now has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world (which explicitly protects the civil liberties and human rights of women, lesbians, and gays).
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It will be instructive to observe how Muslims there, many of whom sacrificed their lives in opposing apartheid, will come to accept and embrace the new constitution and the values it enshrines.

An-Na‘im has pointed out that the central questions to be addressed in this reformation of the
Shari‘ah
are those of international law, human rights, and civil liberties. Under this last rubric come concerns about women and their rights. However, as argued in this study, asserting women’s rights will never be limited to the realm of women. It will necessarily change the way men behave and the way both women and men perceive sexuality. As feminism opens up sexuality as a topic for discussion, homosexuality will inevitably come up as a challenge to all Muslims with a keen sense of justice.

endnotes

1. The author would like to acknowledge two friends and colleagues who helped in the revision of this text, Daayiee Abdullah and Nicholas Heer.
   

2. Hamid Nastoh was a fourteen-year-old in Vancouver from an Afghan family who was driven to suicide on March 11, 2000. Schoolmates persistently bullied him with accusations of being gay and he found no consolation or protection in his religious tradition as it had been presented to him. Since Hamid’s death, his mother has become a local advocate for sexuality education and “gay–straight alliance clubs” in Canadian high schools.
   

3. Madelain Farah,
   Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of al-Ghazali’s Book on the Etiquette of Marriage from The Revival of the Religious Sciences
   (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984), 45. Creation “from water” (as found in Q. 21:30) is often interpreted as sexual union and the meeting of ejaculatory fluids, while the term “sexual intercourse” is understood metaphorically from the Qur’an’s use of “tillage” (
   hirth
   ) in Qur’an 2:223.
   

4. Momin Rahman,
   Sexuality and Democracy: Identities and Strategies in Lesbian and Gay Politics
   (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 172.
   

5. Ibid., 21.

1. Some ascetic-minded Sufis were the exception, and saw sexual desire as a distraction from worshipful contemplation of God.
   

2. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba,
   Sexuality in Islam
   (London: Saqi, 1998), 159. This is the best study in English illustrating the continuity between Muslim sexual practices in this world and how Muslims imagine the sacred world of paradise to come. In Arabic, there are many full studies of this theme, like Ibrahim Mahmud,
   Jaghrafiyat al-Muladhat: al-Jins wa’l-Janna
   [
   Geography of Rapture: Sex and Paradise
   ] (Beirut: Riyad el-Rais, 1998).
   

3. This frequently cited hadith is referred to by a number of authorities, such as al-Ghazali who records it in his
   Ihya ‘ulum al-Din
   (Beirut: Dar al-Hadi, 1992), vol. 2, p. 48. See Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick,
   Vision of Islam
   (St Paul: Paragon Press, 1994) 228, 350. For discussion of this
   hadith
   , see R.W.J. Austin (trans.),
   Ibn al-Arabi: the Bezels of Wisdom
   , (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 269–78, and Sachiko Murata,
   The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought
   (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 186–7.
   

4. ‘Ali ibn Husam al-Din al-Hindi Muttaqi,
   Jarr al-Thaqil fi Suluk al-Ma‘il
   , [Bearing the Heavy Burden on Soul Training of Men Considering Marriage], manuscript in Lahore: Punjab University Library 4950/1937 folios 22–9, and Islamabad: Ganj Bakhsh Library (Iranian Cultural Institute) 3745.
   

5. Surat al-Ahzab 33:50–2 directly addresses the question of sexual relationships outside of marriage with slaves and concubines, explicitly allowing this for the Prophet (and implicitly allowing it for other believers) while contrasting such women to those formally married.
   

6. Basim Musallam,
   Sex and Society in Islam: Birth-Control before the Nineteenth Century
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), supplemented by Munawar Ahmad Anees
   , Islam and Biological Futures: Ethics, Gender and Technology
   (London: Mansell, 1989).
   

7. Scholars argue whether this verse refers to anal sex between men and women, or to vaginal sex from behind, or to whether the control of timing and frequency of sexual relations should be in the hands of men or women. Fatima Mernissi,
   The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam
   (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991) discusses the importance of this verse and its context of revelation for a feminist critique of Islamic patriarchy.
   

8. Athar Hussain and Mark Cousins,
   Michel Foucault: Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences
   (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984) is a good introduction to Michel Foucault, one of the most infl ntial historians of sexuality. Foucault argued that the term “homosexuality” (as well as “sexuality”) is completely modern, and cannot be justifiably applied to ideas, practices or people before European modernity and its uneven spread to the wider world. Many historians of sexuality have questioned this assertion and are suspicious of accepting Foucault’s glib Eurocentric conclusions about the uniqueness of modernity.
   

9. John Boswell, “Concepts, Experience and Sexuality,” in
   Forms of Desire
   , ed. E. Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992) provides an overview of the concept of sexuality, from a scholar who has wrestled, as a historian and committed Christian, with the traditional Christian denunciation of homosexuality.
   

10. The Qur’an is very clear here that no ethnic group is racially or cultural inferior to another, but Islamic culture has often slipped into justifying slavery in terms that approach racial chauvinism.
    

11. Amina Wadud,
    Qur’an and Woman
    (Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti, 1992; 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
    

12. ‘Ali Muttaqi,
    Jarr al-Thaqil,
    which was a Persian commentary on al-Ghazali’s book quoted at the beginning of this study.
    

13. In other passages the Qur’an uses
    alwan
    to describe different types of honey, different types of beasts, and different types of agricultural produce.
    

14. “Lawn,”
    Encyclopedia of Islam
    ,
    New Edition
    (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954–2002), vol. 5, 699.
    

15. The Qur’an comes closer to discussing gender than it does to discussing sexuality. The Qur’an uses the term
    zawj
    to mean “one of a pair of people or things.” Sometimes,
    zawj
    is used in an abstract sense and sometimes concretely as applied to human beings or objects. At least once, the Qur’an uses the term to indicate a binary relationship of male to female: “We have made them pairs, male and female” (42:49). But the term is not used constantly in this way; at times
    zawj
    refers not to clearly gendered pairs, and often to non-living entities. At one point the pair is not male and female persons, but the soul and body of each person regardless of anatomical or social gender
    :
    “We made the souls joined to their pair” (Q. 81:7).
    

16. The phrase is
    al-Tabi‘in ghayr ulu al-Irbat min al-Rijal
    . The phrase might also be translated as “those men among your followers who have no guile with women.”
    

17. Muslim theologians have not yet considered the fascinating case of the Prophet
    Dhu al-Qarnayn
    as described in Surat al-Kahf. Qur’an commentators have traditionally identified him as the historical figure of Alexander the Great, and Yusuf Ali has recently argued very persuasively for the authenticity of this identification. Historical record clearly reveals that Alexander’s major erotic attachments were to a series of men (though he did marry as his political role required). Could it be that
    Dhu al-Qarnayn
    as Alexander may have been a gay man who acted as a Divinely appointed Prophet? Islamic theologians have not even begun to grapple with this question.
    

18. Everrett Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina” in
    Que(e)rying Religion: a Critical Anthology
    , ed. G. Comstock and Henking (New York: Continuum, 1997). Rowson has clearly shown that some of these “effeminate” men acted in ways that we would identify as “gay” but that many of them did not; what characterized them was their breaking norms of gendered behavior rather than their sexual orientation.
    

19. Najman Yasin,
    Al-Islam wa’l-Jins fi al-Qarn al-Awwal al-Hijri
    [
    Islam and Sex in the First Century Hijri
    ] (Beirut: Dar al-Atiya li’l-Nashr, 1997), 111 uses a phrase (in Arabic) that can be translated as “unusual sexual practices that are unnatural.” Islamic jurists never used “nature” to denounce same-sex sexual practices; these practices may have been forbidden, but were not “unnatural.” This is a subtle but crucial distinction that reveals how much modern Muslim intellectuals (even those who write in Arabic) have been shaped by Euro- American discourses of modernity.
    

20. No list will be offered here, since it would be very long. Let us highlight one personality, on whom more research must be done. That is the medieval writer Ibn Dawud al-Zahiri, who was the leading jurist of the Zahiri legal school. He was also well known for having fallen into a deeply romantic love with a school friend, Ibn Jami‘, to whom he dedicated his book in praise of love,
    Kitab al-Zahra
    . Ibn Dawud al-Zahiri held that a man’s love for another man is noble as long as it is “chaste” [
    ‘udhri
    ] and made no effort to conceal his erotic orientation. See Massignon,
    The Passion of Hallaj
    , 1:80 and 338–68.
    

21. Norman Daniel,
    Islam and the West: The Making of an Image
    (Edinburgh: University Press, 1960) and Nabil Matar,
    Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery
    (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) document the scope and persistence of this pre-modern European condemnation of Muslims as “sodomites.” Though driven by the European need to make Muslims alien, inferior, and worthy of conquest, this theme was based on a substantial contrast between medieval Christendom (which seemed obsessed with punishing “sodomites”) and a medieval Islamdom (which seemed far more relaxed and accepting of same-sex eroticism, despite the jurists’ condemnations depicted in this study).
    

22. Byrne Fone,
    Homo-Phobia: A History
    (New York: Metropolitan, 2000), 294. There are many examples of Western scholars who ignore or repress the presence of homoerotic
    

    practices among Muslims in their specific subjects of study. Let one example suffice. Madelain Farah’s comments in the introduction to
    Marriage and Sexuality in Islam,
    37 can only be called “bad faith.” She errs in stating that “The Koran addressed the subject of sodomy. It is a reference in over seventy Koranic verses.” She demonstrates a lack of understanding Arabic when she writes that
    liwata
    in Arabic means “homosexuality” while
    Lut
    means sodomy (in fact
    liwata
    means sodomy or anal intercourse while “
    Lut
    ” is the name of a Prophet). Farah blithely ignores the fact that Imam al-Ghazali’s own brother, Shaykh Ahmad al-Ghazali, who was a respected religious scholar and Islamic leader, was well known for homoerotic sentiments in his poetry and devotional practices, like
    shahid- bazi
    or “gazing at beautiful men” in order to contemplate the beauty of God. Examples of Western scholars working out their own prejudices by supposedly “representing” the Islamic tradition are legion.
    

23. Asadullah Khan Ghalib,
    Divan-i Ghalib, Urdu
    (New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1998), 104. Translation is by the author. Ghalib repeats al-Ghazali’s insight with sarcasm because Ghalib was no theologian or ascetic; rather he was a highly intellectual and aesthetically refined poet in Urdu and Persian, who is known for writing verses of love and longing for beloved men.
    

24. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe.
    Islamic Homosexualities: Culture History and Literature
    (New York: New York University Press, 1997) asserts a universal gay identity that underlies any variation in history and culture. This contrasts with the careful avoidance of asserting any gay identity in Everett Rowson and J.W. Wright (eds),
    Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature
    (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
    

25. Farid Esack,
    Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression
    (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997), 75.
    

26. This study is very limited in its focus on homosexual men and anal sex. This is not ideal and will certainly not satisfy lesbian or women readers (nor should it satisfy them). However, there is a purpose to this limitation. What follows in this study is in dialogue with the Islamic legal tradition, which addresses homosexuality through condemning anal sex between men. The condemnation was the platform for a more general cultural rhetoric against homosexuality in general, including same-sex relations between women. Though anal sex (and penetrative sex in general) is not necessarily relevant to lesbian sexuality, it was the dominant theme used by jurists to condemn both men and women. Therefore, it is the starting point of this article, though future investigation of this topic should not and cannot focus solely on men. This article is also driven by a critique of capital punishment that is inflicted on homosexual men in certain countries, and this punishment seems to be directed primarily (in the knowledge of this writer, only) against men. Lesbians, by virtue of being women first, tend not to suffer publicly under these laws, though they suffer differently under other laws and under pressure to marry and procreate.
    

27. The term
    hassas
    is used this way, in a clever
    double entendre
    , in Morocco. Though it is a North African term for “homosexual” (which may not be used in eastern Arabic-speaking regions or in the wider Islamic world) it is conceptually understandable anywhere.
    

28. Al-Tabari,
    Tafsir al-Tabari min Jami‘ al-Bayan ‘an Ta’wil Ayi al-Qur’an
    , ed
    .
    Bashar ‘Awwad (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risala, 1994), 3:463.