Sex and the Citadel (38 page)

If any of your women commit a lewd act [
fahisha
], call four witnesses from among you, then, if they testify to their guilt, keep the women at home until death comes to them or until God shows them another way. If two men commit a lewd act, punish them both; if they repent and mend their ways, leave them alone—God is always ready to accept repentance, He is full of mercy.
²²

In addition to the Qur’an, those condemning homosexuality also turn to hadiths. There are plenty of reports of the sayings and doings of the Prophet that take a dim view of same-sex relations, variously invoking God’s curse, execution in this life, and punishment in the hereafter. Among them is this uncompromising statement, attributed to the Prophet:

When the male mounts another male the angels are alarmed and raise a cry to their Lord. The wrath of the mighty One comes down upon those [men], the curse covers over them, and the tempters surround them. The earth asks its Lord for permission to swallow them up and the divine throne grows heavy upon those who bear it up, while the angels declare God’s greatness and hellfire rears up high.
²³

Plenty of grist, then, for the homophobic mill. Even less strident voices—including the well-known scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is prepared to cut Muslims a little slack on other controversial practices like fellatio and masturbation—are unyielding when it comes to the question of homosexual intercourse. “The spread of this depraved practice in a society disrupts its natural life pattern and makes those who practice it slaves to their lusts, depriving them of decent taste, decent morals, and a decent manner of living,” al-Qaradawi opined in his user’s guide to the faith.
²⁴
“The jurists of Islam have held differing opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication, or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.”
²⁵

With this burden of scriptural proof, it would appear that Islam and homosexuality are fundamentally incompatible. There are, however, those who question these seemingly irreconcilable differences. Some of the most outspoken voices come from outside the Arab world, but a few are piping up from within the region. Among them is Olfa Youssef, a professor of linguistics and psychoanalysis, and former director of Tunisia’s National Library. In 2008, Youssef published a slim volume called
Hayrat Muslima (A Muslim Woman’s Confusion)
. In it, she asked a series of hard-hitting questions: “What happened to Muslims these days? Why is Islam equivalent to closed-mindedness and rigidity? Why are we damaging this brilliant Islam, the Islam of freedom of faith and belief, love and forgiveness, and replacing it with an Islam that is alien and terrifying? Why do we present [the face of] Islam to the West as a Muslim in a secret society, thinking only of martyrdom, killing himself and
other people, which is forbidden by God, and justifying it on a difference of opinion or faith?”
²⁶

Youssef and I met at a café in Sidi Bou Said, a picture-perfect seaside village just outside Tunis, once home to Michel Foucault, the famous philosopher and thinker on sexuality—a pleasing, though unintended, bit of historical symmetry, given our subject. With her black corkscrew curls and animated manner, Youssef is like a human spring, coiled with mental energy. She pins the blame for today’s sorry state of affairs on contemporary
fuqaha’—
that is, interpreters of Islamic jurisprudence—who present their views as inviolate truth and on those who follow them blindly. As a Muslim, Youssef isn’t questioning the Qur’an; rather, she has its narrow-minded interpreters in her sights. “The Qur’an alone is the only thing perfect for every time and place, but the human reading is relative and depends on the nature of who’s doing the reading, and their historical situation and their psychological complexes,” she observed.
²⁷
Those who argue that it’s their way or the highway are, in her opinion, on dangerous ground: “Anyone who says that he owns the only correct meaning for the Qur’an is talking in the name of God almighty and putting himself in the position of one who knows everything in infinite knowledge.”
²⁸

To illustrate her point, Youssef tackles a number of topics that appear black and white to many Muslims, based on conventional interpretations of the Qur’an, but perplex her because of her own and others’ alternative readings through the ages. Among them is homosexuality. Youssef questions the reading of Qur’anic verses used to condemn sodomy, among them “And Lot said to his people: you are committing the outrage which no one from the two worlds has done before. You are getting at men, and cutting the road and committing evil at your gatherings.”
²⁹
Is this outrage sodomy (“cutting the road,” being a metaphor for blocking the path to reproduction), she asks, or actual highway robbery (literally cutting the road off to wayfarers) and other violent practices for which the people of Lot were famous? In another instance, the Qur’an presents Lot’s neighbors as they are about to sexually assault the visiting angels. And so, Youssef asks, “What was the sin of the people of Lot? Having
sex with men, or forcing men to have sex without their consent,” thereby violating one of their key codes of conduct—hospitality—and dishonoring Lot?
³⁰

According to Youssef, the patriarchal nature of Islamic society over the ages has encouraged readings of the Qur’an that condemn sodomy, which, by putting men in a position of giving pleasure to other men, reduces passive partners to the status of women, “against the rules of nature and contradicting God’s wisdom,” as such interpreters would have it.
³¹
This also explains the enduring popularity of hadiths in which the Prophet is said to condemn sodomy and its practitioners, hadiths that have been known for centuries to be of dubious authenticity.

Since the Qur’an does not specify a punishment for
liwat
, Sunni jurisprudence has relied on a variety of ways and means, among them analogy to
zina
(sex outside marriage) to derive a penalty for male sodomy. The upshot is death by stoning, or lashing, according to three of its four main schools. This
hadd
punishment, as it is known in Islam, translates into laws on the books in a handful of Arab countries—among them Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia—that directly apply shari’a. However, there is a debate among legal experts as to whether such punishments are, indeed, based on reliable evidence and sound reasoning, doubts that Youssef also raises.

Homosexuality isn’t the only hot topic she tackles—child marriage, masturbation, polygamy (for men and women), heterosexual anal intercourse,
mut’a
unions, and less sexy subjects like
mahr
and inheritance are also on Youssef’s list. But it’s her arguments on homosexuality that have provoked the most vitriolic response. “The papers said that I said homosexuality is licit, that homosexual marriage is not forbidden.… I didn’t say that, though I do think it,” Youssef explained. For her, homosexuality and sexuality in general are entry points to a deeper understanding of Islam’s holy book and a fertile ground for
ijtihad
, which she aptly describes as “a perpetual adventure in search of the real meaning of the Qur’an, which is known only to God.”
³²
Unfortunately, much of the public response to her book, particularly on Islamist websites, has focused more on the sex and less on that deeper purpose. “I understand [why],
because sex is sacred and religion is sacred.” Youssef laughed. “Together it’s a Molotov cocktail, and especially when it’s a woman [involved] as well.”

She was quick to point out that her arguments draw on more than a millennium of Qur’anic interpretation—although the earlier thinkers she cites were unlikely to have been branded sluts for their intellectual pains, as Youssef has been. “Why is the new ‘ulama’ [community of Islamic scholars] so much more closed and rigid toward sexuality than the ancient ones?” she asked rhetorically. “It is extraordinary. The old ones talked in detail about homosexuality, no problem.” Then, ever the teacher, she offered an answer. “There are [several] reasons why we went from an open to closed interpretation. The first is that Muslims were colonized by a Christian point of view. In Christianity, sex is not just taboo, it is locked up,” she opined. “Another reason is the Wahhabism. [The Wahhabis] are people who show Islam in a completely different way to its real essence. To have power, you need to subjugate people. What is the thing that is freest and most shared by human beings? It’s sexuality. So it’s the best way to block all desire to be individual, to be different. We are all the same; therefore there is control.” The final straw, in Youssef’s opinion, is the general decline in religious education. “The other reason is ignorance,” she said, her eyes alight with frustration. “People don’t read anymore—they watch television; they listen to al-Qaradawi, Amr Khaled [television preachers]; they don’t read what al-Tabari, al-Razi [two early Islamic scholars] said. They don’t even read the life of Muhammad.” Her indignation suddenly turned to a smile at the name of the Prophet. “I like that man. He never had a problem with the sexual.”

This winding down of individual religious thinking—a sort of spiritual and intellectual malaise—may seem at odds with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and religiosity over the past few decades. But, as Youssef and others argue, religious form has come to replace spiritual substance for many. “In Islamic countries, if you stop someone in the street and ask them, ‘What is haram?’ they will say fornication and alcohol, things on the surface. But everything else, we don’t talk about it: love your neighbor, honor—forget it. We
throw rubbish in the road, no problem; we say bad things about our neighbor, no problem. Religion, it’s [now about] sex. But this is the institution of religion, not religion [itself].” Questioning Islamic interpretations on homosexuality and other issues is Youssef’s way of trying to kick-start that thinking, even if the process begins with an angry riposte. “I would like to make people think there are other ways of reflecting. It’s too boastful to say a book will change things directly. But already, it has touched people, it has set off something. And that’s a good thing, because it’s time to speak. We cannot change on the sexual level without speaking. Talk doesn’t change things directly, but it’s with talk that things will change.”

But it’s going to take a lot of talk to get even the most open-minded religious leaders in the region on board. “No, no, no, [with] God Almighty [as my witness].” Shaykh Ahmad, imam of one of the largest mosques in Damascus, shook his head and laughed when I discussed these alternative interpretations with him. “The Lot people, why did they want to rape the angels? Because the angels came like boys, and they wanted to make sex with the boys. This is settled. To my mind, there is no debate.”

If anyone might consider taking a second look, it’s Shaykh Ahmad. He’s been a leading light in a network of religious leaders and faith-based organizations established by the United Nations Development Program. The initiative was started by Khadija Moalla, a human rights lawyer from Tunisia, who spent almost a decade trying to improve the status of people living with HIV in the Arab region—against terrific odds. Too often, religion was used as an excuse for inaction, especially by politicians, because the groups at highest risk of infection—men who have sex with men, female sex workers, injecting drug users—were also the ones roundly condemned by prevailing religious discourse. So in 2004, Moalla set out to engage Muslim and Christian religious leaders, male and female, to break through the fear, ignorance, and stigma that characterized their attitude toward HIV and those living with the infection.

Under these auspices, religious leaders have had a chance to sit down with men who have sex with men at workshops across the Arab region, including a series of annual meetings in Cairo. If it
were not for HIV, Shaykh Ahmad and his peers could not have come to the table in the first place, but the focus on public health and protection gives them a socially respectable cover. For Shaykh Ahmed and some of his more open-minded peers it has been a real eye-opener. “The word ‘homosexual’ is connected in our minds with lots of dirty things. Like molesting children and raping girls. That they are dirty people, they are hypersexed, they are living a wrong life,” he freely admits. Years of working together, however, have changed his outlook. “They are like the religious leaders: some of them are nice and not nice. There is a singer with a good voice and a singer with a bad voice. In them, there are all sorts of people.”

Shaykh Ahmad is a deeply religious man, and his conviction compels him to do whatever he can to reach all corners of his community. “The function of the religious leader is not to say this guy is going to hell or going to heaven. No. That’s not my mission. My mission is to try and say to these people, ‘Come, come, my friends, let’s try to solve your problems.’ ” I asked him if that “solution” and those “problems” included trying to turn homosexual men straight, given the current fashion, among some religious leaders, of talking about treatment where they once spoke of punishment. Not at all, he said, with feeling. “If he wants to repent, God willing, I am going to help. If he does not want to repent, at least he shouldn’t harm other people.” By that, Shaykh Ahmad means unsafe sex and the spread of HIV; although he himself does not openly endorse condoms, he discreetly recommends those in need to seek medical advice, knowing full well that condoms will be part of the package.