Gay Muslims Find
Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
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Randi Lynn Beach for The New York Times
Ayman, a gay Muslim man, in June at the Gay Pride
Parade in San Francisco. Many Muslims in the parade disguised
themselves |
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR,
nytimes.com on the Web, November 7, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15
people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay
Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt,
Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant
duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses,
fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they
remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their
local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky
31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the
basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is
impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority
Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn
homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment
against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish
a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label
homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more
leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more
protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to
scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say,
partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such
research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United
States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was
expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out
he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington
failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a
gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is
no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that
examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic
interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi,
an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an
abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male
rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination,
said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes
in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a
medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he
said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because
sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical
Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan
al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he
said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing
Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the
town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the
flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time,
but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ.
“Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does
it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with
homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it
given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw
from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San
Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and
individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted
as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique
and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European
colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix
of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist.
“They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they
saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it
helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by
fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he
said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He
denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him.
He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an
apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the
family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that
anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When
I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his
faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a
religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in
Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too
depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to
live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay
underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are
both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat.
“They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into
the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man
or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have
sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I
live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I
don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
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