Approaching Islam queerly

A body. My body. Our body. Beaten. In pain. Abandoned. Scars run deeper than the wounds inflicted. Do you see me? Do you see us? Through eyes of revulsion, complicity  …  compassion, maybe? Do you hear our bones fracture against your fist? Our testimony of being, being erased. Our stories, untold. Our words, rejected. Our enfleshed body, massacred. No, this is not an act of self-erasure, not this time. The ephemeral relation is a rejection of our becoming, together.

-The beloved grieves.

Embodying deviance, deficiency, lack. This is our struggle, my struggle, A struggle. Enacting radical difference, or not acting at all. Annihilate our breath, the breath that gives birth to breathing life – but only certain forms of life. ‘Enjoining what is good and forbidding evil’ – who are you to reap the legislative arm, with the fist that dispense of malevolence. Justice, you utter. Justice? Who are you to suffocate the rūḥ (spirit) endowed by the Creator? Do you taste the names of God on my swollen lips?

-For I am a believer.

Our voices are many. Our diverse racial inscriptions surprise some. Our religiosity is often unwanted. Conform. Unite. Our struggle is one! Why refuse a seat at the table of solidarity, bite off the hand that offers protection? Terrorist! Fundamentalist! Jihadist! We have many names. Infidel! Kafir! Unbeliever! Under whose wing do we seek refuge? Coon! Sand nigger! Camel jockey! Holding together all of the delicate parts that constitute our being. Unwilling to compromise or let go of the fragments, however fragile or precarious, that enable a life worth living.

-The incredible queerness of being.

Inspired by the stories in Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives (ed. Pepe Hendricks), the Pulse massacre, and the multiple documented accounts of hate crimes committed against queer Muslims.

During the last two decades the topic of Islam and homosexuality has received increased attention particularly from scholars and activists involved in challenging and disrupting dominant heteronormative religious paradigms. The commitment to render visible LGBTIQ Muslims’ perspectives and realities has resulted in numerous important publications, ranging from critical exegetical explorations of religious texts¹ to empirical accounts,² historical mappings,³ autobiographies,⁴ and documentaries.⁵ This special issue of Theology & Sexuality aims to contribute to this dynamic field. We understand the complexities of the above approaches as being in conversation with each other, and this special issue creates the conditions of possibility for a much needed intervention to destabilize the oft-cited identity driven discourses that frames approaches to Islam and approaches to queerness. Noting the critique that queer theology remains entrenched in an identitarian discourse, the hope for this issue is to expose the limits of these identity driven theories and re-imagine Islam by approaching it queerly.

The title of this special issue, “Approaching Islam Queerly”, is meant to draw attention to the ontological and epistemological categories of positionality, subjectivity, and relationality – delicately and complexly manifested in the act of approaching. The subject who is approaching is always approaching from somewhere (positionality/location/situatedness), embodying and enacting various fluid and amorphous subject positions (subjectivity as intersectionally understood and as materially enfleshed), which are expressed, performed, and given meaning in relation to an other/subject (relationality). The approaching subject is always “on-the-move”, immersed in a process, and intends to move closer to someone or something. As such, the act of approaching is not only a journey but also a cartography of relationality, at times saturated with hesitation, fear or despair, at other times, with hope, excitement or delight. The act of approaching carries with it a promise of something yet-to-be, a mode of becoming that is entangled and interdependent on the awaiting destination. And, yet, we are aware that stable destinations are complicated when it comes to queerness, so we do not posit a stable destination in firm teleological terms; we imagine a directedness in imagining a destination, but without it resting in a teleology of fulfillment.

The destination, or purpose of approaching, in this special issue is Islam. Scholars and religious actors have dedicated considerable time to learn about, understand, analyze, critique, and teach about Islam – from its very inception until today. Islam, as a religious framework that is dynamic and continuously changing, is constituted and constitutes different ways through which believers perceive and live in the world. For many, particular understandings of Islam inspire a deep commitment of working toward social justice; for others, Islam is understood in ways that help legitimizing discriminatory and marginalizing social norms and practices. Islam does not speak, but is given voice (and authority) through believers’ (and nonbelievers’) engagements in religious meaning-making. The plural “voices of Islam” is reflective of past, present and future imaginings of a religious tradition that solicits particular understandings of being and belonging in the world. In this special issue the two guest editors bring together scholars whose work engages some of the diverse ways in which Islam is approached in contemporary and historical discourses. Their work takes seriously the act of approaching, meeting and relationalities/interactions/intra-actions that enfleshed subjects experience in their wrestling with personhood, religious meaning, social practices, and theological imagination.

The queering project of this special issue of Theology and Sexuality is to rupture and destabilize dominant perceptions pertaining to religious normativity and queer identitarian politics by foregrounding different and diverging positionalities, subjectivities, and relationalities. As envisioned by the guest editors, the notion of approaching Islam queerly is a commitment to illuminate the multivalent margins, particularly as it pertains to LGBTIQ Muslims’ perspectives, experiences and narratives. Approaching Islam queerly contributes to the unsettling of normative and/or authoritative Islamic discourses, frameworks, and praxis – modalities that commonly construct and regulate sexual identities and gendered performances. Approaching Islam queerly also intends to probe, and perhaps complicate, queer theories and methodologies for the study of Islam and Muslim socialities. What can queer theories and methodologies learn from queer Muslim lifeworlds? What can queer theories and methodologies learn from the various ways in which Muslim queering projects, for example, exegetical, historical, empirical, often render visible the discursive functioning of religious personhood in the context of Islamophobia, racism and neo-colonialism? Increased attention to religiosity, race and neo-colonialism, for example, add important and critical layers to queer approaching, or approaching something (in this case Islam) queerly.

Positioning, accountability and partiality

The idea for this special issue came through sustained, thought-provoking and committed conversations between the two guest editors. Situated in different geographical areas (South Africa/Norway and USA/Mexico), where our lives unfold and connect (and, at times, disconnect) through a variety of messy temporalities (clock time being one of them), we embarked on this journey of “approaching Islam queerly” together. Our motivation for approaching this topic is connected to our multifaceted positionings. Seeing, perceiving and living in the world from geographies of wealth, health, consumption and privilege, whilst also being immersed in topographies where poverty, disease and hardship persevere, the guest editors are deeply committed to the precarity of margins, marginality and to those who are most impacted by multi-system oppressions. We also approach Islam queerly as scholars of religious studies and theology whose areas of research are grounded within the critical fields of race, gender and sexuality studies. Taking seriously the much-needed turn to lived religion, we navigate these fields through the lenses of the materiality of the body, embodiment, and the cultivation of personhood and community.

Our accountability is articulated by means of a reflexive engagement pertaining to current debates that tie together and pull apart Islam and queerness, without reducing the complexity of either. Dominant narratives perpetuate fairly homogenized and essentialistic representations of Islam – feeding off the contemporary Islamophobic political and social currents. At the same time, other dominant narratives project quite ethnocentric imaginings of queer selves – excluding and keeping other margins marginal and marginalized. Queerphobia, another dominant narrative, complicates both religion and queerness as it often is situated at the intersection of reclaiming and “rescuing” religious personhood and “traditional” culture/values from colonial and neoliberal projects and politics. As such, queerphobia both strengthens the reductive narrative of Islam “under Western eyes” and the whiteness of homonationalism.⁶ Our accountability is tied to a critical awareness of the functioning of these entangled currents and our responsibility, thus, rests in a commitment of not feeding them. Rather, through the issues we raise in this introductory framing piece and through many of the contributions that follows in this special issue, we wish to (re-)direct attention to the materialities these narratives evoke. Starting from the materiality of bodies, critique is fleshed out in ways that pay attention to the inter-workings and intra-workings of text and reader, between subjects and their socialities, and between encounters of past, present and future imaginings of queer Muslim selves. Our accountability is to these locations or sites of struggle and critical engagement.

Given that this is a special issue, with a limited number of contributions and approaches therein, we are in no way claiming that we present or represent the way to approach Islam queerly. Rather, this special issue is reflective of the partial and “situated knowledges” of its producers, guided by the guest editors’ “ultimate concerns” and positionings (theoretical and otherwise). Partiality, as we perceive it, is not a limitation but following Donna Haraway (1988) resists generalizations and cemented portrayals by taking seriously questions of difference, the possibilities of multiple subjectivities, and the plurality of views (expressed in this special issue). Continuous attention to positioning, accountability and partiality constitutes three methodological keys that underpin the ways in which the two guest editors approach Islam queerly in this special issue.

Intersectionalities and contemporary discourses

Approaching Islam queerly is an intersectional endeavor. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critical concept intersectionality⁷ takes into account the multiple ways in which bodies are marked by a range of different and intersectional qualities that are regulated by multiple systems of oppression. While the mechanism of intersectionality may lend itself to an overdependence on identity, we see intersectionality as a helpful framework to bridge together the multiple and unstable points of embodiment that are most impacted by multi-system oppressions.

The “body” of Islam can be perceived as a deeply complicated body, where borders and delineations are blurred and complex. What is Islam, and what is not? Who decides? Historical intellectual luminaries and contemporary scholars of Islam present multiple answers to these questions and further conundrums to be contemplated. The body of Islam consist of multiple dimensions, ranging from textual sources in the form of words to buildings/space and historical cartographies, to aesthetics, rituals and metaphysics, and much much more. But, central to the continuing heartbeat of the body of Islam is the believers, the materially enfleshed subjects who engage in surrender and ritual performance. It is the Muslim intersectional body that is the focus of this section.

In keeping with the tenets of intersectionality, it is important to stress from the beginning that the Muslim body is not only religious – and that in fact, sometimes, the Muslim body is not religious at all, but is characterized as such, by others, due to particular external markers (such as race) or features such as name or spoken language. The religiosity of the Muslim body is as such not necessarily inherent. For those who practice Islam or perceive themselves as religious persons, religiosity is also compounded by ethnicity, raciality, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, and so on (this is obviously also true for those who do not consider themselves religious). These labels are not only identitarian markers but deeply embodied subjectivities and modalities that interact, intersect and constitute the experiences of the body. Given that the matter of these labels are embodied in different locations and geographies, the performative scripts they follow depends on the dominant and subversive discourses that produce and enables them. At times, certain subjectivities become dominant and find meaningful expression due to contextual demands or need for self-expression. Arguably, racial matter, and the embodied experience of race, can dominate gender, ability and sexuality in places where particular racialized constellations of power exist, such as that of apartheid South Africa, for example. At other times, the mattering of queer sexualities, and the embodied experience of a sexuality that is unfamiliar or unwanted, can dominate ethnicity, race and ability, as in the process of (or right to) sex reassignment surgery. The domination of certain subjectivities over others does not mean that certain matters stop mattering. Rather, enfleshed subjects are constituted by the intersectionalities of these matters, that intersectionally matters in different ways depending on location and situatedness.

Intersectional mattering is, as mentioned above, made meaningful in contextual interactions. Foregrounding some of the contemporary discourses in which Muslim bodies are embedded, it is perhaps fair to say that the current era is indeed a hostile one. Many of the contributions in this volume speak to the rise of Islamophobia as one of many harmful contemporary discourses. The discourse is buttressed by what has come to be known as the “Muslim migration crisis”; the heightened fear of terror as a result of horrific incidents like the attack on Charlie Hebdo (7 January 2015), Paris (13 November 2015), Brussels (22 March 2016), and Berlin (19 December 2016); and the “New Year’s Eve” sexual assaults (2015/2016), reported in Germany, Switzerland and Finland, which add to the fear of the “(male) Muslim migrant” being a misogynistic degenerate who despises anything “Western”. The flourishing of negative stereotypes about Muslims – commonly originating from the centers of empire – perpetuate an increased fear of the other, and lead to the stigmatization and vilification of Islam as a whole.

Another discourse is that of Muslim homophobia. Reports of executions, lashings, or imprisonment of Muslims due to non-heterosexual proclivities, circulate in Western media. However, these human rights violations commonly happens “over there”, which is not to say that people do not care. With the terrorist attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, USA, Muslim homophobia took on new meaning. Seen as an act of terror, deliberately targeting people for their sexual orientation, the Pulse execution spurred anxiety and fear among queer communities. While some spoke out loudly for solidarity – refusing Muslim homophobia to become yet another log on the increasingly rising Islamophobic fire – others (the Donald Trumps of the world) used the terrorist attack to address the problems of lenient immigration policies. Later reports revealed that Omar Mateen was likely struggling with his own sexuality (see Mahomed in this issue). This indicates that prejudices, and the human capacity for violence, also exist and “flourish” in the midst of experienced vulnerability. The disavowal or repudiation with which some Muslim religious leaders address the issue of LGBT rights (or) the silencing of queerness within Muslim faith communities, as well as the ethnocentric identitarian politics that surrounds the LGBT-movement, all contribute to the continuing perpetuation of the binary Muslim/queer.

This takes us to the third and final discourse we wish to highlight in this introduction, namely that of homonationalism. According to Puar (2007), heteronormative ideals are now accompanied by particular homonormativities that have become part of imperial/Western neoliberal projects. Promulgated through human rights discourses and neoliberal NGOs, for example, homonationalism – not unlike the early feminist plight to “save brown women from brown men” – is attempting to liberate Muslim queer folks (and other queers of color) from the repressive strongholds of (primitive) cultures and religions. This colonial move subsumes multivalent queer socialities, practices, norms and languages (including terminology) that are culturally specific and carries localized expressions of queer selves, and replaces them with a dominant discourse that sustains a normative understandings of queerness. Deriving identitarian and performative aspects of queerness from Western experiences results in limited and un-nuanced renditions of queer selves (see Rahman and Valliani in this issue). Challenging the explicit and implicit workings of homonationalism becomes important for queer folks who, for example, perceive God as a source of empowerment and who enact in a confession to religious and social practice that encourages an internal queer orientation toward God that also contemplates what it means to be a “good Muslim” person.

Muslim bodies – with all their intersectional matters mattering – are embedded and embodied in these discursive intersections of Islamophobia, homophobia and queer politics. These discourses, among others, inform the various ways in which Muslim bodies move through and experience particular locations. The complexities of being and belonging, questions of embodiment and location, are critical to keep in mind when attempting to approach Islam queerly.

Approaching Islam queerly in this issue

The contributions included in this special issue are reflective of multiple genres. Our contributors employ exegetical, hermeneutical, methodological, historical, empirical and poetic approaches to disrupt dominant and authoritative understandings of normative sexual regimes in Islam. They

suggest critical avenues for the continued exploration of queer sexuality that welcomes transdisciplinarity. That is, the contributions included in this special issue complicate theoretical frameworks as separate containers of critical meaning-making. Rather, frameworks such as queer theory, postcolonial theory, hermeneutics and the turn to “lived religion”, could be seen as interactive and interdependent modes of engagement that bridge together disparate voices to help mobilize an approach to Islam that is queer.

We begin this special issue with Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle’s article, which starts out by asking the question: “Is lesbian sex banned in the Qur’an?” Kugle takes us on a fascinating journey, guiding us through the existing contradictions and complexities that emerge when probing this question in greater depth. He introduces us to a range of Islamic thinkers, both female and male, contemporary and medieval, Shìi and Sunni, whose interpretations of Qur’an 4:15–16 show that this seemingly simple question has no simple answer. Kugle’s contribution shows the multivocality and plasticity of the Islamic tradition concerning questions of sexual diversity. Kugle’s critical intellectual work continues to produce rich imaginaries of sexuality that may provide empowering forms for human flourishing.

Angus M. Slater follows with a close reading of Khaled Abou El Fadl’s methodological approach to Shari’ah. By focusing on Abou El Fadl’s notions of “de-legitimation”, “re-presentation”, and “judgement according to the ethical standard of beauty”, he argues that not only does the methodology itself function as a queering device, but it enables a recovery of queerness as an aspect of tradition. Slater’s article is a critique against contemporary representations and usages of Shari’ah, which, he claims, are dependent on authoritarian and conservative renditions of Islam. The article offers insight into the usefulness of methodological tools to weaken religious authority in communities where Islamic law holds notable sway, and imagines possibilities that allow for the expression of Muslim queer lives in such spaces.

Critically and intriguingly engaging the theme of Muslim alterity, E. J. Hernández Peña’s article examines Muslim-Christian relations during the Umayyad period, the Mudejar period, and in the wake of the advent of the anti-Morisco texts and legislation. Hernández Peña illustrates that these three historical examples bear witness to the marginal social location of Muslims and the constant vilification of Islam by Christian intellectuals – specifically due to Christian perceptions of Muslims as prone to libidinous and sodomitic behavior. He argues that Muslims were commonly marked (and targeted) by difference and radical otherness – alterity, and that the climate of the time can be perceived as an early expression of Islamophobia. Hernández Peña’s article creates a portal through which to trace Muslim othering. Moving into the present, he contends that Muslim alterity may serve as an important corrective to challenge the heterosexual and ethnocentric normativity of the center.

Nadeem Mahomed’s article examines the responses by contemporary Muslim scholars to the Orlando shooting and the United States Supreme Court Judgement on same-sex marriage. He argues that responses are commonly reflective of the privileging of heteronormativity and does little to address the challenges that surface at the nexus of Islam and sexual diversity. Mahomed uses Talal Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition and Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of an epistemological crisis to urge Muslim scholars to engage more actively with the issue of same-sex sexuality; it is not enough to reject the violence that queer Muslims experience – rather, Muslim scholars needs to become more responsive to the actual lives and well-being of queer Muslims.

Highlighting the need for empirical exploration, Momin Rahman and Ayesha Valliani present an empirical account of LGBT Muslims in Canada. The article provides us with rich data that challenge the binarization of Muslim/queer – a binary that contributes to the invisibility of Muslim queers. Through an intersectional lens Rahman and Valliani show how Muslims as “queer intersectional subjects” navigate family relationships, complicate the notion of being Muslim and queer and the need for (or expectation of) “coming-out”, and the wrestling with Islamic texts. Rahman and Valliani find that participants draw on a range of resources, both Western and Eastern so as to meaningfully negotiate their sexuality. This demonstrate, they argue, the need for more nuanced and located scholarship so as to more fully understand the workings of Muslim queer selves.

Following the empirical trail, Asifa Siraj’s article presents findings from an in-depth interview with a Muslim queer academic. The paper examines the various ways in which a profound engagement with queering the Qur’an engendered empowering notions of self, whilst also enabled the participant to address issues of queerness and Islam among queer Muslims in a more activist capacity. The paper importantly situates the Qur’an as a source of support for queer Muslims, undermining its opposite use. Siraj delicately shows how the experience of a queer Muslim queering the Qur’an resolves the perceived binary between Islam and queer sexuality, while also reimagining a more inclusive vision of Islam.

Pepe Hendricks’ reflective essay introduces us to a sexual diversity workshop held in Cape Town, South Africa. Hendricks outlines the aims and objectives of the workshop, while also explaining the ijtihadic paradigm that underpins it. He takes us through some of the processes and findings of the workshop by including comments and reflections of participants. The essay is a valuable contribution to this special issue, not only because it presents us with a unique way of engaging the topic of queer Muslim love, but also because it invites us to think through the important role of “on-the-ground”-work and the various ways in which our research in this field may be envisioned to make a contribution.

We are also privileged to include two of Pepe Hendricks’ poems, which follow his essay. The poems, “Snippets of Confusion” and “A Queer Lament” allow us to reflect and meditate on the struggles, tensions, and complexities of queer Muslim lives. The poems challenge us to reimagine an ethics of compassion that is able to hold expanded conceptions of gender and sexuality in Islam.

Lastly, this special issue is rounded off by seven book reviews. Thematically, the reviewed books have in common a keen focus on Islam, gender, sexuality, and queerness.

Notes on contributors

Nina Hoel is Associate Professor in Religion and Society at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway. Her work uses feminist theory and methodology in the study of lived religion. In particular, Hoel has researched the field of Islam, gender and sexuality, using anthropological approaches as her main method. Having studied and worked for more than a decade in South Africa, she has published extensively in a variety of journals on the topic of Islam, gender and sexuality in South Africa.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethics at the Pacific School of Religion, USA. Their work exists in the in-between spaces of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, working to establish a speculatively queer material realism to influence new contours of a materialist liberation theology and ethics. Henderson-Espinoza uses the thought and theory of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer theories, the New Materialism movement, along with queer epistemologies to consider a queer materialist philosophy.

Notes

1 See, for example, Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam.

2 See, for example, Karim, “Living Sexualities”; Kugle, Living Out Islam; Siraj, “Isolated, Invisible, and in the Closet.”

3 See, for example, Babayan and Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities.

4 See, for example, Hendricks, Hijab.

5 See, for example, A Jihad for Love; Al-Nisa; Be Like Others.

6 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

7 See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; “Mapping the Margins”; and “Postscript.”