The following article appeared in the May issue of Gay
Times - a monthly gay magazine published in the United
Kingdom. A picture of 2 gay Muslim men appears with the
article which can be viewed at
http://www.gaytimes.co.uk/public_html/news-magazines/gt260/features_may.html

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Copyright: Gay Times, UK

Sodom & the Koran - By Raza Griffiths

Can you be gay and a Muslim?

Yusuf Islam, the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens,
thinks not, and he has thrown his weight behind Baroness
Young's campaign to retain Section 28.

But he cannot speak for all Muslims any more than the noble
lady can speak for every Christian.

Increasingly, lesbian and gay Muslims are coming out about
their pride in both their sexuality and their religion.

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RAZA GRIFFITHS reports

Religious homophobia has made many gay people frankly
dismissive of all orthodox religions. Yet even within this
general scepticism, Islam is seen by some as being
particularly homophobic, and conjures up images of veiled
women and fanatical bearded imams stoning homosexuals to
death in public squares. While this picture in part springs
from widespread Islamophobia, and does scant justice to the
day-to-day reality of how homosexuality is accommodated in
practice within the billion-strong Islamic world, it is not
entirely without foundation.

Homosexual acts are a capital crime in several Muslim
countries. In many others, including Pakistan, they carry
mandatory prison sentences. In Iran, Islamic hardliners who
came to power in 1979 imposed the death penalty for
homosexual acts, in accordance with Islamic law, or
shariah. Many of those condemned have been stoned to death,
in accordance with some interpretations of the shariah.
Precise information on the number of such executions is
difficult to establish, says Nassim, a member of Homan, a
gay group for Iranians living in the West. This is because
the Iranian press suppressed reports of homosexual
executions following strong protests from Western gay
activists about the killings. In the early years of the
Islamic regime, however, when all activities deemed
"un-Islamic" were openly and vigorously repressed, there
were well-documented accounts of whole groups of people at
clandestine homosexual parties being rounded up and
executed without any evidence of homosexual activity having
taken place.

This zeal to rid Iran of homosexuals went directly against
the limits set even by the shariah, which expressly forbids
spying to prove homosexual acts have been committed, and,
furthermore, demands that four male Muslims of sound mind
witness the act of penetration for the death penalty to be
incurred. This standard of proof, if properly followed,
makes prosecutions for homosexual acts almost impossible in
practice - though Nassim claims that the Iranian
authorities themselves regularly acted as "witnesses" in
order to secure convictions. Nevertheless, the result is
covert tolerance, if not overt acceptance, of homosexuality
in the majority of Muslim countries, as long as it is not
publicly seen or talked about.

The present is a time of monumental upheaval in Iran, with
liberal reformers having won a landslide victory in the
Iranian Parliament. However, says Nassim, it is simply too
early to assess what impact, if any, this will have on the
situation for homosexuals in Iran. In Afghanistan,
meanwhile, where shariah law is also in operation, the
fundamentalist Taliban regime's preferred method of
execution is to bulldoze a wall onto the guilty parties,
who are made to lie in a trench dug especially for this
purpose. Whole villages turn out for these occasions, with
relatives of the condemned among those forced to watch. The
Taliban have made no sign that these executions are going
to stop, despite protests from human rights agencies such
as Amnesty International.

Many western countries now have large Muslim populations.
In Germany, there are three million Muslims, mainly of
Turkish origin, while France has two million north African
Muslims. In Britain, the Muslim community is predominantly
from the Indian subcontinent and numbers one-and-a-half
million. Of these, an estimated 75,000 are homosexual (a
figure based on a report on British Muslims by the
Runnymede Trust in 1998). Muslim religious leaders in
Britain officially reject homosexuality completely.
Alongside churches, synagogues and Sikh and Hindu temples,
Muslim organisations such as the Islamic Party of Britain
have been organising petitions protesting against the
Government's attempts to scrap Section 28. Ricky Potts, the
acting Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Officer at the University
of Wales in Bangor, was horrified to be asked to sign a
petition, against the scrapping of Section 28, drawn up by
the Islamic Presentation Centre International Limited. The
petition claimed that to scrap the Section would expose
children "to immoral values and practices [and] will also
undermine the institutions of the family and damage the
fabric of our society. Any teaching in school which
presents homosexual practices Š in a morally neutral way is
profoundly offensive and totally unacceptable to all
communities and religions."

Such political action takes its inspiration from an
orthodox interpretation of Islamic doctrine. Sheikh
Sharkhawy, a senior cleric at the prestigious Regent's Park
Mosque, in a written response to my questions, compares
homosexuality to a "cancer tumour", which must be removed
to preserve the health of society. Viewing homosexuals as
"paedophiles and Aids carriers" who have no hope of a
"spiritual life", he openly and unashamedly argues for the
execution of gay males over the age of ten and life
imprisonment for lesbians. Like many orthodox imams, he
views homosexuality as a symbol of a peculiarly "Western"
decadence, claiming that "homosexuality is not tolerated in
Islamic countries".

More liberal imams, such as Sheikh Zaki Badawi of the
Ealing Muslim College, refuse to pigeonhole homosexuality
in this way. Speaking to Gay Times, he said that "the film
My Beautiful Laundrette [which centres on the love of a gay
Muslim man for a white former racist] should serve as a
useful reminder to the Muslim community that they cannot
simply sweep gays and lesbians under the carpet.
Homosexuality has always existed and continues to exist in
all Islamic countries. Indeed, many high-ranking leaders in
the Islamic world are gay." Sheikh Badawi categorically
rejects homophobic violence. "In Britain," he says, "we
Muslims are in a minority, and it should not be our task to
encourage intolerance towards other minorities." He is one
of the few Muslim figures who advocates the teaching of
homosexuality in the context of sex education lessons in
schools, as long as it does not challenge the "normality"
of the traditional heterosexual family by "promoting"
homosexuality. However, toleration does not equal
acceptance, and even he considers homosexuality to be a
"problem" similar to alcoholism, which is against Islamic
teaching, even though being an alcoholic or gay does not
disqualify one from being Muslim.

Such attitudes from within the Muslim community have made
positive validation of a gay Muslim identity extremely
difficult. Not surprisingly, many gay people from Muslim
backgrounds simply leave Islam. At a recent meeting on the
subject in Leicester (where there is a large Muslim
population), a young gay man who had rejected Islam said
simply, "It's a choice between praying and sucking cock -
you can't do both at the same time." Other gay Muslims who
are very religious often become severely depressed as a
result of the internalised guilt they feel at their
closeted sexuality.

Compared with homosexuals from other faith denominations,
the situation for gay Muslims of faith has been noticeably
bad. For many years now, gay and gay-friendly Christian
organisations and individuals, such as the Rt Revd Richard
Holloway, the Bishop of Edinburgh, have very publicly
denounced homophobia while affirming the possibility of
being gay and remaining true to one's faith

In the past three years, the homophobia of Islamic
orthodoxy has begun to be challenged by gay Muslims
themselves. It all started with the formation of a
ground-breaking new homosexual Muslim group, Al-Fatiha, in
the US in 1997. Al-Fatiha is the brainchild of Faisal Alam.
Facing the same dilemmas as other gay Muslims, he searched
the internet to find information about homosexuality and
Islam. Finding absolutely nothing there, he set up his own
internet discussion group (listserv) for gay Muslims from
all over the world to discuss issues of common concern in a
safe environment. The listserv has now grown to over 1,500
members worldwide, from America to Indonesia. The first
Al-Fatiha Retreat, attended by 40 people, took place in
Boston in October 1998.

Faisal Alam crossed the Atlantic in November 1999 to form
an Al-Fatiha chapter in this country. The very first
meeting of Al-Fatiha UK brought together 30 men and women
from all over Britain to the basement of a bar in Old
Compton Street, Soho - the heart of London's gay scene.
Faisal convened a second meeting in Leicester and a third,
also in Soho, before returning home to the States. At these
gatherings, people shared the intricacies of their lives as
well as discussing some of the theological arguments for a
pro-gay Muslim position. Many had their own tales to tell
of ostracism and feelings of isolation, but also
inspirational stories of being gay and Muslim.

The name Al-Fatiha is taken from the title of the first
chapter of the Koran, and signifies "the Beginning" or
"Opening". It consists of an invocation for guidance from
Allah, who is referred to as "the Compassionate, the
Merciful One". Faisal Alam believes that these qualities -
and not the fundamentalism of extremist groups - represent
the true essence of Islam. In addition, Faisal explains,
the "Opening" refers hopefully to the beginning of a
dialogue through which the mainstream Muslim community will
come to acknowledge the millions of gay Muslims in its
midst and open its arms to them.

Despite the severe hostility homosexual Muslims had
experienced from their communities, some people at the
early meetings of Al-Fatiha UK were wary of provoking an
Islamophobic backlash by highlighting exclusively Islamic
homophobia. Ali, a sexual health worker from NAZ who runs
an HIV forum, had been forced to move after unsolicited
visits to his home from an imam from the Balham mosque and
some of his followers. They demanded that he stop his work,
which, they said, was "corrupting" the Muslim community,
"or else". Yet, says Ali, "I believe that what they did was
not Islamic in the sense I understand Islam. There is
considerable Islamophobia in Britain, and the last thing we
as gay Muslims want is to be marginalised twice over, once
for being gay and again for being Muslim."

Yet this dilemma is little understood by the wider gay
community. A leader article in the September 7th, 1998
issue of the now-defunct London-based gay magazine
Metropolis even called for homophobic Muslims to be
deported back to their country of origin. "While we
understand that the extreme homophobia of some Muslims
leads non-Muslim gay people to characterise Islam itself as
homophobic," says Ifti, an Al-Fatiha spokesperson, "we have
to be very careful to make a distinction between the two so
as not to alienate potential straight Muslim supporters and
to offer homosexual Muslims the possibility of being true
to their faith. We have to emphasise the fact that
interpreting the religious texts is a dynamic process and
that application of religious laws must take into account
the changing social context. While we recognise that we
have many powerful allies in the non-Muslim community, we
must also recognise that, ultimately, the situation for gay
Muslims of faith can only be improved by changing attitudes
from within the Muslim community itself. This is the
revolutionary task Al-Fatiha is attempting to carry out."

Not everyone views being gay and Muslim as a burden,
however. A lesbian member of Al-Fatiha UK, Nur-ul-Islam,
emphasises that although her dual identity had caused her a
lot of internal soul-searching, it was finally a source of
tremendous inspiration to her, as she had to question
everything about herself and her spirituality in a way
straight people do not. This led her on a quest for a
higher spiritual meaning. "Contrary to what fundamentalists
might say, Islam is not a dogmatic religion but emphasises
the search for truth. Being gay or lesbian can be a real
spur to this quest," she insists.

Al-Fatiha members have been active in UNISON, Britain's
largest public sector trade union, which has many gay
Muslim members. UNISON's National Gay and Lesbian
C4ommittee (which has 2,500 members) passed a resolution
last year which supported Al-Fatiha in its activities while
condemning the homophobic persecution of gays in
Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, plans are underway to open a chapter of
Al-Fatiha in Jerusalem - a city which is considered the
third holiest in Islam, after Mecca and Medina in Saudi
Arabia. This chapter will operate with the help of the
Jerusalem Open House, a multi-faith gay centre co-founded
by Rabbi Steven Greenburg, the US's only openly gay
orthodox rabbi. A copy of the Koran and resources for gay
Muslims are to be housed at the Open House's library. In
this way it is hoped to help create dialogue between the
city's sharply segregated religious communities as well as
offering help for homosexual Muslims. Within the next two
years Al-Fatiha hopes to connect with LGBTQ Muslims and
organise support and discussion groups around the world.

Al-Fatiha is not the world's first gay Muslim organisation.
An earlier San Francisco-based group, called the Lavender
Crescent Society, misjudging the situation completely, sent
five members to Iran in 1979 following the overthrow of the
Shah and the coming to power of the hard-line Ayatollah
Khomeini, in the hope of creating an Iranian gay Muslim
movement. The five were taken straight from the airport to
a place of execution and killed. Gay Iranians were forced
to go underground after this.

Even within the West, gay Muslims are bound to attract a
certain level of hostility. An organisation called Min-Alaq
was formed in Toronto in the early 1990s, but folded after
threats from religious fundamentalists. Al-Fatiha has also
received death threats just before some of its events,
though no incident has occurred so far. For the forthcoming
Retreat in London, the Metropolitan Police are in contact
with the New York police to assist in security concerns.
"We are aware of the potential negative reaction from
fundamentalist groups in Britain, such as Al Muhajiroun,
and will take all necessary precautions to ensure the event
goes smoothly," said an Al-Fatiha UK spokesperson.


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* the names of some of the gay Muslims quoted in this
article have been changed

* Al-Fatiha holds regular meetings and social events. For
more details of these and the forthcoming Retreat (May
26th-29th), write to Al-Fatiha UK, Box No 424, 37 Store
Street, London WC1, send an email to
alfatiha_london@... or phone 0774-763 6010 and ask
for Adnan. To subscribe to the gay Muslim internet
discussion group, send an email to gaymuslims@....
Visit the website on www.al-fatiha.org

* Homan UK, the secular group for gay Iranians, can be
contacted by writing to Homan UK, BM Box 7826, London WC1N
3XX or by email at homan@.... Their website is
at www.Homan.cwc



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Al-Fatiha is an international organization for Muslims who are lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgendered, questioning & their friends! web site:
http://www.al-fatiha.org

Al-Fatiha, UK & Al-Fatiha Foundation, USA proudly present the 2nd International
Retreat for LGBTQ Muslims - May 26-29, 2000 - London, England. For more
information email us!

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