ISLAMIC HOMOSEXUALITIES: CULTURE, HISTORY, AND LITERATURE
By Murray, Stephen O, and Will Roscoe; with additional contribution by Eric Allyn [et. al.]
New York University Press, New York and London
1997
Pp. 331
ISBN 0-8147p7467-9
Reviewed by OMAR AFZAL
This book, a collection of 22 essays, including two by Muslim-sounding names, is not a documented history of prevalence of homosexuality in Muslim societies, as it claims, but a brazen attempt to convince the reader that Islam tolerated, even encouraged homosexual behaviour.
Some of the authors are fully aware that Muslim holy book, the Qur’ān, contains clear denunciation of homosexuality and aberrant sexual behaviour.
By narrating the history of Prophet Lut it is made very clear to all humans that Allah did not hesitate to destroy a nation because of their totally unacceptable misconduct. “Do you come (lustfully) to the males from among the creatures? And leave your wives whom Your Lord has created for you? Nay you are a people who transgress all limits of what is right.” (26:165-166)
Love is natural but in Muslim societies it is tolerated only between persons of different sex. “Among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates from among your own kind, so that you might find serenity and quite of mind in them, and He put between the two of you love and compassion. Surely there are signs in this for people who reflect.” (30:21). Often a weak narration is attributed to the Prophet (may Allah bless and greet him): “He who loves and remains chaste, and conceals his secret and dies, dies a martyr.”
The Prophet instituted stoning of “those who practise sodomy, both the active and the passive”, and the first Caliph ordered burning of a “luti”. Ibn Abbas said that the “Luti” should be thrown from the highest building in town and then stoned. All the Islamic legal schools regard sex between males as unlawful, though they differ over the severity of the punishment.
However, in the name of “cross-cultural research”, chapter after chapter has been devoted to prove “Islamic homosexualities” across Muslim communities on the basis of a few anecdotes, spotty vague narratives twisted inferences from some literary traditions in Persian and Urdu poetry, innuendos as well as a few Mughul and Turkish paintings.
The book is divided in four parts: 1. Introduction to Islamic Homosexualities, 2. Literary Studies, 3. Historical Studies, and Anthropological Studies.
Jim Wafer’s paper on Muhammad and Male Homosexuality is a good example of how the western authors do not hesitate to distort facts. He says: The Hadith and stories of the Prophet’s life … are inconsistent and their authenticity is difficult to ascertain.” A few paragraphs later he makes another blatantly false claim: “At the time of its origin, Islam was a warrior religion, and acceptance of Islam entailed induction into its military organization.” He concludes that because of “deeply contradictory nature of Islamic attitude towards homosexuality” contemporary Muslim cultures maintain a conspiracy of silence.
The conclusion summarises the authors’ and the editor’s real intent: “Any account of the emergence of Western homosexuality from Christian northern Russia in Europe” and its importation into Muslim cultures as a result of Western colonisation is not supported by evidence. Sexual receptivity has since early Abbasid times (that is, beginning in 761 C.E.) been assumed to be a “natural concomitant of male beauty. Rowson (1991) shows that at the time of the Prophet and for some times after his death (throughout the Umayyad era) “mukhannathun” were suspected at aiding or even committing heterosexual acts.”
The whole book is replete with similar bizarre concocted facts for which the evidence is the existence of a few words in Arabic or some Persian verses praising male beauty. Readers are warned about passages that hurt Muslim sensibilities about a subject that was a taboo all along human history and abhorred by the Muslim societies globally.