Islamic Doctrine on Gays
Originally appeared Oct. 17, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.
HISTORICALLY, ISLAMIC CULTURE (or better, cultures) seem to present two different faces toward homosexuality: A deeply hostile, punitive aspect rooted in religious texts and edicts and a more benign aspect ranging from bemused tolerance to open approval and celebration in literature.
We are at present learning a great deal about the most adamantly hostile strain of Islam as represented by the execution of gay men in Afghanistan and Stalinesque show-trials of gay men in Egypt.
According to the gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha, at least six Islamic nations have laws permitting capital punishment for homosexual acts and at least two have executed gays in recent years.
Just as Christian fundamentalists defend sodomy laws by citing biblical texts, Muslim governments often trace their own punitive laws to their official religion, to the Qur'an (or Koran), and the elaborate Islamic legal traditions called Shari'ah developed from it.
There seem to be about eight relevant passage in the Qur'an, all of them strongly negative. Seven refer to the ancient myth of Sodom that Muhammad borrowed from Hebrew scriptures and which apparently impressed him deeply. Here is a sampling, cited in Ibn Warraq's comprehensive "Why I Am Not a Muslim" (Prometheus Books, 1995). (Note: suras are akin to books in the Bible.)
- Sura 4:16. "If two men among you commit indecency, punish them both."
- Sura 7:80-81. "And Lot said to his people: Do you commit indecent acts that no nation has ever committed before? You lust after men in preference to women. You really are a degenerate people."
- Sura 26:165-6. "Will you fornicate with males and abandon your wives, whom God has created for you? Surely you are a people transgressing all limits. ... [The people of Lot] were utterly destroyed."
- Sura 27:55. "And tell of Lot. He said to his people: Do you commit indecency though knowing its shameful character, lusting after men instead of women."
In short, homosexual sex is indecent, degenerate, shameful, lust-driven, and must be punished.
Even apart from the specific injunction to punish homosexual sex, religious regimes have usually felt obligated to punish any "indecency" or "degeneracy" because they supposedly weaken the perpetrator's faith, corrupt his neighbors or offend gods. The allegedly gay men on trial in Egypt are not accused specifically of homosexual acts but of dishonoring Islam.
But there seems to be an ambiguity in the Qur'an. Most Westerners know that the Qur'an is surprisingly specific about the sensory, even sensual pleasures of the Islamic paradise, with food and drink and young maidens tending the needs of the faithful.
But, as Warraq points out, the Qur'an also specifies that male youths (presumably adolescents or ephebes) will also provide for the needs of the faithful:
- Sura 52:24. "And there shall wait on them young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls.
- Sura 56:17. "And there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and pitchers of water and a cup of purest wine."
- Sura 76:19. "They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders."
The exact role of these youthful cup-bearers is not stated, perhaps discreetly so, although it is worth noticing the phrase "boys of their own" in Sura 52:24. Some later Islamic cultural traditions certainly assumed physical involvement.
There seems to be a tension throughout between acknowledging the attractiveness of young men, perhaps part of the native Arabic culture Muhammad was appealing to, and the idea imported from Hebrew scriptures or some other strand of earlier Arabic culture that sex with men is somehow shameful or improper.
This ongoing tension between desire and avoidance in Islamic thought seems to ratchet up anxieties and evasions about homosexuality to a high pitch, especially in the exclusively male public world in which even today many men long remain bachelors, not least because polygamy by some men drains the market of women available for marriage.
The same tension lingers after the Qur'anic compilation. According to ethnographer Jim Wafer writing in the excellent anthology "Islamic Homosexualities" (New York Univ. Press, 1997), most of the vast number of supposed statements of Muhammad (called "hadith") collected (or counterfeited) over the next centuries are deeply negative toward homosexuality.
One such hadith reads: "If you see two people who act like the people of Lot, then kill the active and the passive."
But in a few hadiths Muhammad supposedly warned Muslims against lingering glances at young men because they are so attractive. One hadith says: "Keep not company with the sons of kings, for truly souls desire them in a way they do not desire freed slave-girls."
In other words, as with the ancient Greeks, the desire for young men seemed to be completely reasonable and a natural part of the human psyche, not perverse, shameful or immoral. But for Muslims desire was to be resisted in the service of self-control, piety or "submission" ("Islam") to the god and the god's laws.
Those mixed messages were developed and altered, one side or the other gaining ascendancy, as Islam was refracted through a variety of foreign cultures in succeeding centuries.