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LGBT Muslims in Muslim Majority Cultures

In this short article, I aim at giving an overview of the current research on LGBT Muslim identities and argue that this research illustrates some key issues for international relations (IR) in terms of the understanding of globalizing LGBT identities and citizenship.

Habib’s (2010) collection contains evidence on the experiences of those who identify as homosexual within some contemporary Muslim cultures (Malaysia, Pakistan, Iraq, Singaporean Malay Muslims). This evidence illustrates that there is a contemporary discourse of cultural opposition between sexual diversity and Islam, identifying the former with the west.  However, this research and other work also demonstrates that western conceptualizations of LGBT identities are an important resource for local and national developments of queer identities (Mahdavi, 2012) but they are not necessarily a blueprint for how sexual diversity will develop in non-western cultures.  I have theorized this contemporary condition of LGBT Muslim identities (Rahman, 2010, 2014) arguing that queer Muslims draw upon a range of western and eastern identity resources in negotiating their sexualities and thus testify to the intersection of apparently exclusive cultures. For example, Blackwood’s (2005) research on lesbians in Indonesia shows that they incorporate western discourses into local and national ones to make sense of their identities and create communities, and Boellstorff’s (2005) anthropological studies on gay men in Indonesia supports this framing of transnational sexuality formation, although he emphasizes that to be publicly gay for men remains difficult in this Muslim culture. Recent research on same-sex behaviour amongst men in Turkey also suggests that western versions of gay identity are becoming more common, although they remain a minority and indeed co-exist with the more common gender variant understanding of homosexual behaviour in Turkish culture (Bereket and Adam, 2008).

These brief and limited examples continue the suggestion from historical studies of Muslim homoeroticism that we must recognize a different ontological construction from the west when we think about LGBT identities in Muslim cultures (Babayan and Najmabadi, 2008; Murray and Roscoe, 1997). For example, a recent account of lesbian life in Pakistan illustrates the differences of living a lesbian identity in a culture where there is no vocabulary for such identities, while also acknowledging that modernizing influences are gradually shifting the possibilities of traditional gender-segregated culture, where homo-eroticism flourished, towards a more modern western binary world of sexual identities (Gandhi, 2012). Moreover, Hossain’s (2012) research on hijra Muslims in Bangladesh illustrates how they do not conform to dominant understandings of identity of Muslim, male, or homosexual.  Contemporary Muslim same-sex eroticism is therefore not exclusively eastern or, indeed, consistent across Muslim cultures, but rather the ontology of contemporary homosexual identities are being formed in intersection with the increasingly globalized discourse of western LGBT political identity.

Contemporary Lived Experience of Queer Muslims in the West

Research on LGBT Muslims living in the west is similarly limited in quantity.  What evidence there is illuminates four key issues: the perception of negative reactions from familial ethnic communities to declaring a pubic homosexual identity; the related perception of public homosexual identity as ‘western’; individual re-interpretations of Islamic texts to accommodate homosexuality; and the absence of any visible community.

One of the first studies was focused on 6 activists from Al-Fatiha, which is a support group network found in some major cities in the USA. This study identified important themes for LGBT Muslims: religion; east-west cultural comparisons including gay identity, marriage expectations, coming out; ‘color’ dynamics (a term used to discuss ethnicity in the USA) (Minwalla et al., 2005). The cultural opposition identified here is repeated in other studies, and structures the key process of ‘coming out’.  For example, American-Iranian Khalida Saed discusses her mother’s reaction when she came out: “The most compelling argument she came up with was that I was far too Americanized and that my sexuality was an offspring of the American values I had internalized.  This last argument may or may not have a ring of truth to it.  I’m not sure I would have had the balls to discuss my sexuality at all, or even consider it, if my American side hadn’t told me I had the right.” (Saed, 2005: 86). This theme of the perceived ‘westernnness’ of a homosexual identity is mirrored in other research, including autobiographical work (Khayatt, 2002; Khan, 1997; Rahman, 2008) and other research on lesbians in the USA (Al-Sayyad, 2010); gay men in Australia (Abraham, 2009); and both lesbians and gay men in the UK........

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