Manish points me to this bizarre article about a successful young American who happens to be gay, and, is seeking a "marriage of convenience" with a suitably inclined lesbian. Oh, and guess what, he is a practicing Muslim to boot! A few months ago rik asked me if I thought science and religion were fundamentally compatible. My somewhat lame answer was that they must be, as there are individuals who are great scientists who seem sincerely religious. Now, is a homosexual orientation which is active and unabashed compatible with Islam? Most of the scholars and clerics interviewed in the article disavow any hint of such a possibility, and yet people live this ideal. Is it possible to be a vegan for ethical reasons all the while being a promiscuous zoophile?1 Hell if I know. The illusion of an integrated and rational mind is really getting to be a problem for me. The power of ideas is overrated, the persuasiveness of preference is neglected.
1 - I do not believe animals can give consent, so zoophilia is rape in my eyes.
They also don't tend to ask for consent before they start humping legs.
They also don't tend to ask for consent before they start humping legs.
Now there's a point - if a dog starts humping a zoophile's leg, is it still unethical for the 'phile to... um... go all the way?
Now, is a homosexual orientation which is active and unabashed compatible with Islam?
The present strictness may be the result of fairly recent fundamentalist transformations. Nineteenth-century travellers sometimes wondered whether all Muslim men weren't bisexual. Traditional Islam could be very lax, in an Episcopalian sort of way, and many practices were sultural traditions of non-Koranic origin.
Clifford Geertz, "Islam Observed", describes three tendencies in Muslim society. First is the old, corrupt, lax, traditional Islam, which was the colorful thing tourists described. Second is the modernizing, westernizing reform Islam (this would include secularizers who kept religion as a private practice.) Third was the fundamentalist Islam, reacting against the Westernizers but even more against the corruptions of tradition.
There is a muslim lesbian, famous here in Canada as the voice for moderate 'Islam', Ishrad Maji.
I like postmodernist relativism when it makes rigid religious traditions more malleable.
pough: Consent is more of a legal term than merely saying "Yes". Children and animals cannot legally "consent"; it helps protect them from both sexual predators and used car salesmen.
"Look, your dog obviously WANTED that Porsche! That's his paw-print on the documents right there!"
Emerson: That makes a lot of sense. It jives a fair bit with what I've read generally about modern and historical islam.
Maybe a new way approaching to or to think about contradictions, could be of use. If "integrated and rational mind" does in fact mean "coherent" or "non-conflicted mind" then maybe that's the root of the problem. If you accept that contradictions do really exist, then, what is a contradiction and how could anything in object (mind, if understood like one, included) embody a contradiction? On the contrary, if the mind is a bounch of handled symbols (non-material) things, then you bite a lot of philosophical problemas, most of them seemingly unsolvable.
So dependeding on what homosexuality is (how is it caused and so on) and what a religion is (a bounch of abstractions...) and then what kind of religion Islam is, then we would have to accept that homosexuality and Islam are an ongoing fact. I personally tend to think this way.
By the way... I also think that zoophilia is a kind of rape. Maybe it is not just in the case that the "active" part of the sexual relation corresponds to the animal (what could be understood as a kind of real consent or at least as a lack of coercion). In the case of children it is more difficult. In other times in europe there were marriages with kids of 13. Even now in Mexico, some indigenous (mostly females) are getting "married" even at the age of 10. They start breeding at 11... And that would have to be a crime because in our crimminal laws a sexual relation with a person under 12 years old ought to be taken as raping. But on the ther hand we have to respect "cultural differences" (ordered by our Constitution).
(excuse the rustiness of my english)
Instead of "breeding" (a word with a pejorative sense when used with humans) I meant "having and up bringing their children"... Sorry...