Gay in the Arab world

The New York Times Magazine has an article about being gay in the Arab world. Scary stuff. NPR interviews an author who has a book out on the gay culture in the Middle East. One point, which I find interesting, is the peculiar juxtposition of extreme anti-gay sentiment in the Arab world combined with ambivalence and ambiguity in the past and the present. After all, there's the old Afghan saying that even pigeons who fly over the lands of the Pashtun cover their rear with a wing, a reference to the prevalence of pedarasty in that subculture (where men and women are rigidly segregated). The historical record also suggests that the Middle East was often a relative refuge for European homosexuals. Contemporaneously, the fact that prominent Arab political figures such as Yasser Arafat might have had homosexual proclivities were both open secrets and yet unmentionable.

Will this change? I believe so. The article and the interview on NPR both point out that Islamic law's attitude toward homosexuality treads further into grayland than modern Muslims admit. Over at Ali Eteraz's blog I entered into a dispute with a Muslim friend about whether one could be a Muslim and a practicing homosexual. If majority consensus is the prerequisite that time is not here, but I believe that one generation of kulturkampf can be relevatory. The believers shall never agree upon error, and Word of God always evolves....

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It seems that Islamic Neo-Fundamentalism is learning tricks from Christian Neo-Fundamentalism. For some reason, anti-Gay rhetoric sells.

Nevermind the pervasive slackness of family life, East and West. Blame the 2% of urban homosexuals for the moral and political chaos of a culture. I wonder when the first radical cleric will be caught snorting Meth in a massage parlor.

Come, young Ahmed, and sit close to the imam ...

Yasser Arafat and Anwar Ibrahim might have had homosexual proclivities

That snippet of text elicited a mental image that I really could've done without.

I don't think most Muslims in Muslim countries blame the "moral decay" of society on urban homsexuals. The gay lifestyle isn't as open like that and there are many ways it can be hidden considering the culture where straight men hold hands. Mostly slutty women are seen as symbols of moral decay. So the comparision is faulty.

Gay in the Arab world
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The New York Times Magazine has an article about being gay in the Muslim world...

Careful, some people tend to get upset when you treat 'Arab' as 'Muslim' as interchangable terms.

By Mustafa Mond, FCD (not verified) on 07 Dec 2006 #permalink

Islamic law's attitude toward homosexuality treads further into grayland than modern Muslims admit.

Nothing serious to add here, just that I initially misread grayland as GARYland, thought it was some strange new euphemism for the gay community :-)

Contra NuSapiens' comment, it seems to me that the harsh-condemnation-yet-lax-enforcement approach towards homosexuality in the Muslim world is actually a hold over of a much older, patriarchal society set of mores than those which lead to modern Christian condemnations of the same behaviors.

In highly sex segregated societies through history, you tend to see a lot of tacit homosexuality and pedarasty. You see this from the ancient world straight up through the 19th century Europe (though not, so far as I can tell, America). However harsh religious prohibitions or social stigma against "men taking the woman's part" might be, in situations where friendship and love were unlikely to occur between men and women, they tended to happen between men and men.

It was with the simultaneous rise of socially activist, urban Christianity in the mid 19th century that you started to see serious systematic attempt to stamp out homosexuality. And since this came at the same time as an increasing change in the social relations between men and women in Western society, this had the effect of moving from a situation where much larger percentages (though still doubtless a minority) of men were part time homosexuals to where a very small percentage with strong tendencies practiced the lifestyle full time, while the vast majority of men never practiced it at all.