Same as before

An interesting article on how homosexuality is viewed in the Islamic world reveals a pattern of history repeating itself.

It mentions how “Of the seven countries that impose the death penalty for homosexuality, all are Muslim. Even when gays do not face execution, persecution is endemic. In 2010 a Saudi man was sentenced to 500 lashes and five years in jail for having sex with another man. In February last year, police in Bahrain arrested scores of men, mostly other Gulf nationals, at a ‘gay party'”.

It goes on to note how there is something of a double standard with “Gay life in the open in Muslim-majority countries is rare, but the closet is spacious. Countries with fierce laws, such as Saudi Arabia, also have flourishing gay scenes at all levels of society. Syria’s otherwise fearsome police rarely arrest gays. Sibkeh park in Damascus is a tree-filled children’s playground during the day. By night it is known for the young men who linger on its benches or walls. Wealthy Afghans buy bachabazi, (dancing boys) as catamites”.

At the same time it notes the current situation across much of the Middle East. “where homosexuality is legal (as in Turkey), official censure can be fierce. A former minister for women’s affairs, Aliye Kavaf, called it ‘a disease’; the interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, cited it (along with Zoroastrianism and eating pork) as an example of ‘dishonour, immorality and inhuman situations'”.

The writer goes on to mention how the Arab revolutions have had little impact on the situation. It goes on to say that “One small source of hope is the internet: life online offers gays safety, secrecy and the chance to make their case. In a campaign called ‘We are everywhere’ Iranian gays and lesbians are posting protest videos on Facebook”.

It rightly takes care to note the enormous differences in the region with “Earlier Islamic societies were less hardline. An 11th-century Persian ruler advised his son to alternate his partners seasonally: young men in the summer and women in the winter. Many of the love poems of the eighth-century Abu Nuwas in Baghdad, and of other Persian and Urdu poets, were addressed to boys”.

It mentions how “some Muslim thinkers are now finding theological latitude. ‘The Koran does not condemn homosexuality,’ says Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, an American Muslim convert who teaches Islamic studies centuries”. It concludes saying “The story of Lot, he argues, deals with male rape and violence, not homosexuality in general. Classical Islamic theologians and jurists were mostly concerned with stifling lustful immorality, he says. Koranic verses describe without condemnation men who have no sexual desire for women. Arash Naraghi, an Iranian academic at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, suggests that the verses decrying homosexuality, like those referring to slavery and Ptolemaic cosmology, stem from common beliefs at the time of writing, and should be re-examined”.

Is this not how the Western world behaved for so many centuries until attitudes changed?