Islam and LGBT Issues: Reading Material

Bismillāh ir-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmtaullahi wa barakatuh,

As society further descends into the hotbed of moral decay that is Modernity, Muslims are forced to defend what would have been truisms just a century ago in order protect their faith. Unfortunately, our response to the LGBT movement so far has not been a very satisfying one. The current-day discourse is one of un-islamic extremes and unchecked assumptions that keep us from fully embracing our tradition, and I believe that we will not be able to make much progress if we do not scrutinize the assumptions and terms we bring to the table when discussing this issue. I doubt I will be able to do much to change this, but as someone who has a personal stake in this, I hope at least some will benefit from what I'm doing. I will also be updating this list with other things I find as time goes on.

This is a resource list on Islam and LGBT issues. I don't intend that anything here be authoritative, as I myself disagree with a lot of what some authors linked here have said; many of them would even disagree with each other (e.g., Daniel Haqiqatjou and Jonathan Brown). It's better seen as a collection of resources to give you ideas for what the proper response may look like. There is very little that can be definitively affirmed with regards to this issue, in my opinion, and a major problem our response suffers from is unquestioned orthodoxies that ironically are very far from what our tradition actually believed.

Nonetheless, there are some elements I believe a robust Islamic response must have:

1) Sincere and genuine commitment to our tradition: This excludes both the progressive muslim camp and the ackhees who just parrot western conservatives or alt-rights. Our tradition is one of balance and mercy, and anyone who wishes to have any meaningful contribution to this problem must understand that and eschew any western influence on their thought.

2) An account of sexuality and sexual identity that is in some way constructionist: What this means is that we cannot just uncritically accept concepts like "being gay," "homosexuality," etc., and expect them to map neatly onto Islam. These concepts are not universal, they are western constructs that are at most a few centuries old. This of course isn't to say that same sex acts or attractions only originated in the West a couple hundred years ago, but that the way they are conceived of and categorized is something that should be analyzed and scuritinized in relation to Islam. Anything you read on this topic - including the sources linked here - should be read with a constructionist lens. Be wary of any universalizing claims about "homosexuals" and the like (ironically, the worst offenders can be Muslims sometimes, given how nonchalantly we say that "homosexuality is against the fitrah"). If this all sounds a little too alien to you, try reading The Atlantic's famous Kingdom in the Closet piece for a practical look at what this looks like. For more in-depth treatment of how things were in our pre-modern days, Khaled El Rouayheb's Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World is beyond great.

With that lengthy introduction out of the way, I ask that Allah accept this from me, and that He grant this ummah steadfastness in our battle against those who wish to corrupt us and our religion. Ameen.