Gender, Sexuality, and Islam under the Shadow of Empire

Like Manji, Hirsi Ali’s (and Rushdie’s) authority lies in her status as insiders—authentic Muslims and, crucially, brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam who dare to raise their voices against its horrors and against those who would defend these horrors in the name of multiculturalism or other liberal ‘canards.’¹ They are also unabashed in their veneration of the West, which they credit with giving them the agency that ‘Islam’ refused them. This status—not just as an authentic native informant, but as an authentic victim of ‘their’ religion/culture/civilization—allows them to get away with shoddy scholarship and also, importantly, with saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say. In effect, their ideological function is to ventriloquise racist Islamophobia. Here, for example, is Hirsi Ali:

By our Western standards Muhammad is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against freedom of expression. If you don’t do as he says, you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniac rulers in the Middle East: Bin Laden, Khomeini, and Saddam. Are you surprised to find a Saddam Hussein? Muhammad is his example; Muhammad is an example to all Muslim men. Why do you think so many Islamic men use violence? You are shocked to hear me say these things, but like the majority of the native Dutch population, you overlook something: you forget where I am from. I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about.²

For Hirsi Ali, Islam is the common denominator behind a range of misogynist cultural practices—from FGM to honor killings to the ‘cult of virginity.’ That these practices often predate Islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews does not faze Hirsi Ali. Of course, no sociological evidence is provided to back up these claims because such evidence would disrupt the discursive construction of an essentialized Islam; in any case, the complicit audience asks for none, being satisfied with the claims made by authentic ‘insiders.’³

Hirsi Ali’s politics need not be read off her writings alone. Until recently, Hirsi Ali was a member of the Dutch Parliament, representing the right-wing VVD party.⁴ The VVD had wooed her away from the social-democratic Labor Party with whom Hirsi Ali began her political career; Hirsi Ali argued that the VVD provided her with “greater ability to advocate for the rights of Muslim women.”³ What the VVD did provide her was a national platform for her xenophobic and anti-immigrant politics, all nicely packaged in the liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women (from their men).

While a particular liberal vision of women’s rights features most prominently in Manji and Hirsi Ali’s discourse, they have both also been instrumental in the discursive construction of Islam as essentially homophobic. Manji’s status as a queer Muslim woman does much of this ideological work for her, while Hirsi Ali’s next collaboration with gay Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh—after the experimental and incendiary Submission, on women and Islam—was slated to be on Islam and homosexuality.⁵

A Gay Jihad, or, the Trouble with ‘Islam’

So pervasive is the idea that there is something unique about the relationship between Islam and sexuality that it underpins the discourse of otherwise well-meaning projects. A good example is “A Jihad for Love,” the documentary film made by Pervez Sharma (a New Yorker of Indian origin). It might appear unfair to mention Pervez Sharma in the same breath as Hirse Ali, Manji, and Rushdie, but his film is part of the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality. In fact, it is illustrative precisely because it is pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia.

Released in 2008, the film focuses on the experiences of a few main protagonists—an imam from South Africa, a group of Egyptian men, four lesbians—two from Turkey, one from Egypt, and one a Moroccan settled in France—and a few brief clips featuring India and Pakistan. The website—and the film—underscore the ‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter by opening with the visual and audio of the shahada, or ‘testimony’ required of all Muslims, which translates as, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” And it is hard to miss the incredible claim made on the website that the film “[allows] its remarkable subjects [note: not us, the viewers, but the subjects] to move beyond the narrow concept of Jihad as holy war.” Thus, the real protagonists of this project are not “its remarkable subjects” as they are referred to on the website, but the film—and thereby the filmmaker!

Sharma claims that his intent was actually to challenge the idea of a monolithic Islam. He is careful to say that Islam is not unique out of the Abrhamanic faiths in its attitude towards homosexuality.⁶ Despite these good intentions, his film unfortunately reinforces the idea that gay Muslims face particularly or uniquely negative circumstances, and contributes to the confusion around Islam and homosexuality. For example, in an interview with the New York Blade he explains that there are “only six Islamic states that implement sharia (Islamic) law,” which is where “it starts becoming a problem.”⁷ Meanwhile the movie itself does not profile any Muslim queers from these six countries. Unless the viewer already has this (and other) information, she is likely to leave the film feeling that all Muslim countries are Islamic in the sense of being ruled by sharia, and that that is the root of the problem for Muslim queers. Sharma confuses the matter further by including Muslims from countries that are not even Muslim—his main protagonist is a South African imam and the film features a Muslim man in India, a country in which Muslims are not only in the minority, but an increasingly beleaguered one. Moreover, the fact that the experience of harassment related by the gay Indian Muslim man was not unique and would be shared by Indian Hindu or Christian or Jain queers of the same socioeconomic background, is something that Sharma—as an Indian Hindu who only recently converted to Islam—should know and share. Instead, he chooses not to do so, leaving us with the (reinforced) impression that the problem is Islam.⁸

In fact, the narrative and logic of the film would have changed dramatically if Sharma had featured the experience of non-Muslim queers from the same ‘Muslim’ countries as those that his Muslim protagonists came from. Instead, he focuses on Muslims alone, and in fact veers from a focus on state repression (as in the case of the Egyptians) to social and familial homophobia. He makes no distinction between persecution under Islamic laws (the film in fact features no such case) and persecution under secular laws, as in Egypt—where, unsurprisingly, it is the colonial law against sodomy under which the men are arrested, something which, again, the film makes no mention of. In effect, the only connecting thread between the different protagonists is their Muslimness. Thus, although Sharma claims that his motive was not to present Islam as (uniquely) homophobic, the film in fact ends up doing just that.

Needless to say, the endorsements from critics featured on the website deploy words that are familiar to any student of the neo-Orientalist discourse on Islam—words such as “brave,” “brutally honest,” “courageous,” “fascinating;” National Public Radio even exclaims that it “lifts the veil of secrecy.” Critics note that this film is produced by Sandi DuBowski, who made “Trembling Before G-d,” and tend to place it within a genre of films on faith/religion and homosexuality, but in the absence of a comparative frame within the film itself, the viewer cannot be counted on to make the same connection.⁹

1. They are regularly mentioned in the same breath within the mainstream media. See, for example: Marianne Williamson, “Women in Islam,” Oprah Radio, 24 April 2007. [↩]
2. Emphasis mine. Ayan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007): 303. [↩]
3. Lalami. [↩] [↩]
4. By an ironic twist of fate she was stripped of her Dutch citizenship after it emerged that she had lied on her asylum application. [↩]
5. The project was cut short by van Gogh’s murder at the hands of a radical Islamist. By all accounts, van Gogh reveled in baiting Muslims, and saw them as antithetical to Dutch values; in Hirsi Ali he found the perfect partner. [↩]
6. Anthony Brooks and Parvez Sharma, “Interview,” National Public Radio, 2 October 2007. [↩]
7. Trenton Straube, “Struggles of Gay Muslims,” New York Blade, 17 May 2008. [↩]
8. The portion on Pakistan is even more bizarre, focusing on a sufi shrine but featuring no queers. [↩]
9. In fact, when I made the connection in an informal discussion with Dubowski at the screening of the film in Boston, his response was to reject this comparison because whereas the Hasidic Jews (the ones featured in Trembling Before G-d) are members of a conservative Jewish sect, in the case of Islam, the problem was the mainstream. [↩]