Transcript
SHANON SHAH
Talking about homosexuality and religion, we cannot ignore the necessity of having these spaces where you can have open discussions about a lot of things, not just sexuality. I suppose the running thread throughout all my work, whether in Malaysia and the UK, is an interest in clashing identities. So that’s quite personal for me, being gay and Muslim, but I’m also interested in other clashes. I’m in a civil partnership with an openly gay Anglican priest who has had to negotiate those clashes as well, as a gay man who’s also an ordained Christian minister.
It was a huge aha moment for me to discover that there is no equivalent term for homosexuality in the Qur’an. The Qur’an is a seventh century text in Arabic. Homosexuality, or indeed homosexual, is a modern coinage. It’s a nineteenth century coinage. So similarly you wouldn’t find a direct translation for homosexuality in the Hebrew scriptures or in the gospels, in the epistles. What we find in these ancient texts is prohibitions against certain sorts of behaviours.
Now in the Muslim case, so much of what it means to be a good, practicing, observant Muslim is about engaging in lawful behaviour, whether it’s in trade, or dietary laws, or prayers, or relationships with people, including sexual relationships. So there’s this idea of what is a lawful sexual relationship. And, traditionally, it has always been that it has to be through a marriage between a man and a woman, so any kind of act that doesn’t fall within this definition is unlawful. So it’s not about whether it’s homosexual or not.
Historically, a lot of this discussion is captured in Muslim legal texts. So opinions that were given by traditional jurists, which take the form of fatwas, which is basically a legal opinion. But they also are discussed in different medical texts among Muslim medics in literature, in dream interpretations. But, of course, the texts that Muslims rely upon most authoritatively were the legal texts, but we have to remember that a lot of these legal texts also dealt with exceptions. They dealt with exceptional circumstances and they also disagreed. For example, if they agreed that a particular act was wrong, they would disagree on the consequences on why it was wrong.
In Muslim cultures, a lot of public attitudes towards certain issues, such as sexual relations and so on, are based on conversations that people have that they link back to authoritative figures and this is what happens in Muslim legal texts. But, of course, people get creative with this and sometimes culturally they - there are provisions within Muslim jurisprudence to accommodate what is generally acceptable in the surrounding culture.
And this was especially important when Islam spread out of the Arabian Peninsula into the Indian subcontinent, into Africa, into Southeast Asia, and so on. So there was that flexibility to accommodate what was going on around you. So Islamic jurisprudence is also contextual and I think that’s something that’s lost in the discussion about it nowadays. It seems like it’s a frozen, rigid artefact whereas, historically, it was quite dynamic and you were allowed to ask new questions depending on new situations that you encountered.
What I’ve realised, the deeper I engage with my faith tradition as a Muslim, is that there is actually a diverse range of opinions and attitudes within Islam historically and also in the contemporary world about a range of issues - homosexuality just being one of them. But there is a problem of access to these interpretations and there is a problem of what is the interpretation that gains currency in certain Muslim states that are endorsed by different Muslim governments. So these, I have encountered more relaxed or inclusive interpretations of sexuality, but they’re very difficult to find because they’ve either been censored or they haven’t gained authoritative status. But if you look hard enough, they are there.
There was, I think eleventh century Andalusian scholar called Ibn Hazm - this is when Spain and Portugal, what we now know as Iberia, were Muslim as well - who had quite progressive views on sexual relations, including same sex relations. And his idea was as long as they’re not publicly disruptive then why punish them? Only if they are publicly disruptive do we punish them and that was considered very lenient. And so that’s a discovery that had to be made through lots and lots of reading because that’s not an opinion that’s readily available.