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Diversity in religion: Islam
Diversity in religion: Islam

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1 Attitudes to male same-sex relationships in Islam tradition

What do you think is the Islamic teaching regarding sexual preference?

As you think about this question, ask yourself where your ideas about this topic might have come from – from a newspaper or magazine article, a book, your social media feeds, or somewhere else?

Activity 1

Watch this interview with Dr Shanon Shah and make a few notes about the main points.

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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.
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Discussion

As regards-same sex relationships, Dr Shah explains that there was no reference in the traditional Muslim sources of authority to homosexuality as such, and no word in the Qur’an (nor incidentally in the Hebrew religious texts or the Christian Gospels) that can be translated as homosexuality. The word itself is a modern one.

It’s worth pointing out here that although Dr Shah doesn’t say so in the video, in his book he explains that drawing on the stories in the Bible, the Qur’an itself refers at a number of points to the story of Lot and God’s destruction of his people by hurling ‘stones of baked clay … layer upon layer’ (Q. 11:82) on their town (Shah, 2018). It’s usually argued that this was a punishment for the fact that the men had engaged in forbidden sexual activity.

Going back to the video, Dr Shah also makes some helpful points about the development of Muslim legal traditions. Muslims wanted to live in a religiously-lawful way, and over the centuries Muslim legal experts discussed a great range of issues, including sexual relationships. He also explains that in Islamic legal tradition there has traditionally been room to accommodate local cultural norms, so that it has been, as he puts it, ‘contextual’.

These legal experts’ discussions were encapsulated in fatwas, legal opinions, issued by individual experts. Often the experts did not agree with each other, and so their opinions differed. Nevertheless some opinions or interpretations have become more influential and widely accepted, and others may be difficult to find. When it came to sex, the majority view did come to be that the only legitimate sexual relationship was between a married man and his wife (or wives) (and also between a man and female slaves). The four main Sunni legal schools agreed that sexual relationships between men were sinful, and three of them argued that they should be subject to capital punishment.

But the legal experts did not all agree with this. Dr Shah gives the example of the Iberian or Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm (994–1064 CE). A ‘poet, historian, jurist, philosopher and theologian’, Ibn Hazm has been described as ‘one of the greatest thinkers of Arabo-Muslim civilization’ (Arnaldez, 2012, p. 1). Dr Shah explains that he had what were quite tolerant views on same-sex relationships, arguing that they were only a problem if they led to social disruption. If you are interested in learning more about Ibn Hazm there are some resources listed in the Further reading list at the end of this course.

In practice, before the nineteenth century it seems that extreme punishments were rarely inflicted on men who had sexual relationships with other men. Often what Kecia Ali, author of a book on sexual ethics and Islam, calls ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ norms prevailed, and provided those engaging in them were reasonably discrete, such relations were tolerated and those participating in them were not prosecuted (2016, p. 107). If it did come to a court case, in practice judges often imposed milder punishments, and governments often introduced their own legal codes which prescribed much more lenient penalties.