I’m guessing it’s like Christianity where there are leftist Christians who follow Jesus’ more progressive messages such as giving to the less fortunate and healing the sick, and then there are the scary Christian evangelicals that want A Handmaids Tale and conversion therapy. Logically, Islam probably isn’t a monolith in a similar way other religions aren’t.
However, I have never heard about what those of the Islamic faith actually believe outside of the hysterical post 9/11 Islamophobia I’ve been indoctrinated with as a child.
I want to know what the truth is and hear the other sides story. To me it’s obvious that Islamophobia is wrong, however when Islamophobes make wild claims about it, I can’t really refute them confidently because I’m simply ignorant of the facts. Please educate my dumb, white ass.
Fuck the people disparaging the religious, but it should be noted that atheism IS an extreme religious minority and a large percent of western socialists are LGBT+ people that have been abused by organized religion. So a little respect from both sides should be given, and maybe don’t say lol fairy tales or lol fedora (cus again atheism is a minority everywhere, you probably wouldn’t speak about any other religious minority that way).
And no Islam isn’t inherently more sexist than any other abrahamic religion, afaik it’s actually better (but this varies wildly like any religion)
Disclaimer: you’re going to get wildly differing answers because Islam is not a monolith.
Edit: also thank you for asking this respectfully
At least in my experience with the Muslim side if my family, no. There’s maybe a little “oh that’s different and a little weird, but if someone’s queer that’s just Allah’s plan for them and it’s not our place to judge”, but there isn’t the hatred and condemnation you see in conservative christian cults. It can break more along political lines.
It also gets weird with regional variation, like where my family is from trans people are kind of normal. I was even taught that transness is generally accepted religiously as long as the trans person is straight (so since I’m lesbian that doesn’t work as well for me, but whatever).
Generally I consider the “Islam is violently queerphobic” shit essentially a form of colonialist blood-libel to paint Muslim cultures as backwards and oppressive in order to justify committing horrible colonialist and imperialist violence against them, and it’s victim-blaming too. Queerness is very culturally dependent – what is feminine in one culture may be masculine in another. Colonizers exported their queer-bashing ideas during conquest, cracked down on queer communities as removed, reshaped mores in the places they conquered, and now these “enlightened” colonizers have the audacity to condemn the people they colonized for bearing those scars. Of course we’re “behind the times” – you fuckers made us be!
There is certainly room for and indeed a need for conversation and struggle around queer acceptance and liberation in different Islamic cultures, but that’s going to vary greatly by region and is less of a theological question and more a cultural question (of course there’s a give and take between theology and culture). Islam in Iran is wildly different from Islam in Pakistan is wildly different from Islam in Saudi Arabia is wildly different from Islam in Algeria, and even within those places there is a great amount of variation
So the material conditions of being a palestinian just happen to exist here but Islam is the more probable cause for that situation?
Sure, so the question presented here is one about “Islam.”
I’m not a religious person, and I imagine you are not either (considering you use this website, I imagine you are a materialist). So, as nonreligious people, I think we should have no issue saying is that there is fundamental “truth” as to what “Islam” is out there in the world. Rather, what the concept/religion of Islam is just what its followers generally believe it to be. Like most concepts, there probably aren’t many super hard-and-fast necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather there is a family resemblance of concepts that exist in the minds of its followers, with some ideas being more core (i.e. believed to be part of the concept by more people) and some more fringe.
So, answering the question of whether Islam is homophobic (rather than was or has been historically) is just a matter of determining what beliefs/values with respect to homosexuality its followers attribute to it. I imagine Mahmoud would attribute his homophobia to the religion.
As you suggest, it could very well be the case that the Muslims who are homophobic have come to those beliefs due to their material conditions of their place of birth rather than the prevailing religion in the region. But then, insofar as such homophobic people consider themselves Muslims, and attribute such beliefs to being a value of such Islam, then Islam becomes/is homophobic.
Your response to me seems more interested in the question of whether Islam “causes” people to be homophobic. But that’s a distinct question from whether Islam is homophobic.
Separately, if you want to argue that Islam is only homophobic if it “causes” people to be homophobic, then I don’t see why it has to be “the more probable cause” for a person’s homophobia in order to be homophobic. Surely there can be many different causes for why some particular person might be homophobic? If the material conditions of their place of birth is the driving cause for their homophobia, but a religion came in with the assist, (that is, it is not the “most probable cause”) I see no reason to say that such religion is not homophobic.
There’s a few religious people on the website, I don’t know why you would imagine anything specific.
There are still fundamental truths about dogmas that can be found. If we are going to imagine here, as a non-muslim baby leftist, I can’t imagine peaceful fascist ideologies, while I can imagine non homophobic Islam.
The question of what something is, unless specified otherwise, always includes was and will be. Even if you could demonstrate that Islam is currently homophobic, (and I don’t think you were that specific in your original statement) as a whole it seems to be an unjust representation. Doubly so because it’s a faith, and voluntarily or not ends up being a proxy for the individuals that hold it.
While I’m neither a Muslim nor a scholar, I think it’s important to draw a line between fundamentalist, Wahhabi interpretations of Islam like those the west has backed (the US and then the UK with the house of Saud) and the overwhelming majority of Islamic history as well as the breadth of its countless living, breathing cultures, traditions, and interpretations/schools of thought nowadays.
And of course, we also have to look at the cultural context of reactionary Islam (or “”“Islam”“” the way it has been twisted by Daesh/ISIS as an example of particularly wretched strain which to my understanding the Muslim community doesn’t want to be associated with- akin to how any halfways sensible Christians, and certainly all the early Christians would have looked on in absolute horror at the “prosperity gospel” and other wretched takes from the west) came to be, and why it came to be so prominent- as said, I’m not a scholar on any of this, but the religious (not necessarily reactionary- but identity-based defense) resistance to literal, violent, dehumanizing colonialism was something found across the entire world, from the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh’s rebellion and short-lived state against the US, to the Boxer Rebellion with its “bulletproof” superstitions (probably exaggerated nowadays, but still) and the Taiping revolution, to Irish resistance to prior and ongoing colonialism by the Brits, and- in Islam’s case- while I won’t claim to know the most on the subject as always- through their own anti-imperialist movements and teachers like al-Afghani and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc (in regards to religious responses- of course secular ones also existed).
Look at the history of the Islamic world, and time after time, a predictable pattern shows up ever since the Cold War started, arguably even earlier with the Brits backing Wahhabis over pan-Arab and secularists.
said i would comment and here we are. seeing some pretty reductive and dangerous rhetoric and i fear that the majority of this site that has little to no experience in the topic will regurgitate something they heard here without crit.
i grew up muslim and queer, used to go to quran and sunday school and the masjid every friday. i myself have a complicated relationship with islam but though i have left the faith many times and no longer practice in a mass, i still consider myself muslim but also mix other faiths and my personal practices in.
of course there IS misogyny and homophobia. just like when i go to school or work in a christian majority area, and hear the most insane out of pocket misogyny and homophobia and transphobia with the most casual of energy.
to single out muslims as morbidly and uniquely intense or cruel compared to christians, jews, and even atheists is reductive thinking and heavily prejudiced. to not even mention the passing, casual, but incredibly charged and hateful crimes of the real majority reveals indoctrination of anglo supremacy.
did you know islam has a long history of LGBT playing important and positive roles in society before colonial interference in my home country? what about sufiism? did you know the muslim world has had women leader!s! before the christian/atheist dominated west? there are also many progressive muslim scholars, just like there are progressive jewish or christian or atheist scholars.
wahhabiism, the extreme and most bigoted/hateful school of islam that we often associate with extremism and hate, was only made popular in the last 100 years, still a minority of the overarching religion, and guess who funded and encouraged these groups to the platform they have now?
i’m not dismissing anyone’s lived experience. i have suffered at the hands of bigoted muslims of course. and i have suffered at the hands of bigoted everything else with no religious motivation even more. that bigotry and hate comes from a personal or cultural level and it gets wrapped and disguised in islam by those with an agenda. i have also been the most radically and deeply accepted by some muslim peers. the cultural habits of a group of people doesn’t reflect on a religion. even the experience of arabs =/= the experience of all muslims. when i see arabs borderline enslaving people from my homeland and branding them with second class citizenship and taking away their ability to leave, people that look like me, would it be fair of me to claim for all others that have never experienced it that arabs specifically promote slavery and a tiered society?
we just cannot make sweeping generalizations where we apply what we’ve experience behind closed doors in one household to entire populations of people and shove those bigoted harmful actions under the brand of islam, and not even consider the closed-door practices of nonmuslims.
this entire thread has made me deeply deeply uncomfortable to engage on this site. i’m not fully stepping away but i will proceed with extreme caution moving forward
to single out muslims as morbidly and uniquely intense or cruel compared to christians, jews, and even atheists is reductive thinking and heavily prejudiced. to not even mention the passing, casual, but incredibly charged and hateful crimes of the real majority reveals indoctrination of anglo supremacy.
This is always my main take away as well. Just a reminder the number one ad trump is running is “I hate Trans people. Vote for me.”
Not only that, wahhabiism was also directly spread by Saudi Arabia with assistance from the so it didn’t grow organically either
Also I remember reading that the founder of wahhabiism was actually a euro playing at being Laurence of Arabia but I don’t know how accurate that part is
Thank you for honestly answering, and yes some of the comments have been disappointing. I don’t think it represents the majority of Hexbear users though (I hope). I will say that some of the responses are very uncharacteristic, and Islamophobia is not usually tolerated here.
