From Bay Windows
by Ethan Jacobs
associate editor
Thursday May 15, 2008
As an adolescent questioning his sexuality while growing up in Qatar in the 1990s, Mohammed El-Khatib found the homophobic attitudes of his parents, particularly his father, toxic. His parents were secular Arabs whose views on homosexuality were strongly informed by Western attitudes, and his father would complain that homosexuality was unnatural and a "biological defect." To escape this rhetoric El-Khatib found refuge in a place that might seem counterintuitive to many LGBT people: the local mosque. El-Khatib said that while homosexuality was frowned upon by the clergy, they counseled him that it was a temporary phase rather than a permanent pathology.
"I had to choose the lesser of two evils. There were my parents ... versus people telling me there is spiritual redemption, that it's just a phase, that there's a way out, and I believed that. ... Western homophobia is much more toxic, much more virulent than homophobia in Islam," said El-Khatib.
On May 18 El-Khatib and other local LGBT Muslims will give their perspectives on Islam and LGBT identity at a panel discussion sponsored by the Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association (MASALA) at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The discussion will follow a screening of A Jihad for Love, a film by Parvez Sharma documenting the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims struggling to reconcile their faith and their sexuality. For many of Sharma's subjects this conflict is a matter of life or death; gay men from Egypt and Iran, which criminalize homosexuality, are forced to flee and live in exile. To provide a counterpoint to the harsh realities depicted in the film MASALA, which is co-sponsoring the screening as part of the MFA's Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival, will be hosting a panel discussion to give viewers perspectives from local LGBT Muslims whose experiences are far different from those of the men and women in Sharma's film.
Imtiyaz Hussein, another of the panelists and the founder of MASALA, said that he hopes to show the audience that Islam's response to homosexuality is not monolithic. Hussein, who was born in Tanzania to Indian parents and who grew up in Toronto before coming to Boston for college, said that growing up within the Ismaili sect of Islam he faced no conflict between his religion and his sexuality. Hussein said the Ismaili sect, a branch of the Shia community that follows a spiritual leader called the Aga Khan, allows for multiple interpretations of sacred texts, and that openness has allowed adherents with more liberal views on issues like homosexuality and women's rights to take part as full members of the Ismaili community. When Hussein, who lives in Jamaica Plain, first began attending the local jamaatkhaana (mosque) in college, he brought his boyfriend with him to the congregation's celebrations. He said he is one of about a half-dozen LGBT members of the congregation who are more or less out of the closet.
"Today there's a good more than a handful, six or seven, out-to-varying-degrees people in the congregation here. And for the most part people are fine with that. ... I found a lot of freedom, especially over time, to be myself, and I've found the community here in Boston to be pretty receptive," said Hussein.
For Saadia Toor, who was born in Pakistan and who teaches sociology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, there was no conflict between her Muslim and queer identities because she began to explore her sexuality long after she had left behind her Muslim faith. She said when her friend Nikhil Aziz, the organizer of the panel, asked her to participate she initially declined, saying that since she is no longer a believing Muslim she did not fit the bill.
"I was like, I can't because when I was a believing Muslim I wasn't queer ... and by the time I realized I was queer I was no longer a believing Muslim," said Toor.
Yet for Toor the decision to leave behind her faith had nothing to do with sexuality; instead she said she felt that her faith conflicted with her rational worldview, and rationality won out.
Toor said that she travels to Pakistan about once a year, where she has a handful of lesbian friends, some of whom live openly within a small feminist community in the Islamabad area.
"They're very open within our community of friends. ... Obviously I managed to find them all, that's the way these things work in smaller community spaces, but it's not something known in the larger public," said Toor.
She said that while she thought Sharma's film was well made, she worries that by focusing the film on the apparent conflict between Islam and homosexuality it gives viewers the sense that the religion is uniquely homophobic.
"What I would have liked to see embedded within, it should have been a film about religion and sexuality, and religion and homosexuality, because the issues that were coming up were not specific to Islam," said Toor.
For El-Khatib, his relationship to Islam began to change after he moved to Boston and became more deeply involved with the gay community. He said most gay men he has met have had very secular values, and they were uncomfortable with open displays of faith.
"For someone who's Muslim who says, 'Excuse me, I don't drink,' or, 'I have to go pray now, it's seven o'clock,' while people are drinking martinis, people just start looking at you," said El-Khatib.
As a consequence El-Khatib said over time he has grown less observant as a Muslim, which he viewed as an unfortunate but necessary trade-off to becoming more integrated into the gay community.
"Here, to find that being Muslim and being gay puts you at odds from the gay community at large, because it requires so much from you, it's such a pervasive part of your lifestyle that you've got to be Muslim or you can't be something else. ... I think that's how it played out. I read the Koran, I'm theologically engaged with my religion, but I'm not as much a practicing Muslim as I'd want to be," said El-Khatib. He said despite the initial negative reaction towards his religion within the gay community he has actively worked to become part of the community, volunteering for the past several years with the Boston Pride Committee and AIDS Action's Male Center.
Hussein said he hopes the panel discussion shows audience members that the stories depicted in Sharma's film are not the whole story.
"One of the things we really wanted to do with the panel is have people who could convey some of the diversity in Islam and have positive experiences of people being able to reconcile multiple identities," said Hussein.
A Jihad for Love screens at the Museum of Fine Arts May 18 at 3:45 p.m., with the panel discussion to follow. For tickets visit www.mfa.org.
Ethan Jacobs can be reached at ejacobs@baywindows.com
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