Gay Muslims Struggle to Reconcile Faith, Sexuality

From the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, CA

Gay Muslims struggle to reconcile faith, sexuality

By Phillip Zonkel, Staff writer
Article Launched: 08/07/2008

Salman Husainy was distraught.

The gay Pakistani native, who grew up in Central California, was struggling to reconcile his Muslim faith - which is an integral part of his life - with his sexuality, which is condemned by his faith.

At the same time, the then 18-year-old was pressured by family expectations to marry, have kids and pass on the family name.

"I tried to suppress it as much as I could. I wanted to make my family happy. But it didn't work," says the 33-year-old Long Beach resident. "I felt like I was suffocating inside."

Husainy found solace away from home when he attended the University of California at Irvine. He was able to think independently of his family and faith and ready to confront himself, he says.

Through friends and a local gay-support group, Husainy says he met other gay Pakistanis and Muslim people who were experiencing, or had experienced, similar conflicted emotions.

Within a year or so, Husainy reconciled his faith and sexuality, he says.

"I discovered I could be Muslim and gay and proud of who I am," he says. "All of these identities can be interrelated. I didn't have to give up any of them and live life in neatly packaged boxes."

Husainy's struggle isn't isolated, according to a new film.

"A Jihad for Love," which opened Friday at Laemmle's Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood, is possibly the world's first feature documentary on gay Muslims. It introduces viewers to Muslims who share their internal strife of uniting their faith with their sexuality.

The movie was filmed in 12 countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, France, India and South Africa, and in nine languages, by director Parvez Sharma, 34, a gay Muslim filmmaker born and raised in India who now resides in New York City.

The movie was filmed in 12 countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, France, India and South Africa, and in nine languages, by director Parvez Sharma, 34, a gay Muslim filmmaker born and raised in India who now resides in New York City.

Since Sharma didn't receive permission to shoot in several countries, he shot many interviews posing as a tourist filming innocuous footage.

Viewers hear poignant stories from a gay imam in South Africa, an Egyptian man who spent at least a year in prison - and says he was raped - for being gay before fleeing to Paris, and four young men who fled for their lives from Iran and are living as refugees in Turkey.

Gay people can be executed in at least six Muslim countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Mauritania and the northern part of Nigeria, according to the 2008 report "State-Sponsored Homophobia" from the International Gay and Lesbian Association.

In Egypt, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, gay people can be condemned to prison, where the sentence can last from one month to life, according to the IGLA report.

In Western media, a "jihad" has been narrowly equated with a "holy war," but its deeper meaning is "an inner struggle."

In "A Jihad for Love," Sharma challenges those myopic perspectives, he says.

"A very loud minority has hijacked my religion and its pulpits," Sharma says during a phone interview from his New York City residence. "To see Islam depicted every day as a faith of violence is very frustrating to me.

"This film is an intensely political act. I wanted to talk about Islam from a different point of view," Sharma says.

Despite strong emotions on each side of this potentially volatile issue, Sharma deliberately avoids attacking Islam in the film.

"If you want to create change, you can't be angry. You have to work with respect for the faith," he says. "I confront the theology with humanity.

"This film takes the traditional gay documentary about coming out and turns it upside-down," Sharma says. "It's not about coming out as a gay person. It's about coming out as a Muslim, as a person of faith."

That journey toward reconciliation mirrored the experiences of Husainy and other gay Muslims living in the Los Angeles area, who have been supported in their coming out by Satrang, a social, cultural and support group for South Asian gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Formed in the mid-1980 s, the organization was co-founded by Mushtaque Jivani, a gay Pakistani Muslim who recognized the need to combat the isolation, confusion and alienation endured by gay Muslims.

More than 20 years later, Jivani says gay Muslims, particularly Pakistanis and Indians, in the L.A. area have achieved impressive strides in their struggle for acceptance. On Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, Satrang participated in a march in the heart of Little India in Artesia.

"What I thought 20 years ago isn't true now," says the 59-year-old Long Beach resident. "I thought we would be outcasts forever, but now we are part of mainstream society."

Husainy's Muslim parents also have accepted their son's homosexuality and have a "wonderful relationship" with his Indian boyfriend, Husainy says. They frequently talk with him on the phone and have embraced him as a part of the family, he says.

"It was wonderful to get their acceptance," Husainy says. "At the end, did I break my family's expectations? No, I shared a part of me that they didn't know, and they've come to terms with it.

"I'm still the son they wanted me to be," Husainy says. "I'm honorable and successful."

The Queer and the Qur'an

From the Williamette Week Online - Portland, OR - August 6, 2008

The Queer and the Qur'an

Ali is gay. And Muslim. Can he be both?

BY BYRON BECK
DOUBLE LIFE: Ali struggles with being gay and Muslim.


DOUBLE LIFE: Ali struggles with being gay and Muslim.
IMAGE: Tim Gunther

"ALI" IS LIVING THE GAY GOOD LIFE.

At 29, 150 pounds and 5-foot-10, he has the looks of a male model: piercing brown eyes, the thin outline of a beard, glistening studs in each ear and the shaved, fit body of someone who works out.

He and his partner, "Bill," who works in advertising, live in a lavish condominium in Northwest Portland. They travel often, collecting art and artifacts from across the globe. They drive nice cars, sport designer threads, eat at the best restaurants and are seen at all the right events.

In certain circles, Ali is called a "power gay," or "A-list gay," not unlike the local restaurateurs, doctors, and other queer power brokers of Portland. You see them every second Tuesday of the month at "Salon Q," a mixer—Bill is one of the organizers—for affluent gay guys that's become a de facto queer "networking" community.

And although Ali may look like he worships at the temple of all that is gay, none of that really matters.

That's because Ali is a devout Muslim. And to Muslims, queer is not just wrong—it is wicked.

"I'd be just as happy to live a humble life as it is written in the Qur'an," says Ali, who in many ways is a devout Muslim. He prays several times a day. He doesn't eat pork. He celebrates Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. His life is full of the customs of his faith, including the ritual cleansing of the body prior to one of five daily prayers. He follows Islamic teachings religiously.

And he knows very well what the Qur'an says about homosexuality.

"It is wrong," he said.

It's the reason Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a group of students at Columbia University last year: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."

Even in 2008, in a progressive city like Portland, there are gays who remain in the closet: They don't want their employer or co-workers to find out; they worry their families or friends might not understand. Sometimes it has to do with the fact they haven't come to terms with it themselves.

Ali has a different reason he stays—and will continue to stay—in the shadows. He knows his religion could denounce him or, in some countries, something much worse. Gays in the Middle East have been arrested, stoned, beheaded or hanged in the public square (it was widely reported this was the fate of two gay teens in Iran in 2005). This summer there have been several arrests of men who've reportedly displayed gay behavior in Middle Eastern countries.

That said, it's not the fear of death that concerns Ali.

His fears run much deeper. If he were to come out as a gay Muslim, he would lose things dearer to him than his own life: family, community, identity.

IN THE SUBURBAN HILLS OF SOUTHWEST PORTLAND, 10 minutes from downtown and not far from Interstate 5 and a strip mall that includes a McDonald's and a Starbucks, stands a two-story building surrounded by a white picket fence.

This is the home of the Islamic Center of Portland, Masjed As-Saber—the largest of seven mosques in the greater Portland area. Worshipers from about 40 countries gather here to pray and commune. In 2002, the mosque made national headlines when some of its leaders, known as the "Portland Seven," an alleged terror cell made up of local Muslims, tried to join al-Qaeda forces in their fight against the U.S. military and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Sheik Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye is the Somali-born imam, or spiritual leader, of Masjed As-Saber. Kariye was arrested by the Joint Terrorism Task Force on Sept. 8, 2002, as he tried to leave the U.S. for Dubai. He was held for allegedly having traces of TNT on his luggage, an accusation later proved unfounded in tests by the FBI. He was charged with illegal use of a Social Security number and unlawful possession of government documents. Kariye eventually pleaded guilty to fraud charges in March 2003 and was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine.

Despite his notoriety, Kariye remains one of the most influential Muslim leaders in the Portland area. And he is quite clear about the conflict between Islam and homosexuality.

"I don't understand how anyone could say they are gay and Muslim. It is not compatible with our teachings," said Kariye from inside the mosque. After thoughtful consideration, the skullcapped, heavily bearded imam said, "If someone was to claim they were gay, they would not be allowed to be a Muslim anymore."

The imam, who doesn't see why there should be a separation of church and state, went on to say Muslims view the acceptance of homosexuality as one of the downfalls of Western civilization.

In fact, in an interview with WW on Wednesday, July 30, he was asked if it was OK to kill gays. "Yes," he said, "our teachings say it's OK."

The next day, when this reporter read him back his quotes, he said the reporter had misunderstood his words.

MOST MAJOR RELIGIONS FROWN ON HOMOSEXUALITY. That said, few faiths are as rigid as Islam.

The hadith, which are statements ascribed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, contain numerous statements about homosexuality. One such passage, attributed to Muhammad in his farewell speech, says, "Whoever has intercourse with a woman and penetrates her rectum, or with a man, or with a boy, will appear on the Last Day stinking worse than a corpse; people will find him unbearable until he enters hellfire, and God will cancel all his good deeds."

By contrast, members of some faiths are moving slowly to acceptance of gays and lesbians. The Metropolitan Community Church—an international fellowship of Christian congregations with 250 member groups in 23 countries—specifically reaches out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families and communities. Even the Episcopalian Church has elected a gay bishop.

Judaism has in many cases become sympathetic to homosexuality. "There has been a massive policy shift in the Conservative Jewish world," says Sandi DuBowski, director of the 2001 documentary Trembling Before G-d, about gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. "They now permit ordaining gay and lesbian rabbis and same-sex marriages. But it's up to the actual rabbinical seminary, synagogue and communal organizations. Not all of them are that open."

Tara Wilkins, who is a lesbian, is executive director of the Community of Welcoming Congregations, a statewide coalition of nearly 100 faith-based organizations in Oregon that reach out to gays and lesbians. The group's members include Quakers, Mormons, Jews and Methodists, but no Muslims.

"Like Islam, Christianity is struggling to figure out how to be faithful in the 21st century. In a word, it's shifting," says Wilkins. "But all [religions] are not created equal in their position on homosexuality."

Professor Norman Metzler, chair of the Division of Theology at Concordia University, a Christian college in Portland, says, "I know Islam to be generally more restrictive [than other religions] about homosexuality."

Adds Paul Powers, associate professor of religious studies and a specialist in Islam at Lewis & Clark College: "Same-sex sex acts have been a human practice forever, but prior to the past 200 years, there is no religion on the planet that even considered the possibility of homosexuality in the way we think of it today in the West. Yes, it's true that Muslims both in America and the rest of the world have trouble accepting this version of homosexuality."

Is Islam the least tolerant? "Saying that Muslims are the worst," says Powers, "gives us a false sense of comfort about how tolerant the world is today."

ALI IS WELL AWARE OF HIS FAITH'S ATTITUDE about his lifestyle. It's the reason he has yet to visit a local mosque, even though he's lived here for two years. It's also why he doesn't want to use his real name.

Which raises the question: If Ali is gay, why does he continue his devotion to a faith that rejects and renounces his sexuality?

It's a twist on an age-old question other persecuted minorities—African-Americans, women—have faced throughout history. What do you do when your faith considers you a second-class citizen?

"It's all about my purpose in life," says Ali. "The world is evil; my [faith] gives me something to value more than myself. My passion is the shadow of my soul, my devotion is for my God, and the purpose of my life is love."

Then why continue to behave in such a fashion that so violates his faith?

"If I could, I would not choose to be gay," he says. "Why would I choose this life?"

While Ali leads something of a double life today, it pales in comparison to his upbringing.

Born in Denmark to poor, Muslim parents from Pakistan, Ali says his father was distant and abusive, he was the quintessential "mama's boy," and his family was very pious.

"My father, and sometimes my mother, would beat me if I didn't say my prayers," he recalls.

Although he felt pressure from his family to date women, which he has done, including having sex with them, he says he has known he was gay since the age of 9.

He knew he could never openly express his gayness and still be a member of his family or community.

At 19, his secret caused him to become depressed; he stopped eating and lost half his body weight.

"I went from 150 down to [close to] 75 pounds," says Ali.

Hospitalized for four months, Ali harbored thoughts of suicide. He said he would never take his own life, due in part to his faith—and some good meds.

After he got out of the hospital, he moved into his own place and lived the double life of a gay party boy and a devout Muslim son. During his early college years, he was paid by the Danish government to travel throughout Denmark and lecture on what it was like to be an "ethnic role model" (i.e., someone with darker skin, including Africans, Arabs and Indians) in Danish society. At the same time, Ali performed in Sweden as a go-go dancer at gay and straight clubs for the same fee he received to lecture.

"Every day is a double life for me," says Ali. How he speaks to his sisters (he has three who still live in Denmark) is very different from how he speaks to friends. "I have learned to keep everything separate."

For all the complications in Ali's life, the reason he came to Portland was a common one.

Ali met Bill online. Shortly after, Ali moved to Portland to be with him.

While Ali still tries to be discreet about his sexuality, he is at least partially out of the closet. He and Bill, who is not Muslim, registered as domestic partners in Oregon. Most of Ali's close friends here, including a handful of fellow Muslims, know he is gay. That said, he doesn't go to Muslim events, nor does he spend much time in gay bars. "They are so boring here," says Ali. "I'd rather go to a circuit party in Miami." As for visiting a mosque, he continues to go daily—that is, when he is home in Denmark.

"My family, and most of my Pakistani friends back home, don't know I am gay," says Ali, who is in the third year of a five-year student visa. Currently enrolled at a local college in design management, he works on campus.

Ali doesn't know what the future holds for him. He doesn't plan to return to Denmark, he doesn't want to get married to a woman, and he definitely doesn't want to come out of the closet. It is something that he believes will never happen.

Truthfully, Ali's life may not be all that much different from that of a "cafeteria Catholic" who takes communion but supports abortion rights and the death penalty, or a "Jack Mormon" who maintains his faith but doesn't always show up for church. But Ali says his faith is paramount. "My identity is being a Muslim. Before I am gay, Danish or Pakistani, I am a Muslim," says Ali. "It's my purpose in life."

At the same time, he adds, "Being gay allows me to love someone else, and feel that love in return."

DARIUS REJALI, 48, is chairman of the political science department at Reed College and author of the book "Torture and Democracy." He's Muslim. For many years, he served on the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. He's reluctant to discuss his own sexuality, for reasons he says are far more complicated than simply because his faith so completely rejects homosexuality.

Rejali believes, for Middle Easterners, there are much more important things than letting people know you are "gay." He also maintains that the benefits of faith outweigh whatever pain is caused by the fact that his faith spurns being gay.

"For Westerners, the opposite of freedom is slavery. But for most cultures, the opposite of slavery has never been freedom but community," says Rejali, by which he means that whatever loss of freedom gays suffer from Islam's rejection of homosexuality is more than made up for by the sense of community and belonging that Islam provides gays.

ALI PRAYS SEVERAL TIMES A DAY, including on the floor of his condo, where he faces Mecca. On one particular Thursday, his prayers were for his deceased mother. He knelt several times and whispered his prayers. Then he prepared an offering, which on this night was fruit. When he was done, he said, "I want to be allowed to be both gay and Muslim," though he didn't offer much hope. "I will never give up my faith, and I will never come out."

According to a 2000 report by the Pennsylvania-based Association of Religion Data Archives, there were an estimated 3,939 Muslims in three congregations in Multnomah County. Imam Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye now believes that number to be much larger - between 7,000 and 10,000.

When Bill goes to see Ali's family in Denmark, as he recently did, he goes there as his "boss."


A recent book, Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives iIn the Muslim World, follows gay Muslims in more than 20 countries. "In many of these countries, people disappear without a trace," says author Afdhere Jama.

A recent documentary about gay life in Muslim culture is titled A Jihad for Love. For six years, filmmaker Parvez Sharma followed and filmed gay Muslims in 12 countries. The film doesn't yet have a Portland screening date.

Islam is the religion of more than 1.2 billion people worldwide.

Wikipedia on legality of homosexuality: "In some Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Jordan, Indonesia or Mali, same-sex intercourse is not specifically forbidden by law.... Homosexuality, while not legal, is tolerated to some extent in Lebanon, which has a significantly large Christian minority, and has been legal in Turkey for decades."

Wikipedia on "modernization" of Islam's approach to homosexuality: "Some liberal Muslims, such as the members of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, accept and consider homosexuality as natural.... They regard Qu'ran verses condemning homosexuality as obsolete in the context of modern society, or point out that the Qu'ran speaks out against homosexual lust and is silent on homosexual love."

New Book Sheds Light on Gay Life in the Muslim World

New Book Sheds Light on Gay Life in the Muslim World

Fri Jul 25, 3:01 AM ET

Salaam Press publishes Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives
in the Muslim World by Afdhere Jama.

The book follows 33 people in 22 countries.

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) July 25, 2008 -- Following
thirty-three people in twenty-two countries, Afdhere
Jama paints a complicated picture in "Illegal
Citizens", subtitled "Queer Lives in the Muslim
World."

"I set out to tell the stories of people suffering
everywhere," says Jama, who is the editor of Huriyah,
a queer Muslim magazine. "Instead, I was confronted
with diverse lives including happy ones--sometimes in
places I never imagined."

Some of the stories are touching, others completely
surprise. Like the story about a young man in Iran who
clubs all night although he is the son of a high-level
Ayatollah or politician and has a completely different
life during the day.

"Here were gay and lesbian Iranians doing everything
that happens in the Castro (of San Francisco) and
more," Jama says. "That blew me away because I went to
the country chasing stories about gays being harassed,
arrested and executed."

But Jama also has disturbing stories to tell like the
one about a Saudi gay man executed by his immediate
family.

"Horrible, horrible things happen," says Jama. "In
many of these countries, people disappear without a
trace. And that happens only because gay and lesbian
Muslims have no voice. They can't object to abuse
because, as far as anyone is concerned, they don't
exist."

Jama, who grew up in Somalia, says he was deeply
affected by the execution of a lesbian couple in
northern Somalia in 2001, which gave him the idea for
the book.

"I realized we had to tell these stories," he says. "I
had no idea how because I was an immigrant surviving
thousands of miles away from the Muslim countries and,
worse, I had no money. Whatever little money I was
earning, it was going directly to Huriyah, which we
had just started. How was I going to dash all over the
globe? It was discouraging."

By looking into the history of Gay Rights in the West,
Jama realized it was often the united community not
just individuals who changed the ways people saw gays
and lesbians.

"With the internet, things changed fast," says Jama.
"There was such a big community online. I could pay
for my ticket, and find people to stay with all over
the world. Suddenly I could afford to travel. It took
a long time to finish but it was with the help of
countless people."

People he thanks one by one in the book's
acknowledgment. But he also encourages them to be more
active.

"I tell everyone to do what you can," says Jama. "I'm
not expecting someone in Saudi Arabia to be carrying
gay flags. There are many ways we can support the
community. I know of people who give runaway queers a
place to stay. That is enormous! But there are also
those who are directly involved in political
activism."

In many instances, Jama chooses to tell untold
stories. He says it is because he feels certain
communities are underrepresented.

"I'm particularly passionate about transgendered
people and gay women," says Jama. "We all know what it
is to be a gay man in Pakisan or Morocco, but how many
people have read stories of transsexuals or lesbians
in these countries? Not many."

Jama covers a lot of ground. Countries covered include
Nigeria, Lebanon, Indonesia, Bosnia, and many others
who haven't had as much exposure as some countries.
Queer Muslims in Muslim-minority countries like China,
India, Israel, and Ukraine are also included.

Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World
Afdhere Jama
ISBN-13: 9780980013887
ISBN-10: 0980013887
Publication Date: July 25, 2008.
Publisher: Salaam Press.

Wholesale available from Ingram Book Group, with
standard discounts / returnable.

Retail available from online book retailers,
bookstores, available to order and from
salaampress.com

Media Contact, including interview requests and review
copies:
Leila Hosseini
Salaam Press
1 925 281 1917
lhosseini(at)salaampress.com

Breaking Silence on Being Gay and Muslim

From ABC News - July 10, 2008

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Breaking Silence on Being Gay and Muslim

New film 'A Jihad for Love' Shows Gays and Lesbians in the Muslim World

By LARA SETRAKIAN

July 10, 2008 —

A new film about gays and lesbians in the Muslim world is challenging notions of right, wrong and religiosity in Islamic culture.

Filmmaker Parvez Sharma says his film "A Jihad For Love" is an effort to shed light on the social and spiritual struggle of homosexuals who are devout Muslims. It tells the story through personal narratives of gays across 12 countries. In the film, Sharma compiles a vision of Islamic life through the eyes of the gay faithful.

"I felt it really important to empower gay and lesbian Muslims to tell the story of Islam," Sharma told ABC News.

Sharma, who is gay, said he was driven to make the film in part by the desire to "come out as a Muslim" after Sept. 11, hoping to broaden public perception about the diversity of Islam's followers.

The stories in the film are intimate, with main characters that include a gay Imam in South Africa, a lesbian couple in Turkey, homosexuals in Egypt and a group of gay Iranians fleeing the country to seek asylum in Canada.

The characters struggle with their societies, some escaping persecution and abuse. They have strong bonds with their families, but forge a second family among other gay believers.

Muhsin Hendricks, an Islamic scholar in South Africa, openly and actively engages other Muslims in discussions about homosexuality. Hendricks came out on his radio show, setting off an angry and threatening response from listeners of the show.

"I think Muhsin should be thrown off a mountain or burned or something like that," we hear one caller say. "We should bring back the death penalty for this guy. He's bringing down the name of Islam," says another.

In the film, Hendricks voices the scholarly opposition, trying to overturn an interpretation of Islam as categorically against homosexuality. He argues that the book of Lot, with its condemnation of Sodom and Gomorrah, condemns sinners for molestation and rape -- not simply for being gay.

"We cannot find answers within orthodox Islamic thinking. We have to use one of the principles of Islam, 'Ijtihad,' meaning independent reasoning, to find a place for us within Islam," he says. In opposition, another fellow Muslim in the film accuses Hendricks of interpreting Islam to suit his life choices.

Hendricks describes how he lived before coming out, married to a woman in hopes that traditional family life would change his sexual preference. His life as a closeted gay Muslim was cloaked with depression and secrecy, which he sees as a common and potentially suicidal combination for gay Muslims who bury their sexual preference.

It is Hendricks who coins the term "love jihad" in the film, referring to the inner struggle of gay Muslims reconciling their faith with their sexuality.

In another narrative Kiymet, a lesbian living in Turkey, describes how she bridges the two.

"My atheist friends always ask me, how can you be a lesbian and have such religious faith? For me each has its own place. If God has planted this love in my heart, then it is legitimate," Kiyamet says. She lives in relative freedom, but laments the closeted lives of other lesbians in Turkey.

"Women like us are captives in another life. We are prisoners. There are girls in the southeast [of Turkey] and remote areas who are lesbians but cannot lead lesbian lives."

In another scene, three lesbians discuss the Koran and its implications for women.

"The Prophet Muhammad did an enormous number of things so that women could participate in public affairs, including politics. For me, Muhammad was a feminist," says one woman.

She goes on to describe how she would profess her lifestyle while speaking to God on judgment day.

"I have loved women and it was not a sin, because my loving a woman caused no harm. I only loved Allah, my one God, I only loved.'"

Matters of Faith and Sexuality

Sharma says it is the religious commitment of the film's characters that makes the strongest impact.

"Muslims who watched the film actually also are very surprised by the intense religiosity of the people profiled in the film. When you show to a Muslim a person who is as devout, if not more devout than them, then you are presenting a conundrum," Sharma told ABC News.

"You are presenting someone who is living by the Quran, is living by the book, and is still deeply struggling with this idea of their homosexuality."

Given the sensitive topic, Sharma put himself at personal risk by making the film. As he traveled through the Muslim world, he sometimes posed as a tourist or charity worker. He made copies of his raw footage, in case the originals were confiscated by authorities.

Now that "Jihad for Love" is made, it is showing in the West and in countries with significant Muslim populations, like India and Turkey. Sharma has yet to show it anywhere in the Arab world.

"I certainly don't imagine that the film is going to show in a movie theater in the region, but I think in universities, private homes, conferences, and maybe the film festival in Dubai," Sharma told ABC News, adding that he was turned down from last year's film festival for fear of a public backlash.

"There will be a way to show the film, but when you're working with religious orthodoxy it is critical to work with respect and with a lot of patience."

Haifa Jedea contributed to this article.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

A Plea for Muslims Who Are Gay

From the Kansas City Star - June 10, 2008

A plea for Muslims who are gay

A Jihad for Love" is a documentary about young gay and lesbian Muslims' struggles with their faith. Jihad means "struggle" in Arabic and particularly the struggle we have within ourselves to do the right thing.

The movie will be shown as part of the weeklong Kansas City Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which starts June 27.

When I previewed it, I had two overwhelming and paradoxical reactions.

The first was how incredibly beautiful Islam is. I would not expect most non-Muslim viewers to have this reaction. But I have been to some of the sacred sites the movie shows, and I have participated in some of the Muslim rituals.

I cannot get out of my mind the tenderness and devotion of a lesbian couple who trace calligraphy in stone of a passage from the Qur'an as they seek to find their place in their faith.

In a way, the film parallels, say, some Roman Catholics who love the church with its music, liturgy and sacraments, who follow a loving Jesus, for whom the warmth of family embrace is molded by reverential practice of the faith, but who are officially "disordered" because they love someone of their own sex.

My second reaction was grief at seeing devout young people suffering, with their lives threatened in the name of their faith. I don't like hearing an imam talk about stoning and beheading as punishment for loving another human being.

As the film follows individuals and pairs in their jihad for love, we see fear, curiosity, anguish, grief, lamentation; but because they are unwilling to abandon their faith, the anger is restrained.

Parvez Sharma made the film in secrecy and obscures some of the faces. The stories unfold in India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and France, with an escape to Canada. We learn about the harsh traditional Islamic law but also Islamic interpretations that permit, and even legitimize, same-sex relationships.

It is ironic that Islam contains a long and at times honored tradition of same-sex relationships. The film includes a Pakistani holiday celebrating one such couple. But when the West colonized many Muslim countries, anti-gay laws were adopted.

The 81-minute movie shows at 4:45 p.m. June 29 at the Tivoli Cinemas. After the film, in cooperation with OpenCircle, I will lead a panel and audience discussion. Panelists are Josef Walker (Christian), Ahmed El-Sherif (Muslim) and Lynn Barnett (Jewish).

I'll ask, "How does the jihad you see portrayed in this movie compare with struggles you know about that people in your own faith have dealt with?"

Muslims Discuss Views on Homosexuality (in Boston, MA)

From India New England

Issue Date: June 1-15, 2008, Posted On: 6/9/2008

Muslims discuss views on homosexuality

By KARA BECKER

Muslims talk about being gay and religious at a forum at the MFA in Boston. Courtesy photo.

Imtiyaz Hussein says that coming out as a gay man who is also a Muslim was never a problem. But for Mohammed El-Khatib, whose parents hoped he would pass on the family name, it was. Saadia Toor, on the other hand, said she feels that gay Muslims face challenges similar to all religious followers — stereotypes, misunderstandings and resistance.

The three spoke on May 18 about what it means to be "Queer and Muslim" during a panel discussion at the Museum of Fine Arts  in Boston that was hosted by the Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association. The talk followed a screening of the documentary "A Jihad for Love," a film about the hidden life of being Muslim and gay.

Hussein, who is the founder of the Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association, said that he reconciled his faith and his sexual preference early on.

"I was always as certain of my faith as my sexuality," said Hussein, a native of Tanzania who is of Indian descent.

"There were never really any negative messages growing up, I was kind of left alone to see if I could personally reconcile with having the two things as part of my identity simultaneously."

After he came to terms with his identity, he said, being gay and Muslim was never a problem for him.

Toor, however, said that homosexual Muslims often deal with stereotypes and misunderstanding from others.

"Being a Muslim queer is always scary because you carry this burden of representation; you're always in this position of worrying that whatever you say is being represented correctly —  you always have to contextualize and qualify everything," said Toor, who was Muslim but left the faith to become a communist. A native of Lahore, Toor is a member of the Pakistani political-action group Women's Action Forum and teaches sociology and women's studies at The College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She said that panel discussions, such as "Queer and Muslim" can overlook the fact that homosexual followers of Judeo-Christian religions can face challenges just like gay Muslims do.

El-Khatib suggested that the Muslim faith has provided him both problems and solutions. The son of a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father, he said that he grew up in a homophobic household, even though his parents are secular.

"I actually turned to Islam and the Muslim religion for answers, and they were more open to the idea than I had originally thought," said El-Khatib, who was born in Lebanon and moved to the United States in 1999. His father, however, opposed homosexuality and viewed it as a "disease" and felt that that gays "should be burned."

When he first came out to his mother, he said, the first thing she said was that he had to get married. Procreation and the passing on of the family name were important to his parents, he said. Because he was family-oriented, he said, their reaction was a difficult one.

The other panelists also said coming out was a challenge. "I always wondered, why do people care so much about who I choose to sleep with?" said Toor. "At the heart of it is concern about existing kinship structures and where they fit in. It has to do with the perpetuation of structures of power, which are usually patriarchal. It's all about who has the power to say things and who gets circulated and heard."

Hussein agreed that coming out can be difficult and noted nuances of doing so among his Muslim peers. The Muslims he knows, he said, accept that he is gay, until his lifestyle violates the family norms of the faith.

But why? asked El-Khatib. "Our sexuality is but one frame of the entire picture. Why does it matter if I'm gay? I eat with you, I pray with you, I go to mosque. Instead of turning away, we should do the opposite; we will fight and stand by our faith, regardless of what people think."

Queer & Muslim Panel in Boston - May 18, 2008

Museum of Fine Arts Gay & Lesbian Film Festival Sunday May 18, 3:45pm

Co Sponsored by MASALA (Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association) Film shown at 3:45pm in the Remis Auditorium Purchase Tickets Followed By: Queer & Muslim A panel discussion sponsored by MASALA Riley seminar room recent articles in the press Using the film A Jihad for Love -- screened before the panel -- as a starting point, panelists will discuss what it might mean to be Muslim and Queer, especially in 2008 in the context of an increasingly globalized world. The panelists coming from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa represent to some extent the range of diversity within Islam as well as what it means to be Muslim (and Queer) from being practitioners to agnostics to atheists to those who simply identify culturally as Muslim. Organizer Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association (MASALA) is a social group based in Boston that provides a safe and supportive environment to New England based Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans, and Questioning South Asians (people from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet; and from the global South Asian Diaspora). MASALA's events are open to all unless otherwise specified.MASALA takes pride in building coalitions with Boston area organizations, including South Asian organizations such as the Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, and others like the Massachusetts Asians & Pacific Islanders for Health (www.mapforhealth.org). MASALA works to dismantle homophobia and discrimination and to help foster general awareness and acceptance about the Asian-Pacific Islander LGBT community. Panelists: Imtiyaz Hussein is from Toronto, Canada via Tanzania (where he was born) via India (where his family originates from, in Kutch). Imtiyaz founded MASALA in 1994 in an effort to connect his "Indian-ness" with his "gayness." Formerly Chair of the Board of AIDS Housing Corporation, he has worked in a number of community organizations such as GLAD before going to business school and moving into the corporate world. He was raised as an Ismaili (part of the Shia tradition) Muslim and is out in the local Ismaili jamaatkhaana (mosque), and doesn't see any conflict in being gay and Muslim. "Allah created all of us and loves all of his creatures." Saadia Toor was born and bred in Lahore, Pakistan. She is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at The College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is a member of the Womens Action Forum, Pakistan. She has written and spoken on issues of gender/sexuality, nationalism, globalization, imperialism, Islam and the war on terror. "When I was Muslim I was not Queer, now I'm Queer but not Muslim." Mohammed El-Khatib was born in Lebanon and lived in Qatar before moving to the US in 1999. He is of mixed Lebanese and Palestinian heritage as well as half Sunni and half Shia. Mohammed, who has a degree in public policy works with the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston. Raised in a secular setting, he came out to himself at 17 and found faith as a way to reconcile with his homosexuality. "Islam gave me the strength to face a homophobic home and social life. The irony is that since coming out, I've found it harder to practice Islam without feeling like I'm in personal conflict with my identity as a gay man." Moderator: Dr. Rakshanda Saleem is a local activist involved in a range of social justice issues including LGBT rights and those focused on South Asia and the Middle East. A long-time ally of MASALA, she is a neuropsychologist and teaches at Harvard Medical and Lesley University. She was born and raised in Rawalpindi, Pakistan and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Struggles of Gay Muslims

From the New York Blade - May 17, 2008

Parvez Sharma's documentary 'Jihad for Love' follows gay Muslims in 12 countries. It opens May 21 at IFC Center in New York City.

Struggles of Gay Muslims

Local filmmaker Parvez Sharma discusses homosexual Muslims—and the trouble with U.S. activists who try to help them.

By TRENTON STRAUBE
Friday, May 09, 2008

Parvez Sharma's documentary, "A Jihad for Love," traverses 12 countries and nine languages as it follows the lives of disparate Muslims who try to reconcile their sexuality with their faith. Produced by "Trembling Before G-d"'s Sandi DuBowski and shot during five years, "Jihad" offers a rare glimpse into a complex and controversial world.

After debuting in 15 countries, the film plays in New York starting Wednesday, May 21. Sharma, a gay immigrant Muslim from India now living in New York, spoke with The Blade about misperceptions Americans have about the world's fastest growing religion (Islam is also the second most popular religion, after Christianity).


"Jihad" covers a variety of Muslims, from those living under extreme sharia law to those practicing the mystical Sufism. Is it a challenge for American audiences to put each person's story in its proper cultural context? Even the term "jihad" is usually interpreted in the U.S. as "holy war" though you're reclaiming it to mean "inner struggle."

My primary audience was a Muslim audience, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to make a film that was respectful of Islam. I knew that if I could get to Muslims, I could open doors to other audiences. That's what the film has been doing: Educating people tremendously about the complexities of Islam.

I try to present Islam with a little bit of sanity and with a perspective only an insider Muslim can have. I tried hard not to attack Islam. If I did, it would have been an angrier film and would not have won any credibility with any Muslims.

This is not a traditional coming-out film. We're all coming out as Muslims. The primary identity of all these people—including the filmmaker—is religion.

That begs the question, Why stay in a religion that condemns you?

Answering that was my primary impetus to make the film. So many of us as queer people have abandoned religion completely. Islam calls upon you to be part of a family and culture outside of the mosque. So abandoning religion is a difficult choice—you're abandoning religion, family, culture, a lot of things that go with being a Muslim.

In your film, a gay South African Muslim challenges the anti-gay interpretations of scripture, saying, as many liberal Christians do today, that Sodom and Gomorrah isn't about homosexuality, but about rape or hospitality. Are more Muslims open to newer interpretation of the Koran?

Scholars of all descriptions are engaged in looking at the Koran in light of the 21st century. Islam maybe has more ground to cover in a modern context [compared to Christianity and Judaism]. But a lot of it is happening.

The last battle that remains to be won—around marriage—is true of all religions. In my lifetime, I don't see the Christian church or Vatican or Islam saying homosexuality is okay. What I think is going to happen is people will look at the religious text, for example of Sodom and Gomorrah, and come up with readings that are different.

You've shown the film around the world, recently in Canada, Australia and Turkey. Have reactions varied?

Toronto reacted from point a view of knowing a little more about Islam than Americans. In Sidney, as they were celebrating the hedonistic celebration that is Mardi Gras, people became aware of how hard it is to be gay in other places. And then in Turkey, which is 99 percent Muslim but also secular, young people said the film should be more critical.

Critical of Islam?

In Turkey, extremist Islam is making a comeback and a lot of people living in big cities like Istanbul feel threatened. They'd rather be part of the European Union than be an Islamic country that implements the headscarf. [Their criticism of the film] comes from that place that's fearful about Islam.

A lot of people make the case that the spread of Islam is bad for gay rights and human rights in general.

I don't agree with that at all. Islam is exactly the same for gay rights as Christianity or Judaism. There are only six Islamic states that implement sharia (Islamic) law, and this is where it starts becoming a problem. It is when the state starts interfering in personal sexual life. But again, I want to stress that a majority of Muslims are living outside sharia law.

Paradoxically, under even the extremist regimes, same-sex sexual encounters are not uncommon, correct?

Definitely. There's greater level of fluidity. You're not talked about if you're holding hands with another man. Or a woman with a woman. Certainly the avenues for having same-sex contact in a purely sexual context are much more easily available because many times the sexes are segregated. Sexuality is fluid and very open in most Islamic societies. The act is not associated with guilt. In Christianity, there is a lot of guilt around sex and reproduction. But if you're taking on a political identity like having a gay bar or gay pride or gay marriage, you start having a problem.

I take issue with a lot of Western activists, the ones who are bashing Iran for example, who have the arrogance to assume their models of gay liberation can be applied to this context. I know for a fact that they cannot.

Two lesbians in your documentary mention online dating. Is the Internet a popular and safe mode of gay liberation and communication?

Absolutely. Iran has the worlds' richest blogosphere. But what's also happening is that a lot of content is monitored in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. A lot of activism is happening through the Internet, which has huge advantages and disadvantages. In Egypt, the government used the Internet to entrap (and imprison) gay men. So the Internet can be freeing, but [the users] have to use judgment with whom they talk to and how they talk.

Let's talk about asylum-seekers. "Jihad" follows an Egyptian who fled to France and Iranians who head for Canada via Turkey.

People have felt the film portrays the West in more positive light, like the West means freedom automatically. I don't agree with them. You see in the film how much the Egyptian has had to struggle. It's an uncertain freedom if you seek asylum in the West post-Sept. 11 where being a Muslim refugee of any color is a problem and having a Muslim name is a problem.

Is claiming homosexual persecution a viable reason to seek asylum?

Increasingly, it has been viable because there has been a wave of gay immigration cases. I'm afraid to say not all of them are genuine.

The question is: When people from Iran start seeking asylum in a Western country, does that give the opportunity in this climate to take that agenda of Iran bashing even further? I feel that a lot of this agenda picked up by gay activists in the West is Islamophobic and Iranphobic as well. I'm not the only person saying that. Even the Human Rights Watch has exercised a lot of judgment in how these individual cases are perceived in the press.

How would you rate Western gay press' coverage of LGBT issues in countries like Iran?

The U.S. gay press for the most part has been fairly immature. It's not entirely the fault of the gay press in U.S. It's part of a climate of ignorance. The sensationalism of cases out of Iran has been problematic. We are in political and social climate in which it is fashionable to attack Islam or to attack regimes that are seen as problematic regimes. When we attack these regimes, we make it more difficult for people living within those regimes. For example, when you accuse [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad of carrying out a systematic campaign against homosexuals you make that issue visible and force them to react a certain in which they weren't doing in the past.

There needs to be a greater responsibility exercised in criticizing regimes like Iran of carrying out pogroms against homosexuals. That is not the case. Ahmadinejad has bigger fish to fry.

Ahmadinejad was publicly ridiculed in the press for his infamous statement last fall at Columbia University.

I thought that was irresponsible reporting around the semantics of his comments, which was sensationalized profoundly. What he said was, "We don't have gays like you have in the West." The statement that was reported was "We don't have gays in Iran." He's quite right because of the different context of being. How do you explain these complexities? It's going to take a huge effort of responsibility not just of the press, but of filmmakers, activists, everyone, to do that.

Are Americans receptive to learning these complexities?

I think so. I've lived in the states for eight years. I'm as proud to live here as much as I've been alarmed. But Americans are definitely responsive to learning. The release of the film will engage them. I've seen that in so many countries. I see no reason for that to not happen in a city as rich as ours.

"Jihad for Love" opens Wed., May 21, at IFC Film Center, 323 Sixth Ave. @ Third St. Visit ajihadforlove.com for details, including special events featuring the director, producer and Muslims from the film.

Being Both Queer and Muslim Proves Fodder for Discussion (in Boston)

 From the New England Blade

Being Both Queer and Muslim Proves Fodder for Discussion
Conversation Comes as MFA Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Ends

by Blake Evans
May 14, 2008

Using the film "A Jihad for Love" — screening Sunday as part of the MFA Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival — as a starting point, Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association (MASALA) will sponsor a panel discussion on what it might mean to be Muslim and Queer, especially in 2008 in the context of an increasingly globalized world, on Sunday, May 18.

The panelists, coming from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, represent to some extent the range of diversity within Islam as well as what it means to be Muslim (and Queer), from practitioners and agnostics to atheists and those who simply identify culturally as Muslim.

Panelists will include Imtiyaz Hussein, Saadia Toor, and Mohammed El-Khatib. Dr. Rakshanda Saleem, a local activist involved in a range of social justice issues including LGBT rights and those focused on South Asia and the Middle East, will moderate the discussion. Hussein founded MASALA in 1994 in an effort to connect his "Indian-ness" with his "gayness." Formerly chair of the Board of AIDS Housing Corporation, he worked in a number of community organizations before going to business school and moving into the corporate world. He doesn't see any conflict in being gay and Muslim.

"Allah created all of us and loves all of his creatures," said Hussein.
Toor is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at The College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She believes there is a divide: "When I was Muslim I was not queer," she says, "now I'm queer but not Muslim."

El-Khatib y works with the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston. Raised in a secular setting, he came out to himself at 17 and found faith as a way to reconcile with his homosexuality.

"Islam gave me the strength to face a homophobic home and social life," he says, though he also agrees with Toor that bringing together the two sides of himself has been difficult. "The irony is that since coming out, I've found it harder to practice Islam without feeling like I'm in personal conflict with my identity as a gay man."

"A Jihad for Love" screens at 3:45 p.m. in the Remis Auditorium. The panel discussion follows immediately after in the Riley Seminar Room at the Museum of Fine Arts.

        
   

A Diversity of Opinion: Being LGBT and Muslim (in Boston)

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

Gay Asians 'Marrying to Conform'

From BBC - February 8, 2008

Gay Asians 'marrying to conform'

By Naresh Puri
BBC News

Asian gays and lesbians in the UK have married people of the opposite sex in a bid to conform to traditional values and beliefs, it has been claimed.

Gay activists said these marriages happened because some members of their community felt homosexuals brought shame on their people.

They said in some cases gay and lesbian people had been beaten and abused.

The BBC has seen hundreds of people advertising on the internet for so-called marriages of convenience.


One of them is 19-year-old Rubina, from south-east England, who placed an advert on an Asian gay website.

She said: "I just want to make life easier, I want to get my family off my back, because they're pressurising me to get married.

"In my culture it's not acceptable to be gay. If I have a marriage of convenience it will give them the illusion that I'm straight and I can carry on with who I want."

Arranged marriage

She said her family thought she was leading an independent lifestyle and would soon give in to their requests for an arranged marriage.

"If you'd been raised by parents who love you, it's difficult to let people down that you care for. You don't want them to disown you, that's why I need to fit in with Asian society and have a marriage of convenience," she said.

Fazal Mahmood is a gay rights campaigner and one of a handful of Asians prepared to speak out.

He said he was pressured by his family to get married and from this relationship he had a son. He is now divorced.




We're living in a modern day society and it's wrong that this persecution carries on
Rubina


"I've seen 16 year olds and even 40 year olds being forced into marriage just to make their family and community happy," he said.

"The situation is so serious - we've heard about gays and lesbians being attacked because of their sexuality. We've even had cases where people have tried to commit suicide because Asian society will not accept or tolerate homosexuals."

Balbir Grewal, from the Guru Granth Sikh temple, in Southall, west London, said marriages of convenience were a sin.

"The whole family suffers. We are living in 2008 and it's time they should come out to the parents. Asian weddings are so expensive and then the parents have to go through the heartache of finding out that their children have lied to them.

"I've even heard that parents have died because of the shock of finding out about these pretend marriages. But for Asian gays and lesbians, the situation is very difficult.

Rubina said: "I wish that people would understand sexuality is only one part of a person and my message to parents is that being gay or lesbian does not change your child.

"People must learn more about gays and lesbians. We're living in a modern day society and it's wrong that this persecution carries on. It's unacceptable."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/7234163.stm

Published: 2008/02/08 11:17:53 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Gay Asians 'Marrying To Conform' : BBC News 24 Report

Gay or Lesbian, and Muslims Too

From Menassat

Parvez Sharma spent six years traveling throughout the Muslim world, Europe and North America documenting the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims – many of them devout – who struggle to reconcile their faith with their sexuality. Marianna Evenstein caught up with the Indian filmmaker.

 

By MARIANNA EVENSTEIN

 

R.R.

Parvez Sharma identifies himself as both gay and Muslim. He moved to the United States in 2000, but it was only after the September 11 attacks in 2001 that Sharma felt compelled to "come out" as a Muslim in the US.

"Everything in the world had changed in some ways, and my Islam made me very visible in the West," he says.

At the same time, Sharma was frustrated with the negative ways in which Islam was being portrayed in Western media post 9-11.

The making of "A Jihad for Love" allowed him to tell the "story of Islam through its most unlikely storytellers – gay and lesbian Muslims."

The subjects of Sharma's film represent the various and diverse worlds of Islam – Sunni and Shia, traditional and modern, orthodox and more secular. They include an openly gay imam in South Africa, an Egyptian who was imprisoned and tortured for being gay before fleeing to France, a lesbian couple in Turkey, and four young gay men who escaped Iran and now live in Canada.

What all of these individuals share is a continued and intense devotion to their faith. Despite the ordeals they go through, none of them chooses to abandon their beliefs.

Sharma spent a great deal of time developing a relationship of trust with his subjects, which enabled them to open up about the intensely private experiences of faith and sexuality. This in turn had a tremendous impact on Sharma personally.

Lessons about faith

"I have definitely gone through a long journey of reclaiming my faith and reclaiming my Islam through this film. I feel like I went on a journey through the many worlds of Islam. I have suffered the anguish my subjects suffered, and they taught me every day about faith."


Pervez Sharma. R.R.

According to traditional interpretations of the Qur'an, homosexuality is considered sinful and is strictly forbidden. As a result, same-sex activities are outlawed in most Islamic countries. Because Sharma knew that he would never be granted permission from Islamic governments to make a film on such a taboo subject, he often shot his material undercover.

"I pretended to be a tourist," he explains. "I was able to get remarkable access because I looked like everybody else."

Sharma's own religious identity enabled him to create a film from an insider's perspective and with a tremendous amount of respect for the faith.

"In many ways, being a Muslim enabled me to film with a Muslim lens and a great deal of understanding of Islam," says Sharma. "It would have been easy to make a film that was just critical of my religion. But I worked very hard together with my subjects to make sure that the beauty of the faith they hold so dear is documented with absolute honesty and integrity."

Jihad as internal struggle

The film's title, "A Jihad for Love," was a very deliberate choice. In the West, the concept of "jihad" has come to be associated primarily with "holy war". But "jihad" in Islamic tradition is also understood as an internal, spiritual struggle.

As Sharma explains, "We are laying claim to one of the most contested and divisive words in our vocabulary today, and saying that what the violent minority within Islam presents as jihad is certainly not what the Prophet Mohammed was talking about. Because he was talking about the greater jihad, the struggle within the self."

It is this kind of struggle that the subjects of Sharma's film are engaged in – a personal, spiritual struggle for acceptance, and ultimately for love. While there is much anguish in each of their stories, there is also a sense of hope. As the film's characters strive to reconcile their beliefs with the innate reality of their being, they succeed in negotiating a new, personal relationship to Islam. And by doing this, they offer both Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere a different kind of perspective – one that focuses on a shared humanity and bridges religious divides.

Bringing change

"A Jihad for Love" has already sparked a tremendous response from audiences at film festivals in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and the UK. While most of the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, Sharma admits that he has received a number of angry and threatening emails. But this has not deterred him from his goal of bringing the film to Muslim audiences in the Muslim world.

"Seeing the audience response and how people are embracing this film, I realize that in the next few years the film will turn into a movement," says Sharma. "We are launching a Muslim dialogue project with this film, which will be transformative and create change. I will take this film into mosques, into communities where it really matters most."

"If I can prevent a young man in Tehran or a young woman in Cairo from feeling completely isolated and alone, from contemplating suicide… give them a sense of hope to be able to exercise their sexuality but also stay true to their faith… if one person's life is changed by the film, I think I would have been victorious in some way."


More information at www.ajihadforlove.com










This article was republished with permission from Qantara.de

Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own

Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times

The crowd at Gayhane, a monthly party for Arab and Turkish gay men, lesbians and bisexuals at SO36, a Berlin nightclub. The event's name is fashioned from gay and "hane," Turkish for home.

Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times

Fatma Souad, a transgender performer and Gayhane's organizer, before dressing for a Gayhane party last week.

From the New York Times

January 1, 2008

Berlin Journal
Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own

By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another's shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital's large Muslim population.

But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.

European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.

"When you're here, it's as if you're putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun," said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.

Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.

"Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I'm a foreigner and in the other because I'm a queen," said Fatma Souad, the event's organizer and master of ceremonies. Ms. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.

Ms. Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Ms. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.

The club was packed by midnight and still had a line out the front door. On stage, Ms. Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swiveling her hips.

Under flashing colored lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coifs, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances — halay in Turkish — broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.

One of the regular D.J.'s, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and said: "You're Turkish, right? You're lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and D.J."

Ms. Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music, to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional D.J. for six years and performs all over the world.

The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Ms. Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. "We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either."

Outside the boom of loud firecrackers can be heard, the first test rounds for the annual cacophony here that leaves New Year's revelers ears' ringing. Kreuzberg has been home for decades to large populations of Turks and Kurds, many of whom have very conservative religious values. Yet they have had to share the neighborhood that formerly abutted the Berlin Wall with many counterculture types, artists and anarchists and also gays and lesbians.

According to the city's Schwules Museum, partly devoted to the history of gay people in the city and the country, "a lively homosexual subculture had developed in Berlin by the second half of the 18th century or perhaps earlier." It was known as an oasis for gay men and lesbians in the Weimar period immortalized by the writer Christopher Isherwood and in the period when West Berlin was surrounded by the wall. Today, the city has an openly gay and highly popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

But gay men and lesbians from Muslim families say they face extraordinary discrimination at home. A survey of roughly 1,000 young men and women in Berlin, released in September and widely cited in the German press, found much higher levels of homophobia among Turkish youth.

"These differences are there," said Bernd Simon, who led the study and is a professor of social psychology at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. "We can't deny them. The question is how do we cope with them."

"The answer is not to replace homophobia with Islamophobia," he added, pointing out that homophobia is also higher among Russian immigrants and in other, less urban parts of Germany.

Kader Balcik, a 22-year-old Turk from Hamburg, said: "For us, for Muslims, it's extremely difficult. When you're gay, you're immediately cut off from the family."

He had recently moved to Berlin not long after being cut off from his mother because he is bisexual. "A mother who wishes death for her son, what kind of mother is that?" he asked, his eyes momentarily filling with tears.

Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man, sitting at a table in the club's quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: "They would kill me. My brothers would kill me." Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded, "No, I mean they would kill me."

"I'm living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be," Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away, as his parents wished. "I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do," he said. "I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it."

He stood up from the table and called to his two friends. "All right, boys, let's go dance," he said. "We're here to have fun." And they marched off to the dance floor, smiling.

Gay Muslims Pack a Dance Floor of Their Own (in Berlin, Germany)

Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times The crowd at Gayhane, a monthly party for Arab and Turkish gay men, lesbians and bisexuals at SO36, a Berlin nightclub. The event's name is fashioned from gay and "hane," Turkish for home. (Jan-Peter Boening for The New York Times)

From the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune

Gay Muslims pack a dance floor of their own
By Nicholas Kulish

Tuesday, January 1, 2008


BERLIN: Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another's shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital's large Muslim population.

But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.

European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.

"When you're here, it's as if you're putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun," said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.

Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.

"Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I'm a foreigner and in the other because I'm a queen," said Fatma Souad, the event's organizer and master of ceremonies. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for over a decade.

Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and began teaching herself belly dancing. Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theater, in 1988, and threw the first Gayhane party — hane means home in Turkish — in January 1997.

The club was packed by midnight and still had a line out the front door. On stage, Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swiveling her hips.

Under flashing colored lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coifs, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances — halay in Turkish — broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.

One of the regular D.J.'s, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and said: "You're Turkish, right? You're lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and D.J."

Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music, to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional D.J. for six years and performs all over the world.

The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. "We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either."

Outside the boom of loud firecrackers can be heard, the first test rounds for the annual cacophony here that leaves New Year's revelers ears' ringing. Kreuzberg has been home for decades to large populations of Turks and Kurds, many of whom have very conservative religious values. Yet they have had to share the neighborhood that formerly abutted the Berlin Wall with many counterculture types, artists and anarchists and also gays and lesbians.

According to the city's Schwules Museum, partly devoted to the history of gay people in the city and the country, "a lively homosexual subculture had developed in Berlin by the second half of the 18th century or perhaps earlier." It was known as an oasis for gay men and lesbians in the Weimar period immortalized by the writer Christopher Isherwood and in the period when West Berlin was surrounded by the wall. Today, the city has an openly gay and highly popular mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

But gay men and lesbians from Muslim families say they face extraordinary discrimination at home. A survey of roughly 1,000 young men and women in Berlin, released in September and widely cited in the German press, found much higher levels of homophobia among Turkish youth.

"These differences are there," said Bernd Simon, who led the study and is a professor of social psychology at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. "We can't deny them. The question is how do we cope with them."

"The answer is not to replace homophobia with Islamophobia," he added, pointing out that homophobia is also higher among Russian immigrants and in other, less urban parts of Germany.

Kader Balcik, a 22-year-old Turk from Hamburg, said: "For us, for Muslims, it's extremely difficult. When you're gay, you're immediately cut off from the family."

He had recently moved to Berlin not long after being cut off from his mother because he is bisexual. "A mother who wishes death for her son, what kind of mother is that?" he asked, his eyes momentarily filling with tears.

Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man, sitting at a table in the club's quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: "They would kill me. My brothers would kill me." Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded, "No, I mean they would kill me."

"I'm living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be," Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away, as his parents wished. "I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do," he said. "I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it."

He stood up from the table and called to his two friends. "All right, boys, let's go dance," he said. "We're here to have fun." And they marched off to the dance floor, smiling.