Celebrating LGBT Muslim history

Muslim LGBT visibility has been increasing in recent years. Groups have been forming around the world to give voice to those within Islam keen to celebrate both the present day reality of their lives but also highlighting a rich history of gay, lesbian, and transgender contributions to art, culture, and politics in the Muslim world.

This comes at a challenging time when conservative and ideologically “Islamist” forces have characterised being LGBT as un-Islamic. As we will see, it’s their bigotry which is an anomaly in the history of many Muslim countries. Their homophobia being a crude rendition of Islam, twisting scripture and the sayings of the Prophet to their own end. Equally, we have some well-intentioned liberals of the post-modern persuasion who baulk at the “binaries” of heterosexual and homosexual being “imposed” on the past. Their gay erasure is more accidental while the Islamists are very deliberate in their aims.

LGBT Muslim poets

In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture burned six thousand volumes of the poetry of Abu Nuwas – a writer who lived between 756 and 814CE. Abu Nuwas (c.756-c.814) was scribbling his lewd verses a millennia before, featuring twice in the classic work: The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. So how had an Abbasid-era poet incurred the wrath of the Egyptian authorities in the 21st century? Because Abu Nuwas was out, proud, and penned verses about his gay desires.

Abu Nuwas (full name: Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami) lived in Baghdad during the golden age of Islamic culture under the Abbasid caliphate. Most of his observations were about urban life and a love of handsome young chaps. He wrote this about entering a bathhouse and glimpsing the good looking men:

In the bath-house, the mysteries hidden by trousers
    Are revealed to you.
All becomes radiantly manifest.
    Feast your eyes without restraint!
You see handsome buttocks, shapely trim torsos,
    You hear the guys whispering pious formulas
        to one another
    (“God is Great!” “Praise be to God!”)
Ah, what a palace of pleasure is the bath-house!
    Even when the towel-bearers come in
        And spoil the fun a bit.

Other Muslim poets in history who publicly declared their homosexuality included the Persian Ibn Dawud (868-909 CE), the Andalusian Ibn Quzman (1080-1160 CE) and Ibn Hamdis (1053-1133 CE) who lived in Sicily when it was under Muslim rule. None of them faced a real threat of being put to death because in the “Golden Age” of Islam (when Muslim culture influenced the whole of Europe), the authorities turned a blind eye.

Persian literature from the 9th to the 20th century was full of homoerotic references. In short sonnets, called ‘ghazals’, love of men was almost the only amorous topic. So we get lines like these:

O boy, if you want to gladden my heart / You must give me kisses after serving me wine (11th century)

O boy, you carry the business of beauty beyond all limits / With such beauty you expect me to bide my time? Impossible! (13th century)

There was something of an obsession with Turkic young men recruited as slave soldiers but also invited to banquets and other social gatherings.

They are of musky facial hair, sweet of speech, with perfumed tresses / Silver-bodied, gold-girded, and narrow-waisted

One Persian poet alternated between Turkic and Indian male lovers:

By the time a Turkish sweetheart has given you three furtive kisses / You can take an Indian one and consummate the affair with him

The LGBT Muslim caliph

The sixth Abbasid caliph was Abu Musa Muhammad ibn Harun al-Rashid – better known as Al-Amin (787-813CE). The Muslim historian Al-Tabari recorded that the caliph was open in his relationships with men, especially a slave called Kauthar. Al-Amin described his love for Kauthar:

Kawthar is my soul, my religion, my
illness and my therapeutic

He never consummated his marriage and out of exasperation with her son’s homosexuality, his mother ordered female court slaves to dress as men in the hope the caliph might find them attractive. This even extended to painting fake moustaches on to their faces!

She selected pretty young girls of slim stature, had their hair cut like that of boys, dressed
them in jackets with tight belts, and had them appear before the young Amin.

The tactic didn’t work. Meanwhile Al-Amin organised his favourite court eunuchs into two groups: black eunuchs were called ‘Ravens’ while white eunuchs were dubbed ‘Grasshoppers’. For the court, the problem wasn’t so much that Al-Amin had male or trans lovers but that the dynasty had no heir, as his wife remained without child, and consorting with lower class types gave rise to ribald gossip and unrest. The elite had to keep up appearances.

Predictably, some have tried to explain away accounts of Al-Amin’s sexuality by suggesting it was merely propaganda by his enemies – a standard explanation from those who can’t stomach historical figures enjoying same sex relations.

While the acolytes of Queer Theory and 21st century postmodern analyses of sexual history find calling him ‘homosexual’ problematic and prefer ‘queer’. The usual blah-blah about imposing modern ‘binaries’ of heterosexual and homosexual on the past. This bellyaching in academia results in just another form of more subtly applied erasure where homosexuality is subsumed into everything ‘non-normative’ from bestiality to pedophilia. Ironically, this plays to homophobic arguments – especially in today’s Middle East among Islamists – that gay people are on the same level as child and animal abusers.

In fact – homosexuality seems to have been viewed as being as ‘normative’ as heterosexuality. So, Al-Amin was not part of some alternative ‘queer’ scene, but very much part of mainstream society where elite men had male and female lovers…or sometimes just male.

So…..Al-Amin was gay – full stop.

Christian and Muslim medieval attitudes to LGBT people

In medieval Christian Europe, one can find evidence in church councils (the Third Lateran Council for example) of concerns that same sex relations were becoming too prevalent in society. Some will retort that the term ‘sodomy’ was intended to cover a range of non-reproduction related sexual activity, but contrary to what sceptics claim, male-on-male activity was explicitly specified – with particular punishments detailed.

The Islamic world was not immune to the Abrahamic prohibition on same-sex relations though the explicit condemnations tend arise more in the “hadiths” – alleged sayings of the Prophet, most of which were written centuries after the Qur’an. The authenticity of many of these hadiths has long been disputed by Muslim scholars.

However, in the 9th century, hadiths mandated stoning for both the active and passive partners and the first caliph, Abu Bakr, was reported to have ordered a homosexual to be “buried under the debris of a wall”. The Islamist terrorist group ISIS, the Taleban in Afghanistan, and the Houthis in Yemen have ordered LGBT people to be executed using such archaic forms of execution in the 21st century. No doubt believing they are adhering to the original views of the Prophet in this regard. Draconian punishments for homosexuality were also included in the various Muslim schools of jurisprudence that emerged under the Abbasid caliphate with the Hanbali school calling for stoning – the others tended to recommend flogging.

Yet visitors to Muslim countries right up to the 19th and 20th centuries were often taken aback by the widespread tolerance and prevalence of LGBT activity on the streets of large cities. In 1858, the Ottoman Empire even decriminalised homosexuality – or more accurately, consenting sex between men would not be prosecuted. Of course that didn’t mean full legal recognition for gay marriage, employment rights, etc, etc. But it did mean two men in bed having sex would not be punished.

Blocking the power of the harem

The Ottoman Empire – centred on modern Turkey – had a long history of acceptance of homosexuality observed both by Muslim and Christian chroniclers. Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1359) was Archbishop of Thessaloniki and a political operator in the Byzantine Empire, which was fighting for its very existence against the encroaching Ottomans. He was kept prisoner by the Ottoman sultan for a year and was horrified by the prevalence of same sex relations at their court:

They live by their bows and swords, rejoicing in enslavement, murder, raiding, looting, wantonness, adultery, sodomy. And not only do they indulge in such practices, but (Oh madness!) they think that God approves them.

Another Byzantine Greek visiting the Ottoman Empire, Theodore Spandounes, wondered how the Ottomans squared their very open displays of same-sex attraction with Muslim scripture:

“They are the most self-indulgent men in the world. They keep many women because their law encourages the propagation of children. But they also cohabit with quantities of men. For all that Mohamet explicitly forbade sodomy and recommended the stoning of those guilty of it, this vice is commonly and openly practiced without fear of God or man.”

In the early 17th century, Murad IV became the Ottoman sultan at the age of ten with his mother ruling as regent. She actively encouraged her son to take male lovers as it diminished the power of women in the harem, who might want to exert influence over the sultan. Harems were centres of political intrigue and power play and the sultan’s mother had every reason to be concerned. Clearly she felt better able to manipulate her son’s male lovers than the seasoned operators in the harem.

Muslim Medieval Spain and being LGBT

Muslim-controlled Spain and Portugal – the medieval empire of Al-Andalus – was a centre of culture and the arts. Cities like Seville and Cordoba buzzed with intellectual life. Not surprisingly, they also witnessed a liberal attitude on sexuality – though attitudes ebbed and flowed over the centuries. Depended on the caliph so with Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad (c.1040-1095), ruler of the Muslim emirate (“taifa”) of Seville, the liberal example was set by the top man himself. He wrote this poem about one of his male lovers:

They named him Sword; two other swords: his eyes!
Both he and those two are ready to slay me!
Would not one slaying by sword have quite sufficed?
Yet by his eyebrows two further blows were dealt!
I made him captive~ his charming eyes in turn
Made me his captive: now we both are masters, both slaves!
Oh Sword, be kind toward a captive of love,
Who asks not, as a favour, to be freed by you!

While Christians and Muslims were routinely forbidden by their respective religious scholars and leaders to intermarry, this didn’t seem to apply when it came to same sex relations in Al-Andalus. The poet Al-Ramadi (917-1012) took a young Christian man as a lover. That was unlikely to result in any punishment. However, he then left Islam and converted to Christianity. Reportedly at the special mass conducted before a priest, he embraced his lover before the altar on becoming a Christian. For the crime of apostasy from Islam – Al-Ramadi stood more chance of being executed. However, he was not.

Like other LGBT Muslim poets, Al-Ramadi didn’t just extol the virtues of gay love – he also praised alcohol – and was a regular feature in taverns and certain Christian places of worship, where wine was drunk freely.

Saint Pelagius of Córdoba

Roman Catholic Europe, in the medieval period, loved to tell stories of chaste and beautiful young male and female Christians who resisted the sexual desires of powerful pagans who wielded life or death over them. Invariably, the tale ended with the Christian concerned being martyred in an especially horrible manner where their faith was tested to the maximum. Of course, they endured the agony and kept their chastity.

Such was the story of Saint Pelagius of Córdoba who, in later versions of the story, refused the demands of the Andalusi caliph, Abd al-Rahman III, to convert to Islam. However, in earlier versions of the story, the caliph wanted more than a change of religion. He insisted the teenager become his lover. This of course intertwines the idea of heresy and sodomy – a common ploy by Christian propagandists in the Middle Ages and one used against the Knights Templar during their trials and executions in the early 14th century.

Plucky Pelagius not only turns down the caliph’s unwanted advances but strikes him in the face. Well, a death sentence was guaranteed. As with other tales of martyrdom, there then follows a gruesome account of the killing with the boy catapulted over the city walls but miraculously surviving before being dismembered, etc, etc. Catholic story tellers always needed to go over the top on the details of executions by pagans even though the inquisition was probably doing far worse in Christian dungeons. Below is a 16th century painting of Pelagius having a bad day.

Lesbian love in the harem

Harems fascinated westerners – playing to their salacious fantasies about having their own bountiful supply of dutiful women. In reality, knowledge of how harems worked was very limited due to the lack of access. But it is clear that there were incidents of female same sex love within the harem. If discovered, the result could be fatal for the concubines concerned.

Under the Abbasid caliph Al Hadi, in the 8th century CE, two women in the harem were decapitated and their heads brought to the caliph, for engaging in lesbian relations. Though some have argued that what Al-Hadi really didn’t like was his human property not reserving their sexual activity for him alone. Therefore, this had more to do with property relations than sexual relations.

What went wrong?

We have a situation in the past where the Muslim world was broadly regarded as more accepting of homosexual relations compared to the Christian west. Today, that position seems to be reversed. LGBT people are warned not to hold hands, use dating apps, or go to gay clubs in certain Muslim countries. How did this turn of events occur?

The usual explanation is that the European powers introduced harsh anti-homosexual legislation in Middle Eastern countries when they ruled them in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This legislation has then remained on the statue books and is a baleful legacy of colonialism and imperialism.

That’s, however, part of the story. Because since then, the same European powers have liberalised their attitudes and laws towards LGBT people – while in contrast the Muslim world has, if anything, got way more intolerant. The main reason is the emergence of political Islamism which has characterised homosexuality as a western decadent import. Ironically, one could argue that the same argument could be applied to institutional homophobia.

The most extreme expression of theocratic, Islamic anti-LGBT prejudice in recent years was the appalling executions carried out by ISIS – the so-called “Islamic State” – during their control of large swathes of Syria and Iraq. But the same grotesque punishments have been – and are – being inflicted by the Taleban in Afghanistan, Houthis in Yemen, and Islamist terrorist groups from west Africa to the Philippines.

The rituals and barbarity involved tell us more about the Islamist perpetrators than those being murdered in cold blood. Who – one must ask – seriously turns up to watch another human being tossed from the top of a high-rise building and then stamps on their body as it reaches the ground? The executioners and spectators are truly sick and damaged people.

Yet all is not lost – Muslim LGBT civil society and campaign groups are springing up all over the world and demanding equal rights. They are fed up at the use of bigotry by terrorists, extremists, and demagogues to exert power. The twisting of Islamic scripture to justify hate is being resisted.

These groups include:

Hidayah: https://hidayahlgbt.com/

MASGD: https://www.themasgd.org/

Imaan: https://londonlgbtqcentre.org/lgbtq-organisations/imaan/