Week Seven Blog Post

Initially I was a bit skeptical about the premise of Islamic Sexualities that being gay isn’t a mutually exclusive lifestyle with delimiting factors set in stone (Murray and Roscoe, 5). I also thought the assertion that Islam inherited homophobia from Western influences quite interesting (15), especially when contrasted with the idea from Lughod’s Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt that Egyptian liberal Muslims got many of their feminist ideas from Western sources. This certainly proves to undermine the fact that all Western influence is good influence. Personally, I see gender as something that is concrete, but if you think about it, sexual orientation, being based solely on behavior, really boils down to what someone wants to do, or even just tolerates, making it much more malleable than some people might think. Certainly the disgust homosexuals arouse in many people makes it hard for people to imagine being homosexual, but maybe more people would be bisexual if being homosexual wasn’t so stigmatized. Prisons are famous for homosexual rape, and although I haven’t heard such colorful anecdotes about it, the Navy has a homosexual reputation. So Islam may have been more gay than it is now, but the don’t ask don’t tell type policy followed (18) puts Islamic sexual freedom a notch lower than the Greeks, where pederasty was basically an institution.

Najmabadi’s piece about gender was also intriguing. Again, it seems that Western norms are being foisted on a Muslim society, and corrupting it (4). I like this because it reifies the complaints about Orientalism—along with the last piece—making it clear that Western influence has been destructive. The ungendered standard of beauty (Najmabadi, 12) was compelling, and I found the parallels of amrads and nawkhatts to Greek concepts of beauty quite fascinating. Nawkhatts in particular bring to mind Greek and Roman poetry, where descriptions of beautiful boys are always accompanied by describing the “down on their cheeks.” One thing that confused me was the theme of increasingly restrictive ideas about homosexuality being contradicted by the fact that Hadith condemn sodomy (18), so although Western influence may have increased homophobic tendencies, it still seems to me that this was just a development towards something inevitable, a crackdown on immoral behavior.