LGBTQ people and Islam

Muslim attitudes to LGBTQ practices has varied throughout Islamic history; legal scholars condemned and often formulated punishments for homosexual acts, yet lenient (or often non-existent) enforcement allowed for toleration, and sometimes celebration of such acts. Schmitt identifies some twenty words in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish to identify those who are penetrated. European travellers who had visited Iran during the reign of Shah Abbas have spoken of his strong desire for charming young pages and cup-bearers. The famous author Jahiz tried to explain the abrupt change in attitudes toward homosexuality after the Abbasid Revolution by the arrival of the Abbasid army from Khorasan, who are said to have consoled themselves with male pages when they were forbidden to take their wives with them. Later on, in an eleventh-century discussion among the scholars of Baghdad, some scholars who showed traits of bisexuality argued that it is natural for a man to desire anal intercourse with a fellow man, but this would be only allowed in the afterlife. Similarly, El-Rouayheb suggests that as Islamic orthodoxy stabilized and religious scholars considered sodomy as an abhorrent sin more or less without exception, most of them did not believe that this prohibition covered falling in love or writing poetry. (in red robe), shaking hands with a sheikh, with his companion Malik Ayaz standing behind him (1515)The conceptions of homosexuality found in classical Islamic texts resembled the traditions of classical Greece and those of ancient Rome, rather than the modern understanding of sexual orientation. In earlier texts, it was expected that many mature men would be sexually attracted to both women and adolescent boys (with a supposed 'ideal' beginning at the age of fourteen and lasting until the growth of a full beard), and such men were expected to wish to play only an active role in homosexual intercourse once they reached adulthood. This prototype was often represented in Persian poetry by Turkic slave-soldiers in most cases considerably older than the supposed 'ideal age', and was also illustrated by the story of Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030), the ruler of the Ghaznavid Empire, and his cupbearer Malik Ayaz. Murray argues that despite the normative nature of a restrictive pederastic discourse in courtly settings, egalitarian same-sex relations did happen; The works of Enderunlu Fazıl similarly covers both male and female same-sex love in a much less age-segragated fashion. Nedîm, the famed Ottoman poet, seems to have freely talked about love with older men, as he made frequent mention of beards in his Turkish and Persian poetry. Despite these exceptions in certain settings and periods however, homosexual practices present in courtly and 'respectable' settings in the Islamic world remained largely age-segregated. In the medical tradition, seeking to play a passive role was considered both unnatural and shameful for a mature man, and following Greek precedents, the Islamic world regarded this as pathological. Dawud al-Antaki, in contrast, advanced that it could have been caused by an acidic substance embedded in the veins of the anus, causing itchiness and thus the need to seek relief. Modern era The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism such as Wahhabism, which came to call for stricter adherence to the Hadith. In 1744, Muhammad bin Saud, the tribal ruler of the town of Diriyah, endorsed ibn Abd al-Wahhab's mission and the two swore an oath to establish a state together run according to what they considered to be true Islamic principles. For the next seventy years, until the dismantlement of the first state in 1818, the Wahhabis dominated from Damascus to Baghdad. Homosexuality, which had been largely tolerated in the Ottoman Empire, became criminalized under the Wahhabis, and those found guilty were thrown to their deaths from the top of the minarets. However, many authors claim that the effects of this reformist period were the repression, not further acceptance, of same-sex relations: Özsoy writes that before the 19th-century, Ottoman society had not effectively criminalized homosexuality to begin with, and Lapidus and Salaymeh claim that by the 1850s, via European influence, they began censoring same-sex relations that they had once seen as relatively normative. According to Dror Ze'evi, these repressive processes shaped the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, resulting in the reinterpretation of local cultural material and traditions. Ze'evi traces these processes to European travelers denouncing the Ottomans for their ostensibly 'corrupt' sexual proclivities, and Ze'evi argues that the literate classes of the empire responded by 'reinventing' their own sexual norms. With reference to the Muslim world more broadly, Tilo Beckers claims that while "endogenous changes" that sought to reinterpret religious and cultural texts were influential in the shift of attitudes seen in the 19th century Muslim world, "exogenous changes" from European countries also defined new social attitudes in the Muslim world. Bauer similarly writes that "although contemporary Islamist movements decry homosexuality as a form of Western decadence, the current prejudice against it among Muslim publics stems from an amalgamation of traditional Islamic legal theory with popular notions that were imported from Europe during the colonial era." In some Muslim-majority countries, current anti-LGBTQ laws were directly enacted by United Kingdom or Soviet organs and retained following independence. Contemporary developments More recently, persecution of LGBTQ+ people have also been exacerbated by a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and the emergence of the gay-rights movement in the West, which allowed Islamists to paint homosexuality as a noxious Western import. Recent developments in many countries mirror this trend. In some countries like Iran and Iraq, the dominant discourse is that Western imperialism has spread homosexuality. In Iraq, where homosexuality is legal, the breakdown of law and order following the Second Gulf War allowed Islamist militias and vigilantes to act on their prejudice against gay people, with ISIS gaining particular notoriety for the gruesome acts of anti-LGBTQ violence committed under its rule of parts of Syria and Iraq. In Egypt, though, again, homosexuality is not explicitly criminalized, it has been widely prosecuted under vaguely formulated "morality" laws. Under the current rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, arrests of LGBTQ individuals have risen fivefold, apparently reflecting an effort to appeal to conservatives. In Uzbekistan, an anti-sodomy law, passed after World War II with the goal of increasing the birth rate, was invoked in 2004 against a gay rights activist, who was imprisoned and subjected to extreme abuse. == Scripture and Islamic jurisprudence ==