“Standing against the LGBT and other perversions is a form of jihad,” tweeted one Philippine Muslima identified as Umm Yusra on June 8, 2019, while citing the leading Muslim Malay cleric Zulkifli Mohamad Al-Bakri. These and other Muslim social media postings from recent years make all too clear why Muslim parents in Dearborn, Michigan, have recently expressed outrage at school board meetings over often explicit pro-LGBT school library content.
In another since deleted tweet from April 3, 2019, Umm Yusra praised the Southeast Asian Muslim monarchy of Brunei for that day “implementing hudud,” the corporal punishments of Islamic sharia law. Whippings and executions for sexual behavior such as adultery and homosexuality shock modern Western sensibilities, but she scoffed:
Self-proclaimed human rights activists don’t bat an eye when the US and Europe kill millions of Muslims through war, sanctions and occupation; apparently they only value the lives of sodomites and rapists.
Umm Yusra recognized the backlash her views could cause in another deleted tweet from March 12, 2019, about Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, a former Malaysian deputy prime minister:
Thank you for standing up to the rainbow mafia, @drwanazizah. Bear in mind that they’ll work tirelessly to destroy her credibility and career now.
Umm Yusra’s May 10, 2019, deleted tweet compared the reactions of Muslims at the Malaysian university Universiti Putra Malaysia with Muslims in more a secularized America:
Judging by what American Muslims post online, I believe it is safe to say that you would be hardpressed to find this at any Uni in the USA. This sign is part of an awareness campaign to reject LGBT and the foreigners promoting its ideology.
To the American writer Vanessa Taylor, who professed dual Muslim and queer identities, Umm Yusra responded in a June 29, 2019, tweet:
Being Muslim means submitting to Allah wholeheartedly. Saying you’re a queer Muslim is the same as saying I’m a [insert random sin] Muslim. Don’t define yourself by something prohibited by Allah.
However, Umm Yasra has not stopped other individuals from Muslim-majority cultures from identifying as queer. Author Elias Jahshan, an Australian of Lebanese and Palestinian descent currently resident in London, has previously discussed the struggles of coming out gay in an Arab family, even with Christian immigrant parents in Australia. He has written the autobiographical essay Coming Out Palestinian in the book Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity, and recently edited This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers.
Jahshan drew this author’s scorn on Twitter as a “definition of stupid” when Jahshan wore a shirt with the motto “QUEER as in FREE PALESTINE” at London’s July 2 Pride parade. As he himself has recognized in an interview, any LGBT identities in Palestinian society are “just a massive cultural taboo,” something shockingly illustrated by the recent kidnapping and beheading of a gay Palestinian. In another interview, he said, “don’t get me started on the cultural stigma and rampant homophobia that exists in my Arab community.” “Whenever I tell people I’m gay and I support free Palestine, instantly I’m told why don’t you try being gay [there] and see if Hamas throw you off a rooftop,” Jahshan has conceded.
Yet Jahshan has denounced any claim that Islam is behind “homophobia” among Palestinians as “utter bullsh*t,” even though the Palestinian Authority, like other Muslim societies globally, severely represses LGBT communities. He has complained about “how the global community of queer Arabs was represented—or misrepresented, rather—in the media.” Here the “focus was almost always on being sensationalist and it was common for the articles to have subliminal, underlying current of Islamophobia.”
Rather than criticize Islamic canons, Jahshan utilizes a hackneyed
decolonial perspective. We need to hold Western powers accountable for the interventions they carried out through (homophobic) colonial laws that still linger, the rise of right-wing nationalism or theocracies that came in response to, or with the support of, Western imperialism in this post-colonial era.
For Jahshan, any opposition to LGBT agendas among Arabs or other majority-Muslim cultures is a distortion of their supposedly true essence. Thus, he and others of Arabic descent
need to look to our own community and challenge the entrenched, toxic patriarchal elements that enforces the cultural stigma and unfettered homophobia and transphobia around the LGBTQ+ community, and challenge state and community leaders (who are products of this toxic patriarchy) who twist and thwart the values of our cultures, of our religious texts, to further their agendas or to entrench their power.
Far from praising Israel’s pro-LGBT record, absurdly decried as “pinkwashing,” Jahshan remain fixated on his Zionist enemy. “For many queer Palestinians, liberation from Israeli occupation is at the forefront of their struggle—perhaps more so than combatting the homophobia that exists within the community,” he has said. “The hard truth is that queer Palestinians are still persecuted for being Palestinian first and foremost. Israeli authorities do not care about their sexuality—they are still the target of their apartheid laws and military occupation.”
Highly intriguing would be a meeting between Jahshan and a London Muslima, who remained anonymous behind her black niqab while she protested a 2019 Pride march in the East London community of Walthamstow. To rainbow-festooned marchers in this community that is 22 percent Muslim, she cried, “shame on all of you, despicable people,” and “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Some observers decried her “homophobic abuse” while local police began investigations into this verbal “hate crime.”
As Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, and elsewhere are discovering, such global conflicts over sex and the sacred are not going to pass over America. In the process, Western intersectional pieties about various victim statuses are going to become increasingly convoluted. Already many Muslim thought leaders have had to grapple with these upheavals, as a forthcoming article will examine.
Mark Spahn says
Take a look at the photograph that accompanies Umm Yusra’s second message above. Here’s another version:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Umm-Yusra2.png
Is this photo for real? It shows a narrow crescent moon over a Islamic building. The photographer must have waited for just the right moment to snap the picture. And to make the moon seem large behind the tower, he must have taken the picture from a far distance, possibly using a telephoto lens. Where can we find the details of this photo (when, where, camera equipment, etc.)? Does the bright spot in the middle of the crescent mean this photo was faked?
Scotsman48 says
Queer folks defending islamic teachings is like a Rabbi defending Nazi teachings.
Check out the You Tube Channel of Ami Horowitz as he went to the West Bank asked muslims there what they think of the Gay Lifestyle and then he took that footage to the Castro District in San Francisco and showed it to all the Gays folks there, male and female, and lo and behold they were all shocked at what they seen and heard from these muslims in the West Bank… Go figure.
Alkflaeda says
If the Palestinian response to homosexuality is due entirely to colonialism, whose colonialism was it? A near millennium of Turkish Islamic rule (and rule by other Muslims before 1067), or the three decades between the end of the First World War and the establishment of Israel?