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The
following article is by Mubarak Dahir. The article is copyrighted.
For permission to reprint or republish, please email Mubarak at
mubarakdah@aol.com
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A Nonbeliever Finds Faith at a Gay Muslim Conference
By Mubarak Dahir
I have to confess I was a bit nervous attending the first Salaam and
the fourth Al-Fatiha conference in Toronto, Canada, June 20 through
22. Salaam is Canada’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
organization, and this was its first such convention, held jointly
with the U.S.-based Al-Fatiha, which has produced three previous
conferences for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Muslims.
My worries weren’t about the possibility of picking up SARS.
My discomfort was a nagging uneasiness as an atheist at a religious
gathering.
As a journalist, I have covered gay and lesbian Muslim issues
extensively, both here in the United States and overseas in
predominantly Muslim countries. I even went to Saudi Arabia six
months ago and did a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, the holiest site
in Islam. This mouth has kissed the sacred Kaaba stone.
Still, as an atheist, and indeed as someone who believes the world
would be a better place without any religion at all, whether it be
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or anything else, I wasn’t
sure I wanted to attend three days of meetings and lectures centered
on God and religion.
I’m not sure what I expected. I knew better, of course, than to fear
it would be holy rollers of a Muslim bent lecturing that women
should wear veils and that gay men shouldn’t cruise.
But what surprised me was the diversity. It was expressed both in
terms of people’s national backgrounds and heritages, as well as
their thoughts on what it meant to be a gay or lesbian Muslim, how
to express it as a gay or lesbian person, and how to use it in
today’s society.
The crowd was as varied as the topics they attempted to tackle. Many
of the 150 or so attendees were Christian or Jewish converts to
Islam. Others were Christians or Jews or nonbelievers who weren’t
looking for a new religious home,
but were simply hoping to understand Islam a little better given the
political situation of today’s world. Some people described
themselves as “culturally Muslim.” Still others were “lapsed”
Muslims who at one point in life had felt forced to choose between
their sexual orientation and their religion, and
were now looking for ways to bridge the gap.
There was certainly plenty of talk among the conference-goers about
how to reconcile their faith and their sexuality. It is a valid
question to tackle, whether you are gay and Muslim, or gay and
Jewish, or gay and Christian, or gay of just about any faith. If
we’re honest, we’ll admit that no religion has much of a history of
accepting us into the fold.
But reconciling faith and sexuality wasn’t the only problem—or, dare
I say, even the most pressing one—for the vast majority of gay and
lesbian Muslims I met at this conference. Instead, they were worried
about a whole array of equally complex and challenging issues,
including how to advance an Islamic version of liberation theology,
how to “take back” their religion from the
fundamentalists, the role of secular Muslims in both traditional and
Western cultures, how to counter the one-dimensional and negative
stereotypes of Muslims in society at large, how to gain acceptance
as gay people from their larger Islamic communities, and how to
fight prejudice against Muslims within their gay and
lesbian communities.
Visually, the crowd was as equally interesting as it was
intellectually surprising. There were blond white girls with their
hair in pony-tails, and Arab women in shorts and Muslim men with
embroidered, flowing shirts inspired by the craft of their home
cultures. I met a Jordanian Muslim man with a hard gym body, wearing
a tight T-shirt to show off all the work he’d done in the weight
room. There was even a transgender woman from Turkey—the only woman
in the place to wear a hijab, or black flowing gown and scarf that
covered her head, leaving only her white oval face exposed.
I was particularly struck by the comments of Suhail Abualsameed,
another Jordanian gay man who spoke on a panel titled “Queer Muslim
Identities Post September 11.” Abualsameed had arrived in Canada
just a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon.
“All of a sudden,” he recalled, “I wasn’t just a young gay man who
wanted to go out dancing. All of a sudden, I was ‘a Muslim.’ I’d
been one all my life, but now I was being asked to speak on behalf
of Muslims, particularly gay Muslims, and I was pretty nonreligious.
I realized I needed to find an identity somewhere between the gay
identity I had created for myself, and the Muslim identity I was
born into. It’s my culture and my background, and I felt I had to
re-adopt it in some way to regain part of who I am.”
I still don’t believe in God, or that the Koran is the word of God
rather than the writing of man, or that women should cover their
heads, or that there’s anything wrong with eating bacon. Many of the
people I met at the conference, regardless of how they identified
with Islam, would agree with me; many would disagree.
But what they collectively shared with me was a surprising new sense
of faith. Granted, it’s not what you might call traditional faith.
But that’s the whole point.
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Mubarak Dahir is a Palestinian-American syndicated journalist.
Mubarak is on the board of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists
Association. He currently lives in New York City. He can be
contacted at mubarakdah@aol.com
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