LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Hear Me Out: |
by Mubarak Dahir |
A Nonbeliever Finds Faith at a Gay Muslim Conference 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 problemor, dare I say, even the most pressing onefor 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 Turkeythe 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 gave me was a surprising new sense of faith. Granted, it's not what you might call traditional faith. But that's the whole point. Mubarak Dahir receives e-mail at MubarakDah@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 13, No. 8 June 27, 2003 |