In the beginning I hesitated a lot before I wrote this post, but denial would never solve any problems. There are many taboos in the Middle East and one of them is sex. Sex is thorny and ambiguous. Nonetheless, the majority are ignorant of the anatomy of their private parts.
Ten years ago, gays were a laughing stock, especially in movies; feminine appearance with gruff voice would definitely laugh the audience. For instance, a guy who was a successful director, but due to his inclination, he has lost everything. Once, he appeared as a belly dancer and we know well how appealing the belly dancer should be. It was humiliating and sarcastic as ordinary people were unable to fathom such creature. His end was dramatic as he committed suicide, and then his family refused to bury him!
Little by little, the destination has dwindled due to the existence of social media. Social media are the conduit for those people’s feelings and thoughts. Recently, a Palestinian man who is a big fan of Haifa Wehbe; a Lebanese diva. He has even named after her “Haifa Magic” after his sex reassignment surgery. A sexy woman is popping up on the social media, but when he speaks, people get freaked out! Within a few months, Haifa got millions of followers on Instagram watching her coquettish dancing. Now, she has her own cosmetic line with a chain of markets in Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, and some countries in the gulf, showing off her handsome boyfriend with no fear before millions!
In Islam, Christianity, and Judaism; homosexaulity is prohibited and sinful. Life is in pairs and we are only two genders. Therefore, different inclination would be reprehensible and mind-boggling. I tried to do my research and thankfully found “Homosexaulity in Islam” book as enlightenment is the only guru with carte blanche amongst this cruelty and superficiality.
“O people, we created you all from a male and female And made you into different communities and different tribes So that you should come to know one another Acknowledging that the most noble among you Is the one most aware of God”
A Quranic verse is the prologue elucidating Allah’s will in making us different including males, females, and allegedly LGBT with different tongues, colour, and continents. The author insists on making difference between faith and religious traditions as we are living in a patriarchal society where women’s and minorities’ rights are marginalized. As the political war began after prophet Mohammad’s death, Arabs returned to keep slaves even though the Qur’an urged them to free slaves. They began acting as patriarchs even though the Islam declared the moral equality of men and women. They began living in luxury even though the Qur’an warns against the hoarding of wealth.
Within a few generations, the Muslims’ experimental commonwealth of liberation became an empire that rivaled Rome. The Qur’anic message of liberation was interpreted as an Islamic charter for domination. What is going on now, reportedly, is a result of the Iranian revolution in 1978 and subsequent oil crisis detailing western assumption about economic progress, slowly pushing secular advances out of the spotlight and casting attention on to religion. These events first pushed the West into uneasy alliances with Sunni fundamentalists and extremists, from the Wahhabi monarchies of the Gulf states to the Mujahideen and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The first Gulf War revealed how flimsy that alliance was, as Muslim extremists turned against the U.S. and its allies, globalizing their revolt against local monarchies and authoritarian regimes that tried to rule by a balance of religious rhetoric and secular stability.
It is clear how sinful sodomy is in the holy scriptures, but the author narrated an incident as a pretext to refute his convictions when the fourth caliph Imam ‘Ali faced Khariji rebels who insisted that he simply “apply” the Qur’an’s judgment without interpretation. In that situation of armed conflict, Imam ‘Ali gathered the people and brought out a copy of the Qur’an and as he touched the book he exclaimed, “O Qur’an, speak to the people!” The people gathered around ‘Ali, saying, “O ‘Ali, do you mock us? It is only paper and ink and it is we [human beings] who speak on its behalf.” To this, ‘Ali stated, “The Qur’an is written in straight lines between two covers. It does not speak by itself. It needs proper interpreters, and the interpreters are human beings.”
There was an intriguing part in the book when the author confirmed that each religion and its teachings nullify the erstwhile one as there is only an islamic verse talking about tribe of Lot and their acts of transgression, rape, gambling, not only sodomy. He also alleged that homosexaulity was forbidden because of the extinction of human beings, not because of the act itself as prophet Mohammad never punished or killed any gays. There was a man with dyed hands and feet mimicking the women’s style was brought before our prophet, who banished him from Medina to a place called al-Naqi‘ several miles outside the oasis city. When some of the Prophet’s companions asked if it were better to kill the “mukhannath” gay, the Prophet is reported to have said, “I have been forbidden to kill those who pray.”
Jurists and theologians began to argue that faith is not an either/or option: Muslims should not kill others who disagree with them, over religious or political questions, with impunity. Rather, they argued, faith could grow or wane in the heart, but a Muslim who sins or errs should not be dogmatically banished or summarily killed. They advocated the idea that laws, based on the will of God as expressed in revelation and the Prophet’s example, should govern human affairs and restrain sectarian violence. Their arguments gave rise to the notion that there were only a limited number of specifically grave crimes. These were called hadd because they transgressed the “boundary” laid down by God’s explicit revelation, which called for grave corporal or capital punishment of a Muslim. Otherwise, a Muslim’s blood was sacrosanct by her or his verbal profession of faith or basic demonstration of participation in rituals.
Again the author tried to prove human beings’ misinterpretation giving an example when Abu Hurayra reported that the Prophet Muhammad had said, “Three things bring bad luck – house, woman and horse.” Upon hearing this, the Prophet’s wife ‘A’isha responded, “Abu Hurayra learned his lessons very badly. He came into our house when the Prophet was in the middle of a sentence. He only heard the end of it. What the Prophet said was, ‘May God refute the Jews [who] say that three things bring bad luck: house, woman and horse.’”32 On the issue of female impurity during menstruation, hadith that cited Judaic customs to refute them were cut or interrupted in order to have their meaning reversed, so that Muslims would revert to Judaic attitudes and behaviors. Although this time ‘A’isha was present to contradict the mis-remembering, we can assume that in most instances she was not. Through hadith and jurists’ decisions based upon them, Judaic and pre-Islamic attitudes crept back into Islam.
Moreover, They asked him about coitus interruptus, and the Prophet answered, ‘It is hidden infanticide.’” Here the Prophet appears to confirm the Judaic belief that for a man to ejaculate without using “his seed” for procreation amounts to a concealed way of killing his own children, which is a crime against his people and an abomination in the land. However, another hadith recalled by a different companion, Abu Sa’id, relates the same episode but says that someone said to the Prophet that “‘The Jews say that coitus interruptus is minor infanticide,’ and the Prophet answered, ‘The Jews lie, for if God wanted to create something, no one can avert it.’”33 In this incident the Prophet cited Judaic custom only to refute it, but some hadith transmitters recalled only that portion of the speech which cited the Judaic custom and deleted the refutation. This distorted report, for instance, led Ibn Hazm to declare contraception illegal in Islamic law, for he believed it meant killing an infant, in contradiction to the majority of other schools of jurisprudence which allowed it (but which debated whether the man had to have the explicit consent of his female partner in order to use a contraceptive technique, or it was his right to do so even without her consent).
Finally, the author purported that Jurists focus on acts alone, and do not comprehensively address the modern notion of homosexuality as a sexual orientation, a psychological disposition, or an identity as it is based on love and mutual consent without any transgression or threat!
As we all know that knowledge is safety and science is its fruit, therefore reading “DNA is not destiny, sex and orientation” chapter in particular was definitely a must and came up with these!
- People think sex is homogeneous and discrete as upon your arrival into this world, the first statement that was probably uttered to describe you was to announce your sex. The term “sex” generally refers to biological differences between men and women that encompass chromosomes, hormonal patterns, and sex organs, whereas the term “gender” refers to social roles masculine or feminine that a person may identify with.
In fact, that issues of gay and lesbian rights have sometimes been used to motivate social conservatives to get out and vote, as was done in the United States with the issue of same-sex marriage in 2004.
- Two ongoing wars, dramatic changes to tax policies, and the privatization of social security, were not enough to motivate some to the voting booth—for many, only the gay and lesbian rights issue upset them enough to vote. By some estimates, George W. Bush would not have been elected to a second term without the issue of same-sex marriage being on the ballot in the state of Ohio.33 And it’s not just in the United States that homophobia remains widespread; Vladimir Putin sparked international outcry by criminalizing “gay propaganda”
- A version of the experiment above has also played out in real life. In 1993, the geneticist Dean Hamer published evidence that a genetic marker was linked to male homosexuality. His team was studying a sample of gay men, and the researchers asked the participants about the sexual orientation of their relatives. The responses indicated that only certain relatives of the maternal, not paternal, uncles were gay, and more of their cousins who were sons of maternal aunts were gay than were their other cousins. This pattern suggests that men’s sexual orientation might be associated with the X chromosome, which men receive exclusively from their mothers, and share with their brothers, maternal uncles, and male cousins of their maternal aunts. And, indeed, by analyzing the DNA of 40 pairs of gay brothers, Hamer’s team identified a genetic marker on the X chromosome of these men, Xq28 (a region that contains several genes), that looked like it might possibly predict sexual orientation. Specifically, 33 of the 40 pairs of gay brothers had similar genetic variants along Xq28, whereas only 20 pairs would have been expected to share these by chance. The strength of this association was rather modest, there were no specific genes identified, and the authors of the paper were quite careful in highlighting just how tentative and ambiguous their findings were. But this was still the first published evidence of a specific genetic marker associated with homosexuality. So how did people respond to this weak and tentative scientific finding?
- On the other hand, the controversial radio host Bryan Fischer argued against the genetics of homosexuality by questioning the validity of the heritability of sexual orientation from twin studies. He pointed out that for identical twins, “If one of them is gay and it’s genetically caused, the other one ought to be gay one hundred percent of the time!”48 Because this is clearly not the case a gay identical twin shares the sexual orientation of his brother somewhere between 30 percent to 50 percent of the time—Fischer saw this as evidence to refute the argument that sexual orientation has a genetic component.
- One possible mechanism for this is that perhaps genes associated with male homosexuality are actually genes that increase your androphilia that is, your attraction to men so that female relatives of gay men, who possess these same genes, may be especially androphilic, and this would make them more likely to reproduce. And there is some evidence to suggest this is true: for example, one study found that the maternal female relatives of gay men had significantly more children than the maternal female relatives of straight men.54 The genes of gay men might thus thrive because of their unusually fertile sisters.
- When women are pregnant with a son, they produce some antimale antibodies as an immune response to the male-specific antigens linked to the Y chromosome. This immune response builds with each successive male fetus, such that later-born sons are bathed in a womb full of these antibodies, which some have hypothesized may affect their later sexual preferences.58 In fact, there is abundant evidence that men who have a lot of older brothers are more likely to be gay. Ray Blanchard, a psychiatrist, found that for every older brother a man has, he is 33 percent more likely to be gay, and this relation has been observed in several countries around the world. If you extrapolate from this evidence, then the rare man who has ten older brothers would have about a 50-50 chance of being gay.
- A key psychoanalytic theory about homosexuality is that gay men tend to have had overcontrolling and smothering mothers who acted seductively toward them, and fathers who remained detached or hostile toward them.
- The social psychologists Nick Haslam and Sheri Levy found that essence-based beliefs about homosexuality had three distinct clusters. The first cluster was a belief that homosexuality was biologically based and immutable, and the second cluster was a belief that homosexuality was universal across history and cultures. For both of these two clusters, believing in an underlying essence of homosexuality was associated with less antigay prejudice. The third cluster was a belief that homosexuality was discrete—that is, a belief that there are clear differences between gay and straight people. However, the more that people believed in this particular essentialist basis of homosexuality, the more prejudiced they were against gay people.
- Thinking that genes influence people’s sexual orientation led many people to propose that eugenic technologies could be used to prevent people with genes that predispose them toward homosexuality from ever being born. A former chief rabbi of the UK, Rabbi Jakobovits, wrote in a pair of letters to the Times that homosexuality was “a grave departure from the natural norm which we are charged to overcome like any other affliction, genetic or not,” and argued that “the errant gene” should be “removed or repaired,” to liberate the afflicted from their “disability.”
At the end, the web of forces that make some men gay, and the majority of others straight, are part of a complex interaction involving many genes, the potential involvement of epigenetic markers that guide their expression,70 prenatal experiences in the womb, and the collective influences of life experiences along the path of development. Your sexuality is the product of the interplay among all of these factors.
Hopefully, this article will be useful and sorry but I could not curtail it!
BRAINCHILD 