A Just Cause
What’s your worst political nightmare?
The
Advocate, April 29, 2003
http://www.advocate.com/html/stories/888/888_sullivan.asp
By Andrew Sullivan
Here’s one to ponder. By some awful turn of events, the
radical religious right, spearheaded by Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat
Robertson, and even more extreme elements among Christian Reconstructionists,
orchestrates a military coup. The Constitution is abolished.
Biblical law is established as the only legitimate form
of authority. Adulterers are stoned. Women are barred from going to work. And
homosexuals are tortured in order to expose others; the ones flushed out by
omnipresent religious secret police are systematically turned into informers,
executed by mass stonings, or buried under piles of rubble.
This isn’t likely to happen, of course, even in our
most paranoid fantasies. However bad Falwell, Dobson, and Robertson are,
they’re not that extreme. But the truth is, in hard and irrefutable detail,
this is the kind of regime under which millions of gay people live. Throughout
the Arab and Muslim world, vicious persecution of gay people is the norm.
Under the most brutal Islamist dictatorships, the violence is about as awful
as it can get. In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, for example, gay people were
routinely executed. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the death penalty for gay
people was the law. On the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, under the Palestinian
Authority, gay people are regularly harassed, arrested, and tortured.
One such victim’s story was recounted in The New
Republic last year by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi. After a young
man, whom Halevi calls “Tayseer,” was discovered having sex with another
man, he was arrested by the Palestinian police and hung by his arms from the
ceiling. “A high-ranking officer he didn’t know arranged for his release
and then demanded sex as payback,” Halevi wrote. Tayseer fled Gaza for the
West Bank, but he was arrested there too. Halevi reported, “He was forced to
stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with
feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other
creatures he could feel but not see. (‘You slap one part of your body, and
then you have to slap another,’ he recounts.) During one interrogation,
police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire
ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for
being a homosexual.”
Another gay couple under Palestinian rule told Halevi
that they woke up one morning and “found a letter under our door from the
Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for
homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same
day.”
We know these stories because these people have fled to a
free Western country, Israel. Can you imagine the untold stories, the unheard
screams of torture, the web of fear and terror that envelopes gay people under
the auspices of Islamist dictatorships where there’s no escape, no hope, no
refuge?
Now imagine it’s you. And imagine that there’s
another country, miles away, with the military power to stop this in some
instances. A country that allows gay freedom to an extent you and your friends
cannot even dream of. How would you feel if you heard that many gay people in
that country described the attempt to liberate you from this terror as
“state terrorism”? How would you feel if those gay people sided not with
your bid for freedom but with the dictators who oppress you? How would you
feel if these gay people preferred instead to march and protest against any
war to liberate their imprisoned and persecuted brothers and sisters?
We are at war now—with regimes and terrorist groups
whose loathing of homosexuals is matched only by their utter contempt for
human dignity, their sadistic violence, and their hatred of women’s freedom.
We will have good and important debates about how and when to intervene. But
what we shouldn’t debate is the morality of our system as opposed to the
depravity of theirs. And in all these debates, two questions should resonate
more powerfully than many others in the minds and souls of gay Americans:
Whose side are you really on? And how much longer can you afford, actively or
passively, to side with the oppressors?
To: The Editor of the Advocate (letters@theadvocate.com)
From: Faisal Alam, founder & director, Al-Fatiha
Foundation for LGBTIQ Muslims & El-Farouk Khaki, legal advisor, Salaam
Toronto: Queer Muslim Community. (gaymuslims@yahoo.com,
salaam@salaamcanada.com)
CC: Andrew Sullivan (andrew@andrewsullivan.com)
April 17, 2003
Dear Madam / Sir:
I was appalled to read Andrew Sullivan’s diatribe (A
Just Cause, Advocate, April 29, 2003), in which he argues that the oppression
of gay people is widespread and extreme under “Islamist dictatorships.”
It is distressing to see that Sullivan illustrates no
comprehension of the diversity of Islam, a religion that is followed by more
than 1.2 billion people around the world. Every day, LGBT people in
predominantly Muslim nations work to defend the rights of sexual and gender
minorities in their respective societies. Sullivan fails to acknowledge the
historic and grassroots organizing conducted by lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender (LGBT) activists in countries including Bangladesh, Malaysia,
Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. He dismisses their groundbreaking work
and instead focuses his attention solely on several examples of the supposed
brutality of “Islamists.” Further, he does not recognize the context in
which these events have occurred.
Predominantly Muslim countries do not exist in a vacuum
and human rights abuses being committed against gay people are fueled by
poverty, the political manipulation of religion, authoritarian regimes,
economic hardship, the imposition of cultural and social mores, and military
occupation. Sullivan also forgets that our own government has historically
supported brutal regimes and dictators that oppressed gay people, including
the Afghan Mujahideen (freedom fighters that later became known as the Taliban)
and Saddam Hussein himself; all to further our own foreign policy agenda. In
fact today, we continue to ally ourselves with countries that oppress sexual
minorities, women and religious minorities—in the name of our “homeland
security,” and the current “war on terrorism.”
To argue that the “morality of our system” is purer
than the “depravity of theirs,” is a slap in the face to a religion that
is rooted in justice and peace. Sullivan fails to mention that the majority of
predominantly Muslim countries do not follow strict interpretation of Islamic
law (shariah), including Iraq, but in fact still continue to use laws that
were introduced during colonization. These same laws (in this case sodomy
laws) are often used to oppress gay people and are politically motivated to
justify the silence of perceived voices of government oppostion.
While the world might think that the intentions of the
United States are to “liberate” the oppressed people of the world, and
while Sullivan might argue that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
Americans should support this “liberation,” one must only go as far as
Afghanistan to see that nothing significant has changed in our government’s
supposed quest to promote human rights. The current government of Afghanistan
has not passed any legislation protecting the rights of gay people and the
social conditions for women have not dramatically changed.
Sullivan’s diatribe appearing in the Advocate this
month perpetuates false stereotypes of Muslims and the peaceful religion of
Islam. I urge the Advocate to be cautious in publishing another article that
fails to recognize the complex history and culture of Islam—a dynamic faith
that promotes notions justice, and a religion that is practiced by more than
six million Americans.
Sincerely,
Faisal Alam
Founder & Director
Al-Fatiha Foundation (LGBTIQ Muslims)
Tel. 202-223-3738
Email: gaymuslims@yahoo.com Web: http://www.al-fatiha.org
El-Farouk Khaki
Legal Advisor
Salaam Toronto: Queer Muslim Community
Email: salaam@salaamcanada.com
Web: http://www.salaamcanada.com
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