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Prospectus for MA Report tentatively entitled Negotiating Sexual Identity in

Islam, and the Soul



Explain the topic/background:

The topic of this report is predicated upon the use of Islam, the Quran, and Islamic
sacred texts as the justification for state sanctioned persecution and marginalization
of Queer people and their sexualities in Arab Muslim countries and Iran. The
criminalization of homosexuality and violent punishment if not execution for it,
state initiated programs for entrapment, pervasive homophobia, andin the case of
Irancompulsory sex changes, are legally condoned and common practices that
threaten the livelihood of Queer people, and do so with the full support of the
Islamic religious apparatus and its myriad of ideologies and institutions.

Though the Islamic status quo has established a precedent that has effectively
excommunicated openly or obviously Queer Muslims from the larger community,
there is growing countermovement to this precedent. A community of openly Queer
Muslims who, allied with other Muslims with progressive values, are making a stand
against the homophobia and phobia of queer identity and sexuality in Islamic
spaces, as well as providing sanctuary for those who see no contradiction in their
Queerness, their spirituality, and their religious identities.

This report seeks to analyze key arguments that use Islam and the Quran to justify
the stigmas against Queer identity and sexuality, as well as the arguments that
attack the religious validity and spiritual veracity of Queer Muslims. This will entail
applying theories of sexuality, power, and gender, alongside Jungian psychology,
and Sufi texts, in order to present a perspective that supports a Queer Muslim
agenda.

Questions pursuing:

The questions this report will pursue include, but are not limited to:

1. How is gender queerness and the queer subject discursively constructed and
represented by the dominant heteronormative Islamic community?

2. How do Queer people construct and represent their own subjectivity?

3. How do Queer Muslims construct and represent their spirituality respective to
their sexuality and social identities?

4. What does the Quran say regarding sexuality alternative to procreative sexuality?
What course is delineated, or can be determined for people whose sexuality is not of
this variety?

5. Some prominent Shii clerics have stated that homosexuality and the impetus for
trans-gender identity are attributable to the soul being at odds with the body.
Assuming that Sufism is the Islamic tradition that addresses spirituality and Islamic
mysticism, what does Sufism say regarding the nature and composition of the soul,
and how alimun al-ghayb, the unseen worlds and the powers therein affect the
material world and what manifests in it?

6. If Allah is omniscient and omnipotent and the creator of all that exists in this
world and aalimun al-ghayb, does this not include Queer people and Queer
Muslims, thus does this not imply that there is a viable alternative to the status quo
that reconciles Queer people and their intimate relationships (and sexuality)
without contradicting Islamic morality?

Narrative/Analysis/Arguments:
This report seeks to address the series of discursive breaks that conflate
homophobia with a phobia of gender queerness and non-conformity, which
converge in negative stigma against both. This convergence diffuses into a
comprehensive socio-political-cultural attack, where legal policies that prohibit the
presence of Queer bodies and expression in Arab Muslim societies and Iran are
compounded by a socially prominent phobia and antagonism, and which is even
reflected in a linguistic block that only until recentlydid not adequately allow for
the conception of, let alone, the articulation of Queer existence without prejudice.

This multifaceted effort to undermine and eradicate Queer identity in Muslim
societies is the execution of State authority in the form of bio-power because these
processes are the result of the implicit expectation that bodies are to be gendered,
and sexualized in order to proliferate the state under the auspices of moral
obligation to ones higher power and spirit(ual) provenance. Furthermore, when
one is negligent of this responsibility, then the religiously sanctioned and state
enacted response is to exercise its right of bio-power, this time in a punitive fashion
by annihilating the negligent body. Though, in the case of Iran, there in an
alternative to death, which compels the body to be severely altered on a hormonal
level in order to reflect the culturally (if not State) prescribed gender polarity, which
assumes that the soul is actually of the opposite pole, and needs to be expressed
by re-gendering the body.

Second, this report seeks to deconstruct the processes in Arab and Iranian societies
that construct a heterosexist, chauvinistic, and patriarchal social norm under the
auspices of adherence to Islamic and Quranic mandate. In doing so, the power
dynamics that impinge upon individual agency to self-express and, in many cases
even exist, threaten Queer identified people living in these societies will be shown as
exacting a force that presumes the right to punish one actnamely,
homosexuality, yet actually punishes another actnot conforming to socially
prescribed gender norms and roles, and thus, reveals the hysteria that prompts
the discursive break, the conflation, and the fallacies that lay there in. Specifically,
sexual impropriety cannot be the issue, when the act has not been witnessed. Thus,
the assumption is that an individual who is not conforming to socially prescribed
constructions of gender must then also be engaging in illicit sex. This is irrespective
of the fact that homosexual acts can (and frequently do) occur between people who
do not contradict the socially dominant gender constructions. Further, and again in
the case of Iran, a question is prompted: What makes a man, and what makes a
woman? Because, if persons soul is the determining factor, then what degree of
significance should be placed on the form and function of the body? Also, if the soul
is inherently gendered, then would it not be the will of Allah for the body to host the
soul as it occurred at birth? irrespective of cultural sensibilities about what is
correct and aberrant?

Third, through the lenses of Sufism and mysticism, which indicate that the soul is
androgynous in its nature and is feminine before Allah (swt), alongside Jungian
psychology that establishes the subconscious as composed of a feminine and a
masculine aspect the anima and the animus this report seeks to question the
veracity of the commonly held idea that gender and sex are static, and that a
gendered spiritual substance is inherent to and reflected upon the physical body.
This presumption that soul, gender, and body correspond as either masculine-man-
male, or feminine-woman-female to the exclusion of any other composition then
becomes the justification to correct through socialization, physical alteration, or
annihilation, the cases that do not, satisfy the polarized compositions.

Finally, this report seeks to shed light upon alternative and progressive exegeses
and interpretations of the Quran that are motivated from a more clement
perspective regarding the diversity expressed in human sexuality alongside that of
procreative sex, as well as the groups that adhere to them. By doing this, this report
seeks to destabilize the central role normative exegeses have played in discourses
about sexuality and sexual diversity in Islam, in order to emphasize that exegesis of
the Quran is interpretive rather than absolute.

Method and Progression of Sections:
This report will be thematic in its method in order to deconstruct the abstract
processes in play, and to separate and then juxtapose the secular and religious and
spiritual discourses that are overlapping and influencing one another when the
meet the site of a Queer persons body and agency. Thus, I will address issue at
large, and then break it down into its constituent parts. The themes will look
something like this:
Section I
1) The state apparatus and its authority.
2) The religious apparatus and its authority per the state.
3) Bio-power and prescribed and condoned sexuality for proliferation of the
state.
4) The presumption that polarized gender constructions and their respective
identities are determined by sexual potentialities.
5) How alternative expressions to this are perceived as threats to the previous
mentioned state and religious apparatus.
6) Religious appropriation of and conflation with spirituality per state
authority.
Section II
7) Presentation and analysis of texts addressing spirituality, mysticism, and the
construction of the soul, its constituent polarities of male and female, and
the implications for this androgynyor potential to be soas a state of
balance and completeness that exists prior to human intervention upon birth
and socialization and acculturation.
Section III
8) Presentation of the work of Queer and Progressive Muslim organizations.

Sources:
The Holy Quran in Othmani script. The foundation of Heart with eye to Print
Butler, Judith. "Identity, Sex, and the Metaphysics of Substance." Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

El-Rouayheb, Khaled. Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800:
Khaled El-Rouayheb. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. Print.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh. "Nineteenth-Century Transformations." Women with Mustaches
and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley:
University of California, 2005. 26-60. Print.

Al-Haqq Kugle, Scott Siraj. "Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of
Progressive Muslims."Progressive Muslims: on Justice, Gender and Pluralism. Ed. Omid
Safi. Oxford: Oneworld, 2003. Print.

" . " . Shi'ite Political & Religions
Ideologues. Vol. 2 of 2. Austin: Speedway Copying, Printing, & More, 2011. 197-208.
Print.

Labi, Nadya. "The Kingdom in the Closet." Sexuality in Islam. Vol. 1 of 2. Austin:
Speedway Copying, Printing, & More, 2011. 49-57. Print.

"Complete English Translation of The Noble Quran." Dar-us-Salam Publications -
Islamic Books, CDs/DVDs, Gifts and More. Dar-us-Salam Publications. Web. 21 May
2011. http://www.dar-us-salam.com/TheNobleQuran/

Al Tafsir.com - Tafseer Holy Quran from All Tafseer Schools, Quran Translations,
Quran Recitations, Quran Interpretation (Tafseer), Quran Sciences, and Love In Quran.
Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2002. Web. 21 May 2011.
<http://www.altafsir.com/>.

Tait, Robert. "A Fatwa for Freedom." Guardian.co.uk. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/27/gayrights.iran/print>.
Anonymous. "Iran: Two More Executions for Homosexual Conduct | Human Rights
Watch." Home | Human Rights Watch. 21 Nov. 2005. Web. 30 Mar. 2011.
<http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/11/21/iran-two-more-executions-homosexual-
conduct>.

Singer, June. Boundaries of the Soul; the Practice of Jung's Psychology. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1972. Print.

Jung, C. G., and Anthony Storr. The Essential Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983.
Print.

Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn. Sufism: The Transformation of the Heart. Inverness, CA:
Golden Sufi Center, 1995. Print.

And tentatively:

Al-Ghazali, and Tim J. Winter. Al-Ghazali On Disciplining the Soul ; & On Breaking the
Two Desires : Books XXII and XXIII of the "Revival of the Religious Sciences.
Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995. Print.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. "Chapter 16: God." Islamic Spirituality: Foundations. New York:
Crossroad, 1987. N. pag. Print.

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