Queer
and Muslim: Faisal Alam Speaks Out
By
John Byrne
If
you thought being queer was hard, try being queer and Muslim.
Faisal Alam, an internationally renowned activist in Muslim and
queer communities spoke last week to a crowd of 100 students, faculty
and staff.
Tracing his life from a marginalized high school senior in Connecticut,
to a devout brother in his faith at Northwestern University in Boston,
Alam spoke about living two lives: Muslim by day, and homosexual
by night.
By day, he was an avid participant in the Muslim students association
and a vocal brother on campus. By night, he was gay, reveling in
his identity at gay clubs.
Alam said that he was engaged to a woman for several months while
at college, but that she had broken it off, saying that she had
a religious experience and felt that something was wrong with their
relationship.
“Those two lives really came crashing down,” he said,
“when I had a nervous breakdown.”
After this breakdown in 1996, Alam quietly started an online mailing
list to broach the issue of being both queer and Muslim. Moments
after he made his initial post, individuals began subscribing from
around the world.
“Literally, within minutes, people had started subscribing,”
he said.
For the first year of the listserv, Alam was the only one posting
messages, since people were so scared to come out, he said. Another
year later, in 1998, he held the first international gathering of
queer Muslims in Washington, D.C. There, the group decided that
they could no longer keep their movement under the radar.
“After three days of intense dialogue we decided we could
no longer be silent,” he said.
The organization, Al-Fatiha, an international organization dedicated
to Muslims who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning,
now has chapters in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Alam spoke of the challenges that queer men and women face in countries
across the world, and sought to counter assumptions many Americans
may have about his faith.
“In some Islamic countries, coming out of the closet may be
a death sentence,” he said. “What we are fighting against
is 1,400 years of interpretation.”
“Straight, presumably homophobic men,” he added, “have
interpreted our faith.”
Alam traces this Islamic aversion to male homosexuality to a portion
of the Koran which speaks of the Nation of Lot, which is referenced
in Christian religions as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. He argued
that the fall of Lot was not because of homosexuality, but because
sex was being forced on its citizens. Equally important, citizens
of Lot were stealing and were not being hospitable to their guests.
But the life experiences for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered
and questioning Muslims takes on a very different face across the
world, Alam said.
“We’re not as invisible as people would like to believe
and we’re not as oppressed,” he said. “Sexuality
takes a very, very different shape abroad…sexuality is not
politicized.”
He said that female sexuality is invisible, so lesbianism is often
tolerated.
His organization, Al-Fatiha, has received a death sentence from
an extremist Muslim group based in Britain, and does not publicly
disclose the location of their meetings in advance. Alam closed
by arguing that the gay movement has become caught up on its own
agenda, and could better fight within the context of other oppressed
peoples, in the way the civil rights movement did.
“Each of our struggles… are all interconnected,”
he remarked. “Fighting our battles simultaneously is the only
way we can escape.”
The talk was coordinated by Queers and Allies of Faith, and sponsored
by the Multicultural Resource Center, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgendered Union, Liberated Unitarian Universalist Voices,
the Asian American Alliance and an anonymous donor. |