Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The figure of the half a million Iraqi children killed by the sanctions, and which goes back to a 1995 study carried out under Saddam Hussein regime, is an arguable figure. Massad and a few others still repeat it without backing it with recent studies and sources.  A game of capitalist greed

Qatar World Cup 2022

Excerpts from The Islamic Enlightenment

Many of the laws criminalising homosexual relations originate from colonial times.  And in many places, breaking these laws could be punishable by long prison sentences. Out of the 53 countries in the Commonwealth - a loose association of countries most of them former British colonies - 36 have laws that criminalise homosexuality. Countries that criminalise homosexuality today also have criminal penalties against women who have sex with women, although the original British laws applied only to men. Related “Honour killing”

Tunisia Gay politician is running for president The article has ignored a crucial background that proves that the anti-homosexuality law is not religious -based law. "As noted by Tunisian Law Professor Sana Ben Achour, the criminalization of homosexuality in Tunisia began with the passage of 1913 Penal Code, imposed by colonial authorities during the French protectorate.  Previous iterations of the Tunisian penal code, such as the Qanun Al Jinayat Wal Ahkam Al Urfya (قانون الجنايات والأحكام العرفية), issued in 1860’s  under the Husainid dynasty , included no provisions criminalizing homosexuality..." [like in today's South Korea's constitution, for example] In the 1860s by the way Tunisians were Muslims! A similar law was passed by the French in Lebanon. Similar policies were either passed or encouraged by Victorians in the colonies. Even Muslim writers adopted the Victorian language of "perversion" in their literature. The British criminalised...

Gender and Empire Essential readings

Lawmaker Khawla Ben Aicha expects to propose changes to Article 230 of the country’s penal code, a remnant of French colonial rule which  punishes same-sex physical relationships  with up to three years in prison, in early November. Anal tests could finally be banned in Tunisia

"Ultimately, the greatest power of Fahmy’s adaptation is its ability to provide the audience with few obvious escape points, fewer firm assumptions to which to return safely. Even the characters’ best dreams for themselves seem illusory, almost ill-gotten. “Let us get out of Cairo. Out of the Yacoubian Building,” Busayna muses to Zaki, “we’ll be free. We’ll be together.” But few in this world have the luxury of escaping their own history: that history lives above you, works at your feet, sticks to you like the residue of centuries, and is liable to kill you in the end." A new adaptation of the Yacoubian Building

Remembering Pier Paolo Pasolini

by Khaled El-Rouayheb, University of Chicago Press 2005 Excerpts "My central contention is that Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of 'homosexuality,' and that writings from the period [1500-1800] do not evince the same attitude toward all aspects of what we might be inclined to call homosexuality today. The Arab literature of the early Ottoman period (1516-1798) is replete with casual and sometimes sympathetic references to homosexual love." p. 1 "Homosexuality is condemned and forbidden by the holy law of Islam, but there are times and places in Islamic history when the ban on homosexual love seems no stronger than the ban on adultery in, say, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. Some [classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish] poems are openly homosexual; some poets, in their collected poems, even have separate sections for love poems addressed to males and females." — Bernard Lewis, Music from a Distant Drum,...

The invention of sexual indentity and its imposition on the Other. "American and European missionaries of liberalism, that is, those who imagine that the global community of the future will be led by a secular cleric, [have sought] to proselytize their value system and model of social and political order to all Muslims whom they seek to save and rescu e from their despotic system of rule, failing which, the missionaries would at least want to rescue Muslim women and increasingly male (and female, though less attention is paid to the latter) Muslim 'homosexuals' from Islam's misogyny, homophobia, and intolerance. This act of proselytization aims to convert Muslims and Islam to Western liberalism and its value system as the only just and sane system to which the entire planet must be converted. As Talal Asad put it, the liberal mission is to have the Islamic tradition 'remade in the image of liberal Protestant Chiristianity.' Muslim resistance to this benev...

What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism

Homosexuality Salman al-Odah, a leading Saudi cleric with 9 million Twitter followers, said in  an interview with a Swedish newspaper  April 30 [2016] that even though homosexuality is considered a sin in the Torah, Bible, and Quran, according to Islam the punishment comes in the next world, not this one. "Those that say homosexuals are deviants of Islam, they are the true deviants and their actions are a graver sin than the homosexuals themselves,” he added, in a  statement on his website . [T]here is no prescribed execution for homosexuality in the Quran or in Islamic law. Instead, scholars say, the Quran implies that retribution is in the hands of God. As for the  hadith , the sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammad, there is much dispute as to whether he prescribed a particular punishment for sodomy. President Abdul Fattah Sisi [supported and armed by the West], who ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 and brought back a more secular Egypt...

"Last month in Germany, for example, lawmakers voted to approve gay marriage (and adoption) in a historic vote. The anti-Muslim populist party Alternative for Germany opposed the measure on ideological grounds, while all six Muslim members of parliament voted in support of the bill. Incidentally, Chancellor Angela Merkel, now widely seen as the pre-eminent guardian of western liberal values, voted against the bill." How the 'homophobic Muslim' became a populist bogeyman

How the Bible Belt lost God and found Trump

"I'm uncomfortable with how close the mainstream LGBTQ movement in the West has aligned itself with both capitalism and the military. For example, as an Arab man, how can I celebrate legislative changes in the United States that allow gay men and women to serve in the military, when this same institution is responsible for things like the Abu Ghraib prison torture, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continued drone strikes? But there’s hope. There are queer Arab movements, both in the Arab world and in the Western world, who are working to make a space for themselves within the mainstream LGBTQI movement—Qaws, a queer Palestinian movement, is one that comes to mind in its efforts to challenge the Israeli government’s pinkwashing of the occupation, while building positive bridges of solidarity between movements in the West and the East."  — Saleem Haddad , author of Guapa

" Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class." (BBC online) The invention of 'heterosexuality'

The Gulistān (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdī of Shiraz. The book was written in 1258. The most recent translator of the Gulistān says: 'Saʿdi’s Gulistan must be one of the most widely read books ever produced. Almost from the time it was written it was the first book studied by school children throughout the entire Persian-speaking and -reading world—from Constantinople to Bengal and from Central Asia to East Africa.' "The story of the Qāḍī of Hamadān appears in the chapter of the Gulistān on “Love and Youth.” For those readers unfamiliar with the story, I will present it here in summary, mainly in my own words, but also sometimes in Saʿdī’s— very much, one might say, in the manner that the story might have been narrated to largely illiterate audiences down the centuries in various social settings. The story goes thus (any phrase in full quotation marks, or for which I provide a Persian transliteration is a direct quotation from Saʿdī; also, any direct speech in si...