The punishment for a rape of a young man was caning the feet of the perpetrator, or cutting off an ear, Najmabadi writes. There are also factual reports saying it was illegal to force your way onto a young man. And many of the poems from ancient Muslim culture celebrate reciprocal love between two men. Historians often rely on literary representations for evidence of history. It’s about Allah punishing rape, violence and refusing hospitality. While many may use this as an excuse to hate gay people, it’s not. Then other men learn about the strangers, and insist on raping them. Two angels arrive at Sodom, and they meet Lot who insists they stay the night in his house. Like the Bible, the Qu’ran tells the story of how Allah punished the ancient inhabitants of the city of Sodom. There’s far more sexual diversity.’ 3 Sodom and Gomorrah is not an excuse for homophobia in Islam ‘However, it’s not as heteronormative as it might seem at first. ‘These amrads are not having sex in a perfectly consenting way because of power relationships and pressures and so on. ‘It was saying, “I’m a man, I’m a patriarch, I earn money so I can rape anyone including boys, other slaves and women.” We shouldn’t idealize antique culture.’ ‘It wasn’t exactly how we would define homosexuality as we would today, it was about patriarchy,’ Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, a gay imam who lives in Marseilles, France, told GSN. They would often be used as servants for prophets. But even they had their place in society. These were men (some researchers consider them to be transgender or third gender people) who would shave their beards as adults to show they wished to continue being the object of desire for men. There was some judgment over ‘mukhannas’. Iranian historian Afsaneh Najmabadi writes how official Safavid chroniclers would describe the sexual lives of various Shahs, the ruling class, without judgment. Society completely accepted this, at least in elite circles. Once these men had grown his beard (or ‘khatt’), he then became the pursuer of his own younger male desires.Īnd in this time, once you had fulfilled your reproductive responsibilities as a man you could do what you like with younger men, prostitutes and other women. And it was very common for older men to have sex with younger, beardless men. Persianate cultures, all of them Muslim, dominated modern day India and Arab world.
And it shared a lot of similarities with the Ancient Greeks. The Islamic empires, (Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, Mughals), shared a common culture. 1 Ancient Muslim borrowed culture from the boy-loving Ancient Greeks The truth is many Muslims alive today believe the prophet Muhammad supported and protected sexual and gender minorities.īut go back to the beginning, and you’ll see there is far more homosexuality in Islam than you might have ever thought before. They formally ruled gay sex wasn’t a crime in 1858.īut as Christians came over from the west to colonize, they infected Islam with homophobia. The Ottoman Empire, the seat of power in the Muslim world, didn’t view lesbian or gay sex as taboo for centuries. Islam once considered homosexuality to be one of the most normal things in the world.