Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity

M. Rahman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137002969
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the increasing role of queer politics within forms of Islamophobia, both by exploring the framing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues as a key marker of western superiority and by identifying the ways in which Muslim homophobia contributes to this dialectic.

1

In Search of My Mother’s Garden: Reflections on Migration, Gender, Sexuality and Muslim Identity

Introduction

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is Alice Walker’s 1983 collection of essays and reminiscences, in which she focuses on her intellectual and personal journey as a feminist, writer and, as she puts it, womanist:

Womanist, as she defines it, means many things: first, most definitely, ‘a black feminist or feminist of color’ … wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good for one’. Second, ‘a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as the natural counterbalance to laughter), and women’s strength.’

A womanist also loves; ‘Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the folk. Loves herself. Regardless.’(1983: xi–xii)

Following somewhat erratically in her footsteps, I offer a few reflections on issues of migration, gender, sexuality and identity. The original impetus for this chapter was a public lecture delivered in 2005 on women’s history, in which I used my autobiographical narrative to think about questions of gender and sexuality in the context of Muslim identity.¹ Since then, I have thought more directly about my location as a gay man in provoking the initial choice and formation of topic. In revisiting this history with a keener sense of my queerness, I therefore weave a different narrative from the initial talk, but a central thread remains the topic of women in my family and the wider community of Bengalis and Muslims that I am connected to.

This alerts you to that fact that aspects of this narrative are a history once removed and, therefore, whilst these aspects are indeed part of my autobiography, I cannot claim any ‘truth’ for them except as my standpoint on gendered experiences and identities. I mention this at the outset because it is important to say that I am not speaking for women even – particularly – those in my family. How could I? Ontologically and experientially I do not share their existence, their social constitution or their social histories – I am an educationally and materially privileged British-born Bengali male, one who is both physically and culturally absent from most of the everyday aspects of the women’s lives I discuss. Rather, my aim is to explore how my narrative, my standpoint as a gay man, is inextricable from the lived experiences and political dimensions of gendered Muslim identity: how queerness is inevitably defined in relation to gender norms and their disruptions but how these norms are also ones of culture and ethnicity. I am not simply a gay man, but a gay British Bengali, irreducibly racialized in my queerness and thus occupying an intersectional location in terms of gender, race, class and sexuality.² My hope is that I can usefully explore this queer intersectionality to understand its dimensions and also whether it can contribute to untangling some of the contemporary controversies of Muslim ‘difference’.

History, narratives and narrators

My assumption is that history, by definition, only exists in the present. By this statement, I remind myself that narratives, particularly autobiographical ones such as mine, are constructions in the present, even as they seek to be reconstructions of the past. Whilst the methods of narrative are varied, they have in common a reliance on subjective sources, whether that is memory, personal visual or written documents, and the extended in-depth interview. This qualitative approach is in fact the inevitable option when attempting to understand personalized stories, but it just as inevitably throws up the questions of epistemology, ontology and authenticity by placing the narrator at centre stage of our methodological nexus. The act of telling the tale is in full measure, constitutive of the tale that is told: it is a crucial part of those interactions around telling ‘stories’ (Plummer, 1995). And so we need to know something about the narrators of history to assess to what extent their stories, their narrative constructions, are governed by their present social locations and motivations. Hitherto, I have tried to be honest about my position as a socially privileged and largely westernized male, removed from the everyday life of my family. Moreover, the most Western aspect of my character – or so Bengalis and Muslims would have you believe – is my homosexuality. Momin means ‘believer’ and ‘faithful one’ in terms of the Islamic religion, and a homosexual identity is certainly a breach of this faith, regarded as a sin – moreover, one that we can choose not to commit. I have chosen that sin, chosen to come out and live as a gay man, an identity that has pushed me away from a Bengali and Muslim community both geographically and culturally, whilst simultaneously – in common with most homosexuals who ‘escape’ their localized culture – it has provoked a constant awareness of gender conformity and non-conformity amongst that culture.

Part of that awareness has been that the women in Bengali culture carry much of the burden of cultural integrity, although I am loath to accept that as a purely ‘Eastern’ phenomenon.³ In many everyday ways, this means that they also carry the burden of history, of the changes brought about by migration, political events and discourses and the cycles of the economy. My failure to be a ‘faithful’ Bengali male has allowed me space to reflect on these issues of gender division, what it is to be a man or woman, but it has also forced me to reflect upon the privileges of masculinity within culture and how I still receive some of them, despite moving away from the culture, and, perhaps worst of all, having chosen to be gay.⁴ But the truth is that I have never focused directly on these issues in my academic work, despite that being largely about sexuality and gender. Literally too close to home? Perhaps, but also partly because I failed to inhabit an assumed academic identity by failing to engage with issues of ethnicity. What changed was a change of academic location for a while – a semester as a visiting lecturer in a Women’s Studies program at the University of Maine – where they invited me to do the annual Women’s History lecture, thus provoking a more disciplined reflection upon issues which had been circulating for a while. A first telling of the tale that was not reflexive about epistemology in its content. This second telling of the tale has constituted the narrative differently because I am trying to be more reflexive about the knowledge I produce through my narrative, and how that knowledge is fundamentally governed by intertwined neglected narratives, and thus intersecting explanations of oppressions and ontology. The skills an academic training has given me have been used to reflect upon the personal; my existence as a gay man, the oppressions I felt within that identity, how and why gender politics and divisions create controversies of sexual difference and above all, what it means to be Muslim, gay, Muslim and gay.

Epistemological consequences occupy and exercise me precisely because the ontological is what I am at heart attempting to understand. A relativist epistemology is by definition the basis of autobiographical narrative methodologies and I am secure in those implications, but I am aware as well that they raise uncertainties, ambiguities about claims to authenticity and perhaps validity. For example, I am removed from the early experiences of migration simply because I wasn’t born until my family had been in Britain for some time. As a narrator, I am therefore dependent upon the oral histories provided within the family – mostly, it has to be said, by my mother and eldest sister. And so another dimension of standpoints becomes involved which requires attention to the relationship between me, as narrator, and the memories I deploy of others’ memories and how they serve the authenticity I am trying to access, or construct. In this sense, this narrative is not autobiography but auto/biography, a term introduced by the feminist theorist Liz Stanley ‘to contaminate the idea that a narrative produced by a self writing about itself, and one produced by a self writing about another being, were formallydistinguishable from each other’ (Broughton, 2000: 242). Whilst the deployment of memories in the narrative that follows is an attempt on my part to perform some kind of audit of the self (Stanley, 2000) of my ontological dimensions, it is also an auto/biography of the Muslim women I know, and how my thinking and writing of gender determines my thinking about sexuality.

Broughton goes on to discuss how feminist interventions in this genre have shown that writing biographies of other and self have often masked the social location and epistemology of the writer; something I hope I am rendering visible. However, in my uncertainty about these questions of epistemology and authenticity, I think that I can only claim that I am producing a ‘queer’ narrative, one that acknowledges and embraces the uncertainties of identity categories and explores how I am located within, against and outside these categories as historical and political phenomena. Whilst there are different dimensions to queer theory, I am focused on its challenges to ontological foundations, challenges made to universal categories of gender and sexuality often deployed within feminist and gay movements and ideas.⁵ As Seidman argues in his review of queer theory, it has contributed to the elaboration of those ‘disenchanting’ ideas which propose that the ‘subject’ is an unstable and arbitrary construction, forged out of multiple and historically contingent intersections of ways of thinking about self-identity (1996: 11–12). I am proposing that you understand this story as a queer narrative precisely because that framework allows for the uncertainty the narrative displays and thus shows affinity with the intersectionality that I am trying to reach for. In presenting this history, I am made aware that it is a story of intersectionality and how that intersectionality renders me queer – there are never quite solid or definite identifications with Muslim, Bengali, or gay identity – a history of deferred ontology. Perhaps histories are never the whole story about the past, but they are often much of the story about where we are in the present.

Migration

And the present day is somewhat amazing to me – here I am, the son of first generation immigrants, inhabiting a position of social and economic privilege as an academic, having used that profession to migrate recently myself, from the UK to Canada.⁶ Unfortunately, I am an exceptional case, in that Bengalis are still very near the bottom of the socio-economic heap in Britain, despite four generations of presence.⁷ Like many others, my family emigrated to the United Kingdom, or rather, East London, back in the 1950s, from Bangladesh. Monica Ali’s 2003 first novel, Brick Lane, is named for the area in East London which became home to many Bengalis, congregating together as immigrants sensibly do, for the security of knowing that there are others around you, like you, who may give you work and housing and, indeed, treat you as fully human. The family lived in this area before I was born, but we still have relatives there and indeed, the area is now called not only Aldgate, but also Banglatown, in recognition of the now well-established Bengali community and culture. However, my particular Indians moved west. Of course, not very far west, given the narrowness of England’s waistline, but far enough to live in a community in Bristol, a city which was ready for the spice of Indian cooking – or so my parents’ generation hoped. And there they still reside, having been there for almost 50 years, now in a well-established community with several mosques, wonderful grocers and butchers, and so-so tailors, but not widespread economic or educational success.

Migration is of course a rich story and it has many different dimensions, both positive and negative histories intertwined. My interest here is to think through migration as a movement through identities. Who traveled, and what were their identities, and what did we and I become by living within and against those identities? You see, in truth, although we describe our ‘selves’ as Bengali, my parents were born in India, and more properly under the colonial rule of British India. Partition occurred in 1947 and although Nehru – the first Prime Minister of India – eloquently described the moment as part fulfillment of ‘a tryst with destiny’, it turned out to be a bloody and wrenching event, creating two states – India and Pakistan – allocated along majority religious identification. Muslim Pakistan consisted of Pakistan as we know it today – that burden on the left shoulder of India – and East Pakistan, a geographically separate landmass, which became the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971 after a war of independence from Pakistan. So, although we are now officially Bangladeshi in British audits, that State-derived identity did not exist until the early 1970s. We have always been self-identified as Bengali – relating to the region in North-East India which is a wider expanse than the state of Bangladesh. My Bengali father was born and raised in Calcutta, the former colonial capital of India and still an important city, but in India after partition and, more recently, officially renamed Kolkata to match its Bengali pronunciation. And it was my father who came to Britain first, working in and running restaurants, going home occasionally to East Pakistan, and my mother arrived only after the first few years, with my eldest sister in tow. My brother was born here, eight years after my sister. By the time I was born, trips ‘home’ were to Bangladesh, although I went only once in my life, when I was around four years of age, and I will probably never go again; home, for me, is the West. Now living in Canada, when I think of ‘home’ I think of trips back to Britain where my family and most of my friends remain.

Migration is of course about journeying. But it is not enough to understand it as simply journeying from one land to another. Post-colonial migration is definitively about journeying through time – traveling from third to first worlds involves not only a change of economic choices but also a change of culture – how societies and labor are organized and how that impacts upon the possibilities of cultural practice and identity. If, as we sociologists like to claim, the ascendance of the ‘West’ has been defined by all that is modern, migrating to the West has meant traveling into the future, from rural, agricultural and most of all, traditional, lives, to a system of wage labor, commodities, and smaller kinship networks. This traveling through time is a migration into structures of modernity, both economic and bureaucratic. And, as Stanley (2000) reminds us, the bureaucratic imperative to modernity creates the need to account for our ‘selves’, through official audits of self. We travel into the future, and our ‘selves’ are remolded, reimagined in this future-present. My family’s engagement with such structures is defined both through economic location – as with many from the subcontinent – work was the aim, over and above the welfare available – but such work is low skilled, low paid and often, in the catering and service trades where many Bengalis end up, subject to wider economic factors that determine disposable incomes. But for the generations that followed, the welfare state in its various forms provided the hope of springboard out of this situation: from maternity and infant care through the National Health Service (NHS),⁸ through primary and secondary education through the local state, through the benefits system, from public housing provision and supporting and supplementing incomes. What a litany of socialized provision! When it used to be called social security. But state, or rather collective, provisions are now much less secure than they were, and regarded suspiciously in our contemporary neo-liberal or Thatcherite political discourses of low taxation and minimal public provision, as they have been since the late 1970s fiscal crises of Western capitalist states.⁹ But I guess the point is that these bureaucracies, at a general level as well as individualized ones, created identities, or at least defined them to a large extent, both negatively – the immigrants scrounging of the welfare state, and taking ‘Western’ jobs – and positively; by creating personalized routes for the self. Identities now wedded to welfare provision, social housing, income support, all in support of low wage jobs (with low expectations of moving out of such socio-economic sectors) but security in the social provision so fundamentally absent in countries of origin. Such fundamental changes in the way that lives are structured, represented and lived can but impact upon how those lives are inhabited.

Identities

During this journey through modernity, my family have always identified as Bengali. Thus, whilst migration is a journey through time, that journey is undertaken within and against categories of identity. I do not think that any of us were ever actually Bangladeshi citizens since, by 1971–1972, those of us who were already around in Britain were all subjects of the Crown – as British citizenship is charmingly defined. But were we ever really British? Not, I would think, in any full measure – it took until 1997 for British Muslim to become an official identity – in the sense that our head of state mentioned the British Muslim as a new and welcome part of British identity on a trip to Pakistan and India.¹⁰ Forty years after my father first arrived!

There is little point in rehearsing the specifics of legal racism – how Britishness has been defined in opposition to particular ethnic identities. Suffice to say that whilst we may now see British South Asians as indeed British, and whilst we see curry as something of a national dish, British political and popular culture has agonized its way through the process of understanding and accepting difference. Indeed, we have the irony now of a political discourse which criticizes British multiculturalism from the centre left (whence it came) long after multiculturalism has become embedded in everyday life in many cities and towns across the UK. What seems to underlie such anxieties are more traditional concerns of social integration, social order and social inequalities, but in accepting differences, we seem to have lost sight of how to articulate that some difference still can be mapped accurately onto social inequalities. Ghettos are not just ethnic, cultural choices to separate, but have historically been the way to survive economically. They may be a feature of urban British life, but the inequalities and separation they signify are not caused by those that inhabit these spaces. And separation from the wider populace is also, seen from the ‘other’ perspective, a logical social reaction to lack of provision, and a lack of acceptance of differences. But of course, the crucial issue now is how these spaces also have become mini-cultures of their own (as if multiculturalism could mean anything else in practice!), particularly in relation to Muslim identities and the practices that these communities engage in. It is also not a wild claim to make when I say that the British Muslim is now a vilified character, less than ten years after its emergence into the discourse of Britishness. I am sure I don’t even have to iterate the spiraling descent of this discursive transformation but think of the horror at the 7/7 bombers¹¹ being British and of the recent controversies around women wearing the veil in Western societies, exemplified in Britain.¹²

My experience of this identity is governed by my own semi-detached attitude to identification as a British Muslim. I have never been comfortable with that explicitly religious identification, although certainly these days it is used to define and characterize a culture even though many within that group are divided by national identities such as Pakistani and Bangladeshi. My own memories of growing up in Bristol also mark out more of a cultural identity rather than religious one. Furthermore, although we were different in many ways – what food we ate at home, what language we spoke, and of course, our skin, we were also largely westernized, going to school, learning English as our first language, playing with the other kids on the street and in each other’s homes. My only concerns around identity would have been whether I was going to be Starsky or Hutch in playground re-enactments.¹³ Not so, I think for my ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 In Search of My Mother’s Garden: Reflections on Migration, Gender, Sexuality and Muslim Identity
• 2 Islam versus
• 3 Problematic Modernization: The Extent and Formation of Muslim Antipathy to Homosexuality
• 4 Traditions and Transformations of Muslim Homo-eroticism
• 5 Queer Muslims in the Context of Contemporary Globalized LGBTIQ Identity
• 6 The Politics of Identity and the Ends of Liberation
• 7 Beginnings
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index