The ask a Muslim guy thread was getting too long so I’ll just ask over here…
What’s the Muslim position on homosexuality?
The Muslim position on homosexuality is pretty similar to the Christian position on homosexuality.
Missionary?
If you go by the book, Islam strictly prohibits homosexuality, considering it an abomination.
But as a practical matter… male homosexuality activity is EXTREMELY common in the Moslem world, and it’s not only tolerated but winked at.
In strict Islamic communities, an unmarried girl who fornicates has brought shame on her family, and her father has the right to kill her. He ALSO has the right to kill the young man who deflowers his daughter. In fundamentalist Moslem communities, fathers regularly HAVE exercised these rights. So, every young Arab, Irani or Afghan boy knows that messing around with a cute girl is dangerous, and can get him killed. So, if he’s horny (as all teenage boys in every religion always are), how does he satisfy his urges? Why, with other boys, of course!
Now, no Moslem parents WANT their sons to be gay, but if they know their sons are engaging in sex play with male friends, they’re far more likely to shrug “Boys will be boys” and look the other way than to have the kid stoned to death.
Just so long as the boys aren’t doing something REALLY dangerous, like having sex with GIRLS.
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- Someone I know who is a trivia-hound and who isn’t entirely full of crap once told me that he had read that back in ancient times, in the Middle East, men preferred female donkeys and camels to male donkeys and camels.
Now, one with an innocent mind might suppose that a female animal could produce offspring which could be sold,
and they’d be right.
-However, that wasn’t the reason he was inferring.
Something to do with strict codes of marriage or something.
—And this wasn’t confined to any particular religion, by the by.
I haven’t ever run across any evidence to back it up, but it doesn’t seem such a long shot. - MC
- Someone I know who is a trivia-hound and who isn’t entirely full of crap once told me that he had read that back in ancient times, in the Middle East, men preferred female donkeys and camels to male donkeys and camels.
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Gotta wonder about this. Why is it paradise promises both male and female houris to the faithful… or was someone feeding me a line?
Both Homosexuality and fornication are dissallowed in Islam. And while your claims about homosexuality between single males in predominantly Muslim communities may be true, it is not an Islamic trait, morerather it would be a trait of that community.
However, I still find your claims extremely hard to believe. While it is true that fornication is dissallowed, homosexuality is considered a greater sin. So for parents to let homosexuality slide but not fornication, that sounds bogus to me.
I think it’s interesting that Islam allows sex-change operations, though the operation has to be complete before you can start wearing female clothes (no cross-dressing allowed until you no longer have your male parts). The science fiction novel ‘When Gravity Fails’ is set in a Moslem city a couple of hundred years in the future and extrapolates what might happen in such a society when medical technology advances - nearly all the dancers and prostitutes are former males.
That’s about as BS as anything I’ve ever heard.
Bedris… no, I wasn’t joking. And I wasn’t passing along bogus second-hand myths.
Look, I DON’T mean to insult Moslems here. ALL religions have rules and regulations, and ALL face a common problem: people try to stay within the letter of the law, while doing the sinful things they like.
Good example: in Catholic Italy, there’s a common expression: “A virgin in the front, a martyr in the rear.” What does that mean? Well, the Catholic Church insists that girls must remain virgins until marriage. So, devout Italian girls will refuse to have intercourse with their boyfriends before the wedding night, but WILL engage in anal intercourse, because TECHNICALLY, they figure they’ll still be virgins! So, in a perverse, unintended way, the Church has indirectly encouraged anal sex!
Religious laws, like secular laws, can have unintended consequences! That’s true in Catholic Italy, and its true in the Islamic Middle East.
I do NOT suggest that the prophet Mohammed encouraged male homosexuality- he did not, and thought it a shameful sin. But by making the rules against heterosexual fornication so strict, he indirectly, inadvertantly enouraged something else that he disapproved of.
I’m not saying at all that the Taliban is any representation of Islam, but their way of “dealing” with homosexuality is to knock a wall down on them and run them over with bulldozers.
In Egypt, a large number of men were recently arrested for homosexuality. Their trials are ongoing.
As far as homosexuality or fornication, why is the Muslim position so strictly against it? Where in the Qur’an does it say that homosexuality is bad? I’m not disrespecting Islam because Muslims can believe and practice as they see fit, but it seems rather unrealistic to deny that humans are sexual creatures and that not everyone is going to be heterosexual. If Islam is supposed to be about love, peace, and tolerance, then why isn’t love, peace, and tolerance built in for homosexuals?
Although the official religious position is that homosexuality is wrong, it appears that some films, particularly by Iranians, have been done featuring Muslims or folks who live in Muslim countries who try to engage in homosexual relationships or who seek to marry for love rather than submit to arranged marriages, and they explore the price they pay for doing so. These films I imagine–I’ve not seen them yet–do provide some critique class issues as well as gender politics as they investigate the strictures Muslim societies place on homosexual men and women and in particular on heterosexual women who are forced to wear the chador, submit to arranged marriages, in some cases deal brutal husbands, . . . I think there was a film out last year or this year treating two Iranian women who turn to each other for comfort from their miserable lives and wind up having a lesbian affair, but I can’t remember the title of this film. If you do a google search on this topic, it will yield some interesting information.
Hijack, and true sickening story. A judge once gave a guy only probation for sodomizing his 8 year old stepdaughter, citing the fact that “he was acting in her best interests by preserving her virginity.” There was a total outrage over that, but I never heard another thing about it.
That movie is called Fire, and it deals with two Indian women. Worth the watch, but the principal religion is Hinduism.
Beyond the unintended consequences bit, however, the run-around tactic-of-choice for obviating religious or social mores may also depend on existing cultural elements. Take that example of the “technical virgins” in some Euro-christian cultures. Could it be those European societies already had a prior background of acceptance of certain practices from Greek and Roman times?
It would not be too surprising, seeing how the first outward expansion of Islam was to lands that had been in the Hellenistic cultural sphere, if it absorbed some communities who already had a tradition of higher tolerance for homosexuality/pederasty and who, rather than give it up altogehter, rationalized their way around the Koranic/prophetic condemnation thereof and may continue to do so to this day (similar to how African societies that practice “female circumcision” continued doing so even after conversion, there being no mandate for it in Islam).
Islam’s lack of a centralized doctrinal interpretation body makes it even easier for national or tribal tradition to shape the local application of the rules: a more mundane example is the widely varying standard as to how covered should a woman be in public – from western dress, to headscarves, to totally wrapped.
Even when you remove the religious imperative, the “well, it’s not really sex if it’s just ________.” argument is often attributed “validation” by concern about avoiding pregnancy or disease. People will seek every possible excuse to get around any objection to getting off – and it may just make it seem that making a big deal about the evils of teen pregnancy “drives” 14-year-olds to fellatio.
I don’t know what the Quran says about homosexuality, but I have lived in three Islamic countries and visited several others and I can tell you that astorian is completely right. And I think that the explanation he/she gave for this is probably pretty accurate as well.
Slight Hijack__________________________
What’s the Christian position on gays?
End of slight hijack_____________________
andygirl said:
“That movie is called Fire, and it deals with two Indian women. Worth the watch, but the principal religion is Hinduism.”
Thank you for clarifying that, dear. I’m getting senile in my old age! 
I’ll have to check and see if “Fire” and some of these other films I found doing a google search are out on video.
JRDelirious said:
“It would not be too surprising, seeing how the first outward expansion of Islam was to lands that had been in the Hellenistic cultural sphere, if it absorbed some communities who already had a tradition of higher tolerance for homosexuality/pederasty and who, rather than give it up altogehter, rationalized their way around the Koranic/prophetic condemnation thereof and may continue to do so to this day (similar to how African societies that practice “female circumcision” continued doing so even after conversion, there being no mandate for it in Islam).”
Excellent points. I’m generally a really tolerant person, but the practice of “female circumcision” also known as “genital mutilation” is just plain fucked up IMHO, and as you rightly note has nothing to do with Islam. I’m so glad that the women in these cultures that practice this barbaric form of sexual domination are speaking up against it and at great personal risk to themselves trying to work for it to be abolished. For more information on it, a good place to start is Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993) by Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar.
That’s a bit more than a slight hijack. 
The basic answer is that there’s no such singular thing. Opinions on homosexuality varies greatly not only across denominations, but within them. My home congregation (Methodist) has in the past few years been divided fairly equally among pro and anti gay members.
Incidentally, virtually every religion and their segments and denominations have within them a gay/lesbian organization. Not as part of the religion, you understand, but rather as a group of people who are queer who practice said religion. I believe the Muslim gay organization is called Al-Nur.