Transcript: Dr Jonathan Galton – Queerness, Islam and the Left
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Hello and welcome to The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th and 19th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London, the first institution in England to admit students without imposing a religious test. Bentham is widely credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces. He put it simply in his advice: create all the happiness you are able to create, remove all the misery you are able to remove. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant to the ethical problems of the 21st century. Today’s episode looks at the political tension on the progressive left between queerness and Islam. I’m talking to Dr Jonathan Galton, a Leverhulme Early Careers Fellow, whose research asks if the left has a Muslim problem.
JONATHAN GALTON:
My name is Jonathan Galton, I’m a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow here at UCL. I’m in the third year of a three-year project. I’ll tell you the title of the book that I’m currently writing and pitching to editors. So, the book’s called ‘Does the Left have a [quote] “Muslim Problem” and Seven Other Uncomfortable Questions’. It’s a sort of response to the narrative that you often hear from the political right – not exclusively the right, but often the right – the narrative that the left has a problematic relationship with Muslim communities and Islam. And when I say problematic, I mean in this case, problematically close, problematically favourable. And this narrative takes two main forms. One I call the Unholy Alliance narrative, the other I call the Blind Eye narrative. So, the Unholy Alliance narrative posits that leftists have kind of got into bed with Islamists in a sort of political alliance that’s tearing apart the fabric of western civilisation. The Blind Eye narrative goes something like this: that the left is very diligent and committed to calling out homophobia, misogyny, maybe anti-Semitism, when it comes from the Far Right or from conservatives or from evangelical Christians, but they’re strangely reluctant to criticise these, these phenomena, when they occur in Muslim communities.
And again, this is an accusation that’s launched across the political spectrum, actually, but I’ve heard it particularly from right wing politicians and right-wing thinkers, and also quite often from queer ex Muslims.
So, my research basically is trying to sort of work out what this narrative is, where it comes from, who’s using it, what it does – but also how it’s experienced, and particularly how it’s experienced by those groups who are sort of on the receiving end, or caught in the kind of crossfire, of this discourse. So, I’ve conducted a range of interviews, but I’ve been particularly keen to centre the experiences of left-leaning Muslims and also queer Muslims around that. I’ve done a fair bit of sort of textual and media analysis, but it’s really trying to kind of strip behind this, this caricature, if you like, and see sort of what, how this corresponds to any underlying reality.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Is there an underlying reality?
JONATHAN GALTON:
So I think just one thing to be really clear about, is there are lots, there are many, many Muslims – it’s not a homogenous group. Er… So, on one level, it’s sort of, it’s a rather grotesque caricature that’s weaponised to delegitimise left wing politics, to demonise particular left-wing politicians, and also to demonise Muslims. But caricatures don’t come from nowhere. So I’m trying to, kind of trying to characterise the sort of left wing, the wider left wing Muslim engagement. And it’s really important to acknowledge at this point that those are not two separate categories. There are many left-wing Muslims.
And I’ve been thinking of this along four lines: compassion, discomfort, attraction and strategy. So just very briefly – by compassion, I mean compassion for marginalised communities. And there’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that, in the UK, Muslims are one of the most socioeconomically marginalised and demonised groups. So a sort of natural candidate for left wing compassion.
I think there’s also a great deal of discomfort, particularly when conversations turn to some of these tropes of homophobia. A lot of my friends and colleagues on the left, I think, are just unwilling to enter into a discussion that might be seen to be demonising an already marginalised group, so they tend to shy away from these conversations – I would absolutely plead guilty myself on that front.
Attraction, I think goes alongside this compassion, this discomfort, which I think often go hand in hand. I think there is, it’s also important to understand that there are people, not just on the left, who might be attracted to Islam on a theological level, or attracted to what we’d call Islamicate culture, or sometimes Islamicate culture, so the cultural formations around Islam.
And then finally, strategy. It is true that the Labour Party, in particular, over the last several decades at least, have routinely courted the Muslim vote and seen Muslims as vote banks. So there are lots of different things going on, and I think it’s sort of quite easy to see that, looked at from a slightly fuzzy distance, this can appear to be some really coordinated Left Muslim problematic relationship, but I would say actually it’s far more diffuse than that.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Just digging down a little bit, I can see that homophobia could be regarded as one of the critical issues here, because we have, like Middle Eastern Islamic States criticised for their policies towards homosexuals. I mean, what reasons would Muslims give for being opposed to homosexuality?
JONATHAN GALTON:
That’s a really good question. One of the chapters in the book I’m writing, I’m sort of framing this as a response to an article by a man called Jimmy Bangash, who I’ve met. He’s a queer ex Muslim, and one of the reasons why he left Islam was really sort of struggling to reconcile his sexuality and his religion, and his article is really a sort of frustrated address to the left, saying: why is the left betraying queer Muslims? Why is the left not being more robust in calling out homophobia from Muslims? And I think if you wanted to make the case that Islam was exceptionally homophobic, or that Muslims as a community, particularly in the UK, are particularly homophobic, there is plenty of material you can draw on, and that’s not a caricature. You could look at Scripture, the Quran, and also the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. You could look at statistics of attitudes based on different religious groups towards homosexuality, you could look at real events and experiences. And then, of course, you could kind of look further afield – at policies in Muslim-majority countries. It’s an interesting and quite complex picture, though, if you look, if you take that last example, the fact that many of the countries in the world that still criminalise same sex activity are Islamic countries. They also happen to be, in many cases, former British colonies. So in a lot of cases, the actual legal mechanisms by which homosexuality, or at least same sex activity, is criminalised, is through British-era penal codes. So famously, in South Asia section 377, which has been repealed in India now but still remains in force in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
None of that is to say that prior to the arrival of British colonisers any of these places were necessarily sexual free-for-alls, or queer utopias – it’s more that British lawmaking, in that case, sort of fundamentally restructured the way that sexuality was managed, and understandings of public and private. So I think that there is an important legacy there, the British colonial era laws. But currently Sharia law is also, Sharia is also invoked in criminalising sexuality, and particularly in some of the countries where the death penalty is applied. So, in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brunei, various others, the legal mechanism there is normally Islamic law, and that is drawing specifically on certain verses in the Quran which are very closely parallelled to verses that we have in the Old Testament. So, verses around the Prophet Lot, and they’re sort of normatively understood to proscribe same sex acts.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
No, that’s really interesting, because that was a point that Bentham picked up on, was the example of Sodom and Gomorrah. And if we look at Bentham’s great legal rival, William Blackstone, Blackstone makes the point that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah showed that the injunction or the prohibition of homosexuality was a universal precept: it applied to all places, all peoples and all times. And Bentham looked at the story and he said: no, this story is not condemning homosexuality, it’s condemning gang rape. Because that’s what he thought the story was about. And if you looked at the teachings of Jesus, Jesus does never condemn homosexuality on the basis of Sodom and Gomorrah. And in fact, Bentham goes on to say that Christians actually might have reason to think that from the Biblical account, that Jesus was involved himself in homosexual relationships. I mean, is there anything in the Muslim tradition that, you know, you could use to give a more positive view?
JONATHAN GALTON:
Now, actually, that’s very interesting, I didn’t know that about Bentham. I shall certainly be looking more into that because that’s actually strikingly similar to some of the theological work that’s being done really quite kind of currently, in the last few decades, to reinterpret some of these verses. So there’s an American scholar, a Muslim convert called Scott Kugle, who’s written a book called ‘Homosexuality in Islam’. And yeah, he very much regards the verses about the Prophet Lot as pertaining to rape, to sexual coercion, and not to consensual same sex activity. He also kind of then zooms out and says, if you look at where these verses occur, and they occur in different Quranic surah, different Quranic chapters, they’re all embedded alongside other stories about the perils of ignoring prophets. So in some ways, actually, he argues that this is more about, ‘no, listen to prophets, guys’. This is, and this just so happens that those cases are about sexual activity. He’s not alone in revisiting those verses. There are other scholars that have looked at this, some from a more legalistic perspective, some from a historical perspective; some have connected this to kind of Roman understandings of male-male sexual activity, in particular that, of course, then gets lots of pushback from some more conservative scholars. So there’s a particular scholar, Yasir Qadhi, who’s written some real polemics in response to Scott Kugle, and that has real, real world impacts on young queer Muslims or young Muslims growing up and struggling with their sexuality. I’ve met so many people who’ve told me that they’ve read Kugle’s work – they weren’t sure whether to order the book at home if they lived with their parents, but actually reading those books and kind of reading wider resources around that topic have really helped them.
I suppose one other way of looking at that is around gender identity, and a lot of…let’s call them Muslim-majority countries, or what are now Muslim-majority countries, have rich traditions of what you might think of as third-gender cultures. So, in Pakistan for example, there is a community called the Khawaja Sara, and you could loosely consider that to be a trans people, a non-binary people, if we apply labels from here, but it has a very long, long history of a community that has been marginalised. People have kind of left their homes to join sort of groups, they’re called Dera, of Khawaja Sara, but they also play quite sort of important roles and social functions. Khawaja Sara are often regarded as auspicious presences at weddings – similarly in India actually, where they’re called Hijra – and there are many, many other parallel examples in the Arab world and Southeast Asia. So historically, at least, with some legacy that lives on, it would be inaccurate to characterise Islamic gender relations as very strictly falling along a kind of male/female binary.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
That’s really interesting.
We’ll be right back after the break.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
So, taking a step back to the right-wing criticism –
JONATHAN GALTON:
Sure –
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Who are the right wing appealing to?
JONATHAN GALTON:
The way I tend to look at it is, it’s playing to a whole range of anxieties about migration, about social cohesion, about terrorism, about foreign intervention, and so all of these you might think of as very loosely Muslim, or Muslim-related, issues. I think that’s where the political capital is to be gained. And I actually think there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in right wing critics smearing Muslims as homophobic and the left as enablers of homophobia, let’s say, when it’s been incredibly recently that anyone on the right had any concern about homophobia and homosexuality.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
I mean, the other way of looking at it is, you know, the right want the votes of Muslims – and so is this a way of them rather demonising the left by saying, sort of saying to Muslims, you know, you should be voting for us, not for them?
JONATHAN GALTON:
I don’t think there’s been any concerted effort, really, of the right courting the Muslim vote. You get that a bit in the US, actually, where there’s, again, similar sort of debates going on, and a number of quite high profile Muslim clerics have specifically said that we shouldn’t be aligning ourselves to the left. There’s a guy called Yasir Qadhi who put out a sort of statement to that effect, saying, because the left are the ones that are sort of telling your kids that they can be any gender they want and that homosexuality is all fine. I’m not sure that’s actually translated into any great support for the Republicans, although now, because of Biden’s perceived support for Israel, at the moment, there’s an, even more of a kind of withdrawing in the US of Muslim support for the Democrats. That’s the US. Here, yes, there is a very strong, or has been a very strong tendency for the last 20 years or more, for Muslim voters to vote for Labour. It’s gone up and down, a bit of a dip after the Iraq war – but actually, surprisingly, not that much – a huge surge of support when Corbyn was in place because he was seen as sympathetic to Muslim communities and, quote unquote, Muslim causes. I’m not sure that sexuality is going to be a massive electoral issue. There are concerns about, for example, plans to ban conversion therapy, or plans to, kind of, increasingly roll out sort of LGBTQ-inclusive education in schools. And so I know there are certain Muslim educational groups that are very critical, actually, of the Conservative government, because they’re the ones who are in power and doing these things – there’s perhaps a perception that Labour would be even worse. From that perspective, I think a much bigger issue at the moment, in terms of the Muslim vote bank, is Gaza. There’s an organisation, quite recently formed, a group called The Muslim Vote, who are very much trying to mobilise along the lines of supporting candidates who have been seen to be more pro Palestine, I think. And I can’t tell you this with any certainty, because it’s quite a new group, but they do talk about wanting to endorse candidates who are supportive of other so-called Muslim issues, and I think LGBTQ education might be a part of that. So that would be quite interesting, to see whether that has any impact.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
And from the progressive left’s point of view, either the attempt to appeal to Muslims or the fact that Muslims are becoming part of the left – is there any discernible effect on the left’s attitude, from Muslim influence?
JONATHAN GALTON:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s certainly true. I mean, more generally, sort of big picture, I think the Left have… There have been sort of shifts in left-wing approaches to all sorts of things over the last sort of 50, 100 years. So, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, Israel was seen as a very left wing cause, for example, and the rights of racial minorities were not necessarily seen as particularly left wing causes. And a lot of trade unions, for example, were extremely racist and didn’t support South Asian migrant workers who were mobilizing and organizing. Things have really changed, particularly after the sort of 1960s campus movements, when sort of, there was… It’s been seen as a sort of gradual shift away from sort of main Marxist trade unionism, and more to a much wider range of social justice concerns that left wing politicians and parties endorse. There are certain sort of political scientists who do study this idea of how does the Left appeal to, on the one hand, a probably very secular kind of cohort who are very quote, unquote progressive when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender and whatever else, and many more conservative voters, for example, from Muslim communities. And I think the answer is that’s potentially quite an uneasy alliance. But even then, I think that’s perhaps making assumptions about these being two completely different groups of people and ignoring the intersections between those groups and the queer Muslim activists, for example.
So I think just one thing to be really clear about is I’ve while it’s really important to me in the research I’m doing to centre queer Muslim voices, I also don’t want to make this a sort of an ethnography of queer Muslim lives, partly because I just think there are a lot of people who would be much better placed than me to do that. I don’t think it’s necessarily my story to tell but inevitably, you know, I’ve spoken to a lot of queer Muslims.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Sorry, on that – do queer Muslims engage with the queer community generally?
JONATHAN GALTON:
Well, I think there’s no, there’s no ‘them’ there. It’s not a homogenous group. There was a more of an emphasis maybe 20 years ago or so of you know, for those Muslims who did come out, it was very much under the guise of rejecting religion and being very ‘out, loud and proud’ and often, or in some cases, at least positioning themselves as ex-Muslims, and yes, in that case, getting very involved in what you would call the mainstream queer scene, or LGBTQ scene. That didn’t stop them facing quite a lot of racism and exclusion there, but that was perhaps the main sort of…you either did that or you were quite closeted. What there have been really have emerged since the late 90s are a range of different queer Muslim organizations. They wouldn’t all necessarily use that label. Al-Fatiha was formed in the in, I think 1990, late 90s let’s say. More recently, there’s been Iman Hidayah, a group called the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, mostly London-based, some based elsewhere, and they’ve taken a range of different approaches. Some are very much, they’re sort of safe places for queer Muslims to meet each other and to discuss the difficulties they face, in some cases, in their own communities and families, but also when trying to engage with the sort of more mainstream queer scene. Others have taken a more theological approach. So the Inclusive Mosque Initiative is not primarily a queer Muslim organisation, it’s an organisation that’s trying to make worship more inclusive. So they have an emphasis on female Imams training, female Imams, championing disabled access. But as part of that, they’re a welcoming space for queer Muslims and trans Muslims, and they’ve hosted, I think, a range of discussions about theology, about the scripture we talked about. And they’re quite interesting because they very explicitly, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, reject the idea that because they are this sort of inclusive group, that they’re somehow aligned to British liberal values and that they’re somehow distancing themselves from the wider British Muslim landscape. And they say, well no, actually, no, we are first and foremost Muslims; we don’t sort of reject more conservative mosques, we try to find a way in between these paths.
There is a risk, I think, that a number of queer Muslims have told me this – that if they start talking about their experiences, particularly maybe traumatic experiences of homophobia within their families and communities, that can immediately get coopted by people who want to demonise Muslim communities as a whole, and they’re not necessarily interested in giving that ammunition to, for example, right-wing politicians.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
We’ll be right back after the break.
VOICE OVER:
[The Greatest Good’s first documentary is out on YouTube now. Learn more about Bentham and discover the hidden history of the Vere Street Coterie from leading academics at UCL. Click the link in our podcast description, or search YouTube for ‘The Greatest Good: Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’.]
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Bentham was very anti religion, generally. His main target was Christianity, and he believed in not only sexual freedom, but also religious freedom, and so anyone can worship in any way they want, providing it’s not causing harm. But he also thought that in morals and politics, religion should play no role whatsoever, and spent a lot of time undermining Christianity, both as a natural religion and as a revealed religion. He knew he knew the Quran, but didn’t comment on it in particular. So I think he would, well, he would be critical of Islam because it’s a religion, and also critical of its homophobic attitudes, and would perhaps see sexual liberty as one of the battles that had to be fought?
JONATHAN GALTON:
Yeah, I think that a lot of the queer Muslims I speak to would certainly agree that sexual liberty is a battle that needs to be fought. The question they might ask, and there’s a range of different opinions I’ve encountered, is, well, whose conversation is that to have? Is that an internal conversation to be had within Muslim communities, or should that be more widely? And I think there’s advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, but I think it is… Once these things become very public, messages can get distorted so easily. Narratives can get coopted. It can actually kind of polarise people more, rather than kind of bringing people together. And so, a lot of people I know are, I think, very slowly and patiently having these sorts of conversations. And I think we have seen some changes over the last sort of 10, 20 years. One interesting thing, actually, quite a few people I’ve met and spoken to – this seems quite, quite a striking kind of parallel between them, young, queer Muslims on sort of realizing their sexuality. A lot of them went through a phase of really rejecting religion and distancing themselves from religion, maybe sort of in their late teens, early 20s, and went through a sort of atheist or ex Muslim phase. But as they got older, not true of all cases, but in some cases, they realized they missed that. They missed the role that faith played in their lives, and so really tried to find a way of reconciling faith and sexuality through, for example, some of the sort of scholarly literature we’ve talked about, but also through interacting with some of these organizations that have helped them navigate a path.
PHILIP SCHOFIELD:
Thank you very much indeed, Jonathan, that’s absolutely fascinating, and best wishes for your research and in particular, your book.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to subscribe and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please also make sure to tune in to next week’s episode, where I talk to Dr Xine Yao to delve into queer aesthetics and discuss the idea of a panoptic gaze.