Sex, Love, and Sin: Investigating Islamic Conceptions of Homosexuality in Response to The Kite Runner

Surrounded by the trash and debris of a dilapidated alley in Kabul, Afghanistan, a young boy named Hassan is cornered, held down, and raped by neighborhood bully Assef. Keeping Hassan in place are Assef’s minions, Kamal and Wali, excited to please their leader but scared to play accomplice to the “sin.” The controversy elicited by this scene, both in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner and in the Paramount Vantage film adaptation, begs the question of whether it is the brutal rape of a servant boy or the homosexual nature of the encounter that qualify as the greater “sin.”

Both Ahmad Kahn Mahmidzada, the boy who plays Hassan in the film, and his father have publicly voiced anxieties about the release of the film. Ahmad admits, “[T]he rape scene upset me because my friends will watch it and I won’t be about to go outside anymore.” These anxieties evoke not only the trauma of rape, but the modern taboo of homosexuality in nations under Islamic rule. Homosexuals in Islamic nations are termed quam Lut, or the “people of Lot,” recalling the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah described in the 27th chapter of the Koran. Even today, one punishment for “homosexuality” is death by stones, a simulation of Allah’s punishment.

However, the leap from sodomite to homosexual is one that spans gaps in both time and interpretation. Moreover, as Khaled El-Rouayheb suggests in Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, “the relevant passages of the [Koran] do not specify which sexual acts had been committed by the people of Lot… [yet] from an early period, Muslim jurists identified ‘the act of the people of Lot’ with an intercourse” (125). While the passages of the Koran makes clear a lustful approach of men by men, that what we call sodomy was practiced in Sodom and Gomorrah is never made explicit. El-Rouayheb’s assertion thus invites further investigation of “homosexuality” and sodomy in both pre-modern and present day Islamic nations.

In his investigation of pre-modern Ottoman Empire, El-Rouayheb suggests that the concept of “homosexuality” did not exist, and that the Islamic jurists of the Ottoman Empire “operated instead with a set of concepts” like liwat, sodomy, and ubnah, men who desire anal intercourse (6). Each term focuses on a specialized act that we would consider “homosexual” today, but it was “simply not seen as instances of one overarching phenomenon” in the pre-modern world (6). In other words, they were not directly connected by love or desire. In fact, El-Rouayheb draws the same distinction as French philosopher Michel Foucault in noting that a “sodomite” is a “perpetrator of an act,” where the term “homosexual” is much more extensive (3). By this token, if Assef’s transgression against Hassan had taken place in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world, the “sin” that Assef’s followers question would be the act of sodomy, irregardless of the gender of the victim (5, 138).

Consequently, it is inaccurate to argue that “Islam” has always been intolerant to “homosexuality,” and El-Rouayheb goes further to suggest that it was sodomy and fornication that were condemned in judicial texts and by scholars of the Ottoman Empire. El-Rouayheb uncovers a wealth of early Arab-Islamic love poetry dedicated to “beardless youths” from influential men, and notes that “[f]alling in love with a boy was widely considered to be an involuntary act, and as such outside the scope of religious condemnation” (139).

El- Rouayheb also examines many ways in which pre-modern Islamic judges and jurists attempted to shield their eyes, rather than seeking actively to prosecute perpetrators of liwat, by agreeing that “it was best for the offender to refrain from publicizing his misdeed, and to repent in silence,” and providing justifications for sodomizing a male slave (123). Interestingly, “this whole line of thought was said to be one of the things that are ‘known [by scholars] but should not be made known [to people in general]’ (yu’lam wa la yu ‘lam)” (124). There appears then in early Islamic law a tendency to cast a blind eye on acts that might be presently considered “homosexual.”

However, this is a simplification of a complex issue in that even the term liwat did not hold a static meaning and value for all jurists, or even for one jurist at different times. Throughout the texts that El-Rouayheb examines, he finds that “the meaning of liwat constantly oscillates… between the two senses of ‘anal intercourse between men’ and ‘anal intercourse between men’” (131). In other words, an emphasis on the act versus an emphasis on the gender of those involved effects severity of punishment at different times. In conjunction, El-Rouayheb notes that generally, “[in] assessing the gravity of a sexual sin, the mode of intercourse was more important than the genders of the partners” (138).

In his address to Colombia University in September 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that there were “no homosexuals in Iran.” In order to maintain the denial of same-sex love or desire in contemporary Islamic nations, homosexuals continue to be punished as adulterers and lecherous sinners. The evasion of the term translates into a cultural suppression of the phenomenon, and consequent oppression of homosexual-identified Muslims living under Islamic rule.

El-Rouayheb’s study attempts to accommodate this shift from the acknowledgement of same-sex love and attraction in the pre-modern period to the blatant denial now professed. He indicates that an early nineteenth century shift to the “adoption of European Victorian attitudes by the new, modern-educated and westernized elite” Muslims provoked the idea that “each gender inclines toward a distinct property possessed by the other gender” and therefore same-gender attraction became “unnatural” (156). El-Rouayheb contends that the term “shudhudh jinsi” emerged in the 1940s or ‘50s to “express the European concept of ‘sexual inversion’ or ‘sexual perversion’” (159). The invention of this term seemed to “[cement] the emerging view that all forms of passionate attraction to boys were equally signs of ‘sickness’ and ‘depravity’” (159).  “In this respect, the cultural change has been quite dramatic,” El-Rouayheb says; however, Islamic law “still considers liwat… to be a punishable sin comparable to fornication… [and the] punishment prescribed for the act in Islamic law has also remained largely unchanged” (161).

In the case of the pre-modern world, for El-Rouayheb, the source of tension lay within three conflicting ideals: those “of masculinity, of refined aesthetic sensibility, and of conformity to religious stipulations” (153-4). It would seem from a distinctively Western perspective that these three ideals still motivate the brutal punishment of modern day individuals. Perceptively, El-Rouayheb notes that issues that were “particularly controversial, in light of the delicate balance of ideals, appear to have been the relationship between passionate love and sexual desire; and the extent to which poetry reflected personal experience” (155).  Judging from the treatment of homosexuality, rape, and sodomy in The Kite Runner, a novel preoccupied with the representation of Muslims, one could question whether these are the issues that remain prevalent in both Arab-Islamic societies and in communities closer to home.

Sources

Al Fatiha. 15 Feb. 2008 <http://www.al-fatiha.org/index.htm>.

Cooper, Helene. "Ahmadinejad, At Columbia, Parries and Puzzles." New York Times 25 Sept. 2007. 12 Feb. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/world/middleeast/
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Diab, Khaled. "Intolerant Cruelty." Rev. of Unspeakable Love, by Brian Whitaker. Diabolic Digest May 2006 <http://www.diabolicdigest.net/Middle%20East/
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El-Rouayheb, Khaled. Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Haviland, Charles. "Kite Runner Flies into Controversy." BBC News 18 Sept. 2007. 14 Feb. 2008 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6992751.stm>.

Imaan – Muslim LBGTQ Support.  15 Feb. 2008 <http://www.imaan.org.uk>.

Worth, Robert F. "Gay Muslims Face a Growing Challenge Reconciling Their Two Identities." The New York Times 13 Jan. 2002, sec. 1. LexisNexis. University of West Florida, Pensacola. 28 Feb. 2008. Keyword: homosexual islam.

--Tina Colvin and Savannah Stephenson