Yes indeed. Funny title I know - but instead of being fast asleep here i am browsing the net which i haven”t had a chance to do in a while. i visited a very strange blog which i haven”t seen in ages but caught my attention a while back - eye on gay muslims - and boy are they a bunch of whiners. I mean they”re pleased some one got fired for “inappropriate” views on sexual orientation - a Dr. Ghazala Anwar. The objection appears to be that Dr. Anwar wasn”t interpreting her religion in a rigid enough fashion, and being a scholar - might encourage other people to think that her ideas were somehow valid. Apparently the fuss being about that someone who has been open about their views on homosexuality ( shock! horror! someone at ease with themselves ..oh my GAWD) could be appointed as a Professor in Islamic Jursiprudence. Which some viewed as ironic. So instead of having some debate.. right, let”s fire this crazy lady, and be done with. We wouldn”t want to question things with an open mind now would we?
“Puh-leese - they do seem rather a mean lot of people. ( call themselves compassionate as well ) their main aim in life seems to be self-denial ( good for you - if that”s what you want) and trying to enforce the same on everyone else. oops no - not quite - just anyone else who is gay ( oops excuse me - SSA -same sex orientation rather) should do the same. should anyone try to reconcile their religion and their sexual orientation - oh dear! - woe betide them - the eye of eye on gay muslims will be on them, pouring their wrath on them for daring to have a personal individual interpretation of religious beliefs. ooh dearie me..
really it”s people like this lot that make dogma what it is. they seem to forget every person has agency, and the right to individual interpretation, seeing as they”re the ones who”re accountable for their own actions.
anyhow, ignoring this lot * apart from providing me with the occasional entertainment* and they very kindly have my name up in lights on their website to - as a response to this post - thanks for that guys! I am flattered.
The wider issue is one of course of religious dogma and potential reform of said dogma. How is that going to happen when people are always sitting at the sidelines, hissing at people who”re brave enough to say i want to think for myself? Well it must be said that at least hissing at them is perfectly acceptable - free speech and all that - at least it”s not a fatwa. Right? It could be a lot worse, and it often is.
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And a serious part of the problem with any sort of open intellectual discussion - to do with to do with “religion” - is this polarization you are either with us, or against us. and if you”re not a 100% with us and you”re questioning, you either keep it very quiet, or you”re feeding the “Other”. Well it”s not very helpful, but i”m not going to keep quiet because im supposed to “toe the party line” . it”s very unfortunate people should try and separate points of view and opinion which is clearly on some kind of continuum, into separate, discrete, clearly defined camps, and imply that any questioning results one in being “placed” into the other camp. Very unfortunate and it”s contributed to the difficulty religion as a whole finds itself in nowadays.
if you”re not convinced enough of the unpalatable aspects (whatever they may and naturally they will vary from one individual to another) you are still supposed to subscribe to wholeheartedly - instead of just being able to take what positives you may find spiritually - one is exhorted to either deal with everything, or nothing. turned into some sort of apostate. Taking sides - it”s depressing, and imposed externally by various people on various sides. As far as I can see, there are some atheists who are just as dogmatic as some who have “faith” - personally I would like to be more “convinced” - what a luxury. The way I see it though, and as some wise people have pointed out to me, we”re all on a journey. most of us are on a journey, and haven”t “arrived” but are looking. how are you going to “look” meaninfully if you”re not allowed to express what you”re thinking along the way? that”s would correspond to a fixed way of interpreting religion, rather than a dynamic way - which uses the journey as a metaphor. Some of us have more to discover than others, and if we can”t express ourselves along the way, well fat lot of good it is. in my opinion, these are the negative implications of “organized religion” : versus some sort of individualistic approach to ethics and self-determination. ( and this isn”t about Islam particularly, in my opinion, it”s organized religions in general. Personally I can”t see how the dynamics end up being any different to that of any patriotic group, tribe, or nation-state. I”ve been doing some thinking recently and have come to realize that the objections i”ve had to what religious feeding I”ve received have been mostly on anarchist principles.
Whiners is an understatement! They’re a bunch of chumps. The kind of people who sit around in their little gang gossiping and bitching about others. Like old aunties. “Oh the world is collapsing!”
Heh.
I completely misunderstood this blog when I first came across it. I thought it was in support of gay muslims. How wrong was I? They’re a bunch of self-loathing homophobes who have come out of the closet and then, quick as you like, ran back in again and decided to be more reactionary than ever. I suppose they think the closet is a safe place to take pot shots at gay muslims who have decided to be both. Cretins.
yeah too right - both of you! Sid - i completely agree with you - i thought exactly the same thing at the start - that they were in support of gay muslims. And it’s not that easy to work out what the hell they were on about and it is really a rather strange phenomenon I must say. if there was anyone i think the term ’self-hating’ would apply..this would be the time..
Nice to see you back. Here in Amsterdam the gay crowd comes with the territory and does not seem much of an issue. There is an undercurrent of Islamophobia in some quarters though. Recently the Dutch politician Geert Wilders said Moslems would have to throw away much of the Koran to live in Holland. So much for tolerance. I try to keep away from politics at the moment as it often seems so sterile and negative.
Dearest “Sonia” and the eye-on-backbitinig thingies ,
Why don’t all go looking for other blogs to see if others agree with us? That would be fun wouldn’t it, sweethearts.
Sorry I meant to say: …why don’t WE all go looking…etc!
Sorry I forgot to say the right words but my cretinisim is playing up a bit and I forgot to take my anti-chumps medications..
BYYYYEEE!
Sunny:
aren’t you too gossiping and bitching about our blog? with your little gang? like old aunties? Huh? Huh?!!!
I clicked through your link and was surprised to find a piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She left Holland after being threatened with losing her passport by Rita Verdonk, a right-wing Dutch minister who has since left the government. Ali made herself very unpopular with Muslims by joining the VVD (a right-wing party in Holland), and she also worked with Theo van Gogh, the murdered Dutch filmmaker. Now if she works for the American Enterprise Institute as the blog claims (which would not surprise me) then she has joined one of the Bush cabal’s most influential neocon organisations. No wonder some Muslims don’t like her. She has sold her soul to the think tank that fronts for Exxon’s drive to discredit global warming. Sometimes life makes some strange bedfellows.
gossiping we are…or i’m gossiping and they’re listening. but not ‘back-biting’ - i sent a ping and trackback to the site in question to alert them…
the comments i post seem to get deleted all the time! very suspicious.
Yep it’s unfortunate that there’s such a setting up of dichotomies that people end up on one ’side’ or the ‘other’. I think it’s perfectly fair when people engage in a critique - isn’t that what most of us are doing. I always think though that some people manage to critique something without resorting to ‘personal’ attacks or a certain way of attacking a person - e.g. feeling ‘good’ about negative things that happen to them. that just seems a bit ‘vengeancy-’ to me and counter productive, and somewhat unpleasant. plenty of people find Ayaan Hirsi controversial and that’s fair enough. I think though when a lot of them ‘cheered’ when she had to leave Holland - was one of those times.
Agree with comment number. Bunch of whiners and the media actually takes their whining as some news worthy stuff.
*comment number one.
Hello,
I too initially thought that the “gaymuslims” blog was by and for gay Muslims. But it is not. “It is not easy to figure out what they are about?” Not quite. I browsed through 1 or 2 papers and understood what it was about. I have found it to be a helpful website as it tries to deal with the issue of homosexuality in a polite and open manner, which is a rarity among Muslims unfortunately.
Nonetheless, I do not agree with some of the comments in this blog, particularly by Sonia.
I do not see a “back biting” in their article. It seems to be a sober critical analysis of Ms Hirsi. Here is another critique of Ms. Ali:
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8663231
Ms Ali, unfortunately, is now known for making a number of questionable claims. Nonetheless, the more important point is as follows: as far as I can tell, she does not seem to have a knowledge of Islamic studies and most of her comments are just downright bigoted and stereotypical. I don’t understand how a seemingly intelligent person such as Sonia could miss this.
Certainly, Ms. Hirsi has some valid objections as well regarding a number of practises prevalent among Muslims. However, a lot of what she says is a mixture of truth and disinformation, with broad generalized indicments.
One should speak up against hatemonger on both ends, the one within religion and the ones outside of it.
thanks.
The really big problem is of course if you happen to have grown up as a Muslim and then have questions on what is being ‘fed to you’ - {which in itself - to my mind, is not very mindful of the ‘no compulsion in religion’} you can’t ask them very openly, or express the difficulties you are having. Oh no! Thou shall not Question! says the family, say the neighbours, say the Establishment. But sorry that’s rubbish, if there was anything valuable within Islam - it was the edict to think for yourself, use your brain, and not follow things blindly - e.g. not following the ways of your ‘fathers’ [patriarchy noted] blindly. Seems to me if you’re going to try and follow that with some insight, you’re going to come up against people who prefer the status quo. It’s every individual’s right to think for themselves - and if people really think their religion, say Islam, is against that, well that’s their problem.
I’ve updated the links - in my impatience to link to the Eye on Gay Muslims crew i linked inadvertently to their post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali ( which could be the focus of a whole different post) but wasn’t what I was trying to link to in my post here - it was about Dr. Ghazala Anwar.
and the other thing that is interesting re: which end of the ‘bipolar’ criticism you end up receiving: where you are perceived to be and the influence that is perceived to have on you. if you’re in the ‘West’ somewhere everyone thinks oooh la la its only cos you’re there you’re saying ‘it’. Well one aspect of that might be true - i.e you might physically be able to say something without fear of retribution or social ostracization -to some extent. But that’s not always the case. Personally I found it was much easier and acceptable to be critical of ‘religious dogma’ and critique of religion in general - growing up in Kuwait . My peer groups generally got where I was coming from, even if they themselves might be more comfortable with following tenets of religion. In part, that’s obviously due to not having to worry about being ‘defensive’ of their religion in front of ‘the Other’ so much - when you’re in a majority Muslim place, the ‘minority being demonised’ issue doesn’t obviously come up - but rather a questioning of dominant power. Of course the other interesting aspect of being in Kuwait was sitting right next to Saudi Arabia one was fully aware of ‘how lucky one was to have what freedoms one did have’ . Especially obviously if you were female, and people could empathasize why feminists in particular had issues with religious dogma supported by patriarchal establishments.
i suppose an aggregated blog on gay muslims is a step towards understanding the phenomena…
A platform to ask questions and seek an autonomous understanding, rather than the one thats manufactured and dished out on a plate for us to consume.
sonia, would it make much difference if that blog was made by women of the same opinion?
it wasn’t about them being men, it isn’t really even about their views - but the way they have written about individuals whose sexuality they disapprove of, and whose religious and moral justification of that sexuality they disagree with. we’re all entitled to our views. if this guy rashed wants to be an abstaining SSA person - good for him! if he lost his RL job tomorrow I don’t think i’d be gloating. It’s the religious views i.e. disapproval permeating so much into our psyches that we lose common human empathy. That’s just depressing, that is.
Ooo! This was sad!
SSA, RL? I dont understand what they mean…
I think there’s always a bit of a mistake generally made in western based disco like this, that its the ‘moderns’ who have the sexuality political correctness right in the first place.
Whether its the muslims of asia or the christians of africa, there is established opinion on this that hold a lot more sway than the political correctness in the west gives credit to.
Id like to see more stuff on the theme of advice for Muslimimams, parents and friends, who care and beleive in their scriptures to deal with such scenarios with wisdom.
SSA is a term they seem to have appropriated - that they prefer to ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ i think..it stands for Same Sex Attraction. Best go see what they say about the significance of using that terminology.
RL = real life!
Wats the world coming to… Now considering myself to be the BROADMINDED muslim that i am, there are somethings that are black, some that are white.
Any bits on the gender of the writers? That’s a real hard one. When I studied at SOAS Muslim women picked the story of Aisha / Mohammad which can be read from a strong pro woman point. Would love to read a reminder on your blog, if you have time. Cross posted you. D.