Islam, Gender, and Sexuality

Transcript from Speech at the Karima Foundation

Sands, High Wycombe by Andrew Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I want to begin by thanking Ustadh Asim Ayub, Ustadh Hamza Tzortzis, Mawlana Shams Tameez, Mawlana Yasir, Shaykh Salman Younas, the staff, volunteers, and everyone at the Karima Foundation for putting this event together. I am honored to be here and pray that I am able to offer something of benefit in the brief moments we have together today.

I must begin upfront with a few disclaimers: this is actually my first full day in England. In coordinating this program with Ustadh Asim, it became clear to me how little I knew about England (from the names of different towns to the “tube” being the same thing as the underground/overground), and although I find lots within British culture that resembles the world I know more clearly in the United States, I also recognize there are substantial cultural gaps between our countries. Accordingly, though I am going to focus more on the conceptual level, I want to nevertheless be forthright about my lack of cultural conversance with your context and that as I delve into various areas, some of those thoughts are going to approximations and best guesses of what I believe is going on that applies here as well.

I should also confess upfront that I don’t have Ustadh Hamza’s energy or charisma. I will do my best to incorporate examples along the way to make this all more relatable and comprehensible. For these and my many other shortcomings, I ask your forgiveness up front and thank you in advance for your indulgence.

In recent years, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has become something of a celebrity in Conservative Christian circles. His policies over the years have been described as an attempt to fuse culture war Christianity with ethnonationalist anti-establishment populism – including hostility to immigration, a rejection of racial diversity, and the like – that pervades much of the secular right. Nevertheless, in recent days Orban has found himself under attack for policies that his government has passed that have restricted the public proliferation of LGBT, including a 2021 ban on material in books and films targeting people under-18 that display, celebrate, and promote homosexuality. Just five days ago, large Pride rallies took place in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, and joining in the protest was the US ambassador to Hungary, who just so happens to be a gay man (certainly no coincidence that he would be chosen for that post).

This news is certainly not earth-shattering. Hardly a day passes except that the topic of LGBT dominates our airwaves. Rishi Sunak recently apologized for past policies in the UK military which prevented openly gay people from serving. In the US, school counties throughout the country are mired in domestic disputes over curriculum changes integrating LGBT teachings into the classroom, with some teachings designed for children as young as 4 years old. Meanwhile, just two weeks ago in Manchester protests occurred over LGBT teachings in schools, with over a hundred mostly Muslim parents standing out with signs and banners objecting. One sister held a sign that read “Too Much, Too Soon. Let Kids Be Kids.”

The speed of these changes can feel disorienting. How did we go from a society that felt at home with heterosexuality as not only a moral, but social and political norm, to one where the very definition of equality and justice requires us to not only accept, but celebrate LGBT, even to the point of transmitting those teachings to our young children – with drag queen story hours, transgender books for kids, cartoons with homosexual characters, and more?

To be sure, that story is a long one. There is no single factor that has produced the conditions of LGBT normativity in front of us. One can look at economic factors, for example, and the consolidation of social life in large cities alongside the rising cost of living. One can additionally observe the impact of wars like World War 2, or even the rise of Therapeutic thinking. For the brief moments I have today however, I want to meditate on two important factors which are often underappreciated and remain undertheorized, namely, individualism and technology.

To start with the first, the question that begs itself is what it means to be an individual, or perhaps more precisely, what it means to be a human being. Although such a question is one we all may take for granted, it is especially important in times like these to return to first principles and reflect on the ways in which our own principles diverge from what is on offer in modern society. For modern peoples, and indeed the worldview within which they are situated, human beings are fundamentally material. We possess vital organs, flesh, and cognition. What makes a human a human is a difficult philosophical question. For the modern evolutionist, the answer is simply that we are evolutionarily more adapted or advanced. Our languages are more sophisticated than other animals and of course we can exercise our cognition in ways they can’t.

However appealing this view of the human being might be, it is important to realize how radically reductive a view of the human being that is. At the very heart of the human, insan, sits the immaterial. That he or she is possessive of a soul and that the soul has a corresponding health that can be improved or rendered corrupt and diseased is fundamental to our shared natures. Allah tells us of mankind:

قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَن زَكَّىٰهَا 

وَقَدْ خَابَ مَن دَسَّىٰهَا 

He has succeeded who purifies it, and failure is suffered by him who pollutes it. (Surat al-Shams: 9-10)

Allah also tells that on the Day of Resurrection our children and wealth will not profit us — what will benefit us on that day will be the state of our heart:

يَوْمَ لَا يَنفَعُ مَالٌۭ وَلَا بَنُونَ

إِلَّا مَنْ أَتَى ٱللَّهَ بِقَلْبٍۢ سَلِيمٍۢ

The Day when neither wealth nor children can help, but only one who comes to Allāh with a sound heart. (Surat al-Shu’ara: 88-89)

Al-Nu’man ibn Bashir reported: The Messenger of Allah(ﷺ) said:

أَلَا وَإِنَّ فِي الْجَسَدِ مُضْغَةً إِذَا صَلَحَتْ صَلَحَ الْجَسَدُ كُلُّهُ وَإِذَا فَسَدَتْ فَسَدَ الْجَسَدُ كُلُّهُ أَلَا وَهِيَ الْقَلْبُ

Verily, in the body is a piece of flesh which, if sound, the entire body is sound, and if corrupt, the entire body is corrupt. Truly, it is the heart. [Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 52]

We have also been endowed with a fitra, a primordial disposition if you will. The Prophet (ﷺ) said:

مَا مِنْ مَوْلُودٍ إِلاَّ يُولَدُ عَلَى الْفِطْرَةِ، فَأَبَوَاهُ يُهَوِّدَانِهِ وَيُنَصِّرَانِهِ، كَمَا تُنْتِجُونَ الْبَهِيمَةَ، هَلْ تَجِدُونَ فِيهَا مِنْ جَدْعَاءَ حَتَّى تَكُونُوا أَنْتُمْ تَجْدَعُونَهَا ‏

"No child is born except upon the fitra, but its parents turn it into a Jew or a Christian. It is as you help the animals give birth. Do you find among their offspring a mutilated one before you mutilate them yourself?" [Sahih al-Bukhari 6599, 6600]

In all of this, we not only affirm the totality of what it means to be human, we recognize who we truly are. Cut off from the very essence of our being, modern man sees himself as entirely “unencumbered.” As the philosopher Carter Snead observed,

This [modern] self is not defined by its attachments or network of relations, but rather by its capacity to choose a future pathway that is revealed by the investigation of its own inner depths of sentiment….Because this self is defined by its capacity to choose, it is associated fundamentally with its will and not its body.

This idea of individualism has morphed into what some philosophers have termed “expressive individualism” and is now a defining characteristic of our age. It means that people are inherently bound to nothing beyond themselves. Their duty in life is to find happiness, to discover who they are inside, and to do so at whatever expense. Indeed, the cares of others matter little when we’re talking about personal happiness.

Now some might hear that and object: doesn’t everyone want happiness? Wouldn’t we be better off if we were allowed to discover something as beautiful as happiness? Well, it depends of course. If happiness is understood as a connection with the ultimate reality, of living according to the dictates of sacred law, and of discovering wholeness in the sunnah of the Messenger (ﷺ) then sure. 

But when happiness is essentially self-defined, my happiness can come at anyone else's expense. Indeed, I might be happier when I don’t have to worry about my parents. I might be happier when I can have sex with whoever I want, whenever I want. I might enjoy a certain base happiness when I can pursue luxuries and wealth without regard to moral limits. And so on. In this, happiness becomes hedonism, and modern man increasingly fetishizes hedonism as a marker of freedom and joy.

This is expressed perhaps most purely in what are termed “Pride Parades.” Notice the language here. Pride is an expression of satisfaction and joy. When we speak of what makes us proud, we might say we’re proud of our children when they accomplish something good or feel proud of ourselves when we’ve helped others. But “pride” now is being taken in living how one wants, even if it is transgressive. Indeed, for Pride Parade participants, “pride” is expressed by wearing rainbow colors, by partaking in displays of smut, donning sexually provocative clothing, deliberately offending the “prudish” sensibilities of others (who need to “just get over it”), and by declaring publicly ones gender nonconformity, sexual desires, behaviors, and lifestyle.

Such pride is connected to the peculiar brand of individualism that has reduced the human being to an animal – and indeed, often even lower than animals. Of this, Allah tells us:

وَلَقَدْ ذَرَأْنَا لِجَهَنَّمَ كَثِيرًۭا مِّنَ ٱلْجِنِّ وَٱلْإِنسِ ۖ لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌۭ لَّا يَفْقَهُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ أَعْيُنٌۭ لَّا يُبْصِرُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ ءَاذَانٌۭ لَّا يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَآ ۚ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ كَٱلْأَنْعَـٰمِ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ ۚ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْغَـٰفِلُونَ ١٧٩

And We have certainly created for Hell many of the jinn and mankind. They have hearts with which they do not understand, they have eyes with which they do not see, and they have ears with which they do not hear. Those are like livestock; rather, they are more astray. It is they who are the heedless. (Surat al-A’raf:179)

Allah also tells us of those who get so wrapped up into their desires, that those desires become their god. Have you not seen the one who takes his desires as his lord?

But it is not just God who gets rejected. We become resistant as I noted to any duties beyond the self, and this can be especially devastating in our social lives. The things that used to get us out of bed, like caring for our wives and children, no longer provide the type of satisfaction that they did because deep down inside we tell ourselves we deserve to live in the model of happiness society has fed us. And so the family takes a huge toll. Elder care becomes unduly burdensome. You didn’t choose your parents, why should you have to care for them when they age? When did you consent to such an arrangement? Children, too, become a toll. One of the very interesting areas where attitudes towards children emerge is in debates concerning abortion. Quite often abortion advocates tell young women who have unintended pregnancies that keeping the child will ruin their lives. Just think about that – one of the greatest blessings Allah can endow us with is now treated as something that will bring us nothing but ruin and pain?

It should be noted that one of the most important aspects of Islam is the family unit. Allah often connects dutifulness to one’s parents with tawhid:

وَقَضَىٰ رَبُّكَ أَلَّا تَعْبُدُوٓا۟ إِلَّآ إِيَّاهُ وَبِٱلْوَٰلِدَيْنِ إِحْسَـٰنًا ۚ إِمَّا يَبْلُغَنَّ عِندَكَ ٱلْكِبَرَ أَحَدُهُمَآ أَوْ كِلَاهُمَا فَلَا تَقُل لَّهُمَآ أُفٍّۢ وَلَا تَنْهَرْهُمَا وَقُل لَّهُمَا قَوْلًۭا كَرِيمًۭا ٢٣

And your Lord has decreed that you worship not except Him, and to parents, good treatment. Whether one or both of them reach old age [while] with you, say not to them [so much as], "uff," and do not repel them but speak to them a noble word. (Surat al-Isra’:23)

In this and other verses, the imperative to be good to one’s parents immediately comes after and is paired with tawhid. And so the connection between family and faith shouldn’t be surprising to us – a society losing its family will correspondingly lose its faith.

Alongside this, expressive individualism makes us worse people. Because we reject and deny so much of what makes us, us, we ignore our vulnerabilities or frailties. We reject a life of dependence in the pursuit of unending independence. Nothing can stifle our pursuits, and what we choose is all that matters. Indeed, if I want, I can even choose to be the opposite gender or no gender at all, and it is now the responsibility of others to accommodate this at risk of being accused of bigotry.

There is much more that could be said on expressive individualism, an idea that has a lineage and history from the enlightenment onwards, but suffice it to say for now that individualism is a cornerstone of modern life, key for understanding our sense of morality, and a fundamental pillar of the LGBT movement from which it gains legitimacy and public standing.

The second issue I’d like to discuss briefly today is one people may not necessarily see as connected to the first, or the LGBT movement more broadly, which is the topic of technology and the role it has played in all of this.

One of the mistakes we make, and I think academics and philosophers can be especially guilty of this, is that we too often accord ideas power in a vacuum. That isn’t to say that certain ideas aren’t objectively meaningful and connotative of significance. But it is to say that certain ideas don’t simply win the day by being strong. Individualism, in other words, didn’t simply become the way of the world because people proposed and theorized ways of living that are self-centered. Instead, it needed a context to thrive, much like a seed needs proper cultivation, soil, and irrigation to germinate and ultimately thrive.

And here I will contend the following: the modern world of technoculture has created the perfect context for hyperindividualism and LGBT to flourish. 

By technoculture, I don’t just mean electric cars or the internet. I mean substantial social developments that have been going on for centuries and entirely upended how humans used to live. The industrial revolution gives us a decent starting point for this as it creates a context in which rural life is no longer possible. Fewer people carry large families or can afford large families, fewer people own their own homes (on a side note, only 46% of people in London own a home, and even here the idea of “ownership” typically means living in grave debt to a bank or set of banks), and fewer people can afford living on a single income. The industrial age gives birth to proliferating economic activity, and the spread of money alongside the promotion of personal pursuits of happiness ushers in more and more people into the world of corporate life.

Mary Eberstadt and Christian Smith have pointed out in their writings how family practices and the continuity of faith in both parents and children are mutually reinforced and connected. When family life is limited, outsourced, and weakened, faith too is weakened. Technology enables the radical attenuation of anything resembling family life. I can outsource family tasks, I can purchase machines to do things I used to do, I can entertain my children in front of screens and live next to one another but in a perpetually distracted state. Although we are together physically, we are as a matter of reality living alone.

Technology also impedes our ability to see up. James Turner observes in his work Without God, Without Creed:

As divinely created nature receded before the work of human hands, God’s daily presence did not disappear, but it became somewhat less tangible. The effects came mostly below the level of consciousness, where poets speak more clearly than historians…Before the eighteenth century…virtually the only structures that overtopped the trees were church steeples. The terrain filled the eye with God’s presumed handiwork, and churches alone of man’s creations towered over nature. Did this make divine presence more manifest? Did God then more naturally flow into the background of consciousness? …The effect cannot possibly be demonstrated, much less measured, but it needs to be pointed out.

Now to be clear, not all technology is bad. It enables us to treat certain diseases that we couldn’t before. We can feed more people efficiently, and we can accomplish many great things.

But technology distances us from the world around us. One of the things I like to point out here is how rare it has become for most of us to experience night time. By that, I don’t mean that we haven’t been up at night. I’m sure many of us have. But I mean to experience what it’s like to experience nothing but the dark. To be out with no artificial lighting whatsoever.

In the 1920s, Henry Beston wrote about the abandonment of the night:

We of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or poetry of night, who have never even seen the night.

By some measures nearly 80% of the UK can no longer see the Milky Way. A recent study reported that over half of all people in the UK can no longer see a star in the skies due to pollution. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

The Prophet (ﷺ) once said that the inhabitants of Paradise will see certain abodes in Paradise "just as you see stars in the sky" - إِنَّ أَهْلَ الْجَنَّةِ لَيَتَرَاءَوْنَ الْغُرَفَ فِي الْجَنَّةِ كَمَا تَتَرَاءَوْنَ الْكَوْكَبَ فِي السَّمَاءِ‏ - [Sahih al-Bukhari 6555]

How does this hadith even make sense to people who go their entire lives without caring much for the stars or even attempting to view them with interest? How many of us go not only days, but weeks and months without so much as looking up at the night’s sky? Allah tells us that all of this was not created in vain, that the believer sees all this and is left with nothing but awe, and yet our eyes today are drawn to screens before anything else.

Last November when I performed Umrah, I noticed how many signs had been converted to digital signs. Now one of the things that’s really incredible when you see digital signage is the way it draws people’s attention. You see people in ihram walking into the haram staring at the large digital screen. I was reminded of Max Frisch’s famous description of technology as the “knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

Now as we think about gender and sexuality, technology has played a crucial role in transforming them both. For one, technologies have enabled consequence-free sex. Reliable and easy to acquire contraception provides for sexual promiscuity. In a past world, sex was inextricably linked with reproduction, but now sex and reproduction bear no immediate or necessary relationship for people. Reproduction can occur without the sexual act, and sex can occur without reproductive outcomes.

Technologies have also directly contributed to the proliferation of nudity. The internet, computers, and smartphones mean that nude people and sex are only seconds away. Everywhere now people are taking off their clothes. Mainstream television features nudity, some copious amounts. It also distorts our notions of beauty. Everyone is touched up, digitally distorted and photoshopped. We no longer see real human beings but instead caricatures of beauty with wildly accentuated bodily features. For an increasing number of people, the average person of the opposite sex no longer is seen as attractive because their sexual desires have been numbed.

Technologies also enable gender fluidity. They do so by flattening gender difference. Recently I spoke at an Islamic program where a sister prefaced her question with “I don’t accept that men and women have any inherent differences.” When I attempted later to appeal to motherhood and fatherhood and maternal characteristics that women normatively possess at far greater rates than men, she retorted that it was mere stereotype.

These developments also create dysfunctional societies where it is easy to feel alienated and strange. I often tell people a good Muslim is often naturally nonconforming with the gender expectations of the age. Muslim women, for instance, dress in ways that make them stand out, rejecting the tight and form fitting clothes their female counterparts wear on the streets.

Modern societies take that dysfunction and push the envelope farther: the toxic cocktail of hyperindividualism, the sacredness of personal pleasure at any cost, the technological world, and gender fluidity come to tell us that when a woman wants to be a man, she can become one, just as a man can become a woman. Note here that we’re no longer discussing cosmetic alterations, but a completely new ontology. As trans activists like to tell us, “trans women are women and trans men are men.” The effect of technology here is obvious: 70 years ago, a man who believed he was a woman would have been told he was experiencing a mental problem. In a world that now can alter the body in such dramatic ways, the mind is always king, while the body is negotiable.

To close off today’s talk, I wanted to refer to something Alastair MacIntyre talks about in his famous work After Virtue. In it, MacIntyre writes of the Polynesian island of Tonga. In 1777, British explorer James Cook became the first European to travel to Tonga wherein he encountered the Polynesian concept of “taboo.”

Tapu were social prohibitions on physical contact with objects or people. An example of the Tapu is that one could not eat in the presence of a higher ranking relative, touch the food of that relative, or feed himself if he had touched the body of a dead chief. Cook and his crew attempted to ascertain the rationale for the Tapu and could not get an intelligible reply.

Over time, the Tapu eroded. More contact with Europeans exposed them to people who lived without it. In 1819, just 40 years after Cook, Kamehamana II ascended the throne and abolished the Tapu with ease. A missionary wrote about this event:

“The king rose up and said to Mr. Young, “Cut up the fowls and the pig,” which being done, he suddenly started off and went to the women’s table, where…he began to eat with a fury of appetite…the whole assembly…looked to see him fall down dead. But no harm to the king ensuing, they at length cried out with one voice, “The tapu is broken, the eating tapu is broken.”

MacIntyre concludes about the Tapu that not only did Cook and the Europeans not understand it, the Polynesians themselves didn’t understand it. By the early 19th century, taboos had lost all meaning, and were abolished with little opposition.

The collapse of family life is much like the Tapu. Same-sex marriage and LGBT not only makes sense to the vast majority of Westerners today, they are obvious in their view. And this sense of obviousness can only exist in a world where you cannot turn around without seeing people taking their clothes off. How can anyone speak of family values while simultaneously living in a world where every show and movie contains nudity and sex? Where the internet permeates with people posing sexually or in the nude? Where marriages dissolve and fail over half the time? Where fewer people enter marriage than ever before? Where having children is viewed as an undesirable burden? And where our elderly live away from us, out of sight and out of mind? Where nothing is more sacred than the all-important “me”? The deterioration of a culture that gave intelligibility to heterosexual marriage and the family unit led to LGBT becoming the West’s Tapu - we don’t allow it, but we’re not sure why anymore.

As Muslims, the solution to this is not easy, and it is perhaps something we can discuss at greater length during q/a, but briefly: living in reality and community. Producing countercultural spaces where our values are embodied and reinforced. Where people see and exhibit good to our elderly, where we see families and community, where we reflect on Allah’s creation, where we pray and fast in community, and where we work to resist the trends in front of us that are devastating people’s faith and their connection to the divine.

On a final note, I wanted to close with a few resources to review that contributed to my own thinking in this presentation:

• Firstly, Carl Trueman’s recent works Brave New World and Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

• Second, Joseph Minnich’s Bulwarks of Unbelief

• Third, Darel Paul’s From Tolerance to Equality

• Finally, insha’Allah the Sapience Institute has an upcoming course by Dr. Carl Sharif El-Tobgui on Gender and Sexuality which will be available for free online. I cannot emphasize the importance of the course and recommend it highly enough.

And Allah Knows Best.