April 18, 2008 by Kingston
 What is an upright decent gay Muslim to do when parental nagging becomes unbearable, and all your friends are beginning to suspect the unthinkable? Why marry a lesbian, of course. It is not necessary that the dude take an uppity, rabble rousing, lipstick dyke like Irshad Manji.There are some traditional, but gay, girls who would be happy to live and let live behind the cloak of a loveless marriage: What a great sanctuary this would be for the bride. I can not imagine a more socially ostracized and lonely person than a Muslim woman who also happens to be gay. And it could only be more perfect if Wife No. 2 happened to be the girlfriend.  Although there are some outright Islamic groups, and even a Muslim lesbian rights movement, the subterfuge of the marriage veil is more practical in a society that has to deal with an awful lot of institutionalized discrimination before they will ever get around to gay folks. Not that the Prophet had a lot to say about sapphic love. Like the Bible, the Quran only contains one extremely ambiguous passage about "unnatural" female behavior:"If any of your women commit fornication, call in four witnesses from among yourselves against them; if they testify to their guilt confine them to their houses till death overtakes them or till Allah finds another way for them. "  Nonetheless there is a great deal of enthusiastic persecution of both gays and lesbians behind the Islamic Curtain. First time lesbian deviants can usually get away with a hundred lashes However, repeat offenders are stoned or hung in Iran. Saudi Arabia lops off heads, and, except for those enlightened nations which impose a couple decades of prison, the hapless lesbian is, by whatever means, dispatched into an afterlife, which the clerics fervently hope is not inhabited by seventy-two vestal virgins.And lets face it, being gay and Muslim is not exactly a recipe for success in the West either.  So it is, that across the planet, gay and lesbian Muslims have started to pursue this type of queer marriage of convenience. Although romantics frown on sham marriages, this arrangement is not all that bad. It is certainly preferable to the situation where a woman wonders for years what happened to their sex life, and only gets the answer when the cops bust hubby doing a tap dance in an airport bathroom stall. For queer Muslims, who consider themselves devout, it seems less hypocritical than the Misyar marriage-- a casual, generally temporary, marriage of convenience used by horny men who are traveling, and wish to relieve their groinal needs in a religiously sanctioned way.And it can not help but undermine Sharia, and soften the heart of Islam.   |
Posted in Arabs, GLBT, Iran, Islam, LGBT, Muslims, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, gay, homophobia, homosexuals, lesbians, loveless marriage, marriage, marriage of convenience, women | Comments (0)
