Group items tagged

Though divisive and polarizing rhetoric has long been a campaign staple for Erdogan, the ruling party’s current election campaign has featured unprecedented levels of homophobic narrative ahead of presidential and parliamentary polls on May 14.  Earlier in the day, Erdogan wrote on Twitter that LGBTQ movement is “the strongest current threatening the future of Western nations.” 

Over the past two months, Erdogan and his government officials have galvanized homophobic sentiments among their conservative voter base.Speaking at a campaign event last week, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu went so far as to claim that LGBTQ “also includes marriage between animals and humans.” 

While Turkey is a constitutionally secular country where homosexuality has never been criminalized, discrimination and violence against LGBTQ individuals are rampant.  

I am often asked: “How is it like living in an LGBTQ+ friendly MENA country?” My response is usually snarky. The truth is queer people in Lebanon are living on bought time, waking up to the constant threat of erasure. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, gender non-conforming, and queer persons in the country are well aware that powers of hegemony, including national authorities, regressive religious institutions, and conservative social groups, are coming for both their feet and their hearts.

I recall how close we were to reclaiming ownership over the queer identity. There was a real, palpable possibility to create a system that celebrates the queers, all of the queers: the femme, the masc, the raging and the revolutionaries, the discreet, and everyone in between.

Authorities took it upon themselves to wage a psychosocial war against the country’s queer community. Last week, caretaker Minister of Interior Bassam Mawlawi, forwarded a letter asking security forces to take urgent measures to halt any social gatherings seeking to “promote homosexuality.”

before the 20th century, Arabs and Muslims never used shudhudh jinsi to describe homosexuality. For more than a millennium, many learned elites, including religious scholars, linguists and poets, discussed all kinds of sexual relations, including what they called “liwat” and “sihaq” (which refer to male and female sexual acts respectively), that were close to our modern understanding of homosexuality, without using terms like deviant, abnormal or unnatural

When it was first introduced in Arabic in the early 20th century, shudhudh did not exclusively mean homosexuality. Instead, it was more of a scientific and medical category and included a wide range of sexual activities deemed “deviant,” like masturbation, sadism, masochism, fetishism, etc. And contrary to what opponents of homosexuality often claim, mithlyah is not a recent translation of homosexuality that aimed to replace the term shudhudh and normalize homosexuality. Rather, it was the original term that earlier Arab translators chose for homosexuality, coined at the same time as the term shudhudh and within the same movement of translating modern European psychological and sexologist literature. It then took more than three decades for shudhudh to become a synonym of homosexuality and the favorite term in the anti-homosexuality Arab discourse.

(The Quran uses different words when referring to the condemned deeds of Lut’s people: “fahisha,” or obscenity, and “khaba’ith,” or lewdness. Both terms encompass acts beyond same-sex sexual relations, such as highway robbery and dealing in unspecified dishonorable or shameful acts in their assembly.)