[Reader-list] Review of Irshad Manji's book

[mahmood farooqui]

Dear Shohini,

I read your remarks on Vikhar's review with great interest...

On to the question of whether Islam can be reconciled with homosexuality...

We can approach it doctrinally or historically...

If we approach the question doctrinally we would need to determine the
doctrinal canon within Islam, how it came about, what are the central
texts, how they have changed over time and so on...

That might not be such a fruitful proposition, but when we approach
the questin historically we might find that Islamic societies, that is
to say societies where Islam was a promiennt religion, have been the
great founts of homosexual relations....a predominant part of Persian
and Urdu poetry deals, when it deals with personal emotions, with
young men and boys...and girls in the case of women poets if we
properly unearth them. Half our sufis, I somethimes think in my
exaggeratef flights of fancy, became so because of their same sex
love...it is part of the reason, at least Ralph Russell would think
so, why Urdu poetry does not have a gender specific in its
address...that is perhaps why, pace the mid 18th century travelogue of
Delhi called Muraqqa-e Delhi, a male dancer could earn as much as a
lakh Rs a night for his performance....also that is why the Arabs and
the Afghans have been renowned, at least whatever renown they earned
in our parts of the world, for their sexual predilections...but that
is still a male world, admissibly...

The seventy virgins might or might not have appealed to Rabia, one of
the founders, perhaps THE founder, of Sufism, but irrespective of
gender, she at least expounded for us the simple fact that desire has
to sublimated for it to achieve itself truly...whether it is material
or carnal...

The question really is not homosexuality versus Islam...but
institutionalisation of same sex relations in the modern world versus
its 'suppression' in the pre-modern part of it...

When I try and approach the question historically the choices before
me, again, are whether I want a tacit co-existence or a blatant
manifestation...then it is an issue of choosing the modes of
suppression...which one pleases us...

Whatever our choices may be, they do not, from the perspective of the
contemporary modern that we inhabit, cease to be arbitrary...

Best,
Mahmood

On 04/07/06, Shohini Ghosh <shohini at vsnl.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Vikhar Ahmad: I read your review of Irshad Manji's `The Trouble with
> Islam Today' with great interest. I agree to a very large extent with your
> comments about her (frequently naive) political stance on many issues, most
> notoriously, on the Israel Palestinian conflict. Your review however
> underplays the dillemma that she outlines very early in her book : "Can
> Islam and homosexulaity be reconciled?"  (Page 23) I think this idea is
> pretty central to the book. Whether or not one agrees with her formulations,
> it has to be taken seriously.   Had you engaged with the powerful role that
> desire plays - of which sexual orientation is an integral part - you may
> have hesitated to conclude that  "She [Irshad Manji] doesn't talk about
> female suicide bombers and we can be sure that they don't blow themselves up
> because of the seventy virgins in paradise". Well, we can't be so sure, can
> we?  Besides, how many better reasons are there to die? Warmly Shohihi
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