Sex and the Citadel (39 page)

In talking to Shaykh Ahmad over the years, I have the impression of a man who is walking a thin line. On the one hand, he is genuinely interested in helping men whose sexuality crosses the heterosexual norm to find inner peace. This dialogue cuts both ways, as he is also acutely aware of the dangers of falling out of touch with his community. “We need new, innovative ways of thinking. Otherwise, we will be like the Christians: ‘Bye-bye,’ and they put religion to their back,” he remarked. “For Islam to stay alive, it has to live with the problems of society. It’s not essential that I agree with your way of life, but I have got to deal with you. There is a difference
in dealing with you when I am frustrated and angry with you, since I should be dealing with you when I am happy. It’s possible that I find open doors between me and him, and [as a result] I’ll be more responsive to him.”

Yet, in light of his own religious beliefs, Shaykh Ahmad can go only so far in making those who come to him feel at ease. “I tell them, ‘I love you. You are my brother, and you are welcome at the mosque.’ But I cannot tell him it is not haram.” And so Shaykh Ahmad falls back on a long-standing distinction in Islam: acknowledging the inclination to love men while condemning the sexual act itself—a “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach. It’s the best he can do under the circumstances. And it’s compromise that he has tried to communicate to his students and the broader community. “We started telling the people that sexual orientation is one thing and doing [it] is something else. And that raping the children is not homosexuality. The person who rapes is not a homosexual, so we are now limiting the definition of the homosexual. Maybe he could be influenced by his environment, his surroundings. This might not be his own free will a hundred percent. And that the people who move in that world did not leave God’s path after all; they are still our brothers and we can still live and coexist with them.”

Many men and women I know across the region whose lives depart from the heterosexual norm are deeply suspicious of religious leaders. Duplicity is high on their list of indictments: imams and priests who are happy to talk tolerance and compassion when there’s an all-expenses-paid trip to a workshop or international funding in the offing but who quickly take a hard line at Friday or Sunday prayers or when talking to the media. And in some cases, the hypocrisy goes beyond words. Munir described one visit to an imam. “I wanted to have an answer if gay is bad or not; ultimately, I wanted to know am I going to hell or not,” he said. The result was a four-hour lecture on the evils of
liwat
and
zina
. “He talked to me, and then he tried to do it. He was telling me it was haram, and then he had sex with me.” Munir laughed.

By his own admission, Munir is “not a religious man,” but he does believe in God, and this belief has helped him find a peace
that eludes many of his peers. “I have a brother. He is straight; he is married and has children. We are coming from the same womb. So why are the feelings inside me and everything different to him? What are the reasons?” he asked. “Maybe it’s something from God, it is the order of God: You gave me this, and You know my areas of weakness, and You know the places inside me, the dark areas I cannot enter. Maybe it is a test. He wants to see if I will tolerate this load, because I am helpless, I didn’t choose these feelings. So if they are wrong, and it’s made by You, God, how can You judge me?”

Such views are echoed by Nasim, who sees a central role for religious figures in the search for sexual tolerance in Egypt, and the wider Arab world, should they take such lessons to heart. “They have not well studied their religion. God is love, and all religions say that. From this base, since God is love, he loves us as we are. Like a father, who can pardon his son even when he makes mistakes, he will never take a knife and kill his son,” he observed. Nasim’s advice comes from his own struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexual life. “If they transmit the image of a God who makes laws and punishes on the basis of them, we are very far from the heart of religion. The heart of all religion is the love of God for man. I consider myself religious. I felt, at the beginning, guilt, but when I understood this, [that feeling was] finished.”

Like Nasim, Munir dismisses suggestions that religion, and religious leaders, must take a backseat in order for homosexual men and women to find acceptance in Egyptian society. “The shaykhs can change everything; they can do everything. Because what’s focusing the whole world, what’s affecting the whole world, are religious leaders, shaykhs and priests.” Munir wants a spirit of tolerance. He is not looking for approval, nor is he asking for more slack than he himself is willing to cut religious leaders. For all his close encounters with men of God, Munir appreciates that they are in a tight spot: “Shaykhs are afraid to say they are supporting the gays. He is afraid of the people; they will kill him or they will think that he himself is gay.”

The long-term solution, in Munir’s view, lies in the sorts of interactions that these workshops have fostered, opportunities for
dialogue that have changed Munir’s view of religion and the possibility of accommodation. “When I spoke with [the imam of one of Cairo’s largest mosques], he didn’t know what I was suffering, what are my feelings. When I spoke to him and told him all the stories, he was about to weep. He said, ‘I can’t imagine that these groups of you are suffering this much. I thought you were just doing pleasure and sleeping together, but you are being tortured. Yes, I do have reservations about this, and I don’t approve of what you are doing, and it is haram. But I feel that you are subject to many injustices.’ ” Munir clearly sees a role for himself and his peers in shifting attitudes. “Even the scientists or the shaykhs need us to point out the picture for them because they see in the movies this ugly picture, so they take this idea. I feel the problem, so I am the one who can speak about it. So [when] I tell you what I feel, this will touch you inside.”

PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION

“This ugly picture,” as Munir puts it, is the stereotype of homosexual men and women in Egyptian cinema and television: camp, comic, conflicted, or corrupted—take your pick. One study of Egyptian movies made between 1979 and 2009 that touch, however briefly, on homosexuality found that less than a tenth presented homosexual characters in anything close to a sympathetic light.
³³
Few mainstream filmmakers are willing to risk alienating audiences, or financial backers, by cracking old chestnuts, like homosexual men and women driven to their appetites by childhood sexual abuse or homosexual men as indiscriminate sexual predators.
³⁴
Even such superficial and unflattering portrayals raise the ire of conservatives, who accuse filmmakers—under the influence of America or Israel—of tempting young people into perdition merely by depicting such behavior. And there’s rarely a happy ending for homosexual characters on-screen. The film adaptation of
‘Imarat Ya‘qubian
(
Yacoubian Building
) by Alaa Al Aswany, Egypt’s best-known living novelist, is a good example. A central character in the movie is a
homosexual newspaper editor who (warning: spoiler) is murdered by one of his lovers, much to the delight of audiences. “I went to see
Yacoubian Building
four times. Every time, people cheered [at the murder scene]; I felt like they were stabbing me,” Nasim recalled. “Once, I was watching it, when the gay character was being killed, someone said, ‘
Ahsan, ahsan
[Great, great].’ I turned around and saw it was a woman, a distant relative whose husband had once made advances to me and I fooled around with him.” He laughed.

Just the idea of presenting homosexuality in a less glaring light is enough to set off a firestorm.
Tul Omri
(
All My Life
), directed by Maher Sabry, an Egyptian filmmaker based in San Francisco, is a low-budget, DIY production and one of the few films in recent years to offer a more rounded portrayal of homosexual life in Egypt—with stories and characters echoing the experiences of Nasim and Munir. It is unlikely to show at a Cairo multiplex anytime soon, but that hasn’t stopped the fatwas from flying, sight unseen. “Burn it immediately,” was the verdict of one former Grand Mufti of Egypt. “These films are the gateway to debauchery, to committing that forbidden by Allah and propagate deviant social behaviors.”
³⁵
And it’s not just religious authorities in a twist; one high-ranking U.N. official in Egypt suggested that the movie might even encourage the spread of HIV by promoting illicit behavior.

Egyptian cinema has yet to have its
Brokeback Mountain
breakthrough on homosexuality; what with the rise of Islamic conservatives, this looks to be some time in coming. That being said, the growth of independent filmmaking and the new possibilities of alternative distribution (including private screenings and Internet streaming), as well as the longer-term possibility of lighter censorship once Egypt has shaken off its post-Mubarak spasms, make this a less fantastic prospect than it was under the heavy hand of dictatorship. Already, there are a number of other art-house movies and documentaries on homosexual life in the Arab world that give a more nuanced view, though these have not had mainstream distribution in the region.
³⁶

It’s a similar situation with Arabic literature. Long gone are the days of al-Tifashi and his playful treatment of same-sex relations.
The past half century has seen the publication of some truly bleak portrayals of homosexuality, which have come to symbolize a sense of emasculation of Arab society at the hands of colonial occupiers, Israel, their own governments, and a global consumer culture—the “fucked-over” school of writing, in which sodomy represents just one of the many ways people of the region have been oppressed in recent decades.
³⁷
There are, of course, exceptions—books, and in particular novels, that do justice to the complexity of homosexual life in the region without having it carry all the woes of the Arab world. One to emerge from Egypt in recent years is
The World of Boys
, written by Mostafa Fathi, an Egyptian journalist, and put out by a small indie publisher. It’s the tale of Essam, one of Fathi’s friends, a rare coming-of-age story in which the lives of middle-class homosexual men are fleshed out in some detail. It is also a plea for tolerance of diversity—sexual, ethnic, and religious. At the end of the book, Essam makes peace with himself by taking the plunge and baring his soul on the bridge over the Nile leading into Tahrir Square, wearing a sign reading
I AM GAY. I AM A HUMAN BEING
.
³⁸

This is not something Nasim and Munir would recommend. Thanks to the Internet, however, there are easier ways to make a stand. Nasim, for example, took a step out, ever so discreetly, online. “I wrote on my Facebook, ‘I like women and men.’ My kids [students] are not stupid—they read this. They started to talk about it, and I started to talk about it also, and now we speak openly about it.” The news soon spread through the school. “The directors know, the priests know, all the teachers know; we even joke about it. Of course there are some who are a bit uptight … but if they attack me, I know how to defend myself. My private life is my own. I don’t ask you if you fuck your wife from up or down or right or left.”

Not every online entry takes as feisty a tone. “To be homosexual is to live a miserable life, to get used to those disdainful looks, to hear hurtful and mocking words … without being able to defend yourself,” writes a young Moroccan man on his blog,
A Forgotten Life
. The misery goes on: “You are looking for the relationship of your dreams in a society that refuses to recognize you or your
existence and does not want to accept these relationships in spite of their nobility and sincerity. To be homosexual means that you live with a thousand and one faces to show what you do not feel and cover your true feelings. To be homosexual means to think on your own … to express yourself on your own … to feel happy on your own … to cry on your own … to be angry on your own … sleep on your own … on your own … on your own.”
³⁹

For some young men and women, access to the Internet brings the stunning realization that they are, in fact, not alone in their desires. Some young men describe gay porn as life changing, revealing a world of same-sex relations that they thought was unique to them. Online mating and dating sites can have a similarly transformative effect, as well as offer a concrete chance to hook up. Manjam, for example, has more than a hundred thousand listings from across the Middle East (including Iran and Turkey)—tops, bottoms, and versatiles looking for action, complete with discreetly cropped photos of their vital assets. Indeed, such sites are so popular that NGOs working on HIV prevention use them to reach one of their key populations: men who have sex with men. Women find the Internet an especially valuable tool to meet potential partners because their opportunities to do so in the real world are more constrained than men’s. And a growing number of websites in Arabic offering news, views, and accurate information about homosexuality—from social, psychological, medical, legal, and cultural perspectives—are working wonders in bringing men and women to terms with their divergent sexuality.

Such online exchanges are all the more vital in places where physical gatherings are risky. In the summer before the uprising, a real-world discussion group tried to launch in Cairo, with unnerving consequences for participants, when its foreign host was suddenly deported, and they were left in the lurch, wondering if they might be next in line for the attentions of state security. This sobering tale highlights one of the chief risks of online communication—rapid exposure, with potentially damaging consequences—should confidentiality be compromised. I know several men and women who have been inadvertently outed when they forgot to activate
their screen saver and family members came across their profiles on Facebook or GayRomeo. Or worse, given a police penchant for Internet entrapment.
⁴⁰
Nonetheless, the fall of the Mubarak regime triggered a flourish of online activity, but how far, and how fast, to translate this into off-line action was the question facing Nasim and his friends in the shifting new order.