Islam and "LGBTQ": Gender, Sexuality, Morality & Identity with Dr Carl Sharif El-Tobgui (2022-06-17) #

0:00:02 Hello everyone and welcome to blogging theology today I'm delighted to talk again to Dr Carl 0:00:08 Sheriff Altobky you're almost welcome sir thank you so much for having me again Paul it's a 0:00:14 pleasure to be back Sheriff is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Brandeis university 0:00:21 in the United States his expertise is in Islamic thought particularly Islamic theology 0:00:27 law and jurisprudence and also in the Arabic language Quranic classical and modern 0:00:34 as well as classical Arabic literature and poetry now according to the BBC website and i quote June 0:00:44 is pride month a month dedicated to celebrating LGBTQ + communities all around the world 0:00:55 unquote today uh Sheriff has kindly agreed to discuss Islam and LGBTQ gender sexuality morality 0:01:06 and identity that's the title of his presentation now this is now an incredibly important subject 0:01:14 for Muslims to understand because the the west the media corporations and governments now insist that 0:01:22 everyone including Muslims give unconditional approval to LGBTQ + people and communities 0:01:31 it's therefore vital that we have an accurate and reliable understanding of what Islam teaches from 0:01:38 a respected Muslim academic we need to ask how did we get here and realize the importance of getting 0:01:46 our conceptual framework right and explore the islamic paradigm on sex and sexuality 0:01:55 so over to you Sheriff okay thank you so much for the introduction
0:02:04 welcome to everyone here today i'm very happy to be back and to get into this topic which is 0:02:09 a very very important topic i don't think i have to explain to anyone why or how important it is 0:02:14 particularly for people who are in the west um the topic has become one that is pervasive 0:02:19 it is omnipresent everywhere we look and as we will see over the course of this presentation 0:02:25 um it is no longer sufficient for religious communities such as muslims simply to say oh 0:02:29 well we don't approve of particular behaviors just like we don't approve of drinking or 0:02:33 premarital sex between men and women we also don't approve of you know homosexual behavior 0:02:38 um the the discourse on the topic has shifted so radically and so quickly over the last couple of 0:02:45 decades that you know we're basically playing on an entirely different playing field right now and 0:02:50 there are a whole there's a whole set of deeply embedded assumptions 0:02:54 which have conspired to make this issue something that is very very different from a simple 0:03:01 judgment as to what is say halal or in terms of behavior of course according to islam essentially 0:03:06 that's you know what we're dealing with when we're talking about particular behaviors but there is so 0:03:11 much more to the issue than that uh that it is no longer sufficient for muslims just to stop there 0:03:18 both in terms of explaining our position and our religion frankly to those who are not muslim 0:03:23 and increasingly also within our own ranks particularly among our youth who have grown 0:03:27 up in the western westernized environments as we will see the contemporary lgbtq discourse 0:03:33 is um basically it's put out as a moral discourse um we are given to understand 0:03:39 that this is a question primarily of equality of dignity of human rights uh and so forth 0:03:45 um and that if one does not approve for example of particular kinds of behaviors or relationships 0:03:50 then one is actually opposed to all of these things that are otherwise wonderful i mean we 0:03:55 you know the prophet peace be upon him said give every person who's due right so we believe in 0:04:00 giving people their rights we believe in justice justice is very central to islam 0:04:03 it always has been um but the the the discourse is put across uh in a that defines justice inequality 0:04:12 and rights and compassion and dignity and so forth in very specific ways which actually are 0:04:16 at loggerheads with islamic understandings of these concepts and also make mincemeat 0:04:22 frankly of traditional islamic understandings of things like gender sexuality sexual moral norms 0:04:27 and so forth and so we really need to dig deep um in order to have a proper conceptualization 0:04:33 of what it is that we're actually dealing with today very often you have a westernized young 0:04:39 muslim person going to a sheikh from quote unquote back home you know a traditional muslim country 0:04:43 and asking oh i think i'm gay or what does that mean or can i and the sheikh doesn't just 0:04:48 says oh it's haram and the child the the youth is asking about an identity is asking about feelings 0:04:53 it's asking about a political orientation you know asking about many different things and the scholar 0:04:58 is just understanding oh he's asking about sodomy you know can he have anal sex like oh in the shady 0:05:03 that's haram you know end of story and there's kind of a complete miscommunication because 0:05:07 they're coming from two completely different what are now completely different paradigms 0:05:11 of looking at again sex sexuality you know uh gender interactions morality what human beings 0:05:18 are and what it means to be human so we're gonna dig deep and get into all of this before starting 0:05:22 i just want to um to to tell people this is going to be a lengthy uh presentation there's also a lot 0:05:29 of detail there are a lot of slides and the slides have a lot of information it is necessary i think 0:05:35 given our circumstances to take the time to go through and to really understand these issues very 0:05:40 deeply and precisely with the proper conceptual vocabulary in the proper terminology and that 0:05:46 is why paul and i have decided to to give it its due and to really take the time that's necessary 0:05:50 in addition i have asked paul to post the slide deck to connect it to the presentation so that 0:05:57 it will be publicly available anyone can you know download it as a pdf to use it to review it 0:06:03 um you know to use it in your own teaching or or or holocause or study circles or whatever 0:06:10 i think it's just important that the knowledge get out and that people have access to it 0:06:14 so that is going to be an outstanding resource for um you know the coming months 0:06:18 and years for people to come back to it's going to be detailed thorough the presentation the slides 0:06:22 are very professionally produced obviously from an expert perspective so i think this is a wonderful 0:06:28 opportunity to set the record straight no no pun intended right okay all right so without further 0:06:36 ado um so the title of the talk as paul mentioned is islam and lgbtq gender sexuality morality and 0:06:43 identity um lgbtq is enclosed in uh parentheses here or square sorry in quotation marks um because 0:06:52 i will be problematizing the term itself and the conceptual baggage that underlies it and again 0:06:57 that's very important to the work that we need to do so um if anyone wonders why that's in uh uh 0:07:04 quotation marks that is the reason why i'd also like to say that this uh talk today is a kind of 0:07:09 expanded version of a talk i gave about a year and a half ago online to a community in houston texas 0:07:14 um that talk is if you go on uh youtube you will see it and it has the title gender sexuality 0:07:20 morality and identity in islam um and it's based on the same slide deck except this deck is 0:07:25 somewhat expanded and so um this would be you know presumably the um the go-to lecture you know um 0:07:33 once it's out um if you come across both of those this would be the more updated in the more 0:07:38 expanded version um okay all right good great so the contents um we're gonna first start by setting 0:07:48 the stage to now is june the month of june which has been uh identified or billed as uh pride month 0:07:55 in many countries in the west and also other parts of the world so we want to just look you know 0:07:59 how uh we where we are today in the year 1443-2022 and then how did we get here um 0:08:07 and then as paul mentioned the importance of our conceptual framework this is absolutely critical 0:08:12 because um as i already mentioned the language that we use in the conceptual framework that 0:08:17 we bear that we bring to bear on an issue are absolutely critical in terms of how we 0:08:21 conceptualize and therefore judge that issue um and again so many changes have taken place deep 0:08:27 beneath the surface of our conscious understanding that we have to do a lot of digging and also 0:08:31 expend a lot of effort in order to understand how that we are how we are really dealing with two 0:08:36 very different conceptual paradigms now when we talk about islam and islamic worldview in 0:08:42 general and on sexuality and gender in particular and a the kind of modern western secular you know 0:08:48 modern slash postmodern now world view on the other hand these are two very different kind of 0:08:54 approaches ways of looking at the world ways of construing reality that depart from very very 0:09:00 different and often kind of diametrically opposed assumptions and i think the more we realize that 0:09:06 the easier it will be for us in our own hearts and minds to kind of navigate some of these um 0:09:12 differences of opinion and clashes frankly which which arise and will presumably continue to do 0:09:18 so on this issue and others and so after we um talk about that we will get into the islamic 0:09:23 paradigm of on gender sex and sexual morality in general and then we will go into homosexuality and 0:09:28 transgenderism in particular and we will do that from two angles we will look at the kind of moral 0:09:34 considerations so kind of what islam teaches what the sharia says about particular actions 0:09:39 that's kind of from a sort of objective perspective if we can say the way things 0:09:44 are in and of themselves regarding the moral valuation particular act and then we'll also 0:09:49 look at it from the kind of subjective perspective what about muslims who find themselves dealing 0:09:54 with same-sex attractions or gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder um uh how how can 0:10:01 we understand this phenomenon how can muslims in those shoes deal with this in a in an islamic way 0:10:08 while staying true to the teachings in the message of islam and how can we as a muslim community 0:10:13 support muslims who are struggling with these types of issues which are very real issues and can 0:10:17 be very difficult in deep issues how can we best serve and help our brothers and sisters in their 0:10:23 struggle to live their lives uh in accordance with the will of allah as all muslims are called to do 0:10:29 and so and then we will move on to a summary and conclusion and then i will go over some resources 0:10:34 on our community has really produced some great resources over the last just half decade four 0:10:39 five years five six years just a handful of individuals and we'll see them by the end of this 0:10:43 and so i'd like to walk you through some of the resources so that you know where to go after 0:10:47 this talk is over and you are and you want to uh continue your education uh on this topic and your 0:10:53 engagement with it so without further ado um i just want to paint a picture of where we are today 0:11:03 so yes yeah so in terms of literature we said that kind of presence of of the lgbt uh narrative 0:11:11 uh um is everywhere and so starting with say literature right uh we see a significant 0:11:17 growth of lgbt literature that is targeting youth specifically over the past decade so you have this 0:11:22 uh series called the lumberjanes which is a popular comic book series uh consisting 0:11:27 of 75 issues that is directed to teenagers and the protagonist is a navajo trans woman 0:11:34 so a biological male who's transitioned to present is female 0:11:38 with two gay fathers so this is a protagonist in the year 2010 there were approximately 10 books 0:11:44 published by mainstream publishers for young adults with lgbt characters in them by 2016 0:11:50 and mere six years later the number climbed to 80. so it um it multiplied eight-fold in 0:11:58 mere in six years remarkable and then you have the annual rainbow book list which provides updates 0:12:04 concerning lgbt books ranging from infants up until 18 years old so if there are materials 0:12:10 yes yes material is now being produced for the youngest of the young so that when people first 0:12:16 become aware of their surroundings there is sort of an lgbt kind of presence and 0:12:21 and narrative that is present in their kind of first uh um first uh acquaintance with the world 0:12:28 if we can say right which is something that was just would have been unimaginable just 0:12:32 you know very short time ago don't imagine this is unimaginable now i would say for many people
0:12:39 yeah and then libraries throughout the country throughout america as well as probably other 0:12:43 western countries now host drag queen story hours perhaps some people have seen pictures of this 0:12:48 so public libraries um elementary schools they bring drag queens so 0:12:52 men who are dressed very flamboyantly as women with wigs and big dresses and makeup come in and 0:12:58 read to children um you know and the children have a great laugh and also they kind of become 0:13:02 more familiar with and desensitized to this type of behavior which you know until very recently 0:13:08 would have just been considered a kind of bizarre fetish that you did in some cabaret in a nightclub 0:13:12 on the weekend you know dressing up in dragon and whatever and now this is being mainstreamed 0:13:17 you know for children so this is a very very different playing field even in the west from 0:13:21 what we were dealing with just 10 20 years ago and things are changing very very rapidly so that's 0:13:27 literature enough we go to media we see of the 118 films that the organization glad which is one of 0:13:33 the uh predominant lgbt advocacy organizations they counted 118 films from the major studios 0:13:41 in the year 2019 and 22 of these films contained characters who identified as lgbtq so this is 18.6 0:13:49 which is something like five to six times the percentage of people who actually identify as lgbt 0:13:54 in society now that number has shifted from you know one point five to three percent to five 0:13:59 percent to ten percent um you know it depends on the way you count what it means to sort of 0:14:04 identify as lgbtq some definitions are very loose um you know so we have to take the statistics 0:14:10 with a grain of salt but um but certainly the idea that 20 of characters in movies identifies 0:14:16 lgbt is certainly way beyond you know um uh what we see in in reality so there's a sort of over 0:14:23 representation if you will just statistically speaking um that we see in the movies but this 0:14:28 is something that's been um been encouraged but yeah there's massive over representation of people 0:14:34 in the films is deliberate policies it's not just a random statistical fluke so there's an attempt 0:14:38 here to exaggerate to make a political point i i assume ultimately one right yes i mean whatever 0:14:46 the motivation behind it seems like there is some type of uh something like that afoot here so 0:14:51 um and then a new database from insider confirms the existence of more than 250 lgbtq plus 0:14:57 characters in children's cartoons dating back to 1983 1983 is a long time ago so i'm assuming the 0:15:03 majority of these are probably the last 10 15 years but 250 since 1983 which is about almost 0:15:09 40 years and if you look at the data from 2010 to 2020 especially the latter five years right um so 0:15:16 to 2015 to 2020 the representation of overtly queer character skyrocket so indeed it goes 0:15:22 like this and then it skyrockets in the last five years which is right after the obergefell decision 0:15:28 is passed in the united states in 2015 which allowed for same-sex marriage across the country 0:15:35 sesame street spongebob and other such children shows have all had 0:15:40 openly lgbt characters by this point if we go now to schools and i'm just talking about the 0:15:47 united states here california colorado illinois and new jersey oregon rhode island in washington 0:15:51 now mandate specific lgbt education at the elementary levels or at some level of schooling 0:16:00 other states have rolled out in quote-unquote inclusive curriculum standards but have not 0:16:04 necessarily signed statewide bills at least not of yet organizations like the sogi education 0:16:13 soggy education in canada sogi stands for sexual orientation and gender identity education in 0:16:18 canada are devoted to advancing lgbt education in schools and many people may have heard of the 0:16:26 latest brawl with disney the disney corporation in florida when the governor of florida actually 0:16:32 moved to ban discussion and teaching of lgbt related themes in uh florida state classrooms 0:16:38 in the first and second grades so we're just talking about i mean first and second grade 0:16:42 and before um and disney under pressure from certain groups um you know came out in force and 0:16:49 said we are completely against this legislation it's homophobic it's wrong we're going to throw 0:16:53 the full weight of our company behind trying to overturn it and there's been a big spat back and 0:16:57 forth now between disney corporation and um the governor of interesting that disney has become 0:17:03 heavily politicized now it used to be you know i used to watch it for cartoons and so on as a 0:17:07 kid but now it's actively involved in political campaigns to attack politicians and and their 0:17:14 representatives in putting forward legislation so this is extraordinary how politicized corporations 0:17:19 even disney are these days right right and it's uh you know uh interesting that you 0:17:25 should mention that because our very next slide we're gonna meet this gender gender bred person 0:17:29 later on in the um in this in the presentation so we'll come back to him or her you know the person 0:17:36 i noticed the brain of this gingerbread firstly the gingerbread man has a brain which is i didn't 0:17:39 realize they had problems but anyway uh this one has a multi-colored brain as well that surely does 0:17:46 and you mentioned corporations so you know um going on to uh well actually we'll get to 0:17:51 corporations the next slide but global affairs so there's pressure growing now on muslim 0:17:56 countries as well to become quote-unquote lgbt affirming and so you can see here 0:18:01 earlier this month you know in june pride month the u.s embassy u.s embassy accounts 0:18:06 in muslim countries tweeted in support of pride month and you can see here an example 0:18:10 the u.s embassy in kuwait all human beings should be treated with respect and dignity and should 0:18:14 be able to live without fear no matter who they are or whom they love potus the president of the 0:18:19 united states is a champion for the human rights of lgbtqi persons prior to 2022 you are included 0:18:27 is potus also uh campaigning for the rights of muslim men to of a polygamous marriage 0:18:32 uh presumably he's not as it's illegal in the united states i don't recall him 0:18:35 campaigning for muslim rights to have chronically sanctioned marriages but anyway that's just my 0:18:41 my right exactly and we'll come to the you know also we can look at the language here right all 0:18:46 human beings should be treated with respect and dignity and we would agree with that as 0:18:49 muslims right we agree with treating people with respect and dignity the idea is that how is this 0:18:54 understood what does what do respect and dignity consist of and we're going to realize that a big 0:18:59 part of the challenge that muslims face on this issue today is the kind of appropriation 0:19:03 of language a very um you know emotively resonant language like respect and dignity and giving very 0:19:11 specific definitions and meanings to those terms it's loaded it's loaded language it's not neutral 0:19:15 language descriptive objective it's heavily loaded with an ideal ideology and so it is meant to kind 0:19:21 of force you to express that ideology in the very words that's used right and the implication 0:19:27 here of course is that if you don't if you're not fully on board with you know homosexual behavior 0:19:31 relationships family structures and so forth then you are you actually lack respect for people's 0:19:36 dignity right which that's a pretty serious moral charge right that's not a neutral thing 0:19:41 to say oh you don't respect people's dignity right that's that's a very loaded kind of moral charge 0:19:47 and this is what muslims and other kind of more traditional religious believers are facing now 0:19:51 and so we need to understand where this comes from and also how we can best conceptualize and respond 0:19:56 to this um and so this you know movements also now into some res in some respects has become a tool 0:20:03 of demonization and even oppression so aipac the american israeli public affairs council 0:20:09 posted a tweet reading do you support lgbtq plus rights hamas doesn't hamas discriminates against 0:20:15 lesbian gay bisexual transgender and intersex people so the subtext here is that look at those 0:20:21 evil you know people over there who are not pro-lgbtq meaning they are not really part of 0:20:28 modern civilized society and therefore western public should not support them or be sympathetic 0:20:33 to their own struggles and their own plights right in their own oppression because after all they're 0:20:38 not pro-lgbt rights apac representing israelis or jews the jewish faith itself the jewish bible 0:20:45 of course would no way support any of these uh behaviors uh cross-dressing is is prohibited 0:20:52 uh sodomy is prohibited in leviticus so the irony is that this is completely contrary to 0:20:56 the very jewish faith that many of their supporters being jews would presumably uh 0:21:02 support so there's something very very odd going on there that a jewish organization should 0:21:06 advocate completely contrary to the jewish faith right and you know again we'll see reasons behind 0:21:12 that you know um but you're right that it would seem on the surface to be rather uh in incongruous 0:21:19 um also imams certainly maps have been banned from entering particular european countries on account 0:21:24 of lgbt critical teachings uh and preaching right so if you say that that the religion doesn't 0:21:30 allow for example um same-sex relationships or behavior this is considered hate speech 0:21:35 uh for many people and so their imams have been banned you know from from speaking in this way 0:21:41 um okay so global affairs now if we move on to corporations which you mentioned paul 0:21:45 this is something which really surprised me when i first came across this i don't know if people have 0:21:48 seen the burger king pride whopper which was uh put out by burger king in austria i i thought this 0:21:55 was satur when i first saw this on twitter i was convinced this was just a joke because there are 0:21:59 satirical organizations but this turns out to be an actual burger king advert i believe yes 0:22:05 absolutely you're absolutely right um and so uh the headline of a story that ran about this 0:22:11 reads burger king ad prompts apology after pride whopper campaign featuring burgers with top and 0:22:17 bottom buns sparks a backlash um i don't know if people are picking up on this you know symbolism 0:22:24 here but obviously you can see the two top buns and the two bottom bun so it's like same same 0:22:29 but also top and bottom is a not very subtle reference to the different positions that are 0:22:34 assumed in same-sex you know relationship between you know basically anal sex between men where one 0:22:40 plays the top role and one plays the bottom row and you know i was wondering when i first saw this 0:22:45 top and bottom okay do they really mean that like that's so vulgar to put on a on a food hamburger 0:22:51 where children can buy them and you know i mean it's just you know exactly i was like 0:22:54 maybe they just meant like really the top bun in the bottom but if you read the story you know um 0:22:59 you'll find that there's there's a difference of opinion there's like istilaf that you know people 0:23:03 are have a difference in the like tafsir of this uh you know burger this pride right and how to 0:23:10 but it's but many people say no no obviously i mean tops and bottoms like of course you know if 0:23:14 you're if you're familiar with kind of gay culture and gay lingo it's like a very obvious you know 0:23:17 reference and so then we read like in this article the fast food chains advertising agency issued an 0:23:23 apology on sunday for a much ridiculed tone-deaf marketing campaign announcing the pride whopper 0:23:29 a burger served with two matching buns now you might think okay the apology you know this has 0:23:34 been ridiculed tone deaf that people might have objected to a major you know decades-old uh you 0:23:41 know respected international um corporation i guess maybe to say respected international 0:23:47 corporation might be a contradiction in terms but anyway a well-known international corporation 0:23:51 that has been selling burgers to the world for you know decades now and has a big name burger king 0:23:56 you know are is now selling hamburgers and naming them with terms that basically overtly reference 0:24:03 sodomy max of sodomy of nail milk i mean let's call it call it spade a spade here that's what 0:24:08 we're talking about acts of something so people would be like why are why are we being sold 0:24:13 burgers that we're gonna eat that are named after you know anal sex and but but you would 0:24:19 be wrong if you thought that that's why there was offense taken at this in fact right we read 0:24:24 the ad quote includes a burger with two bun tops and another with two bottoms a seemingly 0:24:29 misinformed nod to sex within the lgbtq plus community now how do we understand this within 0:24:35 days of the outgoing life people around the globe took to social media to comment on the campaign 0:24:39 citing the chain's failure to understand quote unquote how gay sex works as well as critique 0:24:45 corporate rainbow washing during pride month so the idea is that okay in a real you know um 0:24:51 relationship right you can't have two tops or two bottoms the idea is that one person is the top and 0:24:56 one person is the bottom so this misrepresents the male male sexual act because you know you're 0:25:03 presenting two tops and two bodies one more why did i get my head around so they've been created 0:25:07 a major international hamburger corporation has been criticized for not understanding the 0:25:11 sexual practices of two or three percent of the population i mean th this is kind of so weird that 0:25:18 i i i can't i'm not representing it properly not representing them probably in their advertising 0:25:25 right it's a misrepresentation of the actual act right because they don't know how gay sex works 0:25:31 because they didn't do their homework and they didn't consult with the lgbt community on it 0:25:34 and that's why we see how would you get your homework on this but anyway we'll go there 0:25:38 so burger king austria you know apologized into the post you know they put out a post and then 0:25:43 the post continues we've learned our lessons and we'll include experts on communicating 0:25:47 with the lgbtq community for future work as promoting equal love and equal rights 0:25:52 will still be a priority for us so they've learned their lesson you know if you're going 0:25:56 to be representing um you know male male sex acts in your in your food products you need to do so 0:26:02 um accurately and you know as you do i mean as you you have you know you mentioned sodomy when you're 0:26:07 advertising for hamburgers i mean what's what's your object to that you know and then we see again 0:26:12 here you know of course the ultimate goal is a promoting of equal love and equal rights so again 0:26:16 these terms which you know have a lot of kind of emotive baggage right equal of equal rights 0:26:20 um which you know once you read that well who would be opposed to equal love who would be 0:26:23 opposed to equal rights and the idea is like no decent person would be and if you are then 0:26:27 you're not a decent person right you're not a moral human being and then the last kind of um
0:26:35 thing i want to point out here is lgbt and islam specifically now this poster that you see here 0:26:41 you can see the date on the bottom is may 17 2022 so um just last month uh this was the 0:26:47 international day against homophobia transphobia and biphobia and this uh poster was produced under 0:26:53 the auspices of a canadian university and was um was displayed within that university and also in a 0:26:59 number of high schools in ontario canada so you can say see again celebrate the power of love 0:27:05 right the constant appeal to love and then you see these two men about to kiss you know 0:27:11 a biracial couple and then you see a couple a heterosexual couple of color and then you see 0:27:17 a you know multiply abled couples so someone in a wheelchair and then a able-bodied person and then 0:27:23 in the bottom left-hand corner you see again two like a biracial muslim two muslim females women in 0:27:30 hijab and they're about to kiss now i blotted that out because many muslims rightly so were quite 0:27:36 outraged at this image and so i didn't want to you know um expose it further but i did want 0:27:42 to just uh give people a nice sense of what is actually going on we know they're muslim 0:27:46 obviously because they're wearing hijab and that's that we've been uh targeted for that uh yeah okay 0:27:52 exactly yeah and so um again so the lgbtq nation put out a they ran a story on this uh university 0:28:00 pulls image of women in hijabs kissing after muslim community protests so when the when the 0:28:06 image first came out the muslim community was very upset they were very offended they were up in arms 0:28:10 and they started um and one of them one person commented said shame on you for such an insulting 0:28:16 mockery post to my religion one commenter wrote about the call to quote unquote celebrate the 0:28:21 power of love now the university in question initially responded to the post by stating that 0:28:26 they understood the image might be quote unquote upsetting to some muslims and calling the topic 0:28:31 quote unquote complex and intersectional right but in the beginning they said they were not going to 0:28:36 take it down as the muslim community continued to protest um and to sign a petition which garnered i 0:28:41 think several thousand signatures in a very short period of time they actually eventually pulled it 0:28:45 down due to muslim pressure which i was actually quite surprised uh exactly i mean this to me 0:28:51 the remarkable thing about this story i mean apart from the sadly predictable poster is 0:28:55 um the fact that the this major institution this library did respond to muslim uh uh pushback on 0:29:02 this and decided to take it down and that that is remarkable i wouldn't have expected that to 0:29:06 be honest in the west right exactly and it was not just you know it was it was islamic centers 0:29:12 and uh you know private individuals but also high school students muslim high school students in 0:29:17 ontario public schools where this was posted who staged walkouts and said we do not accept this 0:29:22 because our religion again we're looking at this particular act the act is prohibited by our 0:29:26 religion and it is disrespectful to our religion and therefore islamophobic to try to force 0:29:35 muslim symbols especially the hijab is like a symbol of purity and devotion 0:29:39 right and to represent it in a way where two people are who are wearing the hijab are engaging 0:29:43 in something that's explicitly prohibited by the religion as if you show someone a hijab you know 0:29:48 drinking alcohol or doing something else or a man in a kufi and a beard you know i don't know doing 0:29:52 something that the religion prohibits this would be considered kind of appropriating our religion 0:29:57 and pushing into the service of something which it doesn't actually support it it just seems to 0:30:01 just however sadly that there's a hierarchy when it comes to phobias so at the top of the the tree 0:30:06 comes homophobia transphobia and biphobia we should be really really really concerned about 0:30:10 those uh islamophobia is not so important because it can be over uh can be accepted as long as it's 0:30:16 in the service of uh uh international day against homophobia et cetera this is a it seems to be a 0:30:21 hierarchy here of people you can offend exactly yeah and the um lgbtq nation article it sort of 0:30:28 ends dutifully with this with this statement and we will see the you know degree of uh uh you know 0:30:34 truth or untruth of the statement as we go through the presentation but they say muslim culture isn't 0:30:38 inherently anti-gay the quran says nothing about homosexuality unlike the bible islamic history is 0:30:44 filled with texts openly depicting homosexuality is a beautiful matter-of-fact thing and more 0:30:49 american muslims support same-sex marriage than do christian evangelicals protestants and mormons 0:30:55 according to a pew research study now we notice here you know the bible says the quran says 0:30:59 nothing about homosexuality this is a you know um it is fake news is it the word doesn't exist the 0:31:05 word there's not a pure research study which may be true the rest of it is fake it's fake 0:31:09 yeah basically basically right and then the text being filled with openly depicting homosexuality 0:31:14 i know what they're talking about we can get to this later but you know again what they mean here 0:31:19 by homosexuality is is not doesn't really map one to one on what is being discussed here and you 0:31:24 know and we'll get to this you know acts versus desires versus intentions and so on and so forth 0:31:29 but anyway you know they end it this way uh as part of again a rhetorical sort of flourish to 0:31:34 show that muslims you know how does the how does the article start university pulls image of women 0:31:40 and hideouts kissing after muslim community protests well obviously this muslim community 0:31:44 must just be a bunch of backwards bigots because they protested over this thing which their own 0:31:51 holy text doesn't even say anything about in their own history has celebrated as being a beautiful 0:31:57 matter of fact thing so what's wrong with these you know it's amazing yeah right and so you so 0:32:02 again we have to be very careful of sort of the rhetoric that is used to frame the issue in a very 0:32:06 particular way so this is kind of you know where we are today right june uh 2022. 0:32:13 um the question is how did we get here how do we get here for young people this is pretty much all 0:32:19 they know if you're 20 or younger you grew up in a world where gay marriage was a fact of life where 0:32:25 homosexuality was only present on the television and you know but people like me i'm only in my 40s 0:32:30 so i'm not that old but this is all very very new i mean i grew up at a time where this was still 0:32:35 very very taboo and there was a very different conversation about it which we'll also get to 0:32:40 as we go through because again there's been a very very rapid and very radical shift in 0:32:44 the discourse which is important for muslims to understand if they're going to be able to 0:32:48 conceptualize and and respond to this properly so how do we get here so this takes us back to 0:32:55 the sexual revolution now the sexual revolution begins in the 1960s late 1960s and this is sort 0:33:01 of the most obvious proximate cause to where we are today but there are antecedent causes 0:33:06 the sexual revolution there are you know things about it which start as a stir in the 1930s we'll 0:33:12 get to this you know and then came into full bloom in the 60s and then even before that developments 0:33:16 that take place from the beginning of the modern period you know 17th 18th 19th centuries also you 0:33:21 know laid the groundwork to get to a point where by the 1960s in western culture specifically 0:33:26 the sexual revolution almost looks like inevitable if not inevitable like it's just waiting to happen 0:33:32 right and then it's waiting for a catalyst to happen and then catalyst comes about we'll see 0:33:36 um in the form of the birth control pill and other kind of social movements that were afoot in this 0:33:41 in the 1960s but it's very important to understand um the sexual revolution 0:33:46 um as part of this um as part of this larger narrative now the sexual revolution is basically 0:33:52 it represents a fundamental rejection of christian or more generally abrahamic religious moral norms 0:33:58 surrounding gender sex and sexuality so up until the 1960s at least you know the official kind of 0:34:03 moral norms in the west were pretty much aligned with with christianity um premarital sex was 0:34:09 very much taboo um it was not something you know living together outside of marriage was completely 0:34:14 unheard of in the west before the 1960s at least in america i think also in europe as well um you 0:34:19 know you did not just live with someone of the opposite sex outside of marriage that was just 0:34:23 not done like in the muslim world today it's just it's unheard of like it's just not done nobody 0:34:27 people might like have relations but you don't you know it's like hush hush 0:34:31 and it's not something that like you know that's accepted and it's certainly not something that you 0:34:35 just would do so openly um up until this time also in the 1960s um people were very reticent about 0:34:42 discussing matters that that that were related to sexuality so on on american um soap operas for 0:34:49 example in the 1960s they did not you could not even say the word pregnant on public television 0:34:54 right now there's nothing really wrong with that for from our perspective as muslims but 0:34:58 the idea was that even that was too forward it was kind of too direct you know and so they used 0:35:02 euphemisms that a woman was said to be with child or expecting you know you couldn't 0:35:08 if you had a movie in the theater where a woman's chest was shown bear chest for like two seconds 0:35:12 it was immediately slapped with an r rating you know restricted audiences no one under 17 0:35:17 without an adult accompanying them right this is considered very shocking 0:35:20 um at the same time you know you have for example pornography was completely 0:35:24 uh forbidden it was prohibited by law in the west and i don't just mean pictures or videos i mean 0:35:30 also just written like salacious novels even that like just you know written descriptions that were 0:35:35 very explicit were actually you couldn't sell them legally in european capitals and in the 0:35:39 united states um so what happened so basically in the 1960s you get a a radical kind of rejection of 0:35:50 of these moral norms and part of what um leads up to this is before this time right and you 0:35:58 know at least traditionally in the west and in many societies you you you have obviously the 0:36:03 sexual act is at its core a reproductive act you know we can give sex different meanings you know 0:36:09 we can we can engage in it for different reasons whether to exert power over someone or to you know 0:36:15 as an expression of intimacy or love or pleasure or whatever right but in the end of the day you 0:36:21 know mechanically speaking it's a reproductive act i'm talking about the full kind of act between 0:36:25 a man and a woman and you know in traditionally especially before the birth control pill comes out 0:36:30 in 1959 there isn't really a very foolproof way of of contraception so the idea is that if a man 0:36:37 and woman are going to engage in intercourse then they are always running a fairly substantial risk 0:36:42 of the natural consequences of the sex act which is which is pregnancy and conception and you know 0:36:49 it doesn't make sense for any society to really have women you know giving birth to children left 0:36:54 and right willy-nilly where we don't know their fathers who you know who's going to be responsible 0:36:59 for them they don't have a lineage and so on and so forth girls are left to fend with these 0:37:02 children on their fend for these children on their own anyway it's a big you know it undermines sort 0:37:06 of the very basic structure of society which is based on the family right i mean the family is the 0:37:12 absolute core uh institution in practically all human societies historically speaking 0:37:17 anthropologically speaking and even in the modern west although it's been pretty much destroyed or 0:37:22 very much you know undermined by this point but the idea is that sex because sex and reproduction 0:37:27 were so tightly bound together they also were um confined at least you know officially so to speak 0:37:34 the official morality and social norms they were confined to marriage to the marriage bed 0:37:39 because the idea is that if people are going to engage in activity which could produce children 0:37:43 they should only do that would only be morally responsible and acceptable to do so 0:37:47 if they are in a situation where they are ready to receive that child right they can provide for it 0:37:52 the it has a father to provide for it financially and mother to take care of it and so forth 0:37:57 um otherwise to engage in this act which could bring about children it's a huge thing to conceive 0:38:02 a child right without being properly prepared to do that is actually you know this is actually 0:38:06 it's immoral it was considered immoral anti-social it it was a direct threat to the social fabric 0:38:12 which it was because it undermines the family and so that's why things like premarital sex were you 0:38:17 know so um so so taboo um again it happened but it was not the norm sometimes girls did 0:38:24 get pregnant out of wedlock they would often disappear and quote unquote go visit grandma 0:38:28 for six seven months you know and stay in a home somewhere and give birth to the baby and 0:38:32 then give it up for adoption and come back home from visiting grandma you know seven months later 0:38:36 and everyone kind of knew why and no one really said anything because it was a big big scandal 0:38:39 right um so what happens uh so sex reproduction marriage as well as morality so religious morality 0:38:46 you know also kind of undergirds this whole system it says because this is the nature of the sex act 0:38:50 right which is based on the nature of the male and female bodies and so on and so forth 0:38:54 moral norms are such that you know sex should be confined to a particular context and christianity 0:38:59 is actually very specific and quite restrictive on that even more restrictive than islam as we'll see 0:39:04 but christians are very very specific you know on this issue um and also in christianity not 0:39:11 just catholicism which we know about today this is just the catholic position but until the 1930s 0:39:16 you know all christian denominations catholic orthodox and protestant they were actually 0:39:20 opposed to uh contraception because the idea was artificial contraceptives 0:39:26 yes because the idea was that it would it was unnatural to artificially separate the 0:39:31 sex act from its natural consequences which is uh possible reproduction and insemination 0:39:37 and so in in the 1930s it was you know in america in the 1920s and in england and other places 0:39:45 contraception was actually illegal it only became legal in the 30s and you had certain 0:39:51 protestant denominations that came to accept it as a morally viable thing for christians to do i mean 0:39:57 this is hard for us to imagine that you know even protestant mainline protestant christian churches 0:40:01 did not accept even contraception here in the united states until 1965 contraception was 0:40:07 illegal in the state of connecticut you cannot buy it right now again for us as muslims contraception 0:40:12 is actually legal and you know for a married couple i mean sex is only legal for you know for 0:40:17 a married couple to begin with but you know it is actually um you know we do have more latitude on 0:40:23 that as muslims than the traditional christian position but at least in the west this kind of 0:40:28 acceptance of artificial contraception is i guess the beginning you could say of this the beginning 0:40:34 of the separation between kind of the sex act and what tends to be its natural outcome and then 0:40:40 you know what kind of contraception did they have in the 1930s it wasn't necessarily that 0:40:44 reliable yet condoms they were not very good but this the game changes radically in 1959 with the 0:40:50 birth control pill so the birth control pill is first marketed maybe 58 but i believe 1959 0:40:56 anyway um and for the first time people say aha now we have basically if you take it every day 0:41:02 you know it's basically a full foolproof way of you know of birth control so now we can just 0:41:07 now we can really kind of just separate sex from reproduction and if we can separate sex from 0:41:13 reproductive consequences then why should it be confined to marriage anymore when those 0:41:17 consequences are not necessarily there and so that old moral norm which demanded that these all be 0:41:23 tightly you know bound together doesn't seem to make much sense to people anymore now i don't 0:41:27 mean to imply that this was just because of the pill and birth control i mean obviously there's a 0:41:31 lot more that drive social change and we're going to look at some of those factors also in a minute 0:41:36 um this the the birth control pill became available all over the world not just in the west 0:41:41 and it did not provoke we do not do not see a sexual revolution take place in the muslim world 0:41:46 we did not see a sexual revolution take place in china for example right so in the west there 0:41:50 were other uh major transformations that had taken place where all the dominoes were sort of in place
0:41:58 needed a final catalyst and this is very interesting about china because 0:42:02 china is officially a communist state uh and so you'd expect perhaps that um a communist society 0:42:08 would naturally ally itself to more libertarian and progressive movements like we have in the 0:42:12 west but china is actually a very traditional society uh when it comes to gender relations and 0:42:16 sexuality so um there has to be something else that's going on in the west so it's not just 0:42:22 the advent of the pill and the availability of artificial conception there are other factors 0:42:26 at play because these are all been available in china without the the social revolution that has 0:42:32 has happened in the west and uh i think it's very interesting that a a communist society can 0:42:36 still be very traditional and a a capitalist society in the west can be very uh extreme 0:42:42 extremely individualist in its approach to relationships well capitalism and individualism 0:42:46 anyway they go hand in hand from the beginning right so that that's uh and what you say is 0:42:50 very true and also you know so i can stress that you know so far i've just given kind of purely 0:42:54 sociological reasons as to why you know kind of premarital sex was considered so taboo before 0:42:59 um but there's more to it than that i mean that's just a purely so that's on the purely 0:43:02 sociological level it's a very important level it's also important in islam i mean 0:43:05 the protection of lineage and families one of the central domains of the sharia we will see that in 0:43:10 the future um but also there's there's just pure moral considerations right because what we do with 0:43:16 our bodies the way we behave how we act it has an effect on our souls on our immaterial souls it has 0:43:22 our effect on our human dignity it has an effect on our relationship with our creator right it goes 0:43:28 beyond just pragmatic so because so much of this had taken a hit in the west in the traditional 0:43:34 religious world we have been undermined right it seems at least the way i interpret it is that 0:43:40 you know by the 1950s and 60s this sort of older morality was just hanging on by a thread and 0:43:46 the only reason people didn't like burst through that door is because there was still this fear of 0:43:49 pregnancy so we just all had to hold back but once the pill comes on okay now we can not worry about 0:43:54 that anymore let's go ahead and just let loose whereas in other parts of the world okay the 0:43:57 pill is available but still like in the muslim world at least when it comes to these types 0:44:01 of issues there was still a much stronger sense of like propriety in terms of you know 0:44:06 sexual behavior and family and so i mean family remains much more central and strong and so 0:44:12 religious there's a theocentric emphasis obviously in islam towards the creator and in the west that 0:44:18 has virtually well completely obviously vanished where there's a great emphasis on the dunya on the 0:44:23 nafs on individual desires and and uh pleasures and so on so for me it's ultimately an existential 0:44:30 and metaphysical question that uh about uh the distance of god and a religious vision of life 0:44:36 and to whom one owes one's allegiance and one looks to you for guidance and and and how to 0:44:41 live one's life and the west now has chosen uh completely irreligious secular path but 0:44:47 of course muslims by definition haven't and they still retain that fundamental vision of life as 0:44:52 orientated to the worship and following of god and of course that that is stable and enduring 0:44:57 and leads to success in this life and the next the west doesn't it's a dead end i would argue 0:45:01 it no longer has a vision to pursue anymore right that's very beautifully said mashallah 0:45:07 very nicely said and i agree with i agree you know hundreds you're great that's good yes
0:45:13 um so great so moving on um
0:45:18 so um so what we see then so the separation of sex reproduction marriages was morality 0:45:23 so these were tightly bound before both by you know kind of nature the nature of the act as 0:45:26 well as you know by by morality but now as of the sexual revolution i always say the sexual 0:45:31 revolution comes like like splits the atom and these three four things they just all take off 0:45:36 in their own direction as free floating variables so sex is not just its own thing it's not tied to 0:45:41 reproduction anymore not tied to marriage not tied to morality or what god has said or legislated 0:45:46 right now we can make of it whatever we want okay um and so this is also important in the sexual 0:45:53 revolution and we will see um in the next slide so this idea of separating these three things 0:45:58 is very very important we're going to keep coming back to this over and over again over the course 0:46:02 of the talk and also there are three other things which are separate which the west then amalgamates 0:46:06 which is also very problematic and we'll see that and come back to it several times but 0:46:09 we'll get to that in the next slide so what is the um what is the fallout of of of this um what 0:46:16 is the fallout of this the sexual revolution we said um you know brings about basically a 0:46:21 wholesale rejection of christian moral norms um for the first time it becomes people start openly 0:46:27 when i was young they called it shacking up right which was a boy and a girl men and woman living 0:46:32 together outside of marriage i mean i was young when that was still very very new and i remember 0:46:36 people saying oh they're shacking up they're living in sin or oh you know it was something 0:46:40 very novel still and many people were like opposed to it because i thought well that's not right and 0:46:45 people used to think oh you know okay some people many people thought no you still have 0:46:49 to be married have sex other people well no you don't have to be right they have to be in love 0:46:52 and then other people you know and then slowly but surely like it doesn't even take that long you 0:46:56 know marriage leads to quote-unquote just love and commitment love and commitment to well okay well 0:47:00 as long as you consent to it no problem right so by the 80s or whatever you know you go like very 0:47:06 slippery slope very quickly it's just like nothing matters anymore but consent as long as the people 0:47:11 are not being forced and they consent there's no more uh specific moral code or any specific moral 0:47:18 standards that apply to sexuality cross-sexuality right so there is no sexual morality at all 0:47:24 anymore in the modern it's just consent which is complete a complete disaster and has nothing to 0:47:29 do with islam i mean it's nothing the islamic paradigm is completely separate on this issue 0:47:34 um but you know this is kind of the world that we are living in um okay and so what are some what is 0:47:41 some of the fallout of this so we see uh in the wake of the sexual revolution we see a huge uh 0:47:46 increase in divorce which also is very taboo in the west and in fact illegal also in some places
0:47:53 we forget how taboo divorce was and how rare it was he even within our own living memory but 0:47:57 now it's kind of uh you know no fault divorce not a problem um they're almost the disposable 0:48:04 relationships now and the idea you may go through serial monogamy as i as some people call it so 0:48:09 we're against polygamy polygamy is a really bad thing but serial monogamy is okay so you're having 0:48:15 multiple partners but just in a slightly different way but that's acceptable but polygamy isn't 0:48:20 right and i remember again growing up just in the 80s you know i think when i was in 0:48:23 third grade there was one kid in our class whose parents were divorced and that was like 0:48:27 like a big deal like oh my gosh you know it was so rare and um you know 10 10 years later everyone 0:48:33 else's parents were divorced too and then also you knew at that time right is children you know 0:48:38 because of course with the sexual revolution part of it in the 60s was also second wave feminism and 0:48:44 this push for women to leave the home and to you know sort of prioritize career over family 0:48:48 and kind of um you know be on a par with men sort of in the public realm and so forth and what this 0:48:53 led to is that now you have empty homes because the man is not working the woman's out working so 0:48:57 for the first time on mass especially in like the middle classes and upper middle classes 0:49:02 you know um of course you know in the poor classes women have always worked because 0:49:06 they've had to but in these other classes where women you know before could stay home you know 0:49:11 be supported um you find out children for the first time coming home now after school and no 0:49:18 one's there we had a name for that back in the 80s which was latchkey children and probably 0:49:22 the younger members of our audience won't know that term but we knew that because that was a 0:49:26 new thing again in the 80s latchkey kid was a kid who was dropped off by the school bus at 2 30 or 3 0:49:32 and went home and actually had a key to his house and had to like open it on his own 0:49:36 he's a lot because there's no mother there to well you know there's no mother in the home 0:49:40 anymore so it's a latchkey kid and that lucky kid phenomenon was something very new anyway 0:49:45 so you see also a huge uptick in uh divorce let me go back to my slide here um you see a huge 0:49:53 uptick in divorce there's a demise of the nuclear family and this brings about with a huge social 0:49:57 dislocation so there's a a an immense rise in fatherlessness obviously when people divorce 0:50:03 up you know they don't often stay in the same location men sometimes you know just abdicate 0:50:08 all responsibility and take off they're not really bound anymore by that the merit to bond or legally 0:50:12 bound to the woman and child other than to sort of pay you know alimony and child support but 0:50:18 in terms of being present you know there's there many many homes don't have fathers and there have 0:50:23 been so many studies on how disastrous it is for children both boys and girls not to have a father 0:50:30 right and we live in a society which demonizes men right but men the presence of a man in the house 0:50:37 nothing i mean some men are tyrants but in general the presence of the father in the home 0:50:42 strong father figures very very critical for the health of children and the stability of children 0:50:47 and therefore society right and so this rise in fatherlessness is correlated with the rise in 0:50:53 delinquency um also of course a rise in single motherhood and then also single female poverty 0:50:59 because it's these single mothers who are left with these kids who are often left fending for 0:51:03 themselves working and trying to raise them at the same time without the help of a father um you know 0:51:09 materially and also sometimes financially as well anyway so you have a lot of and so when you look 0:51:14 at the you know are families perfect no are we saying that okay before the 1960s everything was 0:51:19 hunky-dory never of course not i mean the idea is that the world is not perfect this is not genna 0:51:24 it's not paradise but the question is what is the arrangement that is going to lead to the greatest 0:51:29 amount of kind of human success possibility of human flourishing both again physically but also 0:51:36 emotionally morally spiritually in this life and the next that's what islam is going for 0:51:41 and the idea is that a strong stable family unit is absolutely critical for that it's critical for 0:51:47 the stability of society and health of society in aggregate and for individuals and because 0:51:52 sexuality is so tightly bound we'll see this later on too because it's so tightly bound to the family 0:51:58 uh system that is why norms surrounding sexuality are so um stringent and really any society i mean 0:52:05 i'd say sexuality is so central to who we are as human beings right and this is also a big part 0:52:09 of the lgbt discord so central to who we are as human beings individually and collectively 0:52:14 that no one is really no one is really um truly nonchalant about it whatever moral norms you or 0:52:20 your society hold about uh sexual norms you tend to feel them very deeply and very viscerally 0:52:27 so if you grow up in a you know a society where monogamy is the norm or you know heterosexual norm 0:52:34 is is the norm and so forth like in the west until recently then you have like a very strong reaction 0:52:38 against things like homosexuals just seem like very bizarre and very weird and very like wrong 0:52:43 now if you grow up in the contemporary west where homosexuality and heterosexual have been equated 0:52:50 and all of the relevant differences between them have been you know done away with or denied or 0:52:55 whatever and you don't see why there should be a distinction you're going to feel really 0:52:59 strong about why are you discriminating against you know same-sex relationships or but people 0:53:04 tend to feel very strongly about it because sex is very important very powerful and it's very 0:53:09 central to to human life it's not something that really any society including the mother 0:53:13 and also i think that the new you you're not called it by its name wokism or the new 0:53:17 i think it's a religion anyway it's not just an ideology it has the characteristics of a religion 0:53:23 so it has its fundamental creed it has it has its uh sinful aberrations you're not allowed to commit 0:53:29 heresy in other words disagree with it and so it's not just that sexual sex is a powerful emotive 0:53:34 subject yes of course but also ideologically it has the characteristics of a religion with all 0:53:40 that means for uh the other and the demonization of the heretic and and of course in a christian 0:53:46 west a post-christian west what did you do with heretics you persecuted them or you executed them 0:53:51 so that this kind of binary kind of thing is very strongly an american post-purist and culture i 0:53:56 would argue there's also still here in england and in europe um you have this kind of quasi-religious 0:54:03 uh impulse which is also infusing this wokism which i think is a quasi-religion 0:54:08 right and you're right about that and there's a lot a lot can be said about i mean we could have 0:54:12 a whole separate you know talk about that but but yes you're absolutely right and that that's a big 0:54:18 big issue too that you know um that that really influences a lot the way this kind of discourse 0:54:24 uh is deployed and and takes place in the current uh in the current scene so um yes so back now to 0:54:32 this so all right so what does this have to do with lgbt right what does that have to do with 0:54:36 lgbt so the idea is that you know it is in the midst of the sexual revolution and the rejection 0:54:41 of the traditional norms and the breaking up of sex from reproduction marriage and morality 0:54:45 it is in this sort of you know context that uh something like uh that that you see a rise in the 0:54:52 visibility and prominence of homosexuality and gay rights or the gay rights of the you know the gay 0:54:57 liberation movement which basically rides on the coattails of the sexual revolution because again 0:55:02 think about it if sex is now its own thing and it's not necessarily tied to reproduction marriage 0:55:07 and religious morality then again so what is it about what's about pleasure it's about you know 0:55:12 relationships it's about fulfillment it's about romance it's about you know a lot of other things 0:55:17 and if that's really what it's about and not about these other things then okay well two men can love 0:55:22 each other or two women and you know all of those other things they seem to apply more on a par 0:55:25 right if you take the reproductive and the family and the more traditional moral moral 0:55:30 morality aspect out of it all of a sudden you know homosexual heterosexual relations seem to be much 0:55:35 more commensurate and so people start to see well okay well why should we accept one and reject the 0:55:40 other and then of course it was closed in terms of okay this is a minority statistical minority and 0:55:45 on the right the the also coattails of the civil rights movement especially in the united states 0:55:50 with you know african-americans black americans and so forth the idea was okay well we're a 0:55:54 minority too and we'll get to this later because there's an equivalency that's very strong and this 0:55:58 is part of wokism specifically you have gender you have race gender and sexual orientation sexuality 0:56:05 right lgbt and these are all equated and this is something which again for us as muslims these are 0:56:11 all three completely separate things i mean race is one thing and the way the religion approaches 0:56:15 it is like very one way gender is very different from race and sexuality and sexual or sorry like 0:56:21 sexual behavior which is what this shadow is concerned about here is completely different so 0:56:26 these are three completely different things that have literally nothing to do with each other but 0:56:30 in the contemporary west they're all just thrown together as like minority rights i mean women 0:56:34 are not a minority but like say you know you have racial minorities sexual minorities and the women 0:56:39 you know the ideas that okay historically you know they've been sort of the underclass and so all of 0:56:43 these are sort of three underdog classes and and and so they're all equated and you're either on 0:56:50 board for justice and for everybody or or you're just incoherent at best and immoral and bigoted at 0:56:56 worst and again this is not a paradigm that's really going to work at all um from a muslim 0:57:01 perspective and we'll see this as we as we go on but it's important to realize that again that's a 0:57:04 very very strong motif in our contemporary society so all of this of course puts all traditional 0:57:10 religious believers in a difficult position i put traditional in there because you know in the wake 0:57:14 of the sexual revolution many many denominations of mainstream uh protestant christianity in the 0:57:20 west as well as you know uh certainly reformed judaism as well as you know conservative judaism 0:57:25 which isn't really all that conservative you know have have really taken on the basic assumptions 0:57:30 of the sexual revolution in terms of gender norms gender equality also in terms of you know um the 0:57:36 sort of elective nature of sex that you know we do have the right to just kind of you know have sex 0:57:42 whoever whenever we want as long as it's you know consensual and so forth and 0:57:46 and so um but i'm talking about traditional uh religious believers so traditional catholics 0:57:50 traditional orthodox christians as well as traditional protestants evangelicals and others 0:57:55 and muslims as a whole you know have not really conceded as a body and so muslims are sort of 0:58:00 um i always say i mean islam altogether is orthodox more or less i mean 0:58:04 the mainstream mainstream islam is orthodox which is not necessarily the case at least in the west 0:58:10 in some of these other traditions although it is outside of the west and that's why you see 0:58:14 the church of england and the episcopalian church which is the american branch of the 0:58:17 church of england has really been split apart on this issue because they have so many bishops that 0:58:23 come from africa where again socially speaking like they're just not on board with this and they 0:58:27 have a different social context they did not go the sexual revolution is very specific to western 0:58:32 culture it's not a global phenomenon and so those bishops are like forget it we're not endorsing gay 0:58:38 bishops and homosexual marriages in our churches in africa like you've got to be crazy and you have 0:58:42 your northern european swedes and england and you know oh but for them you know again they're 0:58:48 kind of in having a completely different universe which has been brought about precisely by you know 0:58:53 the sexual revolution and so they say no but this is fundamentally unjust and it's discriminatory 0:58:58 and again it's just it's totally in commensurate the paradigms it's just like 0:59:02 talking right past each other and this is really why it's so important to have this conversation 0:59:07 um so okay so moving right along so this slide we're gonna see it again so i'm just gonna go 0:59:13 very quickly but it's something i want people to really take home with them i think it's really 0:59:17 critical if you get this slide you can it's the key to unlocking the whole conundrum that we're in 0:59:23 so modern western i should say contemporary western culture right modern is like a long 0:59:27 period contemporaries just right now and this is all very new separates three things that are 0:59:32 inherently inex bound up to each other and should be by nature and by religious law we would say as 0:59:38 muslims right allah created us as human beings he created nature endowed with a purpose he also 0:59:44 you know legislates morality and so these are coherent and in tune with each other and by 0:59:49 both the nature of reality and by religious law and norms sex reproduction marriage and 0:59:55 morality should be bound together now i want to say that also as muslims we do not you know 1:00:01 islam is the middle position and i think from a muslim perspective perspective 1:00:05 uh chris traditional christianity is a you know comes across as a very what they call sex negative 1:00:11 religion you have augustine in the fourth century right who was a licentious man before he became 1:00:16 a christian but once he became a christian he was so disgusted with his previous life of profligacy 1:00:21 that he became he took a very very negative view towards the body towards sexuality also the very 1:00:27 heavy platonic and neoplatonic influence which also very much downplayed kind of the materiality 1:00:33 in favor of pure spirituality and so christianity yeah i think right augustine is much more 1:00:38 influenced by neo patternism of the hellenistic greek philosophy than by the hebrew bible which 1:00:44 doesn't have any of these inhibitions the hebrew scriptures the jewish bible in other words doesn't 1:00:48 have any of these sex negative i mean the the song of songs for example in the old testament is 1:00:53 is very erotic actually almost obscenes for some people but for him he was much more influenced 1:00:59 by greek philosophy which uh with with his denial of the of the body uh seeing the body as a prison 1:01:05 uh and so to be really close and transcendent you had to uh deny the carnal nature the sinful nature 1:01:13 which inevitably meant um sexuality so yeah ab absolutely right and augustine's influence over 1:01:18 the western church has been phenomenal absolutely phenomenal right and it's very important because 1:01:24 you know again i think so islam you know sort of understands itself and has been understand as 1:01:28 muslims as being a middle path and you know this sort of you know traditional christian view i mean 1:01:32 augustine said sex was basically a unnecessary evil so it's intrinsically evil because it's of 1:01:38 the flesh and the flesh is is fallen right and carnal you know desires where the trouble began 1:01:44 with back in the garden with adam and eve and you know anyway all of the influences that you 1:01:48 also just mentioned it's so it's evil in and of itself but it's necessary for the propagation of 1:01:52 the species and according to augustine too even a married couple should not enjoy they should 1:01:56 try to enjoy it as little as possible it's like just do what you have to do to like make sure 1:02:00 the species goes on but you should try to enjoy it as low as you can so there's nothing in islam 1:02:05 like this in fact sexuality i mean islam has been considered traditionally a sex positive religion 1:02:10 and by that i mean it doesn't look that way from the modern stereotype that contemporary westerners 1:02:15 have um but that's also because the contemporary west has gone from one extreme to quite the other 1:02:20 extreme probably in reaction to the first extreme partially in reaction to it but also part of other 1:02:25 factors that we'll talk about shortly um but you know islam has never i mean sexuality itself has 1:02:30 always been considered something pure good you know holy if you want to put it that way 1:02:34 but but but but in its proper context i mean so islam is very very strict about 1:02:39 you know illicit sex and it takes a very strong position against it but within the proper context 1:02:45 which is basically the context of marriage between a man man and a woman right that in that context 1:02:51 it's actually considered an act of worship and the prophet as as we know peace be upon him 1:02:55 he said to his companions you will be rewarded for you know for coming unto your wives and they said 1:03:01 they were surprised by this and they said what why would we be why would we be rewarded for simply 1:03:06 uh taking care of our desires and he said did do you not see that if you were to take care 1:03:11 of your desires in an illegal way that you would be punished and they said yes 1:03:15 and he said well therefore if you do it in a permissible way then you will be rewarded right 1:03:20 so you actually get reward and so you know having relations with one spouse is considered an act of 1:03:25 worship one is supposed to be in a state of ritual purity although the act itself vitiates the ritual 1:03:30 purity but you're supposed to get into a state of ritual purity before because it's as if it's an 1:03:33 act of worship and in islam even the sunnah at the moment of climax will just be explicit one 1:03:38 should say allahu akbar right which is to remember god because it's his blessing that one is able to 1:03:44 experience this and our scholars consider that a foretaste of the pleasure of paradise because it's 1:03:49 the greatest physical pleasure at least that that human beings typically can experience in 1:03:53 this world and for many people especially even post-christian westerners it's just completely 1:04:00 you know um they can't wrap their mind around okay maybe we're cool with sex today we don't 1:04:06 have these hang-ups but we've also thrown off christianity but if you want to tell me 1:04:09 i should remember god while i'm having an orgasm i'm sorry like that just doesn't compute you know 1:04:14 yeah for even a modern again post-christians like religion is here and sex is there and it's i mean 1:04:21 whenever the twin shall meet the largest church in the world is the catholic church and 1:04:24 all of the leaders of the catholic church are celibate men uh that they've never had they 1:04:30 just don't do this at all it's completely so that's even now even though the church 1:04:34 is more sex positive it's still in practice is led by celibate people people who've renounced 1:04:40 uh sexuality completely and compare that with the the prophet of islam upon whom be peace who had a 1:04:45 number of wives and and he had the teaching as you just said it's it's integrated in a very 1:04:49 positive way in the life of muslims right and also you know it's important to know so celibacy 1:04:54 has always been considered a very high calling in christianity now christians have understood that 1:04:59 it's not for everybody in fact it's not most people's calling because it's very difficult 1:05:03 right but if you are able to do and if you are quote-unquote called to you have a vocation to 1:05:07 celibacy that's considered very very high and that's why the religious leaders are expected to 1:05:12 to sort of rise to that vocation of course the central figures you have the virgin mary whom 1:05:17 we also believe as muslims was a virgin when she gave birth miraculously to jesus even if 1:05:21 she married thereafter so she's a central figure and then jesus himself you know we don't as far 1:05:27 as we know never married so he was presumably a virgin too i mean because he never married 1:05:32 so your two central figures are people who were you know sexually celibate at least marry until 1:05:37 these are role models of a christian role model jesus and mary are role models and both of them 1:05:42 uh it would seem were completely celebrated so you know and very interestingly the quran affirms mary 1:05:50 in her miraculous conception of jesus as a virgin but it doesn't say that she remained a virgin and 1:05:57 the new testament doesn't say it either it doesn't mean it's jess actually that she went on to have 1:06:01 many children because jesus had many brothers and sisters biological not just an extended sense but 1:06:06 in the right biological yes through her right and i'm not aware that muslim sources you know 1:06:12 think believe that jesus got married either so we probably believe that he didn't i mean 1:06:16 i don't know if i've never heard anything to the contrary but nevertheless right and although jesus 1:06:22 of course is very very highly you know one of the greatest prophets in islam right you have the five 1:06:27 noah abraham moses jesus muhammad peace be upon all of them are the five greatest um never i mean 1:06:32 the quran explicitly repudiates the christian idea of uh of uh monasticism it says the prophet 1:06:42 islam there is no monasticism or religion and allah allah
1:06:50 uh you know monasticism which they uh um that they innovated that they introduced as a as a 1:06:56 um no divine warrant for it yeah exactly as a reprehensible innovation and religion that we 1:07:02 meaning god did not prescribe upon them so anyway so islam you know you also find like obviously 1:07:07 descriptions of paradise in the quran do very strongly suggest that you know um people will have 1:07:13 enjoy sexual congress in paradise in addition to the other types of bodily pleasures that are 1:07:17 mentioned like eating and drinking various you know delicious fruits and foods and reclining on 1:07:23 uh you know um on sofas of silk and so on and so forth and then the greatest uh the greatest uh 1:07:30 uh pleasure of paradise of course is the vision of god himself right 1:07:33 but nevertheless the quran you know doesn't really have a fundamental problem with these sort of the 1:07:39 physical aspect of being but it brings it under the divine law and the divine ruling and it 1:07:44 dignifies and sanctifies it by making these bodily functions so to speak um a concern 1:07:51 you know part of the divine concern shall we say so islam kind of some have said that you know i 1:07:57 remember christopher hitchens once said oh islam is very grubby it's like kind of in the dirt he 1:08:01 said i mean he was an atheist but he was very anti-islamic you know i mean he was i remember 1:08:06 he's very pro-bosnian back at the time of the war but so but you know that was not a religion he was 1:08:11 very critical of the islamic religion um but but what he meant he says it sounds like very earthy 1:08:17 and i i think even though he's an atheist he's still coming from this kind of christian 1:08:21 background and what he doesn't realize that for a muslim perspective islam is actually you know the 1:08:26 the companions they the the disbeliever that the mecca said oh your prophet even teaches you how 1:08:31 to go to the bathroom because in islam we have to clean ourselves a particular way use water and so 1:08:35 on and so forth like you don't just do it any way which way because cleanliness and the love 1:08:39 of women and iman cleanliness is part of faith and so the disbelievers made fun of the muslims 1:08:43 like what kind of prophet is even teaching you how to clean yourselves and he said yes that's right 1:08:47 he teaches us even how to clean ourselves because this becomes also an act now that is endowed with 1:08:52 significance because there's a proper way to do it there's a sunnah behind it a way of following the 1:08:56 prophetic guidance and this is what guidance is all that's comprehensive and so you have this um 1:09:02 you know notion that these bodily functions they have to be of course trained and they have to be 1:09:08 um schooled and they have to be reined in and they have to be directed in the proper way but 1:09:12 they are not in and of themselves wrong or bad and that's why you have muslim scholars with no qualms 1:09:18 whatsoever talking about you know these things in paradise and even writing some of the great 1:09:23 scholars i mean i'm kind of going a little off topic but again i think it's important for us to 1:09:27 realize from a a large person because we will be told that we're prudes if you're not on board with 1:09:33 the lgbt then you guys are just repressing this no no no islam very much throughout its history you 1:09:38 know it's been very open we have major scholars of the religion who also wrote basically sex manuals 1:09:44 i mean you know uh not just about you know the rulings of it but how to actually pleasure your 1:09:49 spouse and yourself in different positions and so on and so forth written by religious scholars 1:09:54 you know this is good part of their scholarly output is a completely legitimate you know uh 1:10:00 uh subject of inquiry no problem whatsoever but within the proper context so islam has always 1:10:06 had that middle i think the chris christian perspective was so anti-body anti-sex anti you 1:10:12 know also i think maybe you know quite anti-woman in a lot of respects too with you know eve was the 1:10:18 one who brought sin into the world and so forth there's nothing equivalent like that and it's not 1:10:22 right that it went from that to like you know sort of the other extreme and we see that now but you 1:10:28 know as muslims i think again muslims especially in the current western environment where we are 1:10:32 and we are compared to the current environment we are very strict and quote-unquote like prude 1:10:37 i mean prude it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad word but very restrained and we have a we have 1:10:41 a stern sexual morality absolutely it's central to our religion but that just means that sexual 1:10:46 has to take place in the right context and we're very very insistent upon that but in that context 1:10:52 it's it's it's a fine thing it's a good thing it's nothing to be ashamed of and that's the 1:10:56 proper balance you know that is that's what we would say as muslims is is the proper balance 1:11:02 um all right so moving right along so you have this separation right of sex reproduction in 1:11:08 marriage we'll see this again and also now going coming back specifically to the lgbt 1:11:13 issue and we'll see this again too i'll go into much more detail that while it separates these 1:11:18 three things which are by nature and in moral law and religious you know prescription tightly 1:11:24 bound to to each other it also um it also uh amalgamates or puts together three things that 1:11:31 ought to be rigorously separate and which were separate before in which 1:11:35 contemporary western culture study in the late 19th century started to put together 1:11:39 namely desires actions and identity and desires particularly same-sex desires desire you know 1:11:46 homosexual desires and when i say desires and actions are put together what i mean 1:11:50 by that is that you know because morality is thrown out the window now religious morality 1:11:54 the actions are seen to flow from the desire the presence of the desire is sort of where we start 1:11:59 and then if the desire is present as long as everyone consents right then the action naturally 1:12:03 flows from it it's unobjectionable morally because it's simply responding to the desire and there's 1:12:08 no consideration on the basis of which the action should be repudiated in a moral sense right so you 1:12:13 have desires actions flow from it and then this is key this is absolutely critical we'll see this 1:12:18 you know in a future slide that on top of this is built now an entire personal identity and this 1:12:24 starts in the late 19th century 1860 or so the word homosexual is coined in german homosexuality 1:12:30 and then it's taken that's actually you know a greek borrowing but anyway it was coined first in 1:12:35 the german environment and then taken into other languages in the same form essentially um and 1:12:41 uh i mean there's a german word for it but they coined it with that greek um anyway and so and so 1:12:48 only quite recently in western society have people started to see themselves in terms of 1:12:53 having a sexual identity and again very important because anyone who grows up in the modern world 1:12:59 will take it for granted oh you're gay or straight or gay straight or bi or you know and i read also 1:13:04 everyone has asexuality right which is your sexuality well no this idea of asexuality like ity 1:13:11 you know um as an abstract noun this is also a new coinage like what is sexuality how do you say 1:13:15 that in arabic like or other languages you know i mean it's a new thing so the idea that even a 1:13:20 hundred years ago or 110 20 years ago in the west if you were to ask an average person on the street 1:13:25 are you straight they would have said what do you mean am i straight like they wouldn't have 1:13:28 even identified as being quote unquote straight no one really identified in terms of being either gay 1:13:33 or straight for us again it's so ingrained that you're either one or the other or somewhere in 1:13:38 between so you're bi but you are have to be either gay straight or bi well how come no other culture 1:13:44 even has words you know that that that corresponds any of this because they didn't have the concept 1:13:49 you know sexual behavior was something you did it was not something you were and we'll see this 1:13:54 very important right even i mean people have been engaged in such same-sex behavior i mean 1:14:00 in it it's attested in throughout history and we can see it and we know it goes back at least to 1:14:06 the time of the people of lut right and it's in greek culture you find it also in muslim culture 1:14:10 um you know uh if you look at the actual what you know culture of course it existed 1:14:15 it's it's practically universal not totally but practically universal there seem to be some tribes 1:14:19 that don't have a concept of same-sex behavior but it seems to be quite rare um but the idea is that 1:14:26 this was something someone these were some things things that people did it's not something you were 1:14:31 and the uh the analogy would be other sexual behaviors for us today as modern modernized or 1:14:37 modern westernized peoples right someone may or may not engage in x act or why act or i don't 1:14:43 know masturbation or something like that and you know whether you do or not it's like something 1:14:46 you either do or you don't do it's not something you are and you would never think of identifying 1:14:51 yourself based on do you do this particular act or not and we say yeah but homosexuality is different 1:14:55 well yeah it's different to you because it's been constructed that way in your particular cultural 1:15:00 media at this time and place but even in the west until quite recently no one thought in terms of 1:15:06 you know of sexual there was no such thing as a sexual identity it's all very new and it's all 1:15:10 very culturally contingent historically and culturally contingent it's very important for 1:15:15 muslims to understand because forces in the west right are they present this as something that 1:15:21 is is universal that is just natural that is just the way things are and if you're not on board with 1:15:27 this then you are simply you know you're unnatural like you're going against just how things are and 1:15:33 you're denying reality and you say listen i mean you can only go back a little bit and even in your 1:15:39 own culture you have no such conception of this and so by what fiat you know by what right do 1:15:44 you sort of you know have the fiat to just say well this is now a universal truth okay anyway 1:15:51 let's let's go on because we have a lot to do and we want to make sure we can get through this 1:15:56 so very quickly so the sexual revolution i said is the most important kind of and you know the 1:16:00 most proximate cause of where we are today but the sexual revolution itself has antecedents and again 1:16:06 important for us as muslims you know we're trying to get a a large uh conceptual and historical uh 1:16:11 view of the issue so that we can understand them in their proper context and as deeply 1:16:15 and as accurately as possible so sexual revolution has antecedents right this goes back to you could 1:16:21 say the rise of sort of the modern period means 15 16th century 17th century particularly with 1:16:27 the scientific revolution again i'm not going to say much on this i have i mean at the bottom of 1:16:31 this slide you're going to see a talk i've given on these things in much more detail so i'll refer 1:16:35 you to that but with the scientific revolution in 17th century you have the rise of a materialistic 1:16:40 mechanical view of the world right the world is now seen as just being this kind of clock ticking 1:16:45 along material stuff out there and one of the um one of the results of this is that god essentially 1:16:51 is cut off from his creation i mean not really of course because if we're not for god's will the 1:16:55 whole creation would you know uh uh cease to exist in in the blink of an eye but in people's minds 1:17:01 right in their world view they no longer see god's hand in his creation right whereas before there 1:17:07 there you know things were created with a purpose and they were given a teleology a purpose by god 1:17:12 and they were seen to have a particular nature that was imbued you know through divine agency and 1:17:16 so forth um you know the universe as a whole as well as human beings collectively and individually 1:17:22 and this starts to fall by the wayside in the western consciousness with the rise of a kind 1:17:26 of materialistic and mechanical worldview so you have a loss of inherent meaning and purpose right 1:17:30 and this is important because if there's no meaning out there in the world there's 1:17:34 no intrinsic meaning no inherent meaning and there's no inherent meaning in human existence 1:17:39 or my personal existence then either you live in a world without meaning which is one of the main 1:17:45 themes of modernity you know how do we grapple with kind of the meaninglessness of it all which 1:17:49 is why i have so much absurd art and pessimistic art because people are really staring this 1:17:54 meaningless meaningless base right so either there is no meaning or whatever meaning there is because 1:18:00 there's no meaning out there that's been put in it by a creator god the only meaning that there could 1:18:04 be is something that's self-generated i generate the meaning and i impose a meaning and that goes 1:18:08 back to why we say now as of the sexual revolution okay the male body and female body they don't mean 1:18:13 anything anymore there's no inherent you know comple it's obvious that they're meant to be 1:18:17 complementary i mean just you know a five-year-old could tell you that just look at the bot one body 1:18:21 and the other it's clear that what was meant to go where and how it's all supposed to fit together 1:18:27 but the idea is that there is no more you know this is there this is not seen as like intended 1:18:33 or or endowed with like an inherent purposefulness or teleology or nature that you know that to 1:18:40 violate would be a moral violation right your body is just stuff and you inhabit it as this 1:18:47 immaterial mind and it's up to you to like you know run your stuff however you want do with 1:18:52 your stuff whatever you want and to give whatever meaning to your stuff and what you do with it that 1:18:57 you want to right so you're just sovereign to kind of impart meanings and this is totally different 1:19:02 from the pre-modern worldview completely you know alien to the islamic worldview obviously right 1:19:08 but this is sort of very central to the modern consciousness um so that's 17. now if we go into 1:19:13 the 18th century of the enlightenment right and the enlightenment is basically puts human reason 1:19:18 in the center and makes it the standard of all knowledge including moral knowledge now what falls 1:19:23 by the wayside here revelation revelation gets discredited we're talking about specifically the 1:19:28 bible because that's revelation for the west was the the bible the christian and jewish scriptures 1:19:32 this is discredited for you know higher biblical criticism very important here i know you've had 1:19:37 many uh guests on on here who are world experts who have discussed that issue um also you know 1:19:42 geological findings which were incompatible with a um you know a straightforward reading of genesis 1:19:48 the timeline of genesis darwinism in the 19th century is a major secularizing factor although 1:19:53 it doesn't necessarily entail uh you know atheism nevertheless socially speaking sociologically 1:20:00 speaking there's no doubt that that you know darwin's theory of evolution had a massive 1:20:04 impact on the kind of loss of meaning and sort of religious sense sentiment in the west there's 1:20:10 a book written by uh owen chadwick um i believe a british scholar so he's a professor at cambridge 1:20:16 i think yeah the secularization of the european mind in the 19th century so it's really the 19th 1:20:21 century where the all of this stuff trickles down and the average everyday person in the west mind 1:20:28 becomes secularized and so at the beginning of the century of the 19th century you cannot be hired in 1:20:32 a university to teach if you're an atheist who would hire an atheist to teach people in the 1:20:37 university you know it's just considered so you know deviant and and you know immoral where do you 1:20:42 get your morals from you don't believe in god you don't believe in an afterlife how can we trust you 1:20:46 and by the end of the century you have nietzsche famously declaring again blasphemous from a muslim 1:20:51 perspective quote unquote god is dead right in in the space of 50 60 years right so anyway that's 1:20:58 jumping ahead so 19th century so then we so we have uh the rise of the materialistic mechanical 1:21:03 worldview um pursuant to the scientific revolution yet the enlightenment of the 18th century then 1:21:07 liberalism you know all of these are humongous topics obviously i'm just giving a very very quick 1:21:12 you know overview liberalism in the 18th 19th century classical liberalism liberalism it sees 1:21:17 it puts a premium on human individual freedom and personal autonomy and this in a sense makes 1:21:23 sense okay if there's no god anymore really in our consciousness and the world is just there 1:21:26 now man rises to the top right this is kind of the deification of man so we are at the center we are 1:21:33 sovereign we can rule the world we're no longer standing under a god the world is not standing 1:21:39 we are the masters we're in control and we demand absolute you know maximum freedom and and autonomy 1:21:45 as a species to do whatever we want you know to the planet with the planet whatever and also 1:21:49 in our own societies to um you know structure them the way we want in our own lives as well 1:21:55 we have this ultimate freedom and autonomy so freedom of course everyone you know um appreciates 1:22:00 freedom when you talk about political freedom from tyranny and so forth and oppression of course 1:22:04 but the modern psyche has a very particular notion of freedom which is much goes well beyond that 1:22:10 it's almost a fetishization i am here i am born to be absolutely as free as possible from all 1:22:16 external constraints be they moral constraints religious constraints the ties of family the ties 1:22:21 of tradition the ties of society right every you know such tie is just a barrier that is meant for 1:22:28 me to break in order to actualize my own self so the self actualization is self realization 1:22:35 and we'll see again a little bit more in detail where this comes from this is absolutely critical 1:22:39 and this is very deeply embedded in current discourses surrounding sexuality in general in 1:22:45 the west and homosexuality and lgbt in particular and again these assumptions lie so deep beneath 1:22:51 the surface that we are really not aware of their presence because they're they're so buried and 1:22:56 they've impacted our psyche so much that we just oh of course like that's just natural you just 1:23:01 think that's the way the world has always been that's the only way to see it you don't realize 1:23:05 that this is actually just a particular way i see the sun reverberating on my face so excuse me um 1:23:13 so you have that and then again i i will refer you to a lecture i gave uh that goes into this in a 1:23:18 lot more detail it's called negotiating paradigms islam in the modern world view every blue uh title 1:23:23 you see in this presentation is a hyperlink so um again i this slide deck will be available to you 1:23:30 and you can just click on the uh on the blue links and they will take you directly to uh 1:23:36 what they're connected to um sexual revolution antecedent very very quickly um there's a great 1:23:41 book that came out in 2020 the rise and triumph of the modern self by carl truman 1:23:47 there's a subtitle which is quite long it's something like cultural amnesia expressive 1:23:52 individualism and the the sexual revolution something like that so quite a jawbreaker yeah 1:23:59 exactly so this is a very very good book and also just this year i mean literally in march he came 1:24:05 out with a abridged version of it called strange new world but if you can read the original i would 1:24:10 definitely do this maybe 400 and some pages it's quite a thick tone very very well done but for 1:24:16 more of a lay audience so to speak i mean there is a 180 page kind of uh you know digest of it if 1:24:23 you want with the main points uh and so i'm taking this you know uh what i'm presenting on this slide 1:24:28 is is taken from uh from truman so he traces back to russo jean-jacques russo who of course is a 1:24:36 geneva swiss uh um uh uh philosopher and man of letters uh of the 18th century so his dates are 1:24:43 17 12 to 78 and very quickly so locates identity in the inner psychological life of the individual 1:24:52 so this is what truman says is the beginning of the psychologization of the human being right 1:24:57 so um for who so feelings are central to who we are does that sound familiar to anyone it's like 1:25:03 this is the air we breathe authenticity another very important word for the modern individual 1:25:08 authenticity is tied to the outward expression of inner feelings right so who i am is not you 1:25:15 know the role i play in society which in other society okay i'm a father i'm a husband i'm a son 1:25:19 who i am is the roles i play no who i am is my own private personal kind of inner 1:25:25 feelings that's the primary locus of who i am and to be authentic means that i live outwardly 1:25:31 exactly in accord with my inner feelings now you can say fine but your enough feelings need to be 1:25:36 controlled and they need to be you know um again uh um uh molded and they need to be 1:25:42 shaped and they need to be trained right and and probably would have agreed with that but again the 1:25:47 seeds get set and then as this idea develops it becomes more and more like whatever i feel inside 1:25:52 is who i truly am deep down and for me to live authentically i must be able to live outwardly 1:25:59 how i feel inwardly and any discrepancy between the two is a lack of my proper self realization 1:26:06 it's a lack of my becoming fully the human i am supposed to be or i am deep down and you can hear 1:26:13 in this resonances of what we hear around us today especially in with transgenderism right 1:26:18 okay i have a male body but i i am a woman not i feel like i'm a woman but i'm not so i feel like 1:26:24 that way there's there's an issue but i actually am a woman because if i feel like i'm a woman 1:26:29 yeah right you could say but wait a minute but you've got a male body 1:26:32 so are you a woman or a man well this is a metaphysical question people have to realize this 1:26:36 it's a metaphysical question what role does the body have to play in the definition of who you are 1:26:43 and what role does the mind the inner subjective self play right is it all the physical and the 1:26:49 psychology means absolutely nothing is it all psychology and the body means nothing is it both 1:26:53 these are metaphysical questions and the fact that we have gone from you know in just a couple years 1:26:59 especially on the transgender issue you know 10 years ago gender identity disorder that's what 1:27:04 it was called that means if you have a male body and you feel like you're a female or vice versa 1:27:09 then you have a disorder now we're not blaming you morally for that because it's a disorder 1:27:14 okay you couldn't help it but people recognize there's a disorder it's not supposed to be the 1:27:18 case quote unquote if you're have a male body you should identify as a man and feel like a 1:27:22 man and if you don't okay there's a disorder there we need to try to figure out what to do 1:27:26 right that then changes to gender dysphoria dysphoria just means okay i'm uncomfortable 1:27:31 with it so it's no longer a question of you're objectively like out of kilter or off kilter 1:27:37 out of sync with your biology and that's a problem because you're supposed to be one integrated 1:27:41 person right it's it now becomes okay dysphoria well if you're if you're um uh uh troubled by that 1:27:50 or uncomfortable okay then you've got dysphoria will try to help you 1:27:53 and now just a couple years later even saying gender dysphoria is considered offensive to many 1:27:57 in these movements and the idea is like no i am a woman or i am a man in the wrong body period 1:28:04 right and the body's wrong the body means nothing the objective kind of physiology 1:28:09 it doesn't matter it's all the psychology it's all so it's it's a the maximum and so truman will say 1:28:15 well this is i mean jose would have been aghast i mean probably but he would say this is kind of the 1:28:21 ultimate you know logical outcome of this idea of making the internal you know given 1:28:28 such primacy to the internals this is not really new in the west we have this idea of dualism 1:28:33 which goes back to the ancient greeks where the the idea is you have the body and the soul and the 1:28:38 soul is preeminently important that's the precious thing that's that that's the soul is that which 1:28:43 you gain knowledge of the divine and become divine in a way and the body is seen as like a prisons uh 1:28:49 it's called a prison in plasonic so this is the old old hoary notion of dualism which goes back 1:28:55 to the ancient greeks resurfacing post-renaissance in rousseau and his thinking but it's not really 1:29:01 new it is a fundamental category that we see much earlier in in greek thought resurfacing 1:29:07 in the modern world and it's very contrary to the abrahamic face the hebrew bible for 1:29:11 example has a much more um integrated holistic understanding of the human being as being uh 1:29:18 ones a part soul heart mind part body not as jewelers dualism where it splits apart so i think 1:29:26 we're seeing some deep western tributaries here surfacing up again in the modern times which are 1:29:32 not really new i mean okay they have certain new configurations but the fundamental metaphysical 1:29:38 duality is there a thousand over millennia i would argue right and again and again i think 1:29:44 that's a great point and i think you know really like the arabs there's nothing new under the sun 1:29:50 you know like it's the fr m shows right i mean it's there there's not really nothing new i mean 1:29:55 all of these ideas atheism is all you know just recycled from like this office and ancient you 1:30:00 know but it takes a different guy so you're right that you have that dualism but i think it's given 1:30:04 a specific um valence in the modern period that you know it becomes sort of this very specific 1:30:10 outgrowth so to say of something that had seeds there before but was also kind of um balanced out 1:30:15 by other types of considerations which fell by the wayside and you get this kind of ex ex crescents 1:30:21 right this outgrowth of of of this kind of like very radical internalization and subjectivization 1:30:29 and personalization and individualization of the notion of the human being right and this 1:30:34 is absolutely fundamental to the moderate and this is at the base of people saying well this is who i 1:30:39 am right it's not just sexuality right the idea is because you're not anything other 1:30:43 than your internal feelings and if you're going to deny me that well then you're denying me my
1:30:55 is that we've because we've been here before in some ways yes there are unique configurations as 1:30:59 you say the west keeps on having to go over the same ground over and over again and relearning 1:31:04 the same lessons it doesn't it's not there's no stability or continuity in the western tradition 1:31:10 it's this complex uh composite of different traditions pagan christian jewish uh and 1:31:16 so on and they keep on throwing up the same paradigms and we have to go through the same 1:31:20 heartache and catastrophe again and again learning the same lesson and it's obviously 1:31:26 uh presents uh it presents itself as a final dispensation but events it offers stability 1:31:31 and kind of divine wisdom in the social order so we don't have to keep on searching for solutions 1:31:36 to these problems we've got the perfect template which is impart the life of the prophet peace be 1:31:40 upon him but also the teaching of the quran and so on so but muslims are spared this agony of 1:31:47 these convulsions of going over the same thing over and over again because they have this this 1:31:52 is the sunnah i suppose that they can right exactly and that's why the sun is so important 1:31:56 you know it's it's really the the the firm you know in the quran you know uh that that 1:32:02 it's the firmest handhold right holding on to the religion holding on to the rope of allah you know
1:32:10 hold on altogether to the rope of god and do not separate from it yeah do not separate from 1:32:15 each other because that is what brings you to safety otherwise you're just going to be 1:32:19 adrift literally and drown exactly yeah and i think what you said too is very important about 1:32:25 the integrated nature of we are body we are mind and we are soul we are all three together 1:32:31 and you know the idea is that that is why in islam those three are never separate if you 1:32:36 look at the muslim prayer what is it you pray we pray with our bodies our bodies are moving 1:32:41 we're praying with our tongues and our minds because we're saying and reciting certain things 1:32:44 and obviously the most important thing where is the heart but that's not the only thing it's all 1:32:48 three together and from a christian perspective it's like well who cares where you're standing why 1:32:52 do you have to watch people praying like why would you watch before you pray well no because you have 1:32:56 to be in a state of physical ritual purity well why you know jews on this day they're the bible 1:33:03 but the prophets moses and son are all depicted as doing wudu before they pray well this was the 1:33:08 norm biblical norm but today it is completely like many other things in the bible completely 1:33:12 forgotten by contemporary submission ultimate you know attitude of submission is to take your head 1:33:17 which is the highest part of you right and your it contains your brain and your face is the most 1:33:21 noble part and to put it literally at the lowest point which is what jesus is doing in the gospels 1:33:27 jesus is portrayed as doing that right maybe the prophet and when you do it you're saying 1:33:32 glory be to my lord the highest so he's the highest and you're putting your highest part 1:33:36 in the lowest and that's the proper relationship because he's the master and you're the cre he's 1:33:40 a creator and you're the creature and that's when freedom comes from the islamic freedom your 1:33:44 freedom from nafs freedom from the dunya which enslaves and takes us over whereas the world looks 1:33:49 to the dunya for freedom right and of course it doesn't find it because it's 1:33:54 more of the same so right and not only is it freedom you know the ultimate true freedom but 1:33:59 also it is the ultimate realization of the actual human teleology because you know in the quran
1:34:08 i did not create jinn in mankind except to worship me so worshiping and submitting to god is actually 1:34:13 our own our deepest nature in objective nature right implanted in us by our creator and so this 1:34:21 notion of the fitra right the fitra which is the the the original human disposition the prophet 1:34:26 peace upon him said that every child is born on the fifth and then after that its children 1:34:30 teach it you know different religion judaism christianities or astronomism something other 1:34:34 than like just a pure kind of because these other religions they started but then they changed 1:34:38 right anyway and so it's important that you know you just look at the muslim prayer 1:34:42 that's why it's integrated and that's why all of life you know you come to sexuality it's it's 1:34:47 neither you know it's not god in the modern world takes sex to be almost like god but it's also not 1:34:53 the devil like i mean it's you know it's given its proper place and it's brought under the 1:34:57 the realm so that's that's very important and as you had said earlier this comes more from probably 1:35:02 greek uh you know uh certain tributaries and not really it's very it's very clear if you you know a 1:35:08 bit about greek philosophy and great greek thought that this is very familiar territory it's not a 1:35:13 it's not that new at all really right okay so very quickly now moving along so marx and again mark's 1:35:20 a huge figure this is like you know like a half a lion right but in general religion is a sign of 1:35:26 weakness and freedom you know can only be achieved through the abolishment of religion so this is a 1:35:32 very familiar to us as modern people again we are usually you know unaware of the degree to which 1:35:37 our psychology is really influenced by karl marx friedrich nietzsche sigmund freud you know these 1:35:43 people it's like they live on it's like they have left such a sediment in in our minds you 1:35:49 know if we realize that we can say wait a minute but i don't want that i'm not mar i don't have 1:35:52 to you know anyway nietzsche 1844 1900 the quote unquote death of god basically did also to this 1:35:59 notion of the death of human nature if there's no god to provide stability to the world in meaning 1:36:03 then also human nature is kind of untethered from its source and so we read in the quran
1:36:11 do not be like those who forgot god so he forgot caused them to forget themselves and this is you 1:36:17 see this in modern western history people turn their backs on god and then they don't know who 1:36:22 they are anymore exactly the only is pretty nature actually was very perceptive in many ways he 1:36:27 he uh shared the muslim um critique of many aspects of western and christian life you know the 1:36:34 kind of the death wish the denial of of of uh the sexuality he understood all that extremely well 1:36:40 and he had actually many positive things to say about islam as well this is the irony and yet he 1:36:45 he persisted in his um his atheism and and and saw refuge in a kind of greek kind of virtue ethics in 1:36:52 a way a heroism and but um but no he was not all a lot of what he said was actually very insightful 1:36:59 although he obviously had a a fundamental problem uh at the heart of his worldview though absolutely 1:37:04 and again two lines is not at all to give nietzsche his due i mean because he's 1:37:09 quite profound and prophetic in the sense that he really foresaw you know what the west had done and 1:37:13 that's his whole you know the the marketplace the guy going out there right so he was telling people 1:37:18 you european christians or post-christians in the late 19th century you don't understand the 1:37:24 implications of the enlightenment quote-unquote killing of god right and you're just riding on 1:37:29 the fumes of christian morality and civility but you don't understand the implications of 1:37:33 what you've done i do yeah we didn't go back and say we should believe in god but he foretold 1:37:38 you know that what this would lead to so anyway sigmund freud then comes along and he sees sex as 1:37:44 absolutely foundational to human person dude and happiness freud is extremely important i mean his 1:37:48 theories have been debunked for like decades and decades but he lives on in so many aspects of our 1:37:54 culture and our psyche and so he's really one who says again god is gone right and he was an 1:37:59 atheist i mean all of these marks nietzsche freud these are all hardcore atheists not also but these 1:38:04 other they're all atheists right and that's not neutral if you ask a muslim is your view of the 1:38:09 world and the way you perceive things and you know is it influenced by your belief in that well of 1:38:13 course yeah i mean it's profoundly influenced so how can someone be an atheist and that's not going 1:38:17 to profoundly influence the way they look at the world we cannot just take these thinkers as like 1:38:21 neutral right and think that their atheism is not very germane to you know the ideas 1:38:28 that they come up with in the way they perceive the world so we have to be very careful of that 1:38:32 anyway so freud makes sex absolutely foundational to human personhood and happiness however 1:38:39 he realizes that it's a very powerful force in that civilization the possibility of civilization 1:38:45 civilization requires it to be contained but so he sees this fundamental struggle so he wrote 1:38:50 that word civilization and its discontents and it's that sexual discontent and he said even 1:38:55 infants are sexual right so this is again so freud is very so we see through so and through the 19th 1:39:01 century kind of increasing psychologization of the human person and then with freud we get the 1:39:06 sexualization of that inner psychology so you are like very much your inner psychology right and now 1:39:13 your sexuality is at the core of that inner psychology and then in america you get people 1:39:17 like kinsey the the famous in the 50s and 60s who continued freud's work and also uh did 1:39:23 actual empirical research on the sexual life of babies which i won't go into but yeah right he 1:39:29 carried that continued precisely this trajectory um and had a huge influence obviously on the the 1:39:35 sexual revolution 1960s absolutely and so i didn't put them on here but definitely alfred kinsey um 1:39:42 is very um very uh central to this nietzsche freud and oscar wilde you know they concur 1:39:48 basically that moral notions are essentially a matter of taste this is very important um 1:39:52 it's also referred to as emotivism and this is discussed at length by aleister mcintyre 1:39:57 british guy uh british philosopher who's living in north america um but his book after after virtue 1:40:03 which i've read is absolutely extraordinary uh if you want to understand a very profound in many 1:40:08 ways a very positive understanding of moral theory on a fairly advanced level he's a he used to be a 1:40:14 marxist actually he became a catholic through his study of tomism uh that's the philosophy of thomas 1:40:19 aquinas and and heads the word virtue which is uh but um he's a brilliant brilliant philosopher 1:40:25 aleister mcinerney still still very much with us i think absolutely yeah so so but this notion that 1:40:30 you know as actually what freud making sexuality the center of the personhood
1:40:39 have you seen him who takes his desire as his god and this is literally i mean subhanallah you 1:40:44 see you know like nietzsche okay we forget god so we don't know who we are anymore freud you 1:40:50 know we don't have god so we take our literally our desires as our god and like this literally 1:40:55 what they're doing like like this is like uh confirmation of what the quran is saying well the 1:40:59 christians i don't know how they think to say but the quran is incredibly profound and insightful 1:41:03 to all these things yeah exactly right and so this idea also that it's a matter of taste or emotivism 1:41:09 right is is similar that it's just a question of you know and we'll get to this too because we read 1:41:14 verses and this is very important for muslims too right you can't just look out and say 1:41:17 oh this appears to be good or society says it's good because in the quran right it says
1:41:30 um you know what about one whose evil deeds or or foul deeds have been made 1:41:36 to look beautiful to him they've been beautified for him so that he sees them as good so you can 1:41:41 see something as good and beautiful but that's not because it is good and beautiful it's because 1:41:46 it's been made to seem that way and who's doing this tazine who's doing this adornment of it 1:41:51 it's satan and that says in the quran too right 1:41:54 that uh um this hopo bird when it comes from bill peace the queen of sheba back to solomon it says
1:42:07 that i found them you know her the peace the queen of sheba and and her people bowing to the sun 1:42:15 you know worshipping the sun rather than god was
1:42:21 and and satan has beautified their act for them in other words he made it look fair and it's a 1:42:26 foul deed right there they're they're worshiping other than the actual creator they're worshiping 1:42:31 his creation rather than him and satan made it appear fair to them 1:42:36 so so so this emotivism that's exactly what emotivism means what oh
1:42:45 i see this as being good or hassan or beautiful 1:42:48 this looks good to me right it appears good to my sensibilities and this is how most modern 1:42:53 people many modern people this is how they decide morality well this appears good to my 1:42:57 my sentiments well okay how do you know it really is or not how do you know that you're that you're 1:43:02 that foul things have not just simply been made to appear fair to you by satan and his you know 1:43:09 those who are sort of working with him these are realities i mean we're not materialists 1:43:14 we believe in these unseen realities right there's absolutely every time the quartet says the scene 1:43:20 in the unseen realm always the unseen realm comes first right it's principial we see what happens in 1:43:24 the uh world is really the manifestation of unseen principles the whole world is the manifestation of 1:43:31 of of of an unseen creator we don't see him in this world right and things that happen i mean 1:43:37 even you don't even have to be a believer to you know uh to appreciate this point what we do our 1:43:42 actions are expressions of our inner reality right of who we are kind of in an immaterial sense yes 1:43:50 we don't see our consciousness our consciousness is is invisible absolutely but it's manifested and 1:43:54 science we can't see our thoughts no scientists ever say no experiment can ever see our thoughts 1:43:59 so this is this is kind of an example of the the unseen affecting the the material world 1:44:05 right and then you have uh wilhelm reich and herbert mark hughes both of these um uh german 1:44:11 i mean very important very important figures also who was 1930s mostly 30s and 40 mark hughes 1:44:16 a little bit later really pushed very openly for sexual liberation even back you know starting from 1:44:22 the 30s with reich these are very dubious things it's called in the 30s which the nazis closed down 1:44:27 but they continued after that and exactly yes and and you really see that there's this radical push 1:44:32 and again we said that sexuality and sexual norms are very tied to the family and they were not 1:44:37 unaware of that they weren't it was not just like oh we want to have fun we don't they 1:44:40 didn't see the the implications these people were very much against the family they wanted 1:44:45 to destroy them their names have been associated with what some people call cultural marxism uh 1:44:50 is so yeah a particular way of describing this kind of movement that in today's world i mean yeah 1:44:55 and then you have a number of other like feminist thinkers i don't actually put them on here but 1:44:59 you have simone de beauvoir obviously in france in 1950s she comes out with a book with the feminist 1:45:05 mystique you have you know um jermaine greer uh in the 60s and 70s you have uh shlomite fire uh 1:45:12 firestone um you know there's a whole range and by the way you know i mean people don't realize like 1:45:17 you look into these people i mean really like all of these people all these people mentioned 1:45:23 just read like their wikipedia page you'll be very aghast that like about the kind of people 1:45:29 they were how they live their lives and so on and so forth i mean simon de beauvoir who sort 1:45:33 of put forth as this big feminist icon she and michel foucault who's also practically a prophet 1:45:39 to a lot of these kind of modern post-colonial academics and woke you know kind of people right 1:45:45 they both they campaigned in france to get rid of uh you know to lower the age of sexual consent to 1:45:51 include children both of them did i mean they they campaigned for pedophilia and foucault 1:45:56 left a very dissolute life morally speaking and he actually died after catching aids at a bdsm themed 1:46:02 bath house in san francisco i mean so i again like i mean it's not like as muslims 1:46:07 okay it doesn't mean he cannot have like insights and critiques or maybe simon de beauvoir i mean 1:46:12 okay fine but the point is like we cannot be blind to the fact that you know these people's atheism 1:46:18 and de beauvoir also was a radical atheist and she was grow up in a very conservative christian 1:46:22 family and she became an atheist i think when she was 17 or 18. jermaine greer also atheist you 1:46:27 know by the time she was like 18 she talks about this right she had a very unfortunate experience 1:46:32 and also just went to school with the nuns and um australia and they could not answer her questions 1:46:38 and she you know was kind of rebellious and just said i'm not having it but anyway um all 1:46:44 right let's let's move on so yes let's move on all right so homosexuality in the wake of the sexual 1:46:49 revolution i mean very very fast i'm not going to talk about there's a book that came out in 1989 1:46:54 it's called after the ball how america will conquer its fear and hatred of gays in the 90s 1:46:59 it was written by two gay men marshall kirk who was a neuropsychologist and hunter madsen was a 1:47:06 social marketing and advertising executive so look at the you know um two fields here 1:47:12 a neuropsychologist and a marketing and uh advertising executive and they're both harvard 1:47:18 trained and they basically put together a plan i'm not saying their one book is the whole reason 1:47:23 why things are the way they are but in the eight in 1989 they came out with basically a manifesto 1:47:29 how are we going to get america and by extension the rest of the at least the western world because 1:47:34 america is of course the peak of its power at that time right to basically overcome its rejection 1:47:40 of homosexuality and so on and so forth it's a very fascinating read it's also a maddening read 1:47:45 i think if you're a religious believer because you see that they basically put a plan which was 1:47:50 implemented like lock step and barrel like i mean everything they said like came to be done 1:47:56 um and they actually said i mean this is quoting from the book this is their own words they say 1:48:00 the campaign we outline in this book though complex depends centrally upon a program of 1:48:06 unabashed propaganda these are their words firmly grounded in long-established principles of 1:48:11 psychology and advertising and these are harvard educated psychologists and advertising executives 1:48:16 and you know one thing they say you know one major aspect of this pillar is desensitization 1:48:22 the principle of desensitization builds on people's primal instincts whereby a flood of 1:48:27 gay related advertising presented in the least offensive fashion possible 1:48:31 gets the job done and then they say if straights can't shut off the shower they may at least 1:48:35 eventually get used to being wet right so this was all like this all very intentional 1:48:40 and then they also say they talk about conversion and they say we mean conversion now look at that 1:48:45 i mean again straight quote from the book we mean conversion of the average americans emotions mind 1:48:52 and will through a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the 1:48:59 media wow there's amazing quotes actually i mean it could come it could have been come straight 1:49:04 from hell i mean there's a deliberate attempt to subvert undermine uh traditional deliberate yeah 1:49:12 quite quite intentional you keep you stressed several times they were harvard 1:49:15 educated so you know they had the intelligence uh uh to to uh promote promote this and and you say 1:49:21 they were very successful right and i just want to you know i want people to also just realize that 1:49:27 you know again we should not just naively take the situation that exists around us it's just oh 1:49:32 well that's what it is right like many muslims who kind of just parrot what they hear especially in 1:49:37 western societies and parrot the discourse and all it's like do you realize that your discourse and 1:49:42 your entire moral moral sensibility has literally been crafted by people with a very particular you 1:49:49 know um intention to craft it in a very particular way right i'm not saying the whole thing is just 1:49:55 these two men right but but like what they said and if you read the book i mean they say you know 1:50:00 again they themselves say there are all of these kind of dysfunctional dysfunctionalities about 1:50:05 the gay community and they critique it themselves they have like 10 points about all of these things 1:50:09 and they say we're not going to show that to the public they say when you bring like you're sitting 1:50:14 in a tent and you bring the horses you know you let the front and you don't let the stinky back 1:50:18 and you leave this thing one thing is obvious there's something that shake hands are used 1:50:21 as mentioned is the anal intercourse uh which is the staple diet of um this is extremely dangerous 1:50:27 practice and it's an excellent way to transmit disease as well um yeah and and so you know this 1:50:35 this current emphasis on on public health and so on you know uh advertising against smoking 1:50:41 and so on is all very good of course but this one practice uh gets away scot-free even though 1:50:46 uh it's an excellent way to to uh spread disease obviously uh aids uh the virus and other means so 1:50:53 it's it's uh but that but that's not highlighted or mentioned that's overlooked completely right 1:51:01 okay so finishing off so there's another book which again i'm just putting on here a queer 1:51:07 thing happens to america and what a long strange trip it's been by michael brown 2011 that's a big 1:51:12 fix 600 tome and also kind of chronicles the last couple decades and also full of quotes 1:51:18 from you know sort of gay activists lgbt you know organizations and stuff and a lot of it is very 1:51:24 very shocking and it's not stuff you kind of read in the public but it's things that have been said 1:51:28 and written publicly but are not really you know shouted from the rooftop so to speak and so you 1:51:33 have to dig a little bit but when you see some of the the things that are admitted by people when 1:51:38 they're kind of speaking kind of off the record or even by matson and kirk on the record like 1:51:42 they wrote this book you know it really kind of makes you do a double take and so it's it's worth 1:51:47 you know doing that and all and one of the resources that we're going to talk about at the 1:51:50 end you know you can actually get a very good um summary in two podcast episodes on these two books 1:51:57 so you have to actually read good thousand pages play i'm not familiar with the issue works yeah 1:52:02 yeah okay all right um so very quickly so um from truman's i have a couple quotes from truman's book 1:52:10 says it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this move to make sexual 1:52:14 desire central to human identity in modern society everything from the common use of terms 1:52:19 such as straight and gay and everyday conversation to the underlying assumptions of international 1:52:24 human rights law presupposes that this is the case that what is the case that 1:52:29 sexual desire is central to human identity right that basically our desire is our god
1:52:37 and and the idea that human flourishing is virtually synonymous with sexual fulfillment 1:52:42 is a commonplace in fact virtually an intuition of modern western culture so 1:52:48 you come and say well you know our religion prohibits particular kind of sexual behavior 1:52:52 but wait a minute you are prohibiting people from sexual flourishing which means you are 1:52:57 undermining what it means to actually be a human being like that's where this 1:53:00 symptom is this is the book actually yeah just uh from yeah and um uh i i have my own copy obviously 1:53:07 there is a um i'm proud to say he's actually a british uh living in the united states where he is 1:53:14 a professor of biblical religious studies at grove city college but this is definitely worth reading 1:53:19 and if you read if you get the audio version which is what i listen to both books 1:53:24 he reads it out himself so you can listen to him read it out in his british accent
1:53:29 yup all right and then the next one moving right along if we if we are at root defined in large 1:53:34 part by our sexual desires if sexual desire or orientation as we now say is who we are right not 1:53:40 just what we do who are then sex must be political because rules governing sexual behavior are rules 1:53:46 that govern what is and is not considered by society to be legitimate as an identity so again 1:53:52 this identity question is absolutely central and we have to understand the importance of it 1:53:57 and also why as muslims it is such a problematic category and then finally the old chestnut of love 1:54:03 the sinner hate the sin simply does not work in a world where the sin is the identity of the sinner 1:54:08 and the two cannot be cannot be separated even at a conceptual level okay very very important here 1:54:15 i'm going to now go faster i mean we spent a long time setting the groundwork but i think it's been 1:54:20 important to do this because again if if people have you know absorbed what we've been talking 1:54:26 about now we're going to get into islam and what does islam say we've already adam brady look at 1:54:31 the islamic paradigm on sex and sexuality and now we have a context in which we can fit that in and 1:54:36 so we can go through this much faster because of course this will be familiar to muslims but 1:54:40 hopefully when people hear this now and see these verses you'll also see it in a different context 1:54:45 right because you've seen and again this is going to be uploaded people can take a break stop go 1:54:51 have coffee you know come back and finish this english but yeah so yeah you don't have to listen 1:54:56 to all of this in one go right so yeah okay all right creation of the male and the female so we're 1:55:00 just going to go from the quran but again reading it in terms of what we've been talking about 1:55:06 and by his creation of the male and the female so so god created a male and he created a 1:55:10 female right it's part of his purposeful design in creation
1:55:17 and that he created the two mates the male and 1:55:20 the female so they're mates of each other they're meant to go together
1:55:25 and then he says and the male is not like the female so men and women are the same in 1:55:29 many respects they're both equally human they both equally have you know the duty to worship 1:55:35 god and the ability to uh develop themselves morally and spiritually and to you know um uh uh 1:55:42 earn the pleasure of god and to earn paradise and so forth right but they are not 1:55:46 there are many respects in which men and women are different physically emotionally psychologically 1:55:49 and so on and so forth statistically of course you know i mean individuals are 1:55:53 are very different i mean men and women but statistically speaking 1:55:56 there are things that are dominant in males things are dominant females this is known it's 1:56:01 very not politically correct to sort of speak in these terms today but the science is there 1:56:05 a lot of research you know yeah of course it's there but you're just not a lot of youtube videos 1:56:09 you just have to pretend it doesn't exist right because it's not politically correct so 1:56:13 but but we know foreign so we're fine with that we know it's true both by by revelation and by 1:56:21 just you know observation and our experience of the world and then this longer verse i'll just 1:56:25 read in english for the sake of time and of his signs is that he created for you from yourselves 1:56:30 mates that you may find tranquility in them and he placed between you affection and mercy 1:56:35 indeed and that are signs for people who reflect and then o mankind fear your lord we hear this in 1:56:42 the khutbah every friday o mankind fear your lord who created you from one soul 1:56:46 and created from it it's mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women right
1:56:54 next
1:56:59 i just say that because every muslim people they don't know arabic they'll recognize that phrase 1:57:03 because you know always the hookah starts with it on friday other verses we have the beautiful 1:57:07 verse in the quran right about here the parity the spiritual parity between men and women surely 1:57:13 men who say that to allah and women who submit to allah men who have faith in women who have faith 1:57:19 men who are obedient in women who are obedient men who are truthful and women who are truthful 1:57:24 men who are steadfast in women who are steadfast men who humble themselves to god and women who 1:57:29 humble themselves to god or allah men who give alms in women who give arms men who fast and women 1:57:35 who fast men who guard their chastity and women who guard their chastity men who remember allah 1:57:40 much and women who remember allah much right ten different qualities men who do it women who do it 1:57:46 for them has allah prepared forgiveness and a mighty reward beautiful and then we have the 1:57:51 believing men and believing women are allies of one another they enjoin what is right and 1:57:56 forbid what is wrong and establish prayer and give zakat and obey allah and his messenger 1:58:02 those allah will have mercy upon them indeed allah is exalted in might and wise right so men and 1:58:07 women they are meant to be allies of one another that they are constantly enjoining each other 1:58:13 but to what to just following their whims no they are joining each other to what is right 1:58:18 and forbidding what is wrong right in coming together and forming communities that exalt 1:58:23 the divine standards of right and wrong and try to you know uh give people a greater ability to 1:58:29 realize that moral goal in their lives that moral standard and to develop themselves by doing so 1:58:36 and the established parent gives a cat right and then another verse and this is more than 1:58:41 one verse like this in the quran whoever works righteousness man or woman right or male or female 1:58:47 and has faith verily to him will we give a new life a life that is good and pure and 1:58:52 will bestow on such their reward according to the best of their actions right so we 1:58:56 have this beautiful parity complementarity between men and women and this parity also 1:59:01 right on this level however less of the male is not like the female and so we do see that in the 1:59:06 practical life of how men and women interact in society the roles that each one predominantly 1:59:12 is meant to play right in the way they're meant to complement each other they are not treated 1:59:16 the same because they are not created the same and so men are the protectors and maintainers of women 1:59:22 this is how yusefarily translated protectors and maintainers anyway 1:59:25 there's a big discussion on exactly what this means and of course it's very controversial
1:59:36 again but men have a particular role to play vis-a-vis women because god has given them one 1:59:41 more than the other he says strength but again there's a lot of discussion as to what the more 1:59:45 is and because they support them from their means and then in another verse sort of women 1:59:50 have rights similar to the rights against them according to what is equitable but men have a 1:59:54 degree over them degree of advantage again this is a loss here and god is exalted in power and 1:59:59 wise again there can be a whole discussion on you know the exact uh rights and duties of men 2:00:03 and women men and women have the same rights and duties in certain respects they also have you know 2:00:07 men have some rights that women don't have women have some rights that men don't have women have a 2:00:10 right to be supportive financially their entire lives men don't have that right they have to 2:00:14 support themselves you know men take on certain leadership roles that women don't 2:00:18 take like head of the household you know kind of paradigmatically speaking also 2:00:24 religious leadership like leading prayer and so forth right so there are distinctions there so 2:00:28 there are areas of overlap in areas of distinction this is fine because of and it all balances out in 2:00:35 equity according to the wisdom of the creator from an islamic perspective and so the difference in 2:00:40 complementary nature of the male and the female as we read men and women are not the same right 2:00:46 there are obvious biological there's an obvious biological complementarity between 2:00:50 male and female bodies and reproductive systems as we've been talking about um there is purpose 2:00:56 again this goes back to what you've said now it all falls into place purpose is inherent to 2:01:00 the body and its functions as created by god it's not for us to decide or sign on our own 2:01:05 people say well who cares what you do if you're quote unquote you know dangly bits and all no 2:01:10 i mean those things have a purpose you either use them for that purpose or you don't use them 2:01:15 right but but they are to be directed the way they were meant to be directed by god again with the 2:01:20 more latitude that the islamic tradition provides in terms of you know um rapport between husband 2:01:25 and wife also you know pleasure is you know not every act like in the catholic church at least 2:01:30 every single sexual act has to be at least uh um potentially open to uh to uh conception that's 2:01:37 not true in islam i mean a man and woman they can enjoy themselves also just for pleasure 2:01:41 when the woman is menstruating they're not allowed to have intercourse but they're allowed to have 2:01:45 other types of you know pleasurable activity right so there is sort of this you know notion that but 2:01:50 again this is this is these are the limits that god has placed right he's allowed this within this 2:01:55 parameter uh it's not stricter than that but it's also not you know uh wider than that or the other 2:02:00 way it's not wider it's also much stricter so this idea that my body my choice this is this has 2:02:05 nothing to do with an islamic perspective god's god's body in the end of the day they're on loan 2:02:10 to us we he created them um and and you can choose whether to obey him or not to your own advantage 2:02:17 or disadvantage respectively but it's not up to us to make up the rules or to impose our own 2:02:24 meaning onto things because we do believe that they do have the meaning that's been imparted 2:02:28 up to them by their creator because we're not atheists and we're not materialists and we're 2:02:33 not deists either and so we believe that you know all of creation has a purpose our bodies have 2:02:38 a purpose our souls have a purpose our creation isn't as human beings has a purpose our creations 2:02:42 men and women separate also has a purpose right and so this is very central complementarity and 2:02:47 disposition of masculine versus feminine traits fathers and mothers are not interchangeable 2:02:53 there are religious rules for men and others for women we talked about this even in prayer 2:02:57 even where you wouldn't think it would be relevant like you know men are supposed to stand more like 2:03:02 apart when they're praying women more contracted why well because men lisa right women are more 2:03:08 contracted men more expensive that's just how they stand in the prayer and how they 2:03:12 make the suju you know the prostration so even in very minute the sharia is thoroughly 2:03:17 gendered from start to finish which is why i said earlier the contemporary scene race 2:03:22 gender and sexual orientation is all one we say no race islam makes no distinction between race 2:03:28 and it says in the quran that you know among his signs are the creation of or you know um 2:03:32 uh that the difference in your tongues and your colors are a sign of god right so absolutely no 2:03:40 race distinction whatsoever right uh in the prophet very explicit peace be upon him that 2:03:45 arab is not superior to a non-arab nor non-arab-tuned arab right and a white man 2:03:49 is not superior to black men or black men to white men except by way of piety in fear of god right so 2:03:56 complete like you know i'm not saying there's no racism among muslims but in islam right this is 2:04:00 something that you know is is is uh you know races are all considered equal right gender 2:04:08 equally valid and equally valuable men are not better than women women are not better than men 2:04:13 but they are different and so the sharia treats them differently and the gender distinctions are 2:04:17 pervasive so it's a it's a thoroughly gendered tradition so this idea of moving towards this 2:04:22 androgynous norm where men and women are just all the same and there's no boundaries this is 2:04:27 completely against you know just the heart of islam you have to throw the entire religion out 2:04:32 the window to incorporate this type of thing right so we can't get on board with this kind of radical 2:04:39 gender egalitarianism which sees mathematical sameness and equality and we will not rest 2:04:44 until fifty percent of all ceos and all companies are women and fifty percent of all nurses in all 2:04:49 hospitals that's never going to happen by the way except through very coercious social engineering 2:04:55 yeah and jordan peterson uh who speaks on this subject frequently he has an excellent obviously 2:05:00 a scientist a clinical psychologist um and has a range of data all the data speaks uh against this 2:05:07 uh position that you're you're criticizing as well yeah um yeah and there you go okay showing all 2:05:15 sorts of psychological physiological psychological dispositional differences between men and women 2:05:20 though this is taboo to say today because it goes against you know the zeitgeist and 2:05:24 notions of social constructionism and you know certain uh you know uh gender 2:05:29 ideologies and so forth so anyway the nature of morality and ethics in a sense this is very 2:05:34 important we've touched on it so again hopefully we can go through it um uh uh um quickly but this 2:05:40 is really important for the the latter part of the discussion which we are finally getting to sexual 2:05:45 norms and then homosexuality specifically and then we'll be wrapping up hopefully challah um so 2:05:51 so where does morality come from right where does it come from in the west you've 2:05:55 had deontological ethics back when religion was more um uh prominent this notion that 2:06:01 you know moral behavior was a largely a uh question of doing your moral duty and the 2:06:06 moral duty was often you know seen as coming from god and divine commands right and this is kind of 2:06:10 natural within a atheistic universe um and so this is also for muslims it's very fundamental god's 2:06:17 command is absolutely fundamental and we mentioned this before and i also mentioned the voice verse
2:06:25 i have created jinn in mankind but to worship me right and then um it is god 2:06:30 in his messenger allah's messenger alone right for the muslim who are legislators of what is 2:06:35 right and wrong permitted and prohibited this is not our prerogative as human beings 2:06:39 either collectively to say we just sort of extemporaneously like you know expose it like a 2:06:45 rational morality or let alone you know even more so our individual this is the 2:06:50 motto well what do you think of this what do you where do you stand on premarital sex 2:06:54 it's not your it's nothing to do with what you say your opinion doesn't
2:07:06 don't ask me i was the one who made us because when you do it 2:07:10 you know you get people like legalizing child pornography in the 1970s that's what happens 2:07:16 when you just leave people and so this is a very critical verse right uh i'll just read 2:07:21 in english again for the sake of time it is not for any believing man or woman when allah and his 2:07:26 messenger have decided on an affair to have any choice in their matter okay in the word you know
2:07:38 and this is the the fetish of the modern world choice well i chose did you choose 2:07:42 why do you wear hijab well i chose to you know everything comes down to choice it's legitimate 2:07:46 if you chose it it's not legit if you didn't choose this strikes at the heart of that right 2:07:50 not believing for any believing men or woman not appropriate right or becoming for any believing 2:07:55 men or women when god and this messenger have decided on an affair to have any choice in their 2:08:00 matter and whoever disobeys god and his messenger or allah his messenger has manifestly gone astray 2:08:07 this verse just completely you know shatters that myth right that if god and this messenger have 2:08:13 decided on an affair that's it it's it's their prerogative god's and obviously the messenger only 2:08:19 commanding is obeying the command of his lord so it's really god in the end right now you can 2:08:24 disobey go ahead but you're disobeying you can't make up your own morality you can either obey 2:08:30 god's morality or disobey it and you know reap the consequences of either choice but it's not your 2:08:36 prerogative to make it up so that's one dividing command absolutely fundamental for us as muslims 2:08:41 that cannot be lost from any discussion that we have as muslims particularly internally when 2:08:46 it comes to questions of sex sexual morality or anything number two consequences matter so there 2:08:52 is a type of consequentialism which becomes the dominant ethical theory in the modern world in the 2:08:57 19th and 20th centuries through people like john you know first jeremy bentham and jon stewart mill 2:09:01 right moral action is that which brings the greatest benefit for the greatest number the 2:09:05 greatest happiness for the greatest number so utilitarianism right so we have kind of 2:09:10 a in a sense i wouldn't like to say it this way but there's sort of a divine 2:09:13 utilitarianism in the sense that god is wise just and merciful and he legislates for us what is best 2:09:18 for us both in this world and that both in this world and the next from his omniscient perspective
2:09:25 god knows and you don't know so consequences matter but it's not just the consequences 2:09:30 that we in our limited perspective fixate upon it's it's you know in a larger and we'll see in 2:09:37 another slide or two that there are uh positive of the sharia there are there are uh goals that 2:09:44 the sharia is trying to uphold for the benefit in this world and the next of human beings right 2:09:50 so that's a type of consequentialism but it's the one that is a divine consequential that 2:09:55 god has set and that he has legislated also the means of of achieving it and then the third thing 2:10:01 and this is the third mainstream also in western you know historically is uh virtue ethics which 2:10:07 goes all the way back to aristotle right in which muslims also took on aristotle's writings 2:10:12 on ethics very enthusiastically and modified it and improved it and sort of infused it with you 2:10:17 know the telos of revelation and the spirit of you know and improved upon it but they found what 2:10:22 he said about ethics quite compatible and the idea is that virtue and moral character are also a part 2:10:27 of paramount importance right the notion of or the prophet or or gods we read in the quran allah says
2:10:37 speaking to the prophet you are up you know you have a noble or a magnificent moral character 2:10:44 right and and even the word virtue is like you know uh mcintyre has like after virtue that's why 2:10:51 he called it that there's no virtue that we don't talk about the word is so old-fashioned and virtue 2:10:55 like gets a chuckle like virtue like what is that right but the prophet said peace be upon him
2:11:04 i was sent but to perfect the noble traits of character so 2:11:07 your character matters there are things like for example hasset which is envy 2:11:12 the prophet peace be upon him said that envy eats up good deeds like fire eats wood and envy means 2:11:17 that you are so jealous of what someone has that you don't have to the extent that you want that 2:11:22 person to lose that benefit if you cannot enjoy it yourself so it's one thing to say oh look at 2:11:26 the benefit that person has i wish i had that uh but it's another thing to say i actually 2:11:31 you know uh willfully uh desire that he should lose that benefit because i can't 2:11:36 stand to see someone uh you know uh enjoy it if i can't enjoy it this is very ugly 2:11:41 and and this is not even acting on it's not like i'm going and sabotaging like you know keying his 2:11:46 brand new mercedes like you know i'm not doing it but just in my heart i have that hassai in in that 2:11:52 state of the heart the prophet said that state eats up your good deeds so your your your noble 2:11:57 your your character matters right and your virtue matter matters and then the prophet also said very 2:12:03 important for us as muslims peace be upon him every religion has a characteristic moral traits
2:12:11 and the characteristic trait of islam is modesty right and then finally to round 2:12:16 this off he said if you have no shame or modesty then do as you please either
2:12:24 okay how does this compare with the contemporary moral and ethical discourse where does divine 2:12:28 command fit in the moral in the current moral discourse in the modern secular west well it's 2:12:34 irrelevant right there's no god is dead nietra told us right and the west has been secularizing 2:12:38 for centuries so sexual morality is separated from religion we saw the beginning becomes 2:12:43 thoroughly personally subjective that's true of all morality it becomes a question of emotivism 2:12:48 and you know personal taste and and and so forth right you have center the centrality of these sort 2:12:53 of notions like replacement notions of replacing religion so freedom we talked about right this 2:12:58 kind of fetishization of personal autonomy whereas islam is based on servitude and submission to god 2:13:04 this notion of autonomy right if you know what it means auto itself no most is a law 2:13:09 autonomy literally means and this was kant who really talked a lot about autonomy it means to 2:13:13 give oneself the law any muslim can immediately feel once you translate how blasphemous that is 2:13:19 because god is the law giver right he's the the law giver and the sharia is his way his law right 2:13:25 we are not we don't give ourselves the law this is to make gods of ourselves literally right so 2:13:30 god and this messenger alone have the right to legislate as we saw in that verse right that when 2:13:34 god and this messenger decided upon a matter it is not for a believing man or a woman to have a 2:13:39 say in it and then this notion of authenticity we talked about we would say as muslims in response 2:13:44 to that yes we want to be authentic but we are only our true authentic selves as human beings 2:13:48 when we have found and submitted to our creator because that is the objective inherent purpose 2:13:54 with which he has created all human beings as the prophet peace be upon him said every human being 2:13:58 was born on the fitrah right and so coming back to your internal nature and submitting to your 2:14:04 creator that is the homecoming of every single human being if they don't realize it they don't 2:14:09 realize it so their own detriment but that is everyone's true homecoming is back to to god 2:14:14 and so consequences so divine command we says irrelevant in the modern you know ethical moral 2:14:19 discourse what about consequences well again consequentialism utilitarianism is the dominant 2:14:25 ethical theory right but the consequences are judged in purely subjective terms if at all 2:14:30 and also in purely um material and in this worldly terms it's a secular notion of what 2:14:36 consequences which consequences really matter and we would say that allah knows our interests better 2:14:41 than we do and he alone has full knowledge of all consequences and those consequences are related 2:14:45 both to this world and to the next world as well and then finally virtue and moral character we 2:14:50 talked about virtue is an old-fashioned and quaint term in modern parlance sexual behavior 2:14:55 is seen as irrelevant to moral character right you can do whatever you want sexually as long as 2:15:00 it was consensual no one sees that as having any impact on your moral character it's just 2:15:04 considered totally irrelevant because sex doesn't have any meaning anymore it doesn't have any moral 2:15:09 uh meaning either there's no moral kind of code or norm attached to it as we said right um and so 2:15:16 this also downplaying of more of a virtue of moral character right um this again the quran refuses
2:15:30 the day of judgment is that that day on which neither uh wealth nor progeny will avail a 2:15:35 person right except for one who comes with a sound heart the only thing that will value on that day 2:15:39 is coming to god with a sound heart right okay um all right so islamic sexual and gender 2:15:47 norms again we'll try to just speed through this again hopefully this will be familiar to muslims 2:15:52 but who knows in the modern age and contemporary society a lot of muslims surprisingly don't even 2:15:57 know some of the basic islamic rulings on certain of these issues so hopefully this will be a 2:16:03 beneficial you know experience for our uh viewers right so we talked already about the 2:16:08 centrality of sexual norms to any society and moral system so i won't repeat that 2:16:12 um sexual norms in the shady are tied to family into family law right because again sex is 2:16:18 reproductive and the family's absolute central most central most important social institution 2:16:23 and so you know legislation surrounding sexuality is absolutely uh paramount and it is part and 2:16:30 parcel of our religion it's not negotiable it's not something we say oh well we believe in one 2:16:34 god but we can just change all the sexual norms no this lies at the very heart of the religion and 2:16:39 that's because of the centrality of the family and therefore of sex and sexual morality to the faith 2:16:44 right so as every muslim hopefully should know sex outside of marriage which is called zinna 2:16:49 is strictly forbidden haram and it constitutes a major sin kibira right there are major sins and 2:16:55 you know not less major ascent uh and zuna which is sexual intercourse between a man and a woman 2:17:02 who are not bound by a you know uh islamically valid contract um of marriage uh is a major sin 2:17:10 right why it undermines one of the fundamental objectives or positive of the sharia which are 2:17:15 five or six actually the protection of religion the protection of life the protection of lineage 2:17:21 and family which is where the prohibition of you know uh extranetal sex comes in uh the probe 2:17:28 protection of property protection of intellect and the protection of honor these are the six 2:17:33 you know overriding objectives that the scholars looked at the rulings of the sharia on the divine 2:17:37 legislation and said these are the six fundamental categories that are necessary 2:17:42 for human beings to flourish all human beings to flourish in this world and in the next world that 2:17:46 these six fundamental things have to be protected and one of them we see is lineage and to protect 2:17:52 lineage and the sanctity and integrity of the family structure sexuality must be 2:17:58 tightly confined to it and so the rules regarding extramarital intercourse are actually very strict 2:18:02 and very severe because it's considered not only a sin but also social crime right that's potentially 2:18:08 uh adjudicable you know can potentially be uh you know punished in a court of law it's very 2:18:13 difficult to implement certain of the you know stiffer penalties but conceptually you know we 2:18:18 don't have this notion okay my sexual behavior is just my own private affair no that's modern 2:18:22 secular individualism it's not it's not realistic either because our sexual behavior is it has 2:18:28 ripple effects and it does affect society and it affects many other people other than our ourselves 2:18:32 and so islam recognizes that and legislates accordingly what are the consequences of zina so 2:18:37 extramural sex so the main reason the scholars say this has been prohibited is because it leads to 2:18:43 the mixing of lineage what they call halt and that you're mixing lineage and you're obscuring 2:18:49 you know who uh who who uh belongs to whom into what family and this is considered fundamental 2:18:56 for our identity as human beings and also for our social relationships so many rights and 2:19:00 duties in traditional societies and in islam you know devolve upon a person through their actual 2:19:06 blood relations and so it's very important for me to know if i'm a man is this my child or not 2:19:10 that i have to spend on right who do i inherit from i inherit from my relatives i have to know 2:19:15 who they are right and families you know again a lot of studies on this even by secular like 2:19:20 western secular anthropologists and uh scientists and others you know uh about how we naturally 2:19:27 prefer our own kind of lineage over those who are outside of it right this is natural it's part of 2:19:32 the fitzwa that we've been created with so the consequences of zen are premarital sex right we 2:19:37 didn't get the homosexuality yet this is an aspect of it but even between men and women it undermines 2:19:42 the institution of marriage which leads to the breakdown of the family unit and by extension the 2:19:46 breakdown of society so that's massive consequence it's not just a personal issue and also right 2:19:52 beyond the pragmatic and sort of sociological uh uh repercussions it has grave consequences for 2:19:59 one's personal virtue one's moral character and one standing before allah and all of these are 2:20:04 relevant to us and and important right and they determine our state and on the day of 2:20:09 judgement and in our uh eternal afterlife right and so norms for minimizing zina how does islam 2:20:16 attempt to legislate in order to minimize the occurrence of zina and make it a realizable moral 2:20:21 norm for the average man and woman to actually avoid non-marital intercourse well as we read 2:20:28 in the quran and tell the believing men to lower their gaze and to guard their private parts and 2:20:33 then it goes on and tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their private parts 2:20:37 so uh you know not looking at other people with sexual lust and also covering our bodies and 2:20:43 maintaining modesty we saw before two three slides earlier that the prophet peace be upon him said 2:20:48 every religion has a characteristic moral trait and the characteristic trait of islam is modesty 2:20:52 so muslims are known for their very intense sense of modesty also no physical contact between 2:20:58 non-machrams meaning men and women who are not so closely related that they could not marry so any 2:21:03 woman who's you know not your mother or sister whatever you should have no physical contact if 2:21:07 you're not actually married to her or a close relative so there's not just not premarital sex 2:21:12 in islam there's no pre-mental physical contact at all that's the actual ruling it can sometimes 2:21:17 be difficult especially handshakes and so forth but this is the the principle also no between 2:21:22 which means a man and a woman who are not you know closely related they should not be alone 2:21:28 in an isolated place where they fear um uh unannounced intrusion okay and the idea is 2:21:34 not that oh muslims think every time the men and women are alone together just gonna hit the floor 2:21:38 and lose control but the idea is that you are putting yourself in temptations way 2:21:41 and you know it's a very volatile aspect of human life and when you open yourself to 2:21:45 that temptation sometimes it just comes and gets you from where you least expect it and you fall 2:21:49 you think you're controlling control and you can completely lose control it can be very dangerous 2:21:54 also modest address speech and behavior for both men and women so these are the norms right um is 2:22:01 zenna the only thing that's forbidden in the realm of sexuality so there's a um there's a ruling or 2:22:07 a principle actually in islamic law which says all things are permissible by default and also 2:22:13 that everything that you a human being could do is by permissive by default permissible unless 2:22:20 revelation has come and specifically prohibited it but when it comes to sexuality and sexual 2:22:25 behavior it's the opposite principle sexual matters are forbidden by default they're haram 2:22:32 unless they're specifically permitted so sexual behavior by default is not permitted 2:22:37 and except where it has been specifically legislated and permitted and where is that 2:22:43 sexual relations between a man and a woman bound by an islamically valid contract of marriage 2:22:49 it says important except your spouses and those whom your right hands possess in our day we this 2:22:54 category doesn't exist it's spouses so i put here you know valid contract of marriage right valid 2:22:59 islamically valid contract uh marriage contract between a man and a woman so what is prohibited 2:23:04 everything else okay so if you're not men and woman you're not married then any sexual activity 2:23:10 or if you're obviously two men or two women you can't be a man and a woman married if you're two 2:23:14 men and two women right so everything else would be prohibited sexual acts short of intercourse 2:23:19 right if you're not within that relationship anal intercourse categorically prohibited even between 2:23:25 a man and a woman in marriage that prohibition on on lee white or an intercourse is for 2:23:29 all people not just for uh gays it's for exactly absolutely it's a it's a blanket prohibition right 2:23:36 you know the the rectal cavity is not the place where the male organ was designed to go period i 2:23:42 mean again we believe these things were designed with a purpose but yeah yeah indeed right it's 2:23:47 not meant to go there and that's it's considered a gross misuse of the body to to put it there and 2:23:52 so it's not permitted even between a husband and wife um and then exposing one's aura or 2:23:58 one's private parts to other than one's spouse without need such as medical and so forth and 2:24:03 we know the audit for the man is from the naval to the knee and for the woman you know there's 2:24:07 different levels of it all of the body except the face and hands in front of non-manageable nails 2:24:11 a more relaxed hour in front of family members and women and so forth but the idea is that 2:24:15 you cover your body especially your primary sex organs you know you don't uncover them except in 2:24:21 it for need right so muslims don't have you know are not supposed to have like open kind of locker 2:24:26 rooms and people walking around naked and so forth this would be considered a breach of islamic 2:24:31 morals and etiquette masturbation according to the majority also prohibited so solo sex so the 2:24:37 idea here is that sex is meant to be somehow by designed to be inherently heterosexual obviously 2:24:42 men and women but also inherently interactive right and so uh engaging in sexual behavior by 2:24:47 oneself according to the majority right is there some discussion about it is also prohibited right 2:24:53 um obviously this has nothing to do with consent because you know actions like that are obviously 2:24:57 consensual i mean xena also is consensual so this modern fixation on consent is not relevant 2:25:03 i'm not saying you can force someone to have sex with you i mean but i'm just saying the presence 2:25:07 of consent does not render a sexual act licit if it's otherwise prohibited i mean that would 2:25:11 be ridiculous um and so in addition anything that leads systematically that systematically threatens 2:25:17 to lead to illicit relations like touching gazing you know with the eyes being alone you know 2:25:24 with a person the opposite sex immodest speech dress or behavior all of these things are also 2:25:28 prohibited because they can lead down this very slippery slope and it says in accordance 2:25:34 doesn't just say don't commit sin it says don't even come close to zen don't even get near it 2:25:38 right um what does it mean in the shady yard to protect family and lineage right 2:25:44 again i sort of said this the extended family is normative so consider inheritance laws a person 2:25:48 dies you can bequeath one-third of your wealth to non-errors but then the rest of it devolves upon 2:25:53 your close relatives according to pre-determined shares so it's it the re your wealth resorts to 2:25:59 its rightful owner which is god and then it's d dis redistributed amongst your close relatives 2:26:04 according to the standards of revelation right which is also why it's important who am i related 2:26:09 to who has a right in my inheritance or who's to whose inheritance do i have a right these are 2:26:14 important questions blood ties through lineage and therefore natural reproduction is of prime 2:26:20 importance this is very critical consequently and this is important too the prohibition 2:26:24 of most means of artificial reproduction are prohibited in islam as being tantamount to zina 2:26:32 now this doesn't make sense from a western perspective why so what does this mean a 2:26:37 man and a woman are married okay the woman has healthy eggs the man has healthy sperm 2:26:43 but maybe her fallopian tubes are blocked so the sperm can't get to the egg so they can't conceive 2:26:47 naturally in this case a married man and a woman healthy eggs healthy sperm she carries the baby 2:26:53 in this case alone the doctor can artificially inseminate by the majority and implant the baby 2:27:00 the the zygote in the woman she carries a baby and gives birth to it so the doctor helped but what 2:27:06 the baby's born of a married mother and father and his biological mother also carried him this 2:27:12 is the natural way this is the way that god set up for humans to reproduce that cannot be breached 2:27:18 so sperm donor from outside the couple egg donor from outside the couple surrogate mother all of 2:27:23 these are prohibited because they are seen as bringing about the effects of zina by crossing 2:27:28 lineage and blurring natural family lines and one thing that's relevant to this discussion 2:27:35 we often hear because technology now allows for this kind of artificial reproduction 2:27:39 right technology is never its own moral argument it's never just because we can do something 2:27:45 doesn't mean that we should and whether we do or do not use technology or use in a particular way 2:27:51 comes back to your moral system and for our us as muslims the sharia is our moral system and it 2:27:56 you know it allows me to be sitting in boston view in london and we're conversing using this modern 2:28:01 technology no scholar would say this is a problem but it doesn't but because we have the ability to 2:28:07 artificially reproduce right here they say no the shadiana this is a central 2:28:11 domain of it and it forbids this type of tampering with the natural reproductive
2:28:18 you know sunnah that allah has set up in human reproduction this is this is life itself you can't 2:28:23 play with this and in our society many people say well you know technology has basically flattened 2:28:30 the playing field between gay and straight couples because now you can have gay marriages or 2:28:36 lesbian and they can just have artificial means of reproduction have their own families we say no no 2:28:41 no those means of reproduction are forbidden even for heterosexual couples so the fact that you're 2:28:46 trying to justify these new arrangements based on that technology what a technology we don't even 2:28:51 accept it to begin with so it's not an argument in your favor at least from our perspective right 2:28:56 further islamic principles related to gender there are two genders many verse in the quran we saw 2:29:03 he created the male and the female there is this notion of an intersex person born physiologically 2:29:09 with ambiguous gender this has been known since time eternal in the sharia talks about that this 2:29:15 is not psychological gender dysphoria which is different someone who has an unambiguously male 2:29:20 or female body is considered by the sharian to be a male or female a man or a woman accordingly 2:29:25 so biological sex and psychological gender you know this distinction which came about in the 2:29:31 70s 60s 70s 80s this is not something that we as muslims you know would uh would run with 2:29:38 right this idea that your biological sex and your psychological gender okay they might be disparate 2:29:43 but normatively they should be they should line up these are not free-floating variables and we 2:29:48 said this earlier if you're male and have a male body the norm is that you would actually identify 2:29:53 as a man now maybe you don't that's gender dysphoria that's gender identity disorder 2:29:57 we can deal with that but it doesn't mean that there is no sort of normative connection between 2:30:02 the physical body and the psychological gender right now something also very important and 2:30:08 this you know is going to be uncomfortable for many contemporary muslims especially in the west 2:30:12 deliberate imitation of the opposite sex is forbidden specifically in dress and affectations 2:30:18 and there's a famous hadith which is narrated in several different variations that uh actually not 2:30:24 god is cursed but that the prophet said the prophet cursed men who deliberately imitate 2:30:30 women and women who deliberately imitate men okay now what does this mean deliberately imitate it's 2:30:36 very important that we understand deliberately imitating because there can be men and islam is 2:30:42 realistic there can be men who are more effeminate by nature in their speech in their you know um 2:30:49 mannerisms in the way they behave there could be women who are kind of more masculine 2:30:53 by nature this is not what's being talked about here it's the ones who deliberately imitate who 2:30:59 take on by design the characteristics that are known in a particular society to belong to the 2:31:04 other sects so exactly early on with you those drag queens that go into uh school yeah drugs 2:31:10 between story hours really uh dressed up in the most outrageous uh women's clothes and that is 2:31:16 very deliberate because it's completely unnatural i mean it's very artificial but that would be an 2:31:21 example of deliberately imitating women or a certain very crude and exaggerated uh uh 2:31:27 imitation of women i don't think any normal woman would look like that but anyway so that's actually 2:31:31 a good example yeah right right and the idea is that you can always you know decide how you dress 2:31:37 right you might not be able to control your gait or your mannerisms or your speech but you know 2:31:42 you can always choose what to wear and so actually as buhari one of the main phrase collectors he put 2:31:47 this hadith in the chapter on dress in his book so the you know this was understood as really 2:31:54 again things that you can consciously um that you can consciously control so what about those 2:31:59 who fall outside of this binary right um and so this comes up again these are real and we're going 2:32:04 to get into this now very shortly these are real conditions that people might you know we said they 2:32:10 might actually feel psychologically um not in line with the body right so what do we do about this 2:32:15 so we say sex gender identity and expression and sexual orientation should normatively line 2:32:21 up in other words they are quote unquote meant to line up that is the normal thing right and it 2:32:26 is the normative thing so this gender-bred person which we'll see again in a minute 2:32:30 right where gender is you know sex male female gender man woman sexual orientation gay straight 2:32:37 gender expression you know masculine feminine these are all considered like four free-floating 2:32:42 variables they may or may not match up and you can mix and match however you want and it's all 2:32:46 they're all equally normatively fine we would say no right normatively they should all line up but 2:32:51 we understand that for some people they won't and people are not morally responsible for that to the 2:32:57 extent that it's not something that they have chosen or brought about to on themselves right 2:33:02 um so exceptions to the rule like you know misalignment do not undermine the rule itself 2:33:08 that is the normativity of things like what the normativity of the male female gender binary 2:33:14 absolutely central to the way god has created us as human beings as he says in the quran right 2:33:20 also it does not undermine the normativity of the expectation of broad conformity to the behavioral 2:33:24 norms dress and mannerisms of one's natal sex or gender right and we're not allowed to 2:33:29 imitate the opposite sex um uh willfully right and this also does not undermine the normativity of 2:33:36 opposite sex attraction and within marriage opposite sex sexual expression doesn't mean 2:33:41 everyone necessarily falls into that but the fact that some people might not be attracted to the 2:33:45 opposite sex and they might be attracted to their own sex that doesn't undermine the normativity of 2:33:50 opposite sex attraction so does that make it quote-unquote heteronormative yes obviously we 2:33:56 would not consider that a term of abuse but it's used as a there'd be a virtue rather than a yeah 2:34:03 right yeah right now very important question and again we are wrapping up so i i uh paul i can tell 2:34:09 i know you've been traveling so i i'm sorry to to go on for so long now this is uh extremely helpful 2:34:15 and useful please continue am i sinful for feeling attracted to my own sex or not identifying with my 2:34:20 own gender right am i sinful just for having those feelings whether it's i'm attracted to my own 2:34:25 gender you know erotically or sexually or i don't you know um identify with my with my actual sex 2:34:32 right there's a key islamic principle and this is very important for especially for people who are 2:34:36 you know not as familiar with how these issues play out in people's actual lives right 2:34:41 key islamic principle you are morally responsible only for what you have control over right
2:34:50 that god does not bear does not burden a soul with greater than it can bear you are not called 2:34:56 to account for what you don't have control over so if you are despite yourself you find that you are 2:35:01 attracted to your own sex right you are not responsible for those feelings to the extent that 2:35:08 you did not choose those and people who experience that general don't choose that it's not something 2:35:12 you choose it's something that you kind of experience and you discover within yourself 2:35:15 so you're not morally responsible just for having those feelings right it doesn't mean that 2:35:20 okay you fantasize and you you know whatever you you have ways and then you can live in 2:35:24 ways that might you know encourage right that's different those are things you're choosing to do 2:35:28 but just the very kind of base fact that okay i i discover when i became a teenager that you know 2:35:34 i'm erotically attracted to my own sex rather than the other sex this does not make you a evil person 2:35:39 or a sinful muslim or let alone a non-muslim of course not you're not if you don't have control 2:35:45 over you're not morally responsible however right so merely experiencing same-sex attractions or 2:35:51 gender identity disorder or dysphoria does not constitute a sin and this as far as i know is sort 2:35:57 of agreed upon i mean all scholars would agree with this however right we are still responsible 2:36:02 for our actions because you choose your actions specifically refraining from sexual behavior 2:36:10 right or deliberate imitation or impersonation of the opposite sex right cross-dressing you know 2:36:15 socially transitioning to the other sex chemically or surgically transitioning also these are 2:36:21 by consensus of muslim scholars sunni muslim scholars are forbidden there is some difference 2:36:26 of opinion uh within shiite circles based on the facts were given by the late ayatollah 2:36:32 the leader of the iranian revolution who died in 1989 many shiite scholars don't accept that 2:36:37 you know that permission but there is some discussion there but among sunni scholars 2:36:42 there is a consensus that gender transitioning is is prohibited it doesn't mean there's not a 2:36:48 recognition that people can have gender dysphoria but it means that it is not permissible to try to 2:36:54 deal with that by changing the body um and so this gender bred person i told you we would meet 2:37:00 him again and i already talked about it so sexual orientation you know heterosexual homozygous scale 2:37:06 biological sex female male intersex right it's real there's the intersex condition that's been 2:37:11 dealt with in the shadia gender expression you can be either feminine or expression masculine 2:37:15 or androgynous gender identity woman man genderqueer and these are children are 2:37:20 being taught this now right so your sex is your gonads like you know your genitalia basically 2:37:26 orientation is who you're attracted to and romantically and sexually that's in your heart 2:37:30 identity is how you identify in your brain as a man or a woman and your gender expression is you 2:37:36 know the body how you interact and present and again the sharia regulates this it's not up to 2:37:43 you as a person to just kind of again take this to the psychologization of the south well i feel 2:37:48 this internally therefore i'm an inauthentic person unless i'm allowed to just do this 2:37:53 right and if you don't accept me as a muslim community and you don't accept my gender 2:37:57 expression or my gender identity or my sexual orientation i.e acting upon it in ways that are 2:38:01 well you've undermined my dignity right and that's sort of how that moral discourse goes we 2:38:06 say no no no no that's not what our conception of the human being is based on to begin with 2:38:11 you're importing a completely foreign ideology and a completely foreign world view into islam
2:38:18 um okay i'm not gonna i mean i already talked about this a little bit 2:38:26 when it comes to gender non-conformity right and we are really almost done here when it comes 2:38:30 to gender non-conformity uh scholars recognize that there is a conventional component right a 2:38:36 component to what counts as male versus female uh you know uh dress interest behavior there's some 2:38:43 socially quote unquote socially kind of influence or socially constructed component but nevertheless 2:38:48 all societies differentiate between males and females so if i go back to 18th century america 2:38:53 and look at the way the founding fathers of this country dress they had these big furly wigs you 2:38:58 know i mean like curly long curly hair these frilly blouses and tights like stockings and for 2:39:04 us if you dress that way they're going to think you're dressed in drag that's very feminine for us 2:39:08 today but in their time that's how men dressed so that's conventional but that's not how women 2:39:13 dressed at their time the women there there's very billowing dresses and the you know whatever 2:39:18 so the men and women dressed differently they didn't dress the same even in our age even just 2:39:22 like unisex like i'm wearing what i'm wearing and what you're wearing is clearly men's clothing you 2:39:27 know woman's blouse is always cut like curved and you know it's always different like men and women 2:39:31 are not the same right so there's some cultural component to that but the idea is that whatever is 2:39:37 largely generally recognized as being masculine or feminine in your society you're actually bound 2:39:42 in the sharia to sort of conform to that well can i just be my own autonomous individual and throw 2:39:47 off the shackles of society no i mean that that's russo that's the 19th century that's 2:39:52 secular european psychologization of the self and radical autonomy that's not islam right so choose 2:39:58 your paradigm choose your religion but you know don't try to mix the two they're not the same 2:40:03 dress as we said strictly forbidden on the basis of the hadith quoted to imitate the 2:40:08 opposite sex and dress accoutrements etc as conventionally recognized in one society 2:40:14 what about mannerisms i'm a male i have a high voice or i kind of have effeminate you know 2:40:19 walk or you know hand movements right um the scholars actually again this is a phenomenon 2:40:24 we see this in society right a man could be even heterosexual but kind of effeminate right it's 2:40:29 this or a woman could be kind of masculine and all right scholars recognize that a person could 2:40:34 have gender atypical mannerisms gate voice etc um the man would be called muhammad 2:40:40 right that's a male with effeminate mannerisms and a woman a female with masculine mannerisms 2:40:45 what did the scholars say about this right they said these these mannerisms they could be either 2:40:51 which means constitutional like the person's just it's natural to that person 2:40:55 or it could be affected like they're taking it on their they're purposely doing it we know if it's 2:41:01 purposeful then that's forbidden we've already seen that right so purposely effect affecting 2:41:06 such mannerisms is harambe consensus however if it comes to somebody naturally right effeminate 2:41:11 tendencies to a man or sort of more masculine you know to a woman right the scholars here 2:41:18 have differed some of them said that the person should try to recondition himself or herself 2:41:24 you know try to make reasonable efforts to bring their behavior more in line with what's typical of 2:41:29 their sex and if they don't try to then they're sinful for not trying but if they try to and 2:41:34 they can't do it after a reasonable effort then the blame drops and you know that's fine okay 2:41:39 other scholars said they're not even obligated to even attempt as long as it came to them naturally 2:41:43 and they didn't deliberately do it they don't have to it would normally make your life probably 2:41:47 easier just socially speaking especially for a man you know i mean there's a particular stigma 2:41:52 in most societies against effeminate men often you know it'd probably make one's life easier 2:41:56 you know to to kind of rehabituate if possible some people might find that very difficult and 2:42:01 if they do then they're actually not blamed for that and they should not be um made fun 2:42:05 of it would actually be haram to do that they should not be categorized as being any particular 2:42:10 way or it should not be assumed that they engage in particular sexual behavior like 2:42:14 same-sex behavior just because they might appear as feminine right this is these are all this is 2:42:19 all fun which is kind of um suspicious thinking of someone and this is actually haram to to to 2:42:27 have that in islam okay interests and behavior islam is not super prescriptive when it comes to 2:42:33 thing like things like personal likes and dislikes right girls being more into sports or bricolage 2:42:39 boys being interested in using an art or cooking okay might not be that typical of your sex 2:42:43 but as long as the activity itself is not forbidden there is no particular stigma 2:42:47 you know i mean one can pursue one's interest so there is a latitude there and the sona has lots 2:42:53 of examples of things that in our society modern west or whatever you know we might consider out 2:42:57 of character men crying profusely right also the prophet peace be upon him was not above domestic 2:43:02 tests in seventh century arabia sweeping the floor mending his own socks right we don't say oh that's 2:43:07 just women's work well okay maybe more typically but it doesn't mean that you know it's beneath a 2:43:12 man for example our prophet peace be upon him did this right uh important we don't have an idea of 2:43:17 womanhood that is akin to the victorian notion of the kind of dainty delicate fainting female you 2:43:24 know like ah like so frail and weak and we don't really see that in islam like okay men and women 2:43:29 aren't the same men in general are stronger than women physically i mean obviously that's 2:43:33 that's not really disputable but this idea that women are these kind of fragile porcelain kind of 2:43:38 like fainting you know this is not really i mean even in the west i mean you could say like that's 2:43:44 uh you know localizable to particular time periods and cultures but you know we don't 2:43:48 have this in islam what counts as appropriate same-sex interaction is largely conventional 2:43:54 many muslim men you know as that people know are very touchy-feely compared to men in the west 2:43:58 they're constantly hugging and kissing and you know many eastern societies walking hand in hand 2:44:02 even sometimes with you know their fingers crossed and this in the west you know i mean this would 2:44:08 clearly be you know you'd say okay well they're they're gay if two men are walking like that 2:44:12 in the east um you know this is not taken to be uh sexual at all it's just you know friends are very 2:44:19 you know close they have close physical you know kind of contact um however this is changing as 2:44:24 western norms continue to dominate the world and propagate themselves through media and technology 2:44:30 i was told that you know when i was in cairo in the mid 90s it was very common for men to 2:44:34 walk around with all social classes holding hands in the streets and hooking arms and 2:44:38 i was told that no one does that anymore in cairo so i i actually asked a friend of mine 2:44:43 who's an academic in cairo professor there and he said exactly what you said he lives 2:44:48 there now yeah yeah exactly and and this is not good news because it means the entire western 2:44:53 sexual paradigm is becoming deeply imbibed even by muslims abroad now in the muslim world right 2:44:59 um and now you have cairo youth saying oh well that's gay you know to walk holding my friend what 2:45:04 do you mean gay like we don't have that concept in islam we're not that concept we have actions 2:45:08 we don't have a sexual identity to begin with well but guess what they're taking it on because 2:45:13 you know again western norms are very aggressively pushed as the only valid ones and western culture 2:45:19 continues to dominate through its products movies television cinema the internet and so forth 2:45:24 and so muslims are not you know exempt from being uh affected by this but we should be aware of it 2:45:30 because it's not innocent right it has implications um there are clear islamic guidelines 2:45:34 that transcend culture right so we said there was a cultural element as to what is appropriate 2:45:38 same-sex interaction that's not without limits so again we've seen there's a prohibition of 2:45:43 seeing or touching the aura or private parts of someone of the same sex specifically particularly 2:45:49 prohibited in the hadith to lie naked together together under one sheet even if the lights are 2:45:53 off because well you know i mean that's a very precarious position to be in so there are clear 2:45:58 islamic guidelines that kind of transcend culture but within these guidelines cultures 2:46:02 can differ on these things intersex individuals there's a you know quite extensive uh islamic 2:46:12 discussion of of the junta the intersex individual i will not talk about it here we have plenty of 2:46:16 work and i'll show in the resources you can read a lot about this topic gender identities disorder um 2:46:23 again it would be seen more as a psychological or emotional condition it's not a third sex 2:46:27 or a woman a actual woman actually trapped in a man's body this is kind of a foreign concept 2:46:32 but it would be seen as a a psychological or emotional mismatch between the body which 2:46:37 again can be very acute very painful very real for people but the idea is how do we deal with it and 2:46:42 how do we conceptualize it um and we said hormonal and surgical transition procedures are not 2:46:48 permitted islamically all right the last leg are we good to go yes please all right 2:46:55 so what is homosexuality right we figured wasn't this what the whole talk was about well yes and 2:47:01 we've been building up to this and hopefully again all the pieces will fall into place 2:47:05 what is homosexuality the contemporary background we always have to question our terms 2:47:09 there's a principle in the sharian that one can only judge a thing when it is properly conceived
2:47:18 so if you want to say what something is or isn't or you know give a moral judgment or 2:47:23 legal we have to have a conceptualization first of what is it so when you say homosexuality 2:47:27 what is that i don't even know what that is i don't have an arabic word for it so what is it 2:47:31 lgbt you know again i put it in quotation marks in the beginning because i'm questioning the category 2:47:36 right i i can't translate that into islamic terms so we have to understand what we're talking about 2:47:42 so homosexuality in contemporary parliaments and even the word homosexuality now is old-fashioned 2:47:47 and considered offensive by many people and like the lgbt uh you know uh who identify 2:47:53 as lgbt i think it's fine i mean it's just purely uh clinical it's it's like science homosexuality 2:47:59 same sex that's all it means but anyway and i prefer to use it because it's not our term we 2:48:04 don't have a term that is exactly similar to that in classical islamic terms i mean there 2:48:09 are neologisms that that translate homosexuality into very arabic but i think homosexuality is more 2:48:15 neutral than lgbt which carries a lot of political and social baggage and best for muslims to avoid 2:48:21 you know using lgbt as a term especially internally right because it brings a lot of 2:48:27 baggage and a lot of assumptions with it that that you know we would need to vet into and to be 2:48:33 critical of so homosexuality in contemporary parlance it usually refers to 2:48:39 feelings of romantic and or sexual attraction to member members of one's own sex that's one 2:48:45 element of it another element engaging in on the basis of these feelings engaging in romantic 2:48:51 relationships and or sexual behavior with members of one's own sex so we saw this before action 2:48:56 or attractions and desires and then behavior that follows thereupon and then third adopting 2:49:02 a personal and social identity based on such feelings and or relationships and acts so these 2:49:08 are three things which again traditionally for us as muslims and also in the west have been separate 2:49:13 your attractions are one thing you're not a specific category of human beings just because 2:49:17 you might feel a particular attraction even if you act on it it's an act you do not something 2:49:21 you are but in the contemporary paradigm all of those are fused together you know inextricably 2:49:27 you're attracted you act upon it and that is who you are it's the basis of your identity 2:49:30 so we have to be very careful as muslims not to take on terminology which brings on board with it 2:49:36 this inextricability because we have to keep these separate otherwise you know islam makes no sense 2:49:42 and we cannot operationalize our categories of thought or our categories if we do that 2:49:49 so modern culture again it amalgamates these three into one i am gay lesbian queer right 2:49:55 it's something that i am not something that i feel not something that i do this is again very new and 2:50:00 culturally specific to the modern west homosexual sentiment and behavior is widely attested or why 2:50:06 they are tested in past societies but were never taken as an identity this is very particular to 2:50:11 the current cultural moment right and is therefore contingent upon that moment i.e it was something 2:50:15 that you did not something that you were again that's a good take-home message you know like 2:50:20 phrase to remember right and then there's the illusion of any meaningful distinction between 2:50:26 or sorry the illusion of any meaningful distinction between desires and actions is 2:50:30 morally problematic so eliding means to get rid of right when you say well just because i have 2:50:34 a desire i can act upon it well if you apply that consistently you're going to run to a lot of moral 2:50:39 problems and very uh very quickly right so of course the mere existence of a desire can never be 2:50:47 a moral justification for acting upon it we need other moral criteria brought to bear on it 2:50:52 for the contemporary post-sexual revolution west what's the criterion 2:50:56 consent as long as you're consent no problem for us as muslims that's never the criteria criteria 2:51:01 is what you know when god and his messenger decide upon something it's not for believing or 2:51:06 not for believing men or women when god and his messenger have decided on something to have a 2:51:11 choice in the matter right that's our criteria so we look to revelation to see what god has actually 2:51:15 permitted and prohibited of various desires that we might have um and so considering homosexuality 2:51:21 a question of identity rather than a question of acts fundamentally alters the conversation 2:51:28 and this is very important because the modern west right just assumes that it is a question of 2:51:33 identity and insists on treating it and speaking about it and conceptualizing it in that way 2:51:39 and and and therefore the deck is already stacked against anyone who's coming from 2:51:44 a different paradigm which says no no no i'm just i'm talking about specific acts 2:51:48 no but those acts are core to who i am so if you don't accept the acts and celebrate them 2:51:52 in your mosque and in your community then you are excluding me as an entire person 2:51:57 you're undermining me you're excluding you know uh not recognizing my dignity and so forth 2:52:05 so we saw this before right uh modern western culture it separates these things which should 2:52:09 be and are by nature together sex reproduction marriage morality and it also amalgamates desires 2:52:15 actions and identities should be separate and it puts them together so again this slide you know 2:52:19 take a mental picture keep that in mind this is really the key to unpacking a lot of this 2:52:24 very you know complex issues that come up you know there's a very good prism to to unlock and 2:52:30 untangle a lot of those knots um also and we talked about this it incorrectly separates iec's 2:52:36 as free-floating variables biological sex you know gender identity expression sexual orientation 2:52:42 we say no those should be aligned okay we understand that they might not be 2:52:46 okay and that's fine a person's not morally responsible for what they don't have control over 2:52:49 but normatively yes they should be aligned and we're not embarrassed to say that um while drawing 2:52:55 a false equivalence between race gender and sexual identity or behavior and throwing again 2:53:00 race gender and sexual lgbt all into one you know again we talked about why this is problematic um 2:53:08 okay versus on the people of lot we're just going to go through some of this very quickly 2:53:12 because someone might say how can you have such a long talk on lgbt and not talk about the verse 2:53:16 in the quran right because recently these these are usually the first go-to verses in for some 2:53:22 muslims when talking about this you simply refer to the verses of the people of lot uh none of the 2:53:27 proceeding discussion happens uh and sometimes it is relevant to just go to those verses i'm 2:53:32 not saying you shouldn't do that but these are this is usually how it happens just go straight 2:53:36 to the verses those particular ones without any other context or considerations whatsoever so 2:53:42 uh it's interesting you you're doing it this way without a lot of complex historical depth 2:53:46 uh and theoretical discussions and as you've done so eloquently so yeah sergeant dropped okay 2:53:52 all right and so we are almost there i do promise um all right so verses on the people of lot and 2:53:59 again there has been some uh contest contestation of the meaning of these verses by certain 2:54:05 you know uh secularly trained western academics muslim identifying western academics and you know 2:54:11 we'll read some of these verses and talk very briefly about it it's it's it's very 2:54:15 uh you know very thin but anyway um so so the people of lot also mentioned the bible is 2:54:22 mentioned in at least nine different places in the quran totaling over 75 verses so this story comes 2:54:27 up over and over and over again okay same-sex sexual relations between men particularly in 2:54:32 that story were the emblematic sin of lot's people okay the so every prophet he came you know that 2:54:39 his people had a specific sin that they were known for and this was the emblematic sin of the people 2:54:44 of thought other misdeeds are mentioned in a few verses actually i think just one right but quote 2:54:49 unquote approaching males with desire instead of females is the transgression that is mentioned 2:54:54 most often and in greatest detail with respect to the people of lot okay revisionists i just 2:55:00 mentioned they've tried to reinterpret the sin as one of rape or inhospitality to lot's guests 2:55:05 and we'll see why this is basically you know nonsensical um but the quran repeatedly mentions 2:55:12 the same-sex aspect of the act in particular as the defining feature of their iniquitous nature 2:55:17 and it's very clear that for example and mentioned lot when he said to his people do you commit 2:55:23 iniquity such as none in creation have committed before you okay what is this iniquity verily you 2:55:29 come with desire unto men instead of women nay you are a people transgressing beyond balance okay end 2:55:35 of story but the only reply this people was to say turn them out from your town truly they are people 2:55:40 who keep themselves pure and then it moves on so it's not rape it's not you know forcing it's not 2:55:47 you come to men with desire instead of women like if that's not clear that what's being 2:55:51 concentrated on here is the gender of the partner i don't i don't see how it could possibly be 2:55:56 clearer well i i think there is without going interest because this is very long but uh 2:56:01 i i personally i think the reason is many of people who argue this are drawing on uh christian 2:56:07 or jewish uh uh interpretations of this story in in genesis in the bible where the the the rape 2:56:16 theme is arguably there and and they're simply reading the chronic verses through the biblical 2:56:23 story which is actually in important respects different although there are many similarities as 2:56:27 well so they're basically using uh kind of a gay hermeneutic has been used to justify homosexuality 2:56:33 uh biblically and and just basically i recognize exactly the same arguments i'm familiar with the 2:56:39 um story and the attempts revisionist attempts to reinterpret it and they're basically copying 2:56:45 and pasting that and using it for the quran the quran's anarchy but as you 2:56:49 say the quran's narrative does actually have that quite distinctive feature of 2:56:53 you know that that they turn to to to males rather than females and that emphasis is not 2:56:57 as much in the bible as it is in the quran so they're basically taking that narrative from 2:57:05 christian revisionism and using it for the quran in a very kind of wooden way 2:57:09 without really attending to the the the nuances and the details of the quranic version and that's 2:57:15 very interesting but also it's you know in the christian jewish case it also is a case of 2:57:20 modern very contemporary reinterpretation right because oh yeah i don't think i want to stress i 2:57:24 don't think it works for the bible either actually i'm not saying oh it's just about raping the bible 2:57:29 no it's not i i think i think that that that is a uh easter jesus rather than into it their exegesis 2:57:36 agenda but nevertheless it's even less plausible with the quran if it ever was plausible in the 2:57:40 bible and there was also the story and we'll see it where the you know the angels come in 2:57:44 the form of young men to the lot's house and then the people come after so you could say well maybe 2:57:47 they're kind of trying to force but again it's very it's very uh and then and then there's some 2:57:52 extremely clear hadith obviously which are very specific about the act so um it's pretty uh uh 2:57:58 indisputable i think hard to get around yeah so um great so the next verse i'm not going to 2:58:05 read it because it's too long it's just to give context but again people will have these slides 2:58:09 you can go back and read it for yourself selves we'll just go to these last couple 2:58:13 ones to round this off and mention lot when he said to his people do you commit iniquity 2:58:18 with why with eyes wide open do you indeed come with desire unto men instead of women 2:58:23 nay but you are people behaving foolishly okay so again very specific what the problem is with 2:58:29 their behavior and then in another again so that was uh in sort of the number now 2:58:34 and mentioned lot when he said to his people you commit iniquity the same word 2:58:38 such as none and creation have created committed before you do you indeed come unto men and cut off 2:58:43 the road and practice evil deeds in your assembly so here we get two other things you know the 2:58:47 sort of highway robbery and then other types of unspecified evil deeds that they practice 2:58:51 in their assemblies which scholars have speculated on right um so here are some other sins but we saw 2:58:56 all these other cases it's like very specifically you know the same-sex uh nature of their act the 2:59:01 people the reply of his people is but to say bring upon us god's punishment if you are 2:59:05 among the truthful so they're quite haughty and sort of you know not very concerned that 2:59:11 this might bring on god's punishment as if they're challenging him and when our messengers and i just 2:59:15 met the angels came to lot he was anguished on their account and constrained from helping them 2:59:20 and he said this is a trying day and his people came hastening unto him and before they and before 2:59:27 that they had been working evil deeds he said lot said oh my people these are my daughters 2:59:32 they are purer for you so fear god and disgrace me not with respect to my guests is there not among 2:59:38 you a right-minded man they said you know well what that we have no claim on your daughters and 2:59:44 indeed you know what we want i eat your guests your guests your male guests now this is one of 2:59:49 the um you know uh verses that the revisionists will point to to say okay well look this is the 2:59:55 rape you know this is the implied rape scene and you say but wait a minute but lot's response is 3:00:00 these are my daughters right they're purer for you right so these are men here my daughters my 3:00:06 daughters are women what's the difference between the guests and the daughters it's their gender 3:00:10 and if you assume that these men want to rape the guests it's not reasonable to think lot is saying 3:00:15 well oh don't rape my guests because that's inhospitable but rape my daughter's instead 3:00:20 no doesn't make any sense i mean if that were the case so why does he why is he not blaming them for 3:00:26 wanting to rape why would he say take my daughters instead and then he says they're purer for you 3:00:30 and you don't say well you know um uh don't rape somebody because it's not pure to rape 3:00:36 someone like just have consensual sex because it's more pure like that that's not not how 3:00:40 anyone talks i mean when he says they're pure for you they're pure for you because 3:00:44 you're men and they're women and that's a pure act right not this act with these men it's it's like 3:00:49 super clear but again you know leave it up to academics to kind of complicate right um 3:00:56 and so anyway reinterpreting this as rape right in a classic is a classic example 3:01:04 of anachronistically projecting contemporary notions onto the texts such as this post-sexual 3:01:10 revolution fixation on consent as the only relevant criterion it's so obvious i mean 3:01:15 people say well wait a minute you know it must be that there's a lack of consent here because 3:01:20 that's the only thing that makes sense to us you know that's the only crime that we could 3:01:24 imagine is that there was just a lack of consent and therefore it must have been raped because 3:01:29 don't we all know that consent is really what matters when it comes to sexual behavior and 3:01:33 i mean this is like this is i mean this is obviously just you know taking like literally 3:01:38 the last three decades kind of you know a sexual measuring stick for sexual morality 3:01:45 and just projecting it thousands of years into the past and reading it into a text where it clearly 3:01:50 has nothing to do with it but yeah i i mean it's a bit of interesting uh john boswell the 3:01:55 american harvard uh professor uh uh um who wrote the the classic revisionist work from a christian 3:02:01 point of view on this story in the bible um in the 80s i think i mean he sadly died of aids 3:02:08 himself uh subsequently but um he he proposed that it's true with rape and and so on but 3:02:14 his work was then uh as as indeed um is often the case was critically assessed by biblical scholars 3:02:21 and was found to be very wanting and indeed the top experts now in the biblical field 3:02:27 except that this passage and solomon gomorrah passed you the lot passage and others do 3:02:31 speak of homosexual acts actually okay even though these owns these scholars themselves don't agree 3:02:39 with the bible and i think professor john barton who had the immense privilege of speaking to on 3:02:44 my channel professor of bible at oxford university when he was leading biblical scholars of the old 3:02:48 testament um he he has said this to me he he said no the the revisionist uh argument that is about 3:02:56 rape it's not real it's completely wrong it's not based on the hebrew text it it's 3:03:00 it's easter jesus rather exegesis but i professor john barton don't agree with the bible anyway 3:03:07 i mean so you know and this in fact the world's preeminent scholar in this field it's not john 3:03:12 barton it's a specialist in this area i forget the the scholar's name he's written the the 3:03:17 scholarly text is usually seen as the defining uh clearly states the revisionist case has failed 3:03:23 and the traditional understanding is correct but this very author himself rejects it doesn't agree 3:03:30 with the bible because that they're very liberal or they view the bible as purely a 3:03:34 human construct like john barton they publicly does so you know the the traditional reading 3:03:40 is the correct one but many christians simply don't accept it anyway they'll say well we 3:03:44 don't agree with that we we have our own views we're modern people we accept the lgbt agenda 3:03:50 remarkable irony that the traditional reading actually wins at the end of the day 3:03:54 but people still disregard it anyway you know what i'd say paul at least be honest you know they're 3:03:59 being honest they're saying here's what the text says we can't make it say what it doesn't say 3:04:04 implausibly we might have wished it to say something different but it doesn't 3:04:08 and we don't agree with okay we're not going to follow it but okay but don't try to like play 3:04:13 games with what it actually says and this idea of like we can just read into it anything we want or 3:04:19 that's not plausible i mean i i know advocates say this you'll hear this on social media and so on 3:04:23 that a serious scholarship doesn't go along with that but serious scholarship 3:04:27 the individuals who write that will actually accept the gay agenda anyway because they are 3:04:32 modern enlightened western people and part of the liberal academy you're not committed to the bible 3:04:36 they would accept that publicly they would say oh no we support all these agendas even though 3:04:40 the bible correctly understood and historical content is actually speaking of these acts 3:04:44 yes they were prohibited then but today as john bob said to me we live in a different world and 3:04:48 therefore we can accept these acts right that's what they argue yeah yeah exactly he's the he uh 3:04:54 he's british right yes yeah i saw that actually and i i remember that um you pushed him on that 3:05:00 yeah yeah yeah i did because i i've actually i've actually got we've got the book here it's just i'm 3:05:05 going to go into the details now but he he's very praising of of a top uh academic work written by 3:05:11 an american evangelical scholar which completely demolishes a revisionist argument 3:05:15 john how can you agree with this he says that's a brilliant scholarship fantastic 3:05:20 what is your view oh i accept gay marriage how can you do that well his understanding of scripture 3:05:25 is very different from the evangelical scholars understanding of scripture it's a human product 3:05:29 therefore he is free serenely free to ignore it in his own modern understanding of human relations 3:05:36 and you know i mean saying that the quran is a human product that's you can't do that islamically 3:05:41 you absolutely can't do that with the quran the grammar yeah even a 3:05:45 revisionist would never say that because that would just take you out of the fold of islam 3:05:51 in islam it's locked down you can't play that game with the holy spirit 3:05:54 islam otherwise you you you'd be out of the fold of islam instantly right the quran being 3:05:59 the word of god is sort of definitional of islam and you know a lot of modern christians 3:06:04 don't really get that and they kind of say why are you guys a lot of christian scholars do that 3:06:07 they have a very very different understanding because the bible is a library of books written 3:06:10 by many different people and historical critical understanding means you can you know you can say 3:06:15 well this is just a human opinion maybe this is revelation it's much more complicated right and 3:06:19 so what muslim revisionists will do because they don't have the option of saying well it's just 3:06:23 a human text they'll say well of course it's the word of god but nevertheless god spoke to people 3:06:28 you know according to their near eastern context and they'll try to historicize i mean of course 3:06:33 you know we do take historical context into consideration it's part of the sharia 3:06:36 but there are very specific ways of doing that you can't just do it like at you know 3:06:40 you know with no kind of the wobbit or um you know parameters and and one of these scholars 3:06:46 actually who has been pushing you know this kind of revisionist line for a long time you 3:06:50 know you might say well okay if there's one thing that muslims could never disagree on 3:06:54 it must be what tahit like you know the oneness of god that's absolutely the most fundamental 3:06:59 you might say well maybe sexual behavior because pretty important but like tahrir is like there's 3:07:04 no islam without that okay this scholar has been pushing this i just saw like a tweet i don't know 3:07:09 when he put it up but it was just forwarded to me a few days ago where he actually said polytheism 3:07:15 is a derogatory term used by arrogant monotheists who don't understand that 3:07:20 their own conception of god is you know influenced by their near eastern you know media 3:07:26 right and and and they use it to derogate other people and uh and anyway these so-called 3:07:32 polytheists that's why i always say so-called polytheism theism and so-called monotheism 3:07:37 and in any case these uh the spirituality of these so-called polytheistic societies 3:07:42 has a much better track record when it comes to diversity and tolerance than the monotheists
3:07:52 on every level that they are you know so you can see that you're going to play that game 3:07:56 even tahrid itself even tao he does monotheism you can just historicize it the same way yeah 3:08:02 yeah and they're very dangerous i mean it's it's but anyway like okay fine at least you 3:08:07 see clearly like all right no thank you no thank you i mean how does that how are you 3:08:10 even like how do you even identify as muslim anymore that doesn't make any sense at all so 3:08:16 anyway um so sometimes it's good when things are stated that directly it allows you to see 3:08:22 the experts are very clear the passages do say what people traditionally answered them 3:08:25 to me that that that's really beyond dispute now i think yeah and so i'll just put here so the um uh 3:08:31 actually i forgot to hyperlink this but it's hyperlinked in the resources 3:08:34 the the classic you know article on this uh is by uh who have you had you've had on twice
3:08:42 he's an extraordinary individual actually yes masha'allah very very impressive hats off we 3:08:48 all try to follow him i had a coffee with him in chicago once i heard about that my 3:08:53 totally irrelevant boast but i had met him we actually sat down for a couple of hours 3:08:57 and talked shop it was awesome yes he very much enjoyed that he told me so can islam 3:09:02 accommodate homosexual acts potential revisionism and the case of scott coogle scott google is this 3:09:06 person who wrote this book you know um with this argument um he's not the author of the 3:09:12 exactly this is a book by the notorious scott coogle uh book which is uh massively criticized 3:09:19 definitively criticized many would say by mob invaders and i mean mobile invites article is is 3:09:24 even you know um uh is is uh assigned in university classrooms right because it's at that 3:09:30 level um scott coogle was not the author of the tweet that i just mentioned where the person was 3:09:34 i was wondering no it's someone it was another academic but not scott google just again you 3:09:40 know we have to be fair in our criticisms of weak critique i'm glad you clarified that because that 3:09:45 was my assumption the person for what he says not not for something either the verse is uncommon 3:09:50 people want to check them out here they are um okay building an islamic framework very 3:09:55 quickly on homosexuality again one can only judge a thing once it is properly conceived
3:10:02 so we realize the western paradigm is just a totally different paradigm it's not you know not 3:10:07 something that's really compatible so how do we as muslims conceive of this as i said there's no 3:10:12 single word for homosexuality in the shariah right again in the west also it's a new word because 3:10:19 um the sharia addresses what it addresses acts not desires i.e desires that are 3:10:26 things that are beyond one's control okay um islam does not categorize human beings on the 3:10:31 basis of mere desires sexual or other i.e a person does not come to does not come to be a particular 3:10:38 thing or come to constitute a particular class of human beings right a discrete on the basis of mere 3:10:44 desires and inclinations islam also does not place human beings into discrete identity categories on 3:10:50 the basis of acts even if someone has a desire and is acting upon them they're still not classified 3:10:54 as a discrete you know um uh type of human being they're just someone who's you know shadow hammer 3:11:00 this drinker of wine is someone who drinks wine if you stop drinking why you're not shattered 3:11:05 right if you're engaged in same-sex behavior okay maybe we'll there's a term that 3:11:09 describes your behavior if you don't engage in it there's no term that applies to you 3:11:13 just because you might have the desire or may have engaged in the end 3:11:17 question what is the best way to answer the question what does islam say about i know the 3:11:21 answer before you tell us the answer is i have the answer watch this video watch this video yeah oh
3:11:29 that's the answer to that question watch this video so what so homosexuality the 3:11:34 i hope people learn by now what that's a foreign term i don't understand what it means you know 3:11:38 we have to break it apart so what do you mean by homosexuality question your terms always 3:11:43 so we have to distinguish between desires act and identity again in islam these are all three 3:11:48 separate things they have three separate rulings three separate considerations three separate 3:11:52 conversations they're not just wrapped up into one what are the implications of accepting a western 3:11:57 sexual identity framework again we've already hit this home on this several times the identity 3:12:03 framework changes the discussion it elides moral concerns puts them completely to the side and it 3:12:09 frames the issue as one of social justice defined subjectively as opposed to one of god's command 3:12:15 a lost command which is paramount obviously for us as muslims and which itself embodies perfect 3:12:20 justice we cannot be more just than god we cannot be more compassionate he is right and when i say 3:12:26 it change the conversation when i was growing up in the 80s it was still common for people to say 3:12:31 lgbt didn't exist by the way we only homosexuality i mean the acronym i think came in the 90s 3:12:36 and people would say what do you think what do you think of homosexuality this was commonly asked 3:12:40 in the 80s it was understood again the larger you know assumptions of the culture it was understood 3:12:46 that you were asking about the actions and you were asking what was your moral opinion of them 3:12:51 it was understood that the question was asking about the morality of the actions and most people 3:12:55 would have said i think it's wrong that was like the normal thing to say in the 80s now 3:12:59 it's not the word homosexual is not used asking where you stand on it is like unacceptable right 3:13:05 we've replaced it now with lgbtq the reason why i say muslims should avoid this term is because it 3:13:10 is an identity term i mean it is inherently an identity term the way it's been used so 3:13:17 so the only question today and it's not really a question because there's only one answer that you 3:13:21 can have is where do you stand on lgbt rights so it went 30 years from what do you think about the 3:13:28 morality of a particular act to where do you stand on the civil rights of a discrete minority forget 3:13:33 about what the acts might be at all it's just a question of do you believe in equality freedom and 3:13:37 justice or are you a bigot who hates people i mean that that's how it's like that's the conversation 3:13:43 today right and and this is a direct result of the identity paradigm you know primarily um so you 3:13:51 know the last part of this then how can we build an islamic framework how does the sharia classify 3:13:57 sexual acts well there are halal and haram so permissible and impermissible that's the basic 3:14:04 distinction in the sharia what's halal we've already seen this a man and a woman bound by 3:14:08 an islamically valid contract what's haram all else we've seen that okay haram acts sexual acts 3:14:14 are further divided into gross enormities which are called quebec plural of kibera we saw quebec 3:14:20 earlier quebec is the plural so what are the gross enormities when it comes to sexual behavior there 3:14:25 are two one is male female zina which is vaginal intercourse between a man and woman 3:14:30 not married to each other okay or bound by a contract um and male male nuat sodomy i mean 3:14:37 specifically between two males between a man and a woman it's also forbidden but it's you know 3:14:42 it's a different category between two men so these two actions zina and liwat fornication 3:14:47 and sodomy are considered gross enormities um and then you have other sexual acts which are 3:14:54 neither of these two which are actually non-penetrative and for that reason they don't 3:14:58 reach the level of being sort of gross enormities although they are also forbidden and so this would 3:15:03 include all non-penetrative forbidden sexual acts between members of the opposite sex members of 3:15:08 the same sex just the whole gamut including uh what's known as sihak which is a specific word 3:15:14 um and it means grinding so literally female sort of genital grinding i.e lesbian acts so 3:15:21 all of these you know any type of non-penetrative uh sexual act between other than a married man and 3:15:27 woman would be considered prohibited uh in gross enormities are penetrated intercourse between a 3:15:32 man and a woman vaginal and male male penetrative intercourse uh the one that burger king 3:15:38 uh you know is celebrating with the whopper i was trying to forget about that you just reminded me 3:15:43 i'm never gonna be able to go burger king again eat a hamburger they're not that i do particularly 3:15:47 i think yeah anyway well yeah anyway so all of these things are called muharram which means 3:15:53 all these acts are prohibited intrinsically like for themselves the acts themselves are prohibited 3:15:58 right and then there are preludes to these prohibited sexual acts such as we've seen this 3:16:02 before touching gazing khalwa being alone in an isolated environment immodest stress speech and 3:16:07 behavior these are all considered muharram they are prohibited on account of another i.e because 3:16:13 they lead to that which is prohibited in and of itself which are the sexual acts themselves right 3:16:20 okay so that's done the very very last part of this and i promise the 3:16:24 last part of this before we just finish with the conclusions and the resources 3:16:29 what about the subjective experience and i said we would talk about this and we've talked about 3:16:33 it a little bit along the way right someone who is a muslim who says i feel same-sex attractions i'm 3:16:40 not attracted to the other sex i wish i were but i'm not and i can't just turn it on and off like a 3:16:45 light switch how do i live my life does allah hate me am i a walking sin am i going to hell for these 3:16:52 feelings right these are very important questions and people who have these feelings particularly 3:16:56 same sex desire it's all thrown together calmly you know the people of louis and fire and 3:17:01 brimstone rain down upon okay but wait a minute they were acting on it you're not acting again 3:17:06 you're putting yourself with them because you're not distinguishing acts from behavior because 3:17:11 that's part of the modern paradigm you are seeing them all together but that's not islam islam sees 3:17:17 the desires one thing the acts or another right so there are muslims faithful muslims believing 3:17:23 muslims practicing muslims who experience unchosen same-sex attractions and or gender 3:17:28 dysphoria this is real this is statistically any you know certain uh human population will have 3:17:34 always a number of people who face these types of issues and and muslims you know 3:17:39 are naive if they think this doesn't exist in the muslim community it absolutely does 3:17:43 much more than people actually would think because it's obviously not talked about right but this is 3:17:48 a very real issue all sorts of issues muslims are human beings like others we have anger issues drug 3:17:55 addiction issues we have issues of corruption and cheating and this and that and all human versus 3:18:01 virtues and vices to one degree or another are going to be present in any human community 3:18:05 we hope among muslims they the virtues would be greater and the vice is less 3:18:09 than people who don't practice the religion of islam and that's generally the case 3:18:12 but nevertheless we will always find and this is not virtual advice it's just internal conditions 3:18:18 we said again very important and i'm speaking obviously people watching this 3:18:22 some people watching this will be muslims who are watching this because they themselves fall 3:18:26 in this category and they are concerned how can i you know understand myself what do i do 3:18:31 with my religion what do i do with my sexuality right islam does not define or categorize people 3:18:36 on the basis of internal feelings you are not a specific sub-category of muslim you are a muslim 3:18:41 like anyone else a brother a sister a member of your masjid right there you are not this specific 3:18:48 kind of separate category of human being because you feel this particular thing right and again we 3:18:55 must always distinguish between the feelings and the acts on one hand and also between the acts and 3:19:00 advocacy on the other which we're starting to see unfortunately more and more of okay 3:19:04 muslims struggling faithfully and this is also for the everyone who's listening especially muslims 3:19:10 who maybe are not dealing with this muslims struggling faithfully with either ssas or same-sex 3:19:15 attractions or gid gender identities disorder or dysphoria they should be i said struggling 3:19:22 faithfully faithfully should be embraced and supported as mujahidun in the path of allah 3:19:27 these are people struggling in the way of allah they're struggling with challenges and temptations 3:19:32 like we all have our challenges and temptations and they are trying to live their lives according 3:19:36 to the will of god and to submit which is every muslim struggle and that is the straight struggle 3:19:43 guide us to the straight path every muslim is is trying to go the straight path no pi no the pun is 3:19:49 intended here and there is a support group called straight struggle you can just click on this 3:19:54 hyperlink and it is a support group for muslims who experience same-sex attractions or gender 3:20:00 dysphoria but who are committed to islam into living their lives it's a very good group i do 3:20:04 i do recommend it right and so they are coming together to support themselves and and share 3:20:10 resources and so on and so forth and there's also a group based in the uk strong support brother ali 3:20:16 al jaffari this started about two years ago two or three years ago so you have these two support 3:20:21 groups right now muslims again who don't deal with this should be aware these feelings cannot simply 3:20:27 be turned on and off like a switch well i feel that's disgusting well you know like allah gave 3:20:32 you women well okay yes that's right but this goes much deeper than that it's not simplistic 3:20:38 in that way and people again we can't afford to have such a simplistic uh you know understanding 3:20:44 especially given our current contacts if you speak that way people say okay this person has no idea 3:20:49 what this is even about right and and therefore anything you say on the issue is just gonna sound 3:20:54 you know ridiculous to many people including many sincere muslims by the way right again the gay 3:20:59 identity paradigm is very very uh you know this is a very critical thing that you know this the 3:21:05 identity paradigm is a big trap it is a trap for the community because it again it it it completely 3:21:13 up ends the moral discourse of the sharian it up ends the moral discourse because now the sharia is 3:21:19 is excluding people's core identities and undermining their dignity this makes mince 3:21:24 meat of the shariah also this can be a trap for the person him or herself right you're born in the 3:21:30 modern world okay well this is who i am we islam would say this is not who you are you're a muslim 3:21:35 you're a servant of god you're a creature of god you're the you don't have to identify with your 3:21:41 sexual drives even if you have exclusive same-sex desires okay that's something about you something 3:21:46 you have is not that doesn't define who you are at your core right again that's i hope you can 3:21:52 see now this is a modern social construct of the contemporary west this is not universal 3:21:58 it is not islamic yesterday or today this does not exist in other times and places you won't find 3:22:03 corresponding vocabulary in most other languages in the world you know today or in the past if it's 3:22:09 today only because they're translating from western languages because again the dominance 3:22:12 of the western paradigm right but in it but if you are someone who has grown up in the 3:22:18 west then you have no other language except oh my gosh i feel this i'm gay this is who i am 3:22:25 you have no other language to process it because that's the only language that's available to you 3:22:30 in the cultural sphere and and this talk hopefully has has you know helped you to see that wait a 3:22:36 minute that's a very contingent and specific way of construing this experience right and it can 3:22:42 be construed otherwise and these desires can be shuffled around and they can be given a different 3:22:48 meaning in my life and they don't have to form the core of my identity and you know uh and it 3:22:54 could in fact be very liberating not to have to carry around this burden that okay this is kind 3:23:00 of who i am at my core right especially when you know it conflicts with acting on it conflicts with 3:23:04 the religion this is puts you in a very difficult situation but you you know that identification 3:23:10 don't take it for granted right now other muslims who are hearing this don't say if someone comes 3:23:15 to you with it oh well don't identify it okay easier said than done went for 20 30 years or 3:23:20 whatever 15 years all you've been you've grown up in this kind of identity paradigm and if this has 3:23:26 been your struggle and you've come to like see yourself as a quote unquote gay person right 3:23:31 it's not just by hearing one talk or reading one article that you're gonna just undo all of that 3:23:35 oh okay tomorrow i don't identify anymore i have these desires but they're just desires and not who 3:23:39 i am and all okay this takes time this takes you know really a lot of thinking and redoing one's 3:23:46 emotional and you know internal rearranging ones furniture and all of that don't expect someone to 3:23:51 just like kind of uh you know oh well dr shadif said this was just western contingent whatever 3:23:57 so you know yeah well it's true but again we're all products of our time and place and we have 3:24:02 to look at this realistically right i've mentioned before and we're coming to this now this is going 3:24:06 to be the end we have a wealth of resources in our community to help faithful strugglers on this 3:24:12 path right um a beautiful article that i think all muslims should read especially in the west 3:24:17 whether they deal with this issue personally or not it's called from a same-sex attracted muslim 3:24:22 between denial of reality and distortion of religion beautiful piece written by brother 3:24:26 youssef who has been the um yes i think it's been published in there as well yes it is it's uh 3:24:32 sex matters love marriage and the sinner um that that is isn't it this book is also i do recommend 3:24:38 this generally for uh general discussions of sex in the islamic tradition um and of course paul 3:24:44 has it right at his finger pit tips right every relevant book you know truman and every everything 3:24:49 i've mentioned where's your where's your mcintyre i didn't see it afterwards you of course
3:25:02 moderator of the straight struggle support group for like 20 years yeah and he wrote this very 3:25:08 beautiful article and then a game changer in my opinion is a way beyond the rainbow podcast 3:25:13 brother jensen 88 episodes 88 episodes deals with this topic from every possible conceivable 3:25:21 angle that you can think of um psychological you know spiritual social personal family community 3:25:29 imams i mean same-sex attraction gender dysphoria marriage i mean everything 88 episodes um and and 3:25:37 i'll show you a little bit more of the details in a second on that right um some questions we won't 3:25:42 be able to deal with these distinguishing being gay so that's the identity paradigm from having 3:25:47 same-sex attractions we've talked about this where does homosexuality or same-sex attractions 3:25:52 come from i refer you to episodes seven and eight of the podcast uh way beyond the rainbow 3:25:57 um the brother goes into a great detail all of the research that's been done on this what it says 3:26:02 and what it doesn't say so i won't repeat any of that here um can homosexual homosexuality be quote 3:26:08 unquote cured or overcome again very murky and fraught question that cannot be answered you know 3:26:15 overcome it depends what one means by that cured i mean again uh you can find answers to that in 3:26:20 that podcast can someone with same-sex attractions ever hope to marry islamically i.e to an opposite 3:26:26 part sex part and have a family some perhaps some perhaps not again you know this is a big question 3:26:32 and there are several episodes dedicated to this in the podcast so i really appreciate it just on 3:26:36 that i know it's coming to the end but i'll just on that quite on the very question um it's quite 3:26:40 interesting i was i once read um an article by a uh a quite a respecting gay journalist actually he 3:26:47 said it's the big it's the big secret of the gay community um is that most gay men can actually 3:26:54 function heterosexually and um because it's it's relatively uncommon to have people who are 100 3:27:02 gay there's always you know most gay men can if they wished function heterosexually and 3:27:08 of course if the most famous example would be oscar wilde you actually had a family he 3:27:12 was married and had children he could function heterosexually although he was gay uh so people 3:27:18 forget that and think well if i'm if a person is gay that is their whole identity and their whole 3:27:23 possible expression of sexuality is usually not actually um and i i there are people who i know 3:27:30 who who identify as gay but i know that they are they have a heterosexual component because they 3:27:36 told me they do but they don't identify that way so this is very very true um it's quite 3:27:40 so in a different age many of these people would have married perhaps and had children uh but in 3:27:46 today's age they don't because they don't have to that pressure they would have married had 3:27:50 children maybe had these desires if they were they would have had they could function as 3:27:57 but it was not who they were you know um but today you're told if you feel like one drop of like you 3:28:03 know you're attracted to someone okay well then you're just a closet homosexual and that's who you 3:28:06 are and you're denying yourself you're bisexual and you must express both you know the whole 3:28:11 thing has been configured very differently then it didn't have to be this way but as you repeatedly 3:28:15 says it's a very historically contingent and recent development in just one part of the world 3:28:20 the west which because of its geopolitical power now is hegemonic over the planet but 3:28:25 it wasn't always that way five minutes ago in historical time it wasn't it was very different 3:28:31 absolutely yep and again that goes back again the identity paradigm is absolutely 3:28:36 key to all of this i mean it's it really explains you know every everything that we that we see um 3:28:42 how best to deal with individuals who experience ssa in our communities families etc again all of 3:28:47 this is you know very um uh dealt with in great detail in the podcast especially season five 3:28:52 season five brother moving vayad is on for i think four different episodes um imam is on 3:28:59 sheikh mustafar who's done great work on on this on this issue and has researched a lot into 3:29:05 uh same sex attraction gender just for you spoken very eloquently um so a lot of you 3:29:09 know the sort of well-known scholars in the west um and thinkers um are actually you know 3:29:15 share their experiences on this so again i won't repeat here because we we don't have time and 3:29:20 again you know i can refer you to the podcast how best to deal with non-muslim colleagues classmates 3:29:25 etc when it comes to this issue again i think the episodes particularly the shaykh mustafa omar 3:29:29 really goes into the details and also you know people ask well what about pronouns at 3:29:33 work and i have to you know he goes into all of this mustafa if you go to the the 3:29:38 um uh episodes that he does how should muslims deal with the cultural and political pressures 3:29:43 stemming from this issue in the public square particularly in the west um i refer you again to 3:29:48 brother morbine viad's a recent article from this january where the rainbow ends american muslims 3:29:55 came on blogging theology to discuss that article yes so you can see a video or read the article 3:30:00 exactly or both right okay now we're just wrap wrapping up alhamdulillah we're almost at the at 3:30:07 the end um so towards principles i have two slides here and this is basically just a wrap up you know 3:30:13 the take-home message from the from the entire evening or morning or wherever you are in the 3:30:17 world um so what do we need to do as a community if we want to i think um deal with this issue 3:30:23 effectively in a just compassionate and incorrect way we need to strongly and confidently establish 3:30:30 our islamic gender and sexuality paradigm is very different from the contemporary western one we 3:30:35 believe in gender essentialism we believe in the gender binary we're heteronormative it means all 3:30:40 of these terrible words that you've been told are like from the devil you know we deconstruct that 3:30:45 all that is that's all concocted vocabulary right and and we go to the mahani we go to the meanings 3:30:50 and we look at the wisdom of the legislation of our creator and we understand it and we establish 3:30:56 it uh you know the gender and sexually paradigm right so again gender is binary gender differences 3:31:02 are real and god-given again these are just take-home messenger messages sexual expression is 3:31:07 legitimate only in the context of marriage which is by definition heterosexual um act we should 3:31:13 also critique and deconstruct as we've tried to do paul and i uh in this uh podcast we should 3:31:19 actively critique and deconstruct west the western paradigm post-sexual revolution and show what is 3:31:26 wrong with it because it's harmful to people it har it's not just because muslims don't like it 3:31:31 it harms people right it leads people to destructive behaviors it leads them to sexual 3:31:35 chaos and not just in the realm of homosexuality i mean you know just even heterosexual sex is a mess 3:31:40 in the west today marriage is a mess partnering is a mess the sexual marketplace is a disaster i mean 3:31:45 there's the the the the uh repercussions and the fallout of the sexual revolution 3:31:51 no one wants to talk about it because it would strike at their core ideological 3:31:55 and moral commitments we still have people who are drinking the milk of the sexual revolution 3:32:00 who are adults today and they're not willing to you know to fundamentally question their 3:32:05 basic assumptions that they've taught made them enlightened modern people uh you know 3:32:10 uh post 60s and and we're going to continue to pay the price as long as that's the case i'm 3:32:15 sorry paul you recognized no i interrupted you no i was going to say there's also the 3:32:19 geopolitical uh position here that the uh before there was western colonialism it was perhaps 3:32:25 economic and then it was political then it was military military but today western colonialism 3:32:31 in my view is heavily ideological they can have the other things as well of course but it has a 3:32:36 new virulent form of ideological colonization where you you mentioned the tweets where the 3:32:41 american government is right uh the muslim world which is considered highly provocative of course 3:32:47 by that by by many muslim world and this this is a new form of colonialism which which is this lgbt 3:32:53 colonialism which is non-negotiable so the rest of the world must convert submit obey unconditionally 3:33:00 to the latest uh western colonial uh project which has been which is changing all the time by the way 3:33:07 this is why it's so tiresome isn't it it's always it's always changing you know how much more 3:33:12 because islam as a repeatable you say is based on the stability of god's revelation to humankind 3:33:18 and he's not constantly having to reinvent itself um so it's a sure anchor or a rope as you put it 3:33:24 earlier on for people to hold on to um but this is i think a manifestation of neocolonialism where 3:33:30 the wrestling is expected to come into line with western interests and ideas and ideologies as a 3:33:36 matter of principle because the west knows best it always has and always will do that 3:33:42 which is a huge arrogance and a form of imperialism itself of course yep i agree with 3:33:47 you 100 and ironically it's a lot of these kind of you know people within the academy or some of 3:33:53 these sort of more left-leaning spaces who talk the talk of colonialism and neo colonialism and 3:33:59 post-colonialism but they're also very heavily invested in kind of pushing this particular 3:34:03 narrative and it's like isn't it obvious to you that this is just you know you talk about 3:34:08 victorian morality being brought into the muslim world by british colonials in the 19th century 3:34:12 okay yes that's true but you're doing the same thing now in the 21st century exactly 3:34:16 the same thing because these ideologies were born in in britain and america and 3:34:20 germany and france absolutely exactly the same place and is the the movement of influence and 3:34:26 power and close exactly the same movement from one place to another it's all the same thing 3:34:31 but it's just a different guys a different different dress yeah absolutely um okay so 3:34:39 uh rejection so we talked about this a lot again take home message rejection of the sexual 3:34:43 identity paradigm uh we must once again separate desire from action from identity these are three 3:34:49 separate things just like race gender and sexual behavior those are three separate things right 3:34:55 desire action and identity separate we have to separate these and we also have to bring back 3:34:59 together sex reproduction marriage morality put those together okay terminological terminological 3:35:04 implications we should avoid identity laden vocabulary like gay lgbt right these are heavily 3:35:11 uh identity-laden terms or dignifying quote-unquote who people are well who are people 3:35:17 right they're not their sexuality especially as a muslim we dignify people as muslims 3:35:21 right so all this language about you know dignifying who people are right get uh you 3:35:27 know and using sort of identity identity you know vocabulary that's laden with identity 3:35:33 um implications uh especially you know again when we deal with the outside society you should try to 3:35:38 be careful of your vocabulary you use but you have to negotiate but inside the muslim community these 3:35:43 are not terms that we should be using which is why at the top beginning of this talk i put lgbtq 3:35:47 in quotation marks because it's not a term that i as a muslim speaker and you know in in in 3:35:53 using with an audience you know um whether muslim audience probably majority muslim but also 3:35:59 non-muslim audience right it's it's a term that i think needs to be problematized right and so 3:36:04 that's why i put it in in quotes right we should use descriptive terms instead in adjectives not 3:36:09 now so someone has homosexual feelings experiences same-sex desires very different from saying they 3:36:15 are gay and even the medical field they say so and so you know has what do you say has diabetes 3:36:20 they stopped saying so-and-so is a diabetic i mean they've shifted in medical right 3:36:26 yeah they shifted because you are a diabetic i'm i'm defining you according to your illness no you 3:36:32 are a x person and you have diabetes but you're not a diabetic right so we should also be you know 3:36:41 sensitive to that language use i say no gay exceptionalism either positive or negative what 3:36:46 do i mean by this so pushing acceptance of lgbt acts acts in an islamic environment in an islamic 3:36:54 environment like schools mosques communities and so forth is just as unacceptable as pushing 3:36:59 alcohol zina or anything else that's forbidden by the religion there's no exception here because 3:37:04 again we're not tying this to identity only when you tie it to identity do you have to see 3:37:08 you know that uh right and you see this also in the current society for example i was at a 3:37:13 university once and they're the gay pride student group they were having a dance right and the 3:37:19 advertisement for the dance the poster was you know come to this pride dance whatever saturday 3:37:24 and the picture on it was a drawing it wasn't like a photograph it was like art deco figures like 3:37:28 two men completely naked dancing and the picture showed everything right down to like you know the 3:37:35 very bottom of the groin as far as you could go possibly you know without showing like the organ 3:37:40 so i mean clearly the people are meant to be shown like dancing naked and i think if that were just 3:37:46 any other student group like the latino club or the you know whatever or the dance club and they 3:37:52 showed like a man and a woman dancing who were like naked on the poster you'd be like what like 3:37:58 what kind of dance is this like why are they why are the people naked on the poster right 3:38:03 they wouldn't be considered acceptable but if it's a pride parade or like an lgbt dance oh 3:38:08 well that's perfectly like you know there's like an exceptionalism here that okay yeah you can have 3:38:13 very provocative or kind of images that would otherwise be considered lewd and inappropriate but 3:38:18 because you know you're basically defining your identity by this well we're not going 3:38:22 to say anything and so there's kind of an exceptionalism so we should not accept that 3:38:26 as muslims right we have a moral standard and we stick to that at the same time so there's no 3:38:31 like positive gay exceptionalism but also not negative so again and i say this to muslims of 3:38:36 probably a more traditional bent or people who they consider themselves like okay well we're 3:38:40 firm and hardcore on this issue be careful right as i said before you might be more 3:38:46 uh more impacted by the modern western paradigm than you yourself imagine 3:38:52 merely having and faithfully struggling with same-sex desires or you know gender identity 3:38:58 issues also does not merit any particular stigma or singling out someone comes to you 3:39:04 your friend i've known you for so long i have this big thing i want to you know share with you it's 3:39:08 so difficult for me you know oh that's go away uh no this person's coming they made themselves 3:39:14 very vulnerable you help them you embrace them you support them right and you don't 3:39:18 specifically stigmatize them for something that they don't you know did not bring upon themselves 3:39:24 and are not morally responsible for right we're not talking about people who are pushing the 3:39:28 actions or advocating we're talking about someone who feels a desire and is struggling with it right 3:39:33 we don't have a particular you know sort of uh particular stigma or singling out for this 3:39:39 or say oh that's the gay brother whatever no gay brother okay now you're a western modern western 3:39:44 don't tell me you're traditional muslim and you say gay muslim well what do you mean say that and 3:39:48 say tell me that in classical arabic i don't have a word for it i don't have a word for gay i don't 3:39:53 there's no word that covers you know identifying a person based on sexual feelings this doesn't exist 3:40:00 i can only name people are doing things or gender male females so forth okay all right balancing 3:40:06 individual and community subjective feelings versus objective truths we talked about this you 3:40:10 know the objective right and wrong the objective nature of acts and how laws define them and 3:40:16 legislate according to him and the subjective feelings of people who are facing these desires 3:40:20 right so as i said before individuals dealing with same-sex attraction or gender identity issues 3:40:25 should be supported in their efforts to realize their purpose as muslims and live their lives in 3:40:29 submission to allah and his deen again go back to that you know article by brother youssef 3:40:34 you know from the same sex attracted muslim between distorting reality and
3:40:42 denying reality and distorting religion okay so we should have private support and consultation 3:40:46 to people who deal with these issues right someone comes to you they should be able to go to an imam 3:40:51 to their parents to trusted individuals right like with any other problem they might have 3:40:55 and need support they should be able to find it within supportive and compassionate and loving 3:41:00 communities right but this is private like if i have a drinking issue or anything else right 3:41:04 i'm going to go and speak about it private i'm not just going to come in and wear it on my shirt and 3:41:08 and sort of set up a table at the mosque that's a very different thing right so private support and 3:41:13 consultation people should have people within the community to turn to right as opposed to public 3:41:19 quote-unquote accommodation or inclusion again i put these in quotes because these are buzzwords 3:41:24 accommodation inclusion right they sound very nice but they mean something very specific which is not 3:41:29 acceptable uh given our moral framework as muslims right defiant activist types 3:41:34 within the community should not be allowed to disrupt islamic spaces or impose their will on 3:41:39 the community again no exceptionalism here you want to come to the reed celebration and set up 3:41:44 an uh wine table you're not that's not going to be tolerated you drink on your own time that's 3:41:48 your own business you don't come and push it on the community no exceptionalism when it comes to 3:41:53 sexual behavior that is prohibited by the religion supporting the faithful struggler we've done this 3:41:58 show empathy and understanding for what is often a very difficult and emotionally taxing issue 3:42:02 support the person in general spiritual in other ways mentorship general advice listening ear 3:42:08 shoulder to cry on right but also again someone comes to you privately know your limits you are 3:42:13 not a spiritual guide you're not a professional psychologist it's a deep issue and you don't know 3:42:17 the details of it so what direct them to resources such as all the resources we have in our community 3:42:22 such as a way beyond the rainbow podcasts and these other resources and maybe offered 3:42:26 to discuss but know your pay grade as paul said earlier don't go beyond your pay grab 3:42:31 and then finally maintaining the straight path clarity compassion conviction three 3:42:35 c's you know we've come up with this in some other groups right you are not more 3:42:39 merciful than allah right so people say we need to be compassionate of course we do 3:42:43 and we are compassion true compassion is guiding to the truth and what pleases a creator this is 3:42:49 what is going to be best for people in this world and in the next this is true compassion 3:42:53 compassion is not to usurp the place of god over rule his legislation because you know better 3:42:59 right this is something that people who you know they come with this argument from 3:43:03 compassion and justice you're not more compassionate in justice than just in allah he is
3:43:10 and none of us can claim those titles for ourselves be humble and kind but never 3:43:15 apologetic about islamic beliefs right we're not apologetic islam is clear it's from the creator 3:43:20 it's the birthright of every human being to know about it to be told and to be invited to it 3:43:24 and allah guides whom he wills it's not in our hands right islamic teachings very important 3:43:28 take home message and this is the last one islamic teachings on sexual ethics are not an 3:43:33 embarrassment or a problem listen youth in the west right islamic teachings on sexual ethics 3:43:40 and gender and sexuality in the whole gamut are not an embarrassment or problem they are 3:43:44 the only solution to our problems they are the solution that the west itself 3:43:49 desperately needs and we all desperately need and it is for us to realize that and 3:43:53 take it on and articulate it in the best and most beautiful way as we read them opponents
3:44:06 and beautiful exhortation and dispute with them in the best possible way right this is 3:44:12 the command that we have been uh given and on on this i will just resources we have actually 3:44:17 seen them from the same sex attracted muslim uh between denial of reality and distortion religion 3:44:22 brother yusuf please i think everyone should read that it's not very long beautifully written 3:44:26 way beyond the rainbow podcast i'll show you some details on it uh in the very last slide 3:44:31 uh we've seen brother mcbean's piece candace slam accommodate homosexual acts 3:44:34 quranic revisionism in the case of scott cool well this is a masterly scholar a masterly scholarly 3:44:40 study i mean really hats off it's it's really extremely well done and you will learn so much 3:44:46 about islam and about categories and about the contingency about sexual categories even if you're 3:44:51 not particularly interested in this article it's a very uh informative and educational read so i 3:44:58 actually like i think muslims should challenge themselves it's like 50 pages it's not short 3:45:02 but it's really worth your time you'll gain a lot until actually i agree with every i agree with 3:45:07 your assessment there absolutely yeah absolutely and the male is not like the female from the quran 3:45:13 so we saw that islam and gender non-conformity also again brother will be invited 3:45:18 right he's almost single-handedly carrying this you know has been carrying this burden for the 3:45:21 past you know five six years may allah bless him um muslim matters 2017. that was part one 3:45:27 part two was co-authored between brother mubi invade and brother johnson of the away beyond 3:45:33 the rainbow podcast this is the 85-page study based on 150 or 60 sources right it's a massive 3:45:41 massive study on transgenderism the history of it the contemporary scene in the west 3:45:47 also muslim rulings on it okay so anything you want to do about transgenderism these two articles 3:45:51 are key foundational articles on gender the family and sexuality by sheikhan one of our treasures in 3:45:58 the west has also been a guest on this podcast before um three of his articles they're mostly 3:46:04 quite old boys will be boys gender identity issues islam irrigate and the retrieval of gender fall 3:46:09 of the family all of them very very insightful very incredibly eloquent as we know from jihad 3:46:16 always very insightful and extremely eloquent so these i think are again somewhat dated but 3:46:21 they're still relevant and i think foundational for any muslim in inter intra-muslim discussion on 3:46:28 gender and sexuality issues in general and homosexuality of course in particular and then 3:46:33 this last resource islam and lgbt issues reading material muhammadan discourse.blogspot.com tons of 3:46:39 all of these resources and a lot more are on this particular website and then finally a just uh you 3:46:46 know because i've said uh talked about this away beyond the rainbow i think it is a game changer 3:46:51 um it is very easy to critique a religious community by saying you're stuck in the middle 3:46:56 ages you're stuck in your books you have no idea what's going on or you're all just heteronormative 3:47:00 and you don't understand our position i.e we who you know experience same-sex attractions 3:47:05 this is cannot be the case here right this brother is coming from that inside perspective 3:47:10 he is a doctor and a medical researcher he knows what he's doing it's extremely well 3:47:15 uh extremely well researched extremely well documented and very interesting and a lot of 3:47:21 also guests and things like that so a way beyond the rainbow is a podcast series this is the 3:47:27 you know kind of tagline discussing the everyday struggles of muslims with same-sex attractions 3:47:32 ssa and gender dysphoria who want to live a life true to allah in islam this podcast series is 3:47:38 a safe space for muslims who struggle with ssa as well as parents family members friends imams 3:47:43 chaplains community leaders in the community at large it is separated into five seasons season 3:47:48 one tackles topics to give you an idea shame vulnerability self-compassion identity so on and 3:47:54 so forth okay i won't read everything because it's it's season two tackles the spiritual dimensions 3:47:59 related to this particular struggle right how can people understand the spiritual dimensions 3:48:03 of this particular struggle every struggle but this particular one from the wisdom of hardships 3:48:08 and tribulations attachments and surrender as well as gifts and divine openings future 3:48:15 to the struggle with temptations and desires sin and repentance as well as the story of the people 3:48:19 of loot and of many of the other prophets whose stories are relevant to every struggle including 3:48:23 this particular struggle season three focuses on the importance of support systems and social 3:48:28 connections and answers frequently asked questions when it comes to friendships and support groups 3:48:33 the season also tackles in depth topics of marriage and celibacy i.e for people 3:48:37 who experience same-sex attractions as well as marital intimacy and sex right so again it's 3:48:42 completely comprehensive season four dedicated to healing and recovery work tackles foundational 3:48:47 topics relevant to the healing journey and this is actually relevant to people who don't even 3:48:52 experience same-sex attractions just general you know complex trauma he takes a lot from the sort 3:48:57 of conservatory psychological perspectives but from you know islamic uh angle emotional 3:49:03 attachments dependence in codependency um and then you know sexual compulsions and addictions 3:49:08 as well as sexual abuse so these are things are unfortunately relevant to a lot of muslims you 3:49:13 know have experienced sexual abuse whether they experience you know same-sex attractions or not 3:49:17 uh sexual compulsions and addictions there are i think four episodes on masturbation 3:49:22 pornography addictions and again unfortunately given the state of current technology and so 3:49:27 forth many many muslims i mean we're not we are not immune to these struggles and many muslims 3:49:33 quite apart from same-sex attraction deal with you know issues of sexual compulsion issues of 3:49:39 pornography addiction and so forth um and and so you can also find very uh beneficial things 3:49:45 here and then the last season addresses the wider community and focuses on relevant sociopolitical 3:49:52 themes such as revisionist movements so again you know brother mubin does the whole takedown 3:49:57 of the revisionist you know uh arguments based on his work uh shutting our perspectives gender 3:50:04 dysphoria and transgenderism and also topics that are relevant for parents and family members i.e 3:50:09 muslims who have same-sex attraction or gender identity issues for spouses teachers imams and 3:50:15 community leaders so completely comprehensive and again a lot of muslim kind of personalities 3:50:21 have come there are also personal stories personal stories scattered throughout the podcast a sister 3:50:27 a muslim sister who uh left a same-sex marriage to come back to allah subhanahu ta'ala you know and 3:50:33 other such stories that are very interesting and not really what you hear every day 3:50:37 in the kind of barrage of kind of pro-lgbt messaging that we are subjected to so
3:50:48 and i thank everyone for your time and attention i think brother paul especially everyone else can 3:50:54 stop and start but you've been sitting here for i think what's coming up on four hours now and 3:50:59 i know you've been and traveling imagine this must be the absolute longest episode you've had 3:51:04 oh this is a record this is a record breaker i'm very sorry to go on and on and on i think 3:51:11 it's an important topic i hope we've i agree well before before we went before we recorded this we 3:51:16 discussed whether or not we should cut it up into pieces and stuff and we decided no it's 3:51:20 best to keep it in as the unity and the integrity of one episode and even it is very long i think 3:51:27 there's value in that and hopefully we will have time stamps underneath it as well as well as the 3:51:31 slides which will be accessible um so it won't necessarily have to be digested in one large go 3:51:38 right okay well thank you very very much paul you're doing excellent work i mean blogging 3:51:44 theology is an amazing resource um for people are just new to blogging theology i really strongly 3:51:50 encourage you to check out i mean paul is indeed fatigable it's unbelievable that literally almost 3:51:56 every single day i think you know he has a new episode out and uh very often uh he's discussing 3:52:03 deep works with authors that require him to have read these works you know i mean it's not just 3:52:08 like it's not easy it's not easy he invited me to talk i've been you know running my mouth for 3:52:12 four hours but like ver usually i mean he had me on before he read my book and other people and 3:52:17 as you've seen every time someone mentions a book i don't know how you do it he just 3:52:21 doesn't even get up from his chair reaches oh here's the book you were talking about 3:52:25 every book you mentioned is like at his fingertips so there's something no 3:52:28 no spiritual i think you know futurehat here some divine openings may allah bless you paul um we're 3:52:35 we're very happy to uh to have you among us you're a great great asset to our community 3:52:41 and uh uh yeah may allah may allah bless you and and uh and everyone who watches your channel 3:52:47 benefits from your channel and uh i'll just end as we uh normally do anything that i have said that 3:52:54 is right and true is from allah and we thank him for that all truth and goodness come from 3:52:59 the only true uh allah is the huck the truth itself and and good and beauty itself and 3:53:05 anything that is wrong or inaccurate it comes from me and for me alone and i ask your forgiveness 3:53:10 as an audience as well as allah's forgiveness for anything that i said that it might have been wrong 3:53:14 i hope i was not did not say anything that anyone might have found offensive it was not 3:53:18 my intention to um i think in the larger context that was being said i tried to hit everything 3:53:24 from different angles to make exactly clear what i'm saying what i'm not saying these are 3:53:29 difficult issues um i i may allah help all muslims deal uh whether it's dealing again with society 3:53:36 and uh external pressures or whether it's dealing with this issue inside your own heart 3:53:41 or within your own family or community um this is not going to go away anytime soon and this 3:53:47 is something that we do have to know how to deal with properly and have mature conversations about 3:53:52 principal conversations but conversations that also the human element is involved 3:53:56 and we understand people are very confused in this time and we should also be you know without 3:54:01 letting again this sort of activist type run amok but be gentle with people people have been hearing 3:54:08 one narrative their entire lives right it it can take some time and some effort and some coaxing 3:54:14 to kind of get them to especially if they're dealing with that you know just be patient with 3:54:18 people and make dua for people and may allah guide all of us to what is best and what pleases him
3:54:27 yeah thank you thank you very much for your outstanding work presentation uh 3:54:32 and uh beautiful slides and this is going to be a great resource i'm certain for uh many people in 3:54:39 the months maybe the years to come for a a very comprehensive compassionate accurate faithful 3:54:48 exposition on on the whole question of islam in the lgbt 3:54:52 question gender sexuality morality and identity so thank you very much indeed 3:54:57 for all your extraordinary efforts in this regard and until next time okay inshallah