• If you'd like to contribute articles, opinion pieces or stories for these pages, let me know.

• Bibliography: Selected books and texts concerning Islam and homosexuality. Still under construction...

SPIRITUALITY

What is Islam? What about the rules? What is the Goddess/God like? What is satan's role?

Understanding actions, intentions, the judgment upon them, and the gift of prayer

Marriage, Adultery and Homosexuality

Who We Callin' Ignorant: Islam, the Mother Goddess, and the State

Sleeper Must Awaken - Sulayman X

On being honest

But first, love yourself

Letter to a loved one

The foolishness of judging others

Enter the stream

Non-violently happy

Never mind about god

Investigating Islam "What is Islam's view of homosexuality?"
Islamic Paths "Homosexuality: The Cost to Society" (with links)
Alachua County Dawah Society "Islam and homosexuality"
thetruereligion.org "The Islamic Ruling on Homosexuality"
Islam101.com "Homosexuality"
Submission.org "Homosexuality and Islam (Submission)"
IslamOnline.net Ask about Islam: "Homosexuality... from an Islamic Stand"
IslamOnline.net Fatwa Bank: "Homosexuality is Haram"
Madrassah In'aamiyah "Homosexuality in the Light of Islam"
ViewIslam.com "Homosexuality" (article by Dr. Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips)
Islam - The Modern Religion "What does Islam say about homosexuality?"

For Muslim extremists in Britain, the growing social acceptance of homosexuality symbolises everything that is wrong with democratic, secular western culture. They seem to hate queers more than the racism and poverty that blights their communities. Despite having experienced much prejudice and discrimination themselves, they show no empathy for those who are victimised because of their sexual orientation.

Gay Muslims in many countries face severe penalties—even death—if they come out. But many are now meeting and organizing via the Internet.

Gay and lesbian Muslims have begun to organize, but they say the Islamic faith is hundreds of years behind Christianity in coming to terms with homosexuality.

Can you be gay and a Muslim? Yusuf Islam, the musician formerly known as Cat Stevens, thinks not, and he has thrown his weight behind Baroness Young's campaign to retain Section 28. But he cannot speak for all Muslims any more than the noble lady can speak for every Christian.

Being gay and a Muslim (and worse still, living in an oppressed society) means always being in such a confused state of mind. Any Muslim man knows that being gay is a NO-NO in Muslim society. Gays are condemned for a one-way ticket to hell ! On the other hand, he knows his sexual tendencies so where does he seek help? There is no such thing as a gay Muslim priest for therapy, or one to turn to for help. So it ends up that he lives in a deep closet. Either he is satisfied with only fantasies and make believes, or to cover up his true personality by a marriage of convenience and lead a secret double life.

In a plane, flying home over the dark glittering suburbanity of the Northeast. I am exhausted and elated from a weekend of late nights and early mornings at the first International GLBT Muslim Conference. Like many of the people who had gathered for the Boston event, I had long struggled with some of the inherent problems that arise when one tries to combine Islam and homosexuality-especially the Islam of the mullahs and the gay constructs of the "West". For me, those difficulties were twofold. Firstly to find a personal space where my faith and my sexual identity could peaceably co-exist, and perhaps even re-enforce one another. And secondly to explore ways and means to resolve the tension and despair that knowledge of my sexual orientation has caused within my very traditionally Muslim family.

The slender figure of 19 year-old Muhammad Mustafa* sits on the battered sofa of his London bed-sit. "I have to be careful", he says, peering out of the window to check that no-one is coming to the door. "I don’t even tell my friends where I live". Several weeks earlier, his brothers had beaten him unconscious while his mother, chanting the name of Allah, looked on impassively. Later, a religious leader said he should be killed. Why? Because Muhammad is gay - and Muslim. Like 75 000 others in Britain. Covered in bruises, Muhammad fled the next day to London.

What your homophobia says about you (by Sulayman X))

"It is most interesting to note that of the thousands of messages I have received, very few -- less than 3, in fact -- were actually sincere attempts by concerned Muslims to engage in an honest debate on the issue of homosexuality. Most messages conveyed the idea that I was such a worthless pervert that any attempt at discussing the issue was a waste of time."

“The fervor of this modern Muslim extremism echoes the zealotry of the original Dark Ages in mediaeval Europe, when Christian fundamentalists excommunicated philosophers and scientists as heretics, tortured non-believers, drowned women as witches, and burned sodomites at the stake.”

"You are what you are. Why resist? Has resisting ever changed a homosexual into a heterosexual? Why do you resist what you are? Are you not happy with what God has given you? Give up your resistance. It's foolish. You are wasting time."

"I have never been driven my home, rejected by my parents, hated by brothers and sisters, despised by teachers and religious leaders, but I could have, because I am a homosexual."

"Born Eunuchs": Homosexual Identity in the Ancient World
This is a very long essay is several sections that seeks to prove that the real "gay men" of the ancient world were those referred to at the time as "eunuchs by nature." 

Plato: The Serpent in the Garden of Sexuality  - (deutsche Übersetzung)
Plato, the preeminent philosopher who lived 350 years before Jesus and whose innovative world view profoundly influenced Christian and Muslim theologians, not to mention all of Western thought, was also the inventor of the doctrine of "no sex except in marriage."
The Ancient Roman and Talmudic Definition of Natural Eunuchs
Proves from the Roman Digest of Laws and the Jewish Talmud that most eunuchs in ancient times were not castrated men, but rather they were able to procreate.
The Historic Origin of Church Condemnation of Homosexuality  - in italiano - en español
How and why the Catholic Church launched the criminal prosecution of exclusive, innate homosexuals in the 4th century of our era. Interesting for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, and for anyone concerned with the political dimension of homosexual persecution.
Queer Sexuality and Identity in the Qur'an and Hadith
How Islam originally reversed the Church's persecution of gender-differentiated homosexuality by re-establishing the ancient category of heterosexually abstinent "non-males" that the Church had tried to erase.

Reading the ex-gay literature, one is struck by the admitted homosexual temptations many "ex-gays" still struggle with. "God does not replace one form of lust with another," explain Bob Davies and Lori Rentzel in Coming Out of Homosexuality. Ex-gays commonly struggle with homosexual attractions and typically “do not experience sexual arousal solely by looking at their wife’s body.”

Sexual orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. And some people report trying very hard over many years to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual with no success. For these reasons, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation for most people to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

This site is a forum for the discussion of the scientific, social, political and religious implications of research into the origins of sexual identity.

''One potential consequence of accepting a doctrine of genetic determinism relates to the potential link between genetics and sexual orientation. In the summer of 1993, Dean H. Hamer and his research team at the National Cancer Institute announced their discovered evidence of a connection between genetics and some male homosexuality. By constructing family trees in instances where two or more brothers are gay, and performing actual laboratory testing of the supposed homosexual DNA, Hamer located a region near the end of the long arm of the X chromosome that likely contains a gene influencing sexual orientation.''

"Homosexuality is firmly rooted in genes and biology. We don't understand it completely. We don't know the exact location of all the genes involved.  But we do know, from endless lab tests with fruit flies and mice and other animals that sexuality is biologically determined, the result of a certain mix of genes, chemicals and hormones. To be more accurate, sexuality ? whether gay or straight ? is the result of a certain mix of genes, chemicals and hormones. This “mix” may be different for the homosexual, resulting in a sexuality than varies from the norm."

''It’s a seemingly endless debate: Why are some people attracted to the opposite sex, while others are drawn to their own gender? Thanks to new research published today, that question just got even harder to answer.''

Sulayman X has a lot to say about Islam and homosexuality, and the provocative stand taken by this writer has outraged Muslims worldwide.

I am an American convert to Islam. I made my Shahada, or Profession of Faith, at a mosque in Kansas City on June 4th,  1993, in the presence of several Muslim brothers after due instruction and a great deal of personal research and soul searching.

"I became Muslim because of Malcolm X, because of his grace and dignity, because he was a man and had refused to accept the crumbs thrown to him from the white mans' tables. He had a message for me   a white trash, no account, good for nothing, and a faggot to boot, born in abject poverty, abused from day one in any way imaginable, uneducated, slipping through the cracks, another lost soul in a lost world. His message was simple: stand up and be a man. Stop drinking and smoking and abusing and making excuses. Get right with God. Educate yourself."