[CW: mentions of Islamophobia] Is Islam as homophobic and sexist as westerners claim?

there are rats in my ass

https://lemmy.ml/post/20955835/14091348

https://lemmy.ml/post/20955835/14091503

Main thing is: remember there are a billion Muslims and have been for ~1400 years. There's been a lot of diversity within that.

I live in majority muslim nation and yeah theres plenty of conservative muslim, just like how nearly every nation has many conservatives. However racists westerners pretend homophobia and sexism is uniquely exotic to muslim and use it to deflect that the west still has prevalent sexism and homophobia attitudes.

Edward Said best describes this phenomenonen in his book about Orientalism.

Damn, guys. Please debate the validity of religion as a whole in a different post, would you? It's getting way too off topic. I'm not religious, but I'm also aware that in hell world we need our opiates or we'll go crazy.

said i would comment and here we are. seeing some pretty reductive and dangerous rhetoric and i fear that the majority of this site that has little to no experience in the topic will regurgitate something they heard here without crit.

i grew up muslim and queer, used to go to quran and sunday school and the masjid every friday. i myself have a complicated relationship with islam but though i have left the faith many times and no longer practice in a mass, i still consider myself muslim but also mix other faiths and my personal practices in.

of course there IS misogyny and homophobia. just like when i go to school or work in a christian majority area, and hear the most insane out of pocket misogyny and homophobia and transphobia with the most casual of energy.

to single out muslims as morbidly and uniquely intense or cruel compared to christians, jews, and even atheists is reductive thinking and heavily prejudiced. to not even mention the passing, casual, but incredibly charged and hateful crimes of the real majority reveals indoctrination of anglo supremacy.

did you know islam has a long history of LGBT playing important and positive roles in society before colonial interference in my home country? what about sufiism? did you know the muslim world has had women leader!s! before the christian/atheist dominated west? there are also many progressive muslim scholars, just like there are progressive jewish or christian or atheist scholars.

wahhabiism, the extreme and most bigoted/hateful school of islam that we often associate with extremism and hate, was only made popular in the last 100 years, still a minority of the overarching religion, and guess who funded and encouraged these groups to the platform they have now?

i'm not dismissing anyone's lived experience. i have suffered at the hands of bigoted muslims of course. and i have suffered at the hands of bigoted everything else with no religious motivation even more. that bigotry and hate comes from a personal or cultural level and it gets wrapped and disguised in islam by those with an agenda. i have also been the most radically and deeply accepted by some muslim peers. the cultural habits of a group of people doesn't reflect on a religion. even the experience of arabs =/= the experience of all muslims. when i see arabs borderline enslaving people from my homeland and branding them with second class citizenship and taking away their ability to leave, people that look like me, would it be fair of me to claim for all others that have never experienced it that arabs specifically promote slavery and a tiered society?

we just cannot make sweeping generalizations where we apply what we've experience behind closed doors in one household to entire populations of people and shove those bigoted harmful actions under the brand of islam, and not even consider the closed-door practices of nonmuslims.

this entire thread has made me deeply deeply uncomfortable to engage on this site. i'm not fully stepping away but i will proceed with extreme caution moving forward

We’re still a long way from someone pressing the no religion button

Permanently Deleted

not qualified to comment on the particulars but i think it's worth remembering and its vassals have propped up the worst most reactionary franchises of islam because of cold war shit

if liberals are trying to say shit about internal social repression in palestine recently, iirc hamas rose to prominence because of external influence and because there's just something about islamists that the settlers and imperialists prefer over more cosmopolitan/secular/socialist groups, they can shut up. islam could be exactly what they accuse it of and it wouldn't justify genocide.

As others have pointed out, there are many “sub genres” of Islam. I am not an expert and am not Muslim or religious myself, but from what I gather the extreme ones like Wahhabism in Saudi is of course exceedingly socially conservative, but there are of course others. From what I understand, despite what the z!onists say, The form of Islam that Hamas represents is way more moderate especially regarding things such as the veil (I can’t recall ever seeing Bisan wearing one) and I’ve read anecdotal stories of openly gay tourists visiting Gaza (before the holocaust obviously) and having zero problems.

Any Muslim comrades with more knowledge please feel free to correct me where I am wrong here or expand.

Also fuck new atheists and big ups to all my Muslim comrades, free Palestine inshallah 🇵🇸

There is Islam and there are muslims. Muslims can be homophobic and sexist. Islam is their belief, religion being used to justify ones bigotry is nothing new.

A lot of the times westerners have this view of Islam as if it's a dogma like calvinism. But it's a whole religion, it's a lot more cultural, it's very unique to the individual and what they make of it. There are very dogmatic views of Islam for sure, but if people are talking about "Is Islam X" or "Does Islam teach Y" there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is. Look at how different orthodox christianity, catholicism and protestants are. If you try to pin-point "what does christianity teach?" you will end up with a set of very broad universally-agreed truths "Love thy neighbour etc." and the bare-minimum of christian lore "Jesus was the messiah and died on a cross for our sins and rose again 3 days later from the grave". Other than that everything open. Was Mary a virgin her whole life? Is it ok to pray to idols? Is the bible sent by god? What books should be in the bible?

Pretty much the same for Islam. There as many perspectives to Islam as to Christianity. A historical, an individual, a theological (which depends on the school), a cultural and probably a couple more I'm currently not thinking of. If someone is talking about Islam as if it was a tangible thing there are deeper brainworms at play.

Islam teaches nothing. Mohammed has taught. Allah teaches. A hoca, imam, your mom and dad might teach you what it is to be a muslim. And what they teach you might be completely different from what another muslim is taught.

I was debating whether to respond to this or not and how to respond to this.

Mandatory general reading:

Orientalism, Edward Said and Eurocentrism, Samir Amin

I will link this article again, titled: Gay universalism, homoracialism and « marriage for all » by Houria Bouteldja.

I can also list various writers and works across the Islamic world, from Islamic feminism, Islamic liberation theology, decolonial marxists, to Islamic socialists. But I think that may not be helpful because again we are stuck in this false dichotomy of “liberal” and “conservatism”. Of a rigid notion of “progress” and “reaction”, which I might add spits in the face of dialectics.

I can’t fault those that believe in a linear progress of history. Early Marxism itself was tainted with such notions until the 20th century.

So instead I will posit this question:

If we are to believe that gender and sexuality are socially situated within a specific cultural and time dependent context, then why do we assume that terms derived from such contexts like “homophobia” and “misogyny” are universally applicable and can be compared across different regions and areas of the globe?

This is not to discredit the admirable goal of internationalism, of universalising the struggle, but we then have to ask ourselves if this “internationalism” is based on actual applicability of it’s critique to the entire world or merely a projection based on false conceptions, with aid from the cultural and political hegemony of US-led Capital?

Also I’d like to note: if the Communists and “Progressives” were correct and listened to the masses in the Islamic World, they would have won. But they did not. So who is at fault here?

Ex-muslim here!

While there are obviously a lot of different interpretations and sects of Islam that have different feelings on these matters, the short and most correct answer would be basically, yes, Islam is one of the most homophobic and misogynistic religions out there.

Most Muslims are extremely conservative in their beliefs when it comes to these topics. I'd say it's honestly safe to assume that most every Muslim you come across is likely going to be a raging homophobe and/or misogynist.

All religions are pretty shitty in my opinion but Islam has been the worst offender and is the most cultish in my experience. There's a site I linked below that goes in depth on things like this, so you might wanna check it out.

About Women

About Homosexuality

Edit: Firstly, this should go without saying, but I don't support the genocide of the Palestinian territories by the IDF. I don't necessarily support the religion but I sure as hell do not support a genocide against innocent people. I don't think my comment suggested I do, but clearing this up just in case before more of yall come into my inbox being all butthurt. Secondly, after reading more responses on this thread, I'm going to leave this here: I'm not and will never be an islamophobe, and I respect all Muslims (even the ones who are queer and/or women and muslim, I will never understand how you could do that though) but, I am extremely critical of the religion, and I think it's not a very healthy one. It isn't up for debate on whether or not Islam is homophobic and misogynistic based on my personal experience growing up as a queer male Muslim who had to hear how even my normally-very-accepting-of-other-people family wanted to "kill all the homos". And I mean, they even say shit like women are intellectually deficient and that you should stone Queer people for... existing. It isn't "IsLAmoPHobic" to be critical of these aspects of the religion, it's 'Islamophobic' to demonize all Muslims for the actions of a few (a.k.a Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Hamas) or make those weird 9/11 'jokes', but alas, I suppose Lemmy isn't really ready to have this discussion.

I also require reeducation

As others have said, Islam is not a monolith, there are many interpretations of Islam across the world. Some are more progressive, some less. The culture I am from has a creative interpretation of what homosexuality is, at least partially stemming from the relatively high degree of misogyny there.
So from my experience with a less mainstream Islamic culture, it's less homophobic but about as misogynist

Religion is always trash. No way around that and even as open mind leftists or wannabe leftists we have to recognize that. However the worst elements of religion tend to moderate with development something the Muslim world has been denied by the great Satan

Disclaimer: you're going to get wildly differing answers because Islam is not a monolith.

Edit: also thank you for asking this respectfully

At least in my experience with the Muslim side if my family, no. There's maybe a little "oh that's different and a little weird, but if someone's queer that's just Allah's plan for them and it's not our place to judge", but there isn't the hatred and condemnation you see in conservative christian cults. It can break more along political lines.

It also gets weird with regional variation, like where my family is from trans people are kind of normal. I was even taught that transness is generally accepted religiously as long as the trans person is straight (so since I'm lesbian that doesn't work as well for me, but whatever).

Generally I consider the "Islam is violently queerphobic" shit essentially a form of colonialist blood-libel to paint Muslim cultures as backwards and oppressive in order to justify committing horrible colonialist and imperialist violence against them, and it's victim-blaming too. Queerness is very culturally dependent -- what is feminine in one culture may be masculine in another. Colonizers exported their queer-bashing ideas during conquest, cracked down on queer communities as removed, reshaped mores in the places they conquered, and now these "enlightened" colonizers have the audacity to condemn the people they colonized for bearing those scars. Of course we're "behind the times" -- you fuckers made us be!

There is certainly room for and indeed a need for conversation and struggle around queer acceptance and liberation in different Islamic cultures, but that's going to vary greatly by region and is less of a theological question and more a cultural question (of course there's a give and take between theology and culture). Islam in Iran is wildly different from Islam in Pakistan is wildly different from Islam in Saudi Arabia is wildly different from Islam in Algeria, and even within those places there is a great amount of variation

A Korean revert I’ve watched on YouTube just dropped a transphobic short and a video on “why lgbt is forbidden is islam” that I haven’t watched yet. It’s disappointing, but not uncommon with my minimal exposure. Here is the content in question:

https://youtu.be/VBFKmaviJ6Q

https://youtube.com/shorts/TYo9GTDK6n4

I understand people’s historical defensiveness given how Islam has been a punching bag for the west for centuries. But this guy isn’t a wahhabist, and still has these ideas. So what gives? Just using religion to justify preexisting social conservatism or does Islam provide foundation for these beliefs?

If it was as sexist as westoids claim there would be no living women in the Islamic world

While I'm neither a Muslim nor a scholar, I think it's important to draw a line between fundamentalist, Wahhabi interpretations of Islam like those the west has backed (the US and then the UK with the house of Saud) and the overwhelming majority of Islamic history as well as the breadth of its countless living, breathing cultures, traditions, and interpretations/schools of thought nowadays.

And of course, we also have to look at the cultural context of reactionary Islam (or """Islam""" the way it has been twisted by Daesh/ISIS as an example of particularly wretched strain which to my understanding the Muslim community doesn't want to be associated with- akin to how any halfways sensible Christians, and certainly all the early Christians would have looked on in absolute horror at the "prosperity gospel" and other wretched takes from the west) came to be, and why it came to be so prominent- as said, I'm not a scholar on any of this, but the religious (not necessarily reactionary- but identity-based defense) resistance to literal, violent, dehumanizing colonialism was something found across the entire world, from the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh's rebellion and short-lived state against the US, to the Boxer Rebellion with its "bulletproof" superstitions (probably exaggerated nowadays, but still) and the Taiping revolution, to Irish resistance to prior and ongoing colonialism by the Brits, and- in Islam's case- while I won't claim to know the most on the subject as always- through their own anti-imperialist movements and teachers like al-Afghani and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc (in regards to religious responses- of course secular ones also existed).

Look at the history of the Islamic world, and time after time, a predictable pattern shows up ever since the Cold War started, arguably even earlier with the Brits backing Wahhabis over pan-Arab and secularists.

Ma Allah awaken the people, and expose the evils of Hexbear and Chapo trap house.

Fuck the people disparaging the religious, but it should be noted that atheism IS an extreme religious minority and a large percent of western socialists are LGBT+ people that have been abused by organized religion. So a little respect from both sides should be given, and maybe don't say lol fairy tales or lol fedora (cus again atheism is a minority everywhere, you probably wouldn't speak about any other religious minority that way).

And no Islam isn't inherently more sexist than any other abrahamic religion, afaik it's actually better (but this varies wildly like any religion)

In his first thread here, Mahmoud, a Palestinian hexbear user, in response to a user discussing that it was disheartening that Kamala and Trump were the same with respect to the genocide, wrote “trump is better for America than Kamala, because at least he does not believe in homosexuality. This is a very good thing.”

He has since deleted this message and reposted it without this part. Perhaps this reflected a poor Arabic->English translation, or perhaps he changed his mind later. Take it with a huge grain of salt, too, given that this is a sample size of n=1. But it is also a person with all the intense selection biases of posting here, which would cut quite aggressively against posting such sentiment.