Gay people are reclaiming an Islamic heritage

FOR DECADES regimes in the Middle East have alleged that homosexuality is both morally unacceptable and a Western import. Many gay activists disagree on both counts. Homophobia is the Western import, they claim, introduced by puritanical Europeans. “Ban the colonial law,” cried campaigners in Tunisia in December, referring to a law criminalising gay sex written by the French more than a century ago. “All these homophobic laws in the Middle East were brought in by colonialism to undermine Islam’s permissive civilisation,” says Ramy Khouili, a Tunisian activist.History is complicated, and prejudice has ancient roots. Nonetheless, activists can point to periods of the Islamic past when Arab rulers were more liberal about sex. They relate how the Caliph Amin in ninth-century Baghdad had a male lover and feted gay poets. They read poems from a classical genre called , or hedonistic smut. And they recall that the Ottoman Turks, who ruled most of the Middle East in the 19th century, decriminalised homosexuality a century before America and Britain. Back then, “you could be with a man or a woman,” says the transgender founder of north Africa’s first gay movement, the Abu Nawas Association, named after a great Arab poet, who was gay. “There were men dressed as women and living as women—and it was normal.”