Gay middle easterns

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people generally have limited or highly restrictive rights in most parts of the Middle East, and are open to hostility in others. Sex between men is illegal in 9 of the 18 countries that make up the region. It is punishable by death in four of these 18 countries. In the Middle Eastern region, there are 13 countries that still criminalise homosexuality.

Of these 8 have ratified the ICCPR, but none have submitted themselves to the jurisdiction of the UN Human Rights Committee by ratifying the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR. Homosexuality in the Middle East is a subject marked by contradictions—between tradition and modernity, repression and resilience. Understanding the cultural, legal, and social dynamics of the region is essential for fostering meaningful dialogue and supporting LGBTQ+ rights.

Human Rights Watch reported that LGBTQ activities are heavily criminalized in a large percentage of Middle East countries, as well as countries in the "Greater Middle East" region and.

Gay Arab American and Middle-Eastern Men is an absorbing and rewarding read, full of interesting characters and voices and viewpoints not often heard. Despite Fair’s reluctance to tell these tales in favor of a more ethnically correct authorship, their uniqueness makes their origin more than worthwhile. Most of the people around him don't know he identifies as queer, the year-old Iraqi student told DW. But life in his comparatively conservative southern city of Najaf is dangerous for him anyway.

In July, Iraq's government announced that it was planning a law prohibiting homosexuality. Iraq is one of three Arab-majority countries in the Middle East that doesn't explicitly criminalize same-sex relationships. The others are Jordan and Bahrain. If the law is passed, it would bring Iraq into line with the rest of the region.

Most other Middle Eastern nations outlaw same-sex intimacy more directly, punishing it with anything from fines to prison to, in Saudi Arabia, the death penalty. The law is yet to be voted on but al-Hamami said he believed that it would pass, despite criticism from domestic and international human rights organizations. This argument — that same-sex relationships are not part of Middle Eastern culture — is one that is often used by those opposed to them.

But it is also wrong. Just like the Bible, the Koran mentions homosexuality several times in a disapproving way. But, despite religious condemnation, same-sex relationships featured regularly in poetry and art in the Islamic world. In Iraq, for example, the eighth century poet Abu Nawas is celebrated with a statue in central Baghdad.

Abu Nawas was an infamous libertine, who penned paeans to such things as the delights of the local bathhouse, or hammam, where he could observe handsome men naked — at least "until the towel bearers come in and spoil the fun. Some researchers maintain that, for centuries, Arab culture was more permissive about same-sex relationships than European culture.

This changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Victorian era popularized the idea that sexual pleasure was sinful or shameful, and in the British brought in some of the first laws to criminalize sex between men. Arabs began increasingly to adopt conservative European attitudes. Alamer describes how one Arab visitor to Paris in the early 19th century praised the French for "not being inclined toward loving male youths and eulogizing them in poetry.

Previously acceptable ideas about homosexual desire and poems about male beauty would come to be considered uncivilized. Some of the first laws against homosexuality in the Middle East were actually imported because European legal systems were also used in European colonies. According to British legal advocacy organization, the Human Dignity Trust, most of the modern laws against homosexuality in the Arab world are based on religion.

However even today some of those still have their roots in historical British law. This is true of Sudan and Egypt — the former colonies simply kept those old rules when they became independent.

The Middle Eastern LGBTQ community

Same-sex relations have become a "cultural battleground," Katerina Dalacoura, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, wrote in a paper published in The Third World Quarterly. According to Dalacoura, authoritarian governments and religious fundamentalists stoke public sentiment against LGBTQ communities to secure their power.

This includes the Saudi government's campaign to remove rainbow-colored toys from shelves, a state clampdown and threats from a militant Christian group directed at LGBTQ communities in Lebanon , and a hashtag campaign that originated in Egypt recently that uses "fetrah," the Arabic word for "instinct," to insist that there can only be two genders.

In New Lines magazine, Alamer concluded that authoritarian Arab leaders often substitute "moral authority" for "democratic legitimacy. Arguably, the answer is adopting anti-homosexuality and, to a lesser degree, anti-atheism discourse. This appears to be behind what is happening in Iraq too, activists say. There are other recent examples of similarly attention-getting laws in Iraq, on ography and paternal custody, as well as against normalizing relations with Israel, said Sam, who asked that his full name not be used.