Johann Hari

Ali Orhan is laughing. We’re sitting in the caff in
the Docklands Asda – no expenses spared here at Attitude! – and he is chuckling the most terrible, melancholic chuckle I have ever heard.

He is describing a day eighteen years ago when he picked up his parents at Heathrow airport. He was 21 years old, and they were returning from their annual holiday to Turkey. Ali knew he was gay – he had always
known – but his sexuality wasn’t flickering across his mind that that summer day, as he stood waiting in the arrivals lounge. He saw them waddling towards him with their suitcases and a strange woman. He waved. He had bought his mother a bunch of flowers. His parents had brought something for him too: a wife.

"Within five days, we were married," he says now, his dark laughter melted away. "It had always been there as I was growing up, I suppose, this knowledge that marriage was compulsory, and that you only had sex
within marriage. It was like going through puberty or growing a beard, something that just happened to you. But I was in denial. And then it happened, so suddenly, and I couldn’t see any way out."

Growing up in Britain’s Turkish community in the 1970s, Islam was more a cultural presence than a deep religious commitment. "Religion wasn’t a huge thing in
our family. My younger brothers don’t even believe. The only time we discussed faith was when my parents wanted to end an argument: it’s in the Koran. You can’t argue with it. It’s the word of God."

And the word of God, it seemed to Ali then, was that Turkish boys marry the girls their parents select for them. "We stayed married for ten months. I never tried to kid myself. She was very attractive, articulate, and a lovely person, but there was no way I was ever
going to be attracted to her physically. I knew I was never going to fulfil her or be the husband she deserved, and the guilt was eating me. She had given up everything in Turkey – her whole life – for me, and
I had nothing to offer her."

"The one thing I did that I’m proud of in that whole terrible part of my life is that I never consummated the marriage," he continues, in a soft, measured voice. "We shared a bed for ten months but we never had sex. I knew that once we had slept together, she
would be seen a ruined goods and she would never be able to marry again. She obviously couldn’t understand my attitude, and began to think there was something
wrong with her. She even tried coming on to me, which for a Muslim woman is an incredibly humiliating thing."

Ali was so afraid of telling his parents about his sexuality that he tried to make his wife leave him. He got male friends to put lipstick on his collar so she would think he had another woman. He would stay out late without any explanation. Nothing worked.

"Then one night I came home and finally told her I couldn’t ever love her," he says. "There was a phenomenal amount of family and community pressure for us to not get divorced. Getting permission took
another three months. Finally my parents gave in, but on one condition: that I take her back to her parents in Turkey and explain why."

It was potentially a death-wish: go to a very
conservative part of Turkey, and tell a group of
religious men that you are divorcing their daughter because you’re gay. Ali went. "My one saving grace in their eyes was that I hadn’t ‘defiled’ her. Because of that, I survived." He lived – but the day he returned,
his parents explained that he was no longer their son. They told him bluntly that they never wanted to see him again, not even on their deathbeds.

Nearly two decades later, there is still complete silence from all of his relatives. I ask if he is angry with them. "No," he says, almost surprised by the question. "I had tarnished the whole family’s character: their eldest son wasn’t a man, he hadn’t slept with his wife. I don’t blame them for what they did. It was damage limitation for them within the
community. That was their whole world, and if they had stood by me, that world would have come crashing down. They would have been outcasts. What right have I got to ask them to do that? They had to choose between
their son or their world."

There is a family eating their dinner two tables away from us. I wish they would leave; I wish Ali never had to see another family again. After such a terrible experience, it would seem natural for Ali to renounce Islam, the religion that seemed to wreck his life. But he explains, "If anything, I’ve become more religious since leaving home. I have a much stronger understanding of my faith now. In times of crisis, it’s my faith I turn to. At my lowest point, when I was first expelled from my world, it was Islam that kept me from the edge. I would have committed suicide without my faith."

"The only thing I have left that identifies me with my family, with my community, with my life before I was disowned, is my religion," he continues. "Nobody can take that away from me. It’s the last shred of the person I used to be." He considers himself today to be
a devout Muslim – indeed, more devout than many of the people who cast him out. "It’s not like the Muslim community isn’t aware that there are gay Muslims. But as long as they stay married and only have gay sex on
the side, they’re tolerated. I think that’s
disgusting, and I wasn’t going to play that game. If I had been a hypocrite, if I had cheated on my wife and actually been a much worse Muslim, then I would still be with my family and my community."

Yet he believes that the Koran does clearly condemn homosexuality. "If there was any pro-gay interpretation, I would have seized on it. The only ammunition I have is that the Koran makes it clear that no Muslim has the right to judge another Muslim. Only Allah has that right."

Ten years ago, the words ‘gay’ and ‘Muslim’ seemed like polar opposites, and an out gay Muslim seemed as probable as a black member of the Ku Klux Klan. All of the seven countries that treat homosexuality as a
crime punishable by death are Muslim. Of the 82 countries where being gay is a crime, 36 are predominantly Muslim.

Even in democratic societies, Islam remains
overwhelmingly anti-gay. Dr Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of North America, says "homosexuality is a moral disease, a sin, a corruption… No person is born homosexual, just as nobody is born a thief, a liar or a murderer. People
acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education."

Sheikh Sharkhawy, a cleric at the prestigious London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, compares homosexuality to a "cancer tumour." He argues "we must burn all gays to prevent paedophilia and the spread of
AIDS," and says gay people "have no hope of a spiritual life." The Muslim Educational Trust hands out educational material to Muslim teachers – intended for children! – advocating the death penalty for gay people, and advising Muslim pupils to stay away from
gay classmates and teachers.

But some gay people like Ali have begun to contest this reading of Islam. There have been a small number of groups for gay Muslims over the past twenty years,
and their history is not encouraging. A San
Francisco-based group called the Lavender Crescent Society sent five members to Iran in 1979 after the Islamic revolution there to spur an Iranian gay movement. They were taken straight from the airport to a remote spot and shot dead. Gay Iranians went underground straight after. Even in the West, a Toronto-based group called Min-Alaq was formed in the
early 1990s but closed down after fundamentalists threatened to murder all its members.

And then came Al-Fatiha. With seven branches across the United States and offices in London, Johannesburg and Toronto, these gay Muslims ain’t going to shut up
or scuttle away. They are here and they are fighting. The group – whose name is taken from a Koranic term meaning ‘the beginning’ or ‘the opening’ – was set up in 1997 by Faisal Alam.

Faisal, now 27, arrived in Connecticut from Pakistan when he was 10 years old. In an unfamiliar rural area with "more cows than people", he explains, he found his faith a source of comfort and inspiration. He
became very active in the local mosque and a leader in his Muslim youth group. Yet when he was sixteen he began to realise something was wrong – "something I didn’t have a word for."

He started a relationship with an older male convert to Islam, but it fizzled out and – in the classic gay Muslim pattern – he became engaged to a very religious woman. Fortunately, she broke it off after a year
because "she had a feeling in her heart that something was deeply wrong."

When he started college, Faisal embarked on a dual existence: the good Muslim boy by day and the gay boy by night. His parents found out about his sexuality when someone copied some of his internet messages to a
gay chat-line and distributed them at his family’s mosque. "My mom’s first reaction was to say, ‘You can’t be a Muslim any more,’" he explains.

Nineteen and desolate, he sent out an e-mail that started an avalanche. "Is anyone out there a gay Muslim?" he asked in a discussion list linking Muslim student societies across the US. Most of the responses were filled with revulsion – "There is no such thing
as a gay Muslim!" they howled. But there was a trickle saying, "I though I was the only one."

As a network for those people – and for gay Muslims across the globe – he established al Fatiha. "The Muslim community as a whole is in complete and utter denial about homosexuality," he explains. "The conversation hasn’t even begun. We are about 200 years behind Christianity in terms of progress on gay issues. Homosexuality is still seen as a Western disease that infiltrates Muslim minds and societies."

He admits that al Fatiha is dealing with troubled, torn people. "For each of us, it’s a struggle. Probably 90 to 99 percent of gay Muslims who have accepted their sexuality leave the faith. They don’t see the chance for a reconciliation. They are two identities of your life that are exclusive." One gay man – who asked not to be named – summarised this
belief that the two poles of his identity could never meet: "It’s a choice between praying and sucking cock," he said. "You can’t do both."

Yet Faisal is trying to articulate a pro-gay Islam. He believes that the homophobia of most contemporary Muslims is based not on their faith but on their culture, and there is a surprising amount of scholarly research to back him up. The punishment for almost all
crimes is laid out very clearly in the Koran – 100 lashes for fornication, for example – but there is no punishment mentioned for homosexuality anywhere. There is one passage that is often interpreted as legally
forbidding homosexuality, but it is comparatively mild: "And as for the two of you who are guilty thereof, punish them both. And if they repent and improve, then let them be. Lo! Allah is merciful."

There are seven references in the Koran to the "people of Lut" – named ‘Lot’ in the Christian and Jewish holy texts – which is a town destroyed for the immorality
of its men. But the conventional interpretation – that this ‘immorality’ took the form of gay sex – is increasingly being contested. Mushin Hendriks, an American Muslim scholar and a gay man, claims that the
story of Lut "sees God destroying men because of male rape, sodomy and promiscuity. But there is a difference between sodomy and homosexuality, between
rape and love. The story says nothing about homosexual love."

During the Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime, there was not a single recorded case of a punishment or execution for homosexuality. It is only two generations after Mohammed, under the third Caliph, Omar, that a gay man
was burned alive for his ‘crime’. Even then, it was fiercely debated, and many scholars argued that this was contrary to the traditions of the Prophet.

Several scholars and historians have proven that homosexuality was fairly common at the time of the Prophet. They have also shown that at certain points in history gay people were much more tolerated – and
indeed, sometimes celebrated – in Muslim societies than in Europe. Before the twentieth century, the regions of the world with the most prominent and diverse gay behaviours on display were in northern Africa and southwestern Asia – Muslim lands. The
current gay-hating, homo-cidal climate in Muslim countries is a fairly recent invention.

Look, for example, at the homoerotic poetry that flourished in Spain after the Muslim conquest in 711. This is stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in the porn section of Clonezone: "I gave him what he asked
for, made him my master/ My tears streamed out over the beauty of his cheeks" and so on. Or how about the ninth century Caliph of Baghdad, who "gave himself over entirely to dissipated pleasure in the company of
his eunuchs and refused to take a wife"?

These pockets of gay freedom persisted in some areas right up to the early twentieth century, when Victorian colonial influence started to erode their tolerance away. For example, the oasis town of Siwa, located in the Libyan desert of Western Egypt, sounds
like something from a Bel Ami movie. The
anthropologist Walter Cline described it in the 1930s: "All normal Muslim Siwan men and boys practice sodomy. Among themselves the natives are not ashamed of this; they talk about it as openly as they talk about love
of women and many, if not most, of their fights arise from homosexual competition."

Another visitor, the archaeologist Count Bryron de Prorock reported "an enthusiasm that could not have been approached even in Sodom. Homosexuality was not only rampant, it was raging." Men would marry each other with great ceremony, and this was only stamped out – by non-Muslims – in the 1930s.

Al Fatiha is not as mad a project, then, as it might initially seem. Along with the homophobic strands, there have been strands in Muslim thought for a very long time encouraging tolerance of gay people; they
have simply died away. Today, there are some groups who are prepared to kill in order to prevent a pro-gay Islam from being revived. In 2001, Al Mujharoun – a fanatical British-based fundamentalist group who believe in establishing "the Muslim Republic of Great
Britain" – issued a fatwa against Al Fatiha. They said any member of Al-Fatiha is an apostate (traitor to the Muslim faith), and the punishment for apostasy is death.

Faisal refuses to be intimidated. "We’re challenging 1,400 years of dogma. There’s bound to be a battle," he explains. Ali has had death threats too. A group of black-clad men even turned up at his flat one night "to make it very clear that if I wanted a quiet life I
should shut up about being gay." I asked if he
considered being quiet. "No, I moved," he laughs.

Despite the threat of violence, at least in democratic societies gay Muslims can wrestle with their dual identity. For most of the 50 million gay Muslims in the world, this isn’t an option. They are more likely to be worried about avoiding imprisonment or even
execution. For example, when 52 gay men were recently arrested and jailed for attending an unofficial gay club in Egypt, even the Egypt Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) refused to condemn their prison
sentences. EOHR’s Secretary-General, Hafez Abu Saada, said, "Personally, I don’t like the subject of homosexuality, and I don’t want to defend them."

In Lebanon, one of the more free countries in the Middle East, a popular weekly TV programme – Al Shater Yahki – discusses sexuality and includes gay voices. Even there, every gay person speaks from behind a
mask, or they would risk being killed.

Marianne Duddy, executive director of Dignity/USA, the oldest and largest gay Catholic organisation, explains, "In many ways, Al-Fatiha and the first wave of gay Muslims exactly parallel where gay Catholics
were 25 to 30 years ago. Our first five years were just about putting the words ‘gay’ and ‘Catholic’ in the same sentence. I pray they have a very deep faith." And even now, the Catholic Church is hardly a model of tolerance. The Pope describes gay marriage as
"evil", calls on gay people to be celibate, and has acted at the United Nations to block protection of the human rights of gay people. But things are far better than they were for gay Christians. Gay Jews have made
incredible progress, with the largest group of rabbis in America openly endorsing gay marriage.

Yes, the fight for tolerance within Islam is going to be very long and very painful. There will be many more casualties. But one day the beheading of gay men in the Middle East and the internal exile of men like Ali will be remembered the way we remember the burning of witches today. When that day comes, men like Ali Orhan and Faisal Alam will be seen as heroes.