Wow, that sounds difficult. America, land of the free … I hope you have found a friendly place here.

hakim baker

Well, once we look at Islam as a faith without the associated social restrictions, maybe then you can find your Muslim self and gay self in the same place. But, I won’t kid you that most Muslims wouldn’t understand and will insist that you adhere to the social code. I’m not going to tell anyone that the social code is invalid, but I will say it should be each person’s choice to follow it or not, leaving the rest to God.

- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.

Regarding the absence of a beard, I remember reading that a male is free to shave, or to have a beard, but is NOT free to do bizarre things with his beard, like shave one side of the face, or make designs.

During Hajj, do the men shave their heads? I cant remember now, and am too tired to google for it.

I know part of the idea of the hajj is for everyone to be (look) equal in dress and grooming.

By the way, I have always found it fascinating (since I come from a Hindu background), that pilgrims perform COUNTER-PRADIKSHANUM around the Kaaba, (with the unauspicious left side of the body facing the Kaaba, which causes the rotation of the crowd to be counter-clockwise) whereas a more ancient form of Hindu and Buddhist worship, around a stupa monument, is clockwise pradikshanum, with the auspicious right side towards the object of veneration.

But, many Hindus and Buddhists also shave the head as an offering, and wear sheets, on pilgrimage to a shrine.

I have also noticed that there is often a REVERSAL of direction in practices whenever there is some “protestant” revolution. For example, hand mudras during meditation: Zen places the left hand beneath the right hand, which is just the reverse of Jain practice and depictions or Saivite. Also, various groups which use the swastika symbol will reverse the direction from that “other group” against which they protest.

I heard a great joke once. A rabbi is on a cruise ship and it sinks. He is the only survivor, swimming to a small island where he lives for 20 years. Finally, another ship passes by and the captain goes to see the rabbi.

Captain: “It is amazing how you have survived here. And you have even build a building her. What is this building?

Rabbi: “Oh, that is my synagogue where I pray each day.”

Captain: “And what is that other building I see way over there on the other side of the island.”

Rabbi: “Oh…. THAT.... that is the synagoge I wouldn’t be caught dead in!”

Alas, we all have to build our two houses of worship I suppose, to feel normal, or special.

Here is something to cheer you up, which I wrote a few years ago entitled "What Is Love?" I speak of same sex love and I speak also of spirituality. Several years ago, a dear friend wrote me and asked me to speak on love. Here is my reply: We do not have to worry about how to tell when it is love, for Love tells us. The touchstone of true love is a lifetime of shared commitment. Failure of this test does not mean that we have not loved or cannot love, but passage of this test is proof positive of love indeed. Years after we had parted and gone our separate ways, I told my beloved from my college years, "as Robert Frost once said, home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in, and I know your heart is home for me, for whenever I come to you, I know that you must let me into your heart." We need to be needed and we need to need. We may look to many songs and poems to learn different aspects of love. One old song says "Love is a many-splendored thing" while another says "falling in love with love is falling for make-believe". There is even a song which says, "when I'm not near the one I love, I love the one I'm near." "Better to have known love and lost, than to never have known love at all". There is love of neighbor, love of country and love of God. There are selfish and selfless forms of love. There are selfish loves which smother and destroy and there are loves which give life and meaning both for the giver and the recipient. We see love as instinctive in infants. There is no child which does not love its caregiver, no matter how flawed or abusive they might be. We love because we seek love in return. The love we seek is a validation of our own self-worth, that someone would care if we were not here. The essential message of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," with Jimmy Stuart, is that the world would not be the same place had we not passed through it. In the movie version of Brideshead Revisited (from the novel by Evelyn Waugh), Sebastian, a tragic alcoholic, has found and taken in another man even more tragic and helpless than himself. Sebastian explicitly says that anyone must be in quite a sorry state to need the likes of a Sebastian to look after them. Yet, Sebastian finds meaning and self-worth and validation in this relationship where he feels needed. To love is to find value, worth. To be loved is to have value and worth. Aristotle said: A friend is another 'I'. There is a love which strikes us unexpectedly, like lightening on a stormy night, like the song "some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger, across a crowded room" or the song "strangers in the night, exchanging glances, lovers at first sight". There is a different sort of love which grows through years of shared experiences, which is the love that is possible in arranged marriages. Mohandas Gandhi and Kasturbai were married at the age of 6 and spent a lifetime together. Gandhi, in old age, wept inconsolably when his lifetime companion, Kasturbai, passed away. We see such a love expressed in the song from "Fiddler on the Roof," "Do you love me?" We do not choose our parents, and yet we love them. Sometimes we do not choose our life companion, and yet we grow to love them through shared experiences. We may even learn of bizarre loves as in the movie "Kiss of the Spider Woman": A complex and universal story of friendship and love, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" explores the enforced relationship — through imprisonment — of two men with radically different perspectives on life. Molina is a flagrant homosexual window trimmer convicted on a morals charge and Valentin is a clandestinely-held revolutionary who has been endlessly tortured by prison authorities in a non-specific Latin American metropolis. Definitely, love is quite necessary and required for life. An infant will die without some form of love, even if only a feigned love by some nurse caretaker. Experiments in nurseries indicate that if an infant is fed and cleaned, but never given affection, that it grows sickly and dies. I know this only from reading, and cannot personally vouch for the scientific accuracy of this observation. Various religions speak of love. The Bible says somewhere that God is love. The Psalms say "how blessed is it for brethern to dwell together in unity / it is like the oil running down the beard of Aaron". This passage from the Psalms speaks of the sort of love found in monasteries, which is not a sexual love. One sees an analogous love in the military between comrads-in-arms who have seen many battles together. That love which the world spends most of its time discussing is the love which draws two people to share a life together. For the vast majority of us, that love is heterosexual love, which draws us to someone of the opposite gender, yet for a sizable minority in the world such love is for someone of the same gender. Most of us know what it means to live with another person in one fashion or another. Most of us have lived with parents, siblings, relatives. We share the daily tasks of eating, sleeping, cleaning, working and recreation. It is possible to live with someone without loving them and it is possible to love someone without living with them, but the highest expression and test and proof of love is your love for someone you live with daily. In the delightful play "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder, a young man, about to marry, expresses great anxiety about what they will find to discuss each day, for the thousands of days that constitute a lifetime of marriage. Years later, that same character laughs, because what seemed a problem was never really a problem at all. There were always plenty of things to talk about. Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer price for the play "Our Town". It is quite possible that Thornton Wilder was gay. I have read that, after his death, it was revealed that Wilder was a homosexual, a fact he kept hidden during his life. Karl Maria Kertbeny was a Hungarian writer who is remembered today mostly for coining the term "homosexual", in 1869, as a replacement for the pejorative term "pederast" that was used in the German and French speaking world of his time. Though he claimed not to be homosexual himself, Kertbeny said that his sense of justice made him cry out against sodomy prosecutions. Kertbeny argued that homosexuality is an inborn disposition, so laws like Paragraph 175 that punish it are unjust. Kertbeny's writing career produced many books, but almost nothing of literary merit. I mention Thornton Wilder's sexual orientation simply because so many writers, artists and philosophers have been gay and yet have written works which influence our understanding of what love is. While we are on the subject of Thornton Wilder and his play, "Our Town," take a look at this excerpt from an article on AIDS and the terminally ill: ...anybody who's living with a terminal or a chronic condition is forced to look at their own mortality. For a lot of people who successfully go through the adjustment process and aren't stuck in it, it's real freeing to begin to savor each moment of life, to see fully all the colors that are there, smell fully all the smells, taste all the tastes, hear all the sounds, feel all the feelings you can. It gets back to Thornton Wilder's play 'Our Town' about this girl who was part of a community but who then dies. She comes back as an invisible spirit and watches the townsfolk, her former neighbors. And she see how very little actual living the people do when they're caught up in the middle of it, how they all just kind of sleepwalk through life. I don't think that sexual orientation makes a big difference in one's capacity to love another during a lifetime of cohabitation. There are both straight and gay couples who are successful in committed love relationships, and there are many of both orientations who are failures (and some who are chronic failures). It is difficult to speak about love without speaking about sex. It is perhaps easier to speak about sex without love than to speak of love without sex. It is easier to make a lover out of a friend than it is to make a friend out of a lover. It is rare in any relationship for two people to love each other equally. There is usually one person who loves more and another who loves less. Sometimes, in life, you must make a conscious decision and commitment as to which role you wish to play. Compare a line from e.e. cummings poem : your sex squeaked like a billiard-cue chalking itself, as not to make an error, with twist spontaneously methodical. ..... with this line from Wallace Steven's poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle": If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. In the 1980s I lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut (near Yale University).... Japanese Sushi restaurants were beginning to gain popularity in the USA, but there was only one such restaurant in New Haven at that time. The two restaurant owners were a somewhat portly middle-aged man of Irish ancestry (who was gay), and the chef, who was a much shorter, slender Japanese man (also middle aged). They were lovers who had lived together for many years. I went to the restaurant often, and got to know many people well there (customers), and also the Irish owner…. Im' sure that most people perceived them as quite an unlikely couple to share life together. One day, the Japanese chef returned to Japan for a visit. After several weeks returned to his life (and companion) in New Haven… I had some talks with the owner (the Irishman).... about various personal things… He told me that one day he asked his companion "Do you love me?", and the chef answered… "Love? ...Love!... What is this talk about love?.... We are CONNECTED!"... In the original Greek of that epistle, the word is the famous "agape", which was sometimes translated in the King James version as "charity", but at other times as "love." So, when the King James version speaks of "Faith, Hope and Charity" it is really saying "Faith, Hope and Love." In modern Greek, if one says "agapimene", as an adjective, it means "beloved", but can be said of a child or a sibling or a parent, or a close friend. But if one says that two people are "erotevmene" (note the root Eros), then one definitely implies a sexual dimension to the couple. In the Tagalog (Pilipino) language, if I say to someone "mahal kita" I may mean an agapic form of love, but if I say "ini ibig kita" then there is no mistaking that I have sexual feelings. In America, perhaps the words "like" and "love" have come to serve this distinction. A girl will tell a boy, "I like you, but I don't love you." And, I shall end this on a religious note. I once entered a men's room in a hospital, and read some graffitti on the wall which said "I love God, but God only likes me."

OmarG,

The social code, I understand that there is certainly a social code in Islam, but does that code have to be restrictive Omar?

I am use to fraternizing and interacting with women in school, in the workplace, and in social settings that are non-Muslim spaces. I’m gay, but that doesn’t mean I lust after every guy who I find physically attractive either.

As a Muslim, I am a “prude” by gay standards. I abstain from alcohol which is odd for most gay men eating in Hillcrest, I abstain from pork product, and the recreational drugs of choice prevalent in the gay cicrcuit dance scene.

I dress modestly, never showing off my awrah (from the navel to the knees), I abstain from wearing flashy clothing or gold and silk, etc.

I adhere to many things pertaining to this “social code,” however, I think sometimes the “code” can be a little too unnatural, a little too forced, a little too restrictive.

Salaams, I sympathize and wish I had a solution. I don't nor can I say that I'm comfortable from a religious standpoint with homosexuality—I'm still trying to figure out what the balance is between compassion & tolerance and legitimate Islamic "family values" & maintaing continuity with Islamic tradition in the modern world—but remember that no matter how neurotically many Muslims may overreact to this question, that sexual orientation is not mentioned in the Shahadah. Neither literally or by implication. If someone argues it is implied, then so are all sorts of other far more prominent and commonplace sins (e.g., heterosexual fornication or adultery, backbiting, exploiting widows and orphans). We all submit imperfectly and struggle in various ways.

Anyone who thinks they can excommunicate a Muslim for gay behavior much less simply being gay hasn't a clue about Islam or fiqh. Nor is consciously being unrepetantly and openly gay grouds for takfir. There's no shortage of Muslims who consciously and openly refuse to perform salat, the heart of Islamic faith, yet no one dares to declare them kafirs. No one except perhaps a Khawarjite would say that a murderer or adulterer ceases to be a Muslim due to their offense. Even by the strictest traditional standard (assuming its resonanably internally consistent), homosexuality just one of a whole range of sins. This attitude is an outrageous offense against Islamic faith and tradition.

I'm not trying to repudiate or trivialize traditional concerns (which I share to a great, even if I'm still trying to figure out how many of them are legitimate), but tt the end of the day, your relationship is ultimately between you and Allah. That doesn't let you (or anybody else) off the hook to give in to every urge or neglect authentic shariah. You need to consult authentic sources, such as Quran, Sunnah and scholarly opinion, but only Allah can judge what is in your heart.

The Muslim community in the US needs more homegrown leaders—I don't think "Muslim" soil will grow such leaders for generations, given the state of affairs in most Muslim countries, which are often politically unstable, patriachal developing countries where such discussions naturally seem a bourgeois luxury.—can transcend these neuroses about homosexuality and keep it in its proper perspective so that they can be constructive. Islam does not condone persectuion, takfir or vigillanteism. People who go bonkers over homosexuality need to remember that there are strict hudud (limits) on a Muslim's behavior at all times, and especially when whether we're dealing with people we disapprove of. The same rules and principles that ban homosexuality completely outlaw these violations of gay Muslims' rights. These vile, dehumanizing overreactions of self-declared defenders of tradition are the antithesis of committment to Islam and shariah.

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