Gay in the Arab world

The New York Times Magazine has an article about being gay in the Arab world. Scary stuff. NPR interviews an author who has a book out on the gay culture in the Middle East. One point, which I find interesting, is the peculiar juxtposition of extreme anti-gay sentiment in the Arab world combined with ambivalence and ambiguity in the past and the present. After all, there's the old Afghan saying that even pigeons who fly over the lands of the Pashtun cover their rear with a wing, a reference to the prevalence of pedarasty in that subculture (where men and women are rigidly segregated). The historical record also suggests that the Middle East was often a relative refuge for European homosexuals. Contemporaneously, the fact that prominent Arab political figures such as Yasser Arafat might have had homosexual proclivities were both open secrets and yet unmentionable. Will this change? I believe so. The article and the interview on NPR both point out that Islamic law's attitude toward homosexuality treads further into grayland than modern Muslims admit. Over at Ali Eteraz's blog I entered into a dispute with a Muslim friend about whether one could be a Muslim and a practicing homosexual. If majority consensus is the prerequisite that time is not here, but I believe that one generation of kulturkampf can be relevatory. The believers shall never agree upon error, and Word of God always evolves....