Reimagining Queerness in Islamic History: A Multifaceted Exploration Abstract: This paper embarks on a journey through the annals of Islamic history to uncover the multifarious expressions of queerness that have permeated the fabric of Muslim societies. Departing from conventional narratives that often portray Islamic civilizations as monolithically conservative, this study delves into the rich tapestry of queer experiences, identities, and practices spanning various epochs and regions. Drawing upon a diverse array of historical sources, including religious texts, poetry, and scholarly accounts, the research elucidates the complex interplay between gender, sexuality, and Islamic discourse. From the mystic poetry of Rumi to the accounts of same-sex relationships among caliphs, the paper highlights instances where queerness intersected with and flourished within Islamic culture. Furthermore, the study explores the tensions between societal norms and individual expressions of queerness, revealing how queer individuals navigated and sometimes challenged prevailing attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Through an examination of legal texts, literary works, and cultural practices, the paper demonstrates the existence of spaces where gender nonconformity and same-sex desire found acceptance, albeit often within the confines of secrecy or subversion. Moreover, the research addresses the impact of colonialism, modernization, and globalization on the visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals within Muslim-majority societies. By contextualizing contemporary debates within a historical framework, the study underscores the importance of understanding the complexities of queerness in Islamic history for fostering greater inclusivity and dialogue in the present day. In conclusion, this paper advocates for a reevaluation of Islamic history through a queer lens, challenging essentialist narratives and promoting a more nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality within Muslim societies. By acknowledging the diverse and richly textured manifestations of queerness throughout history, this research contributes to broader conversations surrounding LGBTQ+ rights, religious pluralism, and social justice in the Islamic world and beyond.

During the 1919 Revolution, Egyptian nationalists overthrew their British occupants and established independence in 1922. Among these revolutionaries, Cairo’s performers began to use their voices and new musical styles to express their political ambitions. Mūnira al-Mahdiyya (1885–1965) was one such notable star who worked with her musical troupe to reconfigure Jules Massenet’s work Cléopâtre (1914) into the first Arabic opera, Cleopatra and Marc Antony. The new adaptation featured underlying anti-colonialist politics present since the 1919 Revolution. Cleopatra, performed by Al-Mahdiyya, was the symbol of a patriotic Egyptian queen facing the threat of European colonialism. The young, rising star Muhammad Abdel Wahab performed as Marc Antony, who represented the encroachment of the West. Remarkably, when the work premiered on January 20, 1927 in Cairo, the audience did not enjoy the opera. In subsequent nights, Al-Mahdiyya tried to save the show by firing Abdel Wahab and dressing in male costume to portray Marc Antony herself. After three performances, the opera closed, leading to the end of Al-Mahdiyya’s career. In this presentation, I use the failed Arabic opera Cleopatra and Marc Antony as a case study to analyze the queer persona of Al-Mahdiyya and the fledgling Kingdom of Egypt’s anti-colonial nationalist politics. Drawing upon scholarship on Arabic theatre and politics (Khuri-Makdisi 2010; Cormack 2021) and feminist queer studies in the Middle East (Massad 2007; Georgis 2013; Shomali 2023), I situate Cleopatra and Marc Antony within the broader narrative of the 1919 Revolution and women’s awakening movement. I examine the opera’s use of Western and Arabic musical styles to argue that Al-Mahdiyya brough both contemporary anti-colonial nationalist politics and gender performance to an unpopular opera. As Jack Halberstam (2011) writes, “gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures.” In her performances of both Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Al-Mahdiyya represents her failure at portraying the ideal Egyptian woman and the threat of Western modernity. Cleopatra and Marc Antony provides an alternative queer narrative to anti-colonial nationalism and performance in early twentieth century Egypt.

While there is no core definition of Muslim subjectivity and thereby a singular definition of Islam contrary to Western stereotypes, this paper critically interrogates how Islam has come to be defined as the state’s religion under the authoritarian restoration of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey. What goes into such definitions and institutional arrangements that make such large-scale definitions possible? How do Muslim subjects experience this singular interpretation of Islam and its state-led verifications once their experience is defined outside of this terrain? It is true that this type of reductionist reading misleadingly reinforces the polarization between seculars and Muslims and enables the JDP to consolidate its electoral power. However, I argue that this intertwinement also designates Islam as an indispensable component of the authoritarian apparatus, thereby justifying the spread of Islamophobia alongside denouncing authoritarianism. By depending on 15 months of ethnographic research and interviews with queer pro-bono lawyers and judicial experiences of Turkish queer activists in the courtrooms, my paper analyzes significant consequences of this process wherein Islam and the state’s secular institutions are discursively entangled. Is it possible to talk about Islam without relying on the epistemological oppression of the authoritarian governance, which takes religion as its primary base in Turkey? This presentation approaches this question by specifically focusing on legal cases such as femicide, hate crime, the protection of children and family, and public decency. It demonstrates how this discursive intertwinement between authoritarianism and Islam conceptually aims to separate queer activists from Muslim feminists as if they cannot have a common political ground to critique the state’s gendered power.

If we embrace Imazighen (Indigenous people of North Africa), “free people”, as bearers of liberation, then Tamazgha, our dreamed-of land, asks of us to embody such freedom. But how does one materialize a free, limitless imagination within this envisioned space? Space, as Massey (2005) contends, is a nexus of openness, multiplicity, and relationality, forever in flux and evolution – a precondition for an open history, and by extension, the potential for political agency. So, what kinds of politics and futures might arise from Tamazgha? And how do we mold the contours of both space and politics in its image? Probing these questions, this essay employs a scavenger research methodology (Halberstam, 1998), drawing from vexed “other-archives” (El Guabli, 2023) that encompass personal family narratives, artistic performances of queer Amazigh individuals, queer Moroccan argots, digital activism within the Moroccan queer community, Moroccan street graffiti, and ethnographic encounters with the Amazigh diaspora. Through this lens, Tamazgha is reimagined as both an onto-epistemological and political queer orientation (Ahmed, 2006) toward “freedom” and emancipatory futures. I contend that a genuine engagement with Indigiqueer Tamazgha futures requires us to relinquish the allure of conditional liberal recognition, identity-based imaginaries, colonial legacies, linguistic standardization, cultural essentialism, and cis-heteronormative border norms. The envisioned queer future of Tamazgha embodies a freedom-centric and profoundly utopian mode of existence and action in the world. By interrogating what such a future demands of us and exploring the possibilities it presents, we can challenge biogenetic family-centered structures associated with conventional notions of partnership, parenthood, military service, and gender conformity.

A border or spatial boundary was not an entity binding the feet of a prostitute wandering around in early 20th-century Iran. Long before the rhetoric of modernized urban lines was introduced by force to Iran, the spatial settlements of the city and the national borders of the country would collapse if one followed in the footsteps of a prostitute. Her body was the signifier of the mysterious and wronged spaces, the ruins and the leftovers, with their edges, their impossibilities, and the possibilities of transgressing or reclaiming them. It is unsettling enough to imagine a history for the figure of the prostitute in the historiography of the built environment, feminism, and politics in Iran, all of which have disregarded her as erased, forbidden, wronged, disciplined, punished, and displaced—a figure not worthy of a story or theory but of numbers depicting the density of the crime in Iran. Yet, the figure of the prostitute can challenge the ways the notions of spatial and national boundary and border are perceived or constructed, opening the way to de-map the spatial configurations that regularly marginalize the narratives of those living another life but are still in between the lines of patriarchy, orientalism, imperialism, coloniality, war, and state violence. In this paper, I collect the very few fragments remaining on sex workers, mostly in criminal records published in newspapers, official documentation, or city reports, to craft a queer map of spaces at odds with the regularities of the time over gender, sexuality, labor, and the border system. With a critical look into how the word "prostitute" is turned into a disciplining and punishing category in contemporary Iran against women political oppositionists, I relate the out-of-placeness of the figure of the prostitute in history to that of the disobedient women in contemporary Iran, deeply understanding how bodies can hegemonically be wronged, put in place, defined, ruled, murdered, and where the liminal spaces of resistance to this system of sovereignty exist or can be imagined.

Struggles for LGBTQ+ rights emerging from Muslim majority countries and Muslim minorities in the global north have been critiqued as a product of western sexual hegemony, crystallizing an orientalist opposition between anti-imperialist posture on one hand, and LGBTQ+ rights discourse on the other. Joseph Massad’s discussion of the gay international in “Desiring Arabs” has had major influence in supporting this opposition, both in the global south and in the global north. Much was written on the efficacy of his critique, in part due to its disconnection from material reality and its disregard for feminist analysis of gender and sexuality . However, his reliance on Foucauldian conception of power and his history of sexuality have had impacts on their own. Other than its disregard for the colonial management of sexuality , it historicizes state control of sexuality in relation to moments of moral panics, as opposed to moments of economic and political crisis . In turn, this disconnection between sexuality and class leaves behind key components of the management of sexuality in an imperial context . On the other hand, Marxist work on state violence places social organization along lines of racial and sexual as intrinsic to the processes of accumulation and expansion of capitalism as we see it today . In my presentation, I will critically engage with Massad’s account of gay imperialism by proposing a Marxist framework for both imperialism and sexuality . These frameworks will allow me to account not only for racial violence and sexual imperialism, but that also for the larger globalized capitalist project of which they are a necessary condition of possibility. I will do so by first, apprehending imperialism as an advanced stage of capitalism , and globalized neoliberalism as the context in which the gay international emerges , and second, by accounting not only for discourse on sexuality, but also state repression of certain sexualities through cohesive force as a bourgeois management of sexuality in contexts of violent restructuring of post-colonial economies . My aim is to foreground an anti-imperialist critique of western sexual hegemony which accounts for its role in restructuring global-south economies and the changes in social relations and subjectivities they engender without reproducing the orientalist conflation between western civilization and gender and sexual rights.