Who gets to speak? Muslim Sexual Minorities in the East End of London

Recent events in the East End of London around anti-gay stickers put up supposedly by some Asian youth have triggered clear manifestations of Islamophobic sentiments amongst LBGTQ groups in London. Thus far there has been no evidence as to who is responsible for the act. The stickers had quotes from the Qur’an that refer to Allah’s vengeance. There was supposed to be a pride march organised after the stickers were put up; the East End Gay Pride (EEGP), which was eventually cancelled [1] [1].

Astonishingly responsive, the people who were going to organise this event created a website (within a week of the stickers receiving press) in which they clearly stated that the event was solely supposed to make LGBTQ people visible in the streets of the East End and that it was supposed to be non-political, that it wasn't anti-Islamic and that it didn't have anything to do with the British xenophobic party EDL (English Defence League), although they had received open support from them. Finally they clearly stated that the demonstration was ‘not anti-anything’, the statement of which showed that the whole event was a contradiction in terms. All these disclaimers operate as powerful counter-propositions, indeed they testify to a problematic seemingly depoliticised stance of the organising team.  I would suggest that by reading the text from the pride website pages [2] [2] one could easily notice the incoherence and the semantic ambiguity of the digitised text, whose messages produce controversial meanings. Hence, the pride clearly would have been political, it would have created friction with the large Muslim community of the East End, and finally it was also found that one of the main pride organisers had been operationally involved with the EDL – indeed, a Muslim LGBTQ organisation in East London Imaan found that this person was a founding member of EDL.

All this comes as no surprise. In fact, the EEGP can be read as a forceful attempt by a far-right oriented group of individuals to capitalise on Western diffused feelings of intolerance and discomfort towards Islam, enhanced in the aftermath of September 11th when a renewed global conceptual framework of war on terror came into being. This moulded Islam as the new constitutive enemy of modern civilisation, and sexual minorities in the West have become deeply instrumentalised by state power. Indeed in today's political discourse sexual minorities in Western countries seem to emerge as embodying the symbol of sexual emancipation and freedom guaranteed in liberal democracies as opposed to the state of victimhood of sexual minorities within uncivilised non-Western societies; Saving the homosexuals from the Islamic culture has come to stand for a necessary step in order to install democracy in a monolithically imagined regressive Islam. The neo-colonial move of the white man coming to save the minoritised Other from his/her own co-nationals proffers a very well and painfully known trope. Within this context the imperialist narrative of how necessary it is to civilise/modernise these identified homophobic religious areas of the Orient is a powerful strategic dispositif that associates Islam with homophobia and backwardness that deprive individuals of any form of sexual agency.

In a time where LGBTQ individuals are granted more rights in the West, where they are becoming more and more assimilated within a sexual citizenship discourse by being recognised as full citizens of the liberal democratic state, LGBTQ politics must be very attentive not to contribute to the formation of nationalist sentiments, which are intrinsically and explicitly racist and exclusionary. In the US and Western Europe, it appears clear that the fact that certain gays and certain lesbians can now aspire to full citizenship status hides the recent and current history of oppression and struggle for civil rights and equality that wider LGBTQ communities have been fighting for.

Now more than ever new coalitions and alliances amongst LGBTQ activist and political groups must be created, in which an anti-racist agenda will have to represent one of the predominant concerns and constitute essential part of their work. Clearer messages need being circulated on homosexuality and Islam, indeed with all the misinformation provided by the systems of institutions the risk of stereotyping and essentialising sexual politics in Islam is very high. There are already a number of groups and grassroots organisations run by and for LGBTQ Muslims in the UK and elsewhere in Europe that must be paid more attention to- some of them operate in London. [3] [3]

It is common to encounter the problem of representation in relation to Muslim sexual minorities, whereby who is represented by who becomes an extremely problematic and misleading act. Nevertheless in recent years gay Muslims have attracted the attention of the UK media, the modes of representation remain simplistic and tend to create imagined fixed categories of either the victimised gay Muslim or the counter-category of the gay individual who has escaped homophobic Islam (thus producing the ‘exceptional’ Muslim). Certainly the majority of these representations are partial and they don't tell the full story. The other issue with representing Muslim sexual minorities is constituted by the imbalance of power between who gets represented and the representative, the proxy. The person who speaks out for the Others represents the Others, but simultaneously represents him/herself in the very act of representation, and this is an intrinsic characteristic of any process of political discourse production. As the cultural critic Jasbir Puar acutely remarks, cultural capital accrues to those who represent the ‘Others’, rather than to those who are represented, producing a version of what Michel Foucault calls the ‘speaker’s benefit [4] [4].  One may suggest that this is the eternal problem when attempting to represent social groups in a political framework, and surely we see this happening in a recurrent fashion in relation to Muslim sexual minorities in the UK, whose media representation is all too often controlled by non-Muslims who determine which Muslims take part in the process of representation.

Acknowledging these issues is only the first step to start asking more difficult questions, which should push us all towards looking at more nuanced, more complex and multi-layered narratives that need to be presented to the public; narratives that can challenge stereotyping and that can work as platforms of discussion and critical encounters.

Notes:

[3] Iraqi LGBT [5]; Imaan [6]; Safra Project [7]