I grew up in an extended family that played religious guessing games in gatherings and boasted occasionally about one of their elders being friends with Sheikh al-Shaarawi. In classrooms where teachers lamented that my generation is much more well-versed in Nancy Ajram lyrics than in religious scripture. As a kid, I was pretty into the whole faith thing. I carried around a Qur’an in my backpack. I prayed all the prayers, even the ones I missed. I knew a lot of prophets’ trivia. In first grade, I went around trying to convince other kids to stop collecting Pokémon cards because our religion teacher had declared them haram. For a long time, I’d managed to suppress a lot of questions and discomfort I had about religion on the pretext that that’s just the way it is. That worked out for a while, until it didn’t.

My second year of college was marked by a great turbulence. It was a time when my queerness was becoming more pronounced to me even if I hadn’t explicitly expressed that yet. A time marked by violent cognitive dissonance as I attempted to grapple with reconciling what I had thought to be two antagonistic categories: queerness and Islam. In hopes of getting a sense of relief, I started getting into hermeneutics. Sure, I’d been exposed to social constructivist literature that confirmed that much of what we know about religion is the product of political regimes, uptight men in power and normative modernity projects. But I wanted more proof. I downloaded books and immersed myself in alternative interpretations, emailed authors and joined online forums where queer Muslims chatted about their qualms around piety and desire. At the time, most of the people I knew (with the exception of a couple of friends) dismissed this type of interpretative labor. To be fair, hermeneutics can be an easy target for cynicism. Critiques levelled against it don’t really need to be sophisticated. Hermeneutics are often rejected on the basis that you’re half-assing faith or for the futility of the quest for authentic meaning at the heart of alternative readings. While these two arguments revolve around essence (the former being affirmative in its view that scripture is unaffected by discourse and the latter rejecting the idea of an unchanging core or truth), hermeneutics can also very well be dismissed on the grounds of anachronism and an Orientalist reckoning of temporality. Despite all of that, I still got into hermeneutics because at the time it felt good; in a way it was a little exercise in utopianism.

“Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence” writes queer theorist José.

Esteban Muñoz in his powerfully evocative book on imagining queer utopias...“historically, evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections and acts. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present, who will labor to invalidate the historical fact of queer lives—present, past, and future”.

Reading Scott Kugle’s book Homosexuality in Islam in college felt good. It felt good because of the potentiality it presented. The book convincingly showed that dramatic hadiths (records of actions and statements of Muhammad) about gay sex weren’t reliable and had a weak chain of transmission. It showed, through careful reading and cross-reading of references to the tribe of Lot in different chapters of the Qur’an, that the lazy narration of the story of Lot that is often brought forth so quickly and easily by homophobes is a story about rape and power not about consensual sex. It showed that the history of criminalizing homosexuality hasn’t always been very clear or straightforward, pointing that the sahaba (companions of the prophet) were confused about how to deal with the first case they witnessed. It showed that verses commonly understood as condemning lesbian sexuality were misconstrued and were instead a condemnation of the appropriation of inheritance. It may feel weird to trust the interpretative labor of a white convert named Scott and frankly after re-reading the book recently I found myself having reservations about the way love and companionship are framed throughout. I couldn’t read his attempts at queering the way ‘mating’ is mentioned in the Qur’an (a claim mostly resting on the reflection that zawj [meaning partner] is an ambiguously gendered term) and his celebration of gay marriage as liberation without thinking of the liberal assimilationist politics that cultural analyst Lisa Duggan dubs as homonormativity. Reinforcing the sanctity of marriage, a violently heterosexual capitalist institution, is as Muñoz claims “a symptom of the erosion of the gay and lesbian imagination”. Such an interpretation makes us think: what would a queering of scripture against the institution of the family look like? Such a question obviously doesn’t have an answer in the book. It also makes us wonder whether conjuring such proof is even worth it since it’s pretty hard to delineate these interpretations from disciplinary frameworks that historically condemned the deviance of queer desires. I do want to talk, however, about an instance that was quite imaginative.

At some point while reading the book you stumble upon the following hadith:

A man was with the Prophet (peace be upon him) when another man passed by and the former said, “O Messenger of God! I love this man.” The Messenger of God asked, “Have you let him know that?” He said, “No”. The Messenger of God then said, “tell him”. So he went up to the man and said, “I love you for the sake of God” and the other replied, “May God love you who loves me for the sake of God”.

This hadith is commonly understood to be about platonic love but reading Kugle you start thinking: what if it isn’t? I quite like the whimsical thought experiment of imagining a man telling Muhammad about his crush and him responding “go for it!” A temporary recasting of Muhammad as a queer ally or wingman may sound at best silly and at worst anachronistic (on the grounds of a casual and misplaced colonial transposition of modern western concepts); but what this critique with its overemphasis on discourse blinds us from is the potentiality of imagining such a moment. Like the stories that Muñoz opens his chapters with, this may count as “ephemeral proof”. Proof that doesn’t really count as legit, a clumsy anecdote that “hangs in the air” falling short at invalidating the authority of patriarchal and heterosexist narratives. Its indeterminacy ushers a horizon of possibility nonetheless.

I still pray sometimes. I find it soothing if I don’t read too much into the words.  For a while now I stopped seeking validation for my sexuality from scripture and I am no longer shaken by an imagined impossibility of reconciling my faith and queerness. This reconciliatory narrative is a case of bad ontology, manifested through a gimmicky positing of being Muslim and being queer as divorced ways of being. It’s also pretty exhausting. My hope in this essay was not to cement the necessity of proof to then be used in furthering reconciliation work but more to point to the failure of imagination that so clearly marks our present moment that makes many of us, to borrow from Grada Kilomba, feel like we are trapped within the unreason of homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality.