Constructions of masculinities in Islamic traditions, societies and cultures, with a specific focus on India and Pakistan between the 18th and the 21st century

This is the title of a PhD thesis written by Dr. Amanullah De Sondy, who has just accepted a position at Ithaca College. According to Joan McAlpine, who profiled Dr. De Sondy for The Sunday Times, several leading publishers are competing to buy the thesis and publish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should consider the title she suggested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very interested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Muslim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patriarch with several wives and dozens of children. There are dysfunctional families in Islamic tradition, he says, prophets without father figures and revered holy men who led “effeminate” lifestyles. Most controversially, he challenges homophobia in Islam. “Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The important thing is to link it with living a good life and creating a good society.”

Later in the article, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pilgrims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore district even today, but some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the presence of “antinomian Sufis in the Indian subcontinent — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the conservatives who disagree with him use–that of God’s decision to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhabitants–he says the story “is really about [God’s] disapproval of the rape of young boys that was happening in the place,” which is very different from saying that God disapproves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the complexities of what Islam has to say about homosexuality, but I do know that scholarship like this, which at the very least highlights the degree to which ideas about masculinity, manhood and male sexuality are contested ideological territory, showing that the traditional view is only one of the possibilities that exist, is very, very important.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.