Sexual Diversity in the Muslim World

Abstract

This article interrogates how sexual and gender diversity in the Muslim world is rendered meaningful and positioned within overlapping structures of religion, law, culture and the modern nation-state. It argues that such diversity should not be treated merely as an attribute of individuals, but as an outcome of negotiations across three interconnected levels of social order: Islamic legal texts and doctrines that organize gender through a heteronormative binary; local gender orders and pre-Islamic cultural heritages in particular regions; and modern regimes of law and public morality that incorporate religious prohibitions into criminal law and public moral discourse.

The analysis draws on close readings of Islamic legal texts alongside historical and ethnographic studies and develops four comparative case studies: persons with intersex status (khuntha), the practice of bacha posh in Afghanistan, the sacred gender category of bissu in Bugis society, and same-sex relations classified under liwat. Taken together, these cases show that sexual and gender diversity in Muslim contexts takes the form of a ‘stratified diversity’. Categories with explicit textual recognition and clear juristic reasoning, such as khuntha, tend to be conditionally accommodated by being reinserted into the male–female binary. Practices such as bacha posh and the bissu are located primarily as cultural and ritual capital rather than as fully legitimized gender categories, whereas same-sex relations under liwat are repeatedly produced as a ‘moral threat’ to be controlled and punished, particularly when religious prohibitions are codified in state criminal law.

Theoretically, the article contends that the relationship between Islam and sexual and gender diversity cannot be reduced to the binary question of whether Islam ‘accepts’ or ‘rejects’ such diversity. Instead, it should be understood as a negotiated process among religious authorities, cultural actors and state institutions that together shape the visibility, placement and degrees of legitimacy accorded to different gendered and sexual subjectivities in contemporary Muslim societies.