Islam, Alcohol and Charee Stanley's Religious Freedom

Charee Stanley is a Muslim flight attendant, who was suspended by her employer, Express Jet, for refusing to serve alcohol to passengers. Stanley recently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During a brief appearance on The View, Stanley and her lawyer, Lena Masri, put forward a compelling argument for exploring the protection of her religious freedom.  Masri responded intelligently to the question of whether this is a case that is similar to that of Kim Davis, the Kentucky civil servant who refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. If you'd like to see this brief exchange, see it here.

I personally relish actual, not token, diversity in the workplace. If I were Stanley's boss, I would continue to accommodate her request to refrain from serving alcohol and delegating this task to a colleague, because, as she argues, serving alcohol is a non-essential function of the condition of her employment. But, if I were Stanley's friend, or community member, I would suggest to her that Islam is not a closed set of commandments. Too often we hear "Islam says this, Islam does that..." or "In Islam there is no this...." People make this mistake with their religions all the time. They objectify them, making rigid certainties out of otherwise complex, multifurcated discursive structures. They forget that religion, vis-a-vis scripture, is a living, organic process, that in this case is 1400 years old. I might say to Charee Stanley, if I found her open to my suggestions, that the early Muslim community founded in Madinah was a minority community that had to coexist with a non-Muslim majority. It was here, in this condition, that many of the rituals that Islam shares with Judaism came to be infused in the way the faith is practiced today. The lesson learned from that period is that a Muslim living in a non-Muslim majority context may make adjustments in order to function more effectively as the case may require. For example, in recent years, the Islamic establishment responded by giving women reprieve from donning variations of 7ijab in countries where prohibition of these could lead to hardship for observant Muslim women. If you're fluent in Arabic you can listen to Sheikh al-Tantawi from al-Azhar issue this decree here.

I might also tell Charee that for the Abbasids of Iraq, the drinking of date wine was permitted and that folktales of the period are riddled with stories of Muslims undertaking some interesting libations. I could add that for the sufis, worship is the greatest form of intoxication one could ever aspire to and this is why Omar Khayyam's poetry uses the analogy of drinking wine to refer to communion with Allah. I might tell her of the most beautiful poetry that alcohol has inspired under the patronage of Islamic caliphs from Baghdad to al-Andalus. Finally, I would indicate what is to this day a very controversial realization. There is no verse in the Quran that sets punishment for the consumption of alcohol, or that expressly forbids it in the way other matters, like fornication, are explicitly forbidden.

In Surat al-Nisa', verse 23, we read: يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَقْرَبُوا الصَّلَاةَ وَأَنْتُمْ سُكَارَىٰ حَتَّىٰ تَعْلَمُوا مَا تَقُولُونَ // O, ye who believe, do not approach prayer while you are intoxicated, so that you may know what you are saying (translations are mine). This verse came down, evidently, at a time where Muslims were not observing complete abstinence from alcohol. According to the researcher Ali al-Muqri, in his book Al-Khamr Wa al-Nabeeth Fi al-Islam, the verse was inspired by an incident, in which one of the prophet's companions accidentally said أعوذ بالشيطان الرجيم // I seek strength in Satan, as opposed to what he should have said, I seek strength in God from Satan.The companion was trying to pray whilst drunk and the advice in the Quran is that you shouldn't pray if you're drunk because you need to know what you're saying.

In Surat al-Baqara, verse 219, we read: يسئلونكَ عنِ الخمرِ والمَيسرِ قُلْ فيهما إثمٌ كبيرٌ ومَنافِعُ للناسِ وإثمهما أكبرُ مِن نَفْعِهما//They ask you about wine and gambling, tell them there is great wrong-doing in both of those and that the sin in them is greater than the benefit. The word إثمٌ is almost universally translated as "sin" but here it can function as an "adverse effect." No sin is said to have a potential benefit, or does it?

In Surat al-Ma2ida, verse 90, we read: يا أيُّها الذينَ ءامنوا إنَّما الخمرُ والمَيسرُ والأنصابُ والأزلامُ رِجْسٌ مِنْ عملِ الشيطانِ فاجتَنِبوهُ لعلَّكُم تُفلِحون // Oh, ye who believe, alcohol, gambling, pagan ritual and divination are the ugly work of Satan, avoid him so that you may be saved. This is the advice I would expect to hear from a parent who has been there and done that, to a child who just might get carried away in seeking unfettered pleasure, it's not the eternal fireplace that stokes our contemporary imaginations when we think of Islam and alcohol.

We find, when we look closely at the Quran, that a lot of what we take for granted as essentially Islamic is not. The story is quite different when it comes to the spoken traditions, al-ahadeeth, of the Prophet, whereby multiple sources are said to have indicated forbiddance of consumption and handling of alcohol. And here is where the question of religious freedom becomes all important. One is free to choose one's religion and free to practice it, but there is also another freedom you can accord yourself. This is the freedom to seek the truth of scripture for yourself. Should you abstain from this freedom, then your convictions are those that others have arrived at, but without the intellectual process that brought those convictions into being. Under such circumstances, I wonder if religious freedom is truly possible.

 

The Lesson We Should Have Learned from A Gay Girl in Damascus

I recently watched Sophie Deraspe's documentary A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year. For those of you who don't remember, the Amina Arraf hoax involved an American man* and his wife, who had been traveling in Syria when the civil unrest began to brew. The man authored a character, Amina Arraf, whose blog contained anti-regime and pro-revolutionary rhetoric, that was quite in keeping with the spirit of the early civil uprising. Thus, it became instantly believable that such a young activist, who also happens to be gay, may very well be under threat of persecution by the state. From February to June of 2011, Amina Arraf was in the eyes of the world a real person. Electronic Intifada investigators caught out the hoax when a post was made, allegedly by Amina's cousin, that Amina had been captured by the regime.

This is not an easy film to sit through if the civil war in Syria means something personal to you. Deraspe includes footage of such breath-taking violence that it is hard not to be triggered by it, time and time again. The sheer horror of the context which is exploited for the vanity of a middle aged ESL teacher, makes his grand deception all the more despicable.

The film focuses on one of two of the hoax's victims. A young French woman who has an online affair with Amina Arraf, who falls in love with her and who shares moments of tremendous intimacy and sensuousness with her. What the film does not disclose is that Amina Arraf had left in "her" wake a long string of deceived lesbians and bisexual women with whom "she" had numerous online liaisons. In 2011, I was a member of a closed Facebook group that Amina had infiltrated. Someone from the group had invited "her" and "she" was posting regularly. Needless to say, she had many an admirer, and it was not until the truth came out that people started to share their stories of their online encounters and conversations with her. After the horrible news came out the secret group was disbanded.

That Amina Arraf turned out to be a heterosexual man should not have mortified our little online community as much as it did. After all, lesbian chat rooms have more men in them than they do lesbians, and this has been the case since the dawn of lesbian chat room time. But this was a secret group, not everyone in it was out, some people were extremely worried about exposure and we were supposed to have known better. You weren't supposed to invite someone to the group if you didn't know, first hand, that she was a bonafide, certified, Arab/Middle East/North African queer woman. The numerous women who had sexual liaisons with Amina Arraf, under false pretenses, were unarguably subjected to sexual violence, of this there can be no doubt. What is more, though, I do hope that what that collective experience pointed to, besides a renewed, collective realization of our vulnerability, is the falsity of the online encounter altogether. Regardless of whether the person on the other end is intent on deceiving us or not, this medium of communication functions in such a way as to leave us to fantastically fill in the gaps (in our knowledge of someone) with our own delusory projections. This is a perfectly wonderful and healthy digression into the fantastic if we are aware of ourselves doing it, but when we are unaware, it can potentially be very destructive.

The truth of the matter is, we as  a lesbian community which includes many women who have none of the privileges of social normalization or visibility, have become so reliant on online contact for developing relationships and  romantic liaisons. We risk falling in love with people who are almost entirely figments of our imaginations; figments we may have constructed, or figments that may have been constructed for us. Either way, it seems as though we are in a technological adolescence and it was my hope that the Amina Arraf hoax would at least lead to an awakening out of this curious, unwitting dis-connectedness from the actuality of the person at the other end.

*I deliberately forgo the use of names.

Murders in North Africa

For several years after my departure from the Australian academic climate, I spent my time travelling and living in the Middle East, meeting with LGBTIQ rights activists from throughout the region. I soon realized that it was not in the interest of these activists, nor their beneficiaries, to publish any of my work that I had collected on the subject. While I had originally intended to write my findings in my forthcoming book, I realized that to do so would be irresponsible. At the same time, you can’t really publish academic work without proper references, factual details and exact information that can be corroborated. But nevertheless, I’ve spent the last few years wondering what to do with this information that I have.

There was one particular set of data from North Africa which left a lasting impression on me. I have wanted to share the information, no matter how imprecise and when the idea for this website came up, I took heart that it is perhaps now time. I am relaying information shared with me without having substantiated the alleged facts, with the exception of those that were reported in North African media. I have been haunted by the fact that some of these victims never had their stories heard and their murders never investigated, and I have wanted to do something to address this. It is for this reason that I share the below with you about a period of time between August 2010 and September 2011 in Algeria, which saw a spate of hate crimes, possibly incited by increased media attention on homosexual activity in public places.

Among the primary culprits is al-Shurooq newspaper. The newspaper has a broad circulation, reaching one million readers across the Arabic-speaking world, and it is accessible online. It began to run a series of stories about homosexual beats (cruising places) in North Africa. My analysis of the headlines that circulated clearly shows that homosexuality is depicted as a monstrosity and disease. One would expect no less. Simultaneously al-Nahar Al-Jaza’eria, an Algerian newspaper of wide circulation, was also focusing on exposing homosexual cruising places in the country. These stories produce strong reactions among the readers and the sensationalism provides unfailing high ratings, so it is no wonder that newspapers resort to this kind of “journalism.”

The newspapers may have been in league with the state apparatus as well, which was seeking to turn attention away from civil unrest and popular dissatisfaction with the state’s many political and social failings, internally and externally. These stories, wittingly or unwittingly, were inciting violence against gender and sexual minorities, and most vulnerable among these groups are always those who are visibly non-normative – feminine men, masculine women and gender ambiguous individuals. There is no way we can be certain that the media hype played a pivotal role or not in the series of uninvestigated murders that took place, but the activists’ guess is that this is exactly what they did. Fearing for their own safety and security, when stories of murdered individuals began to surface, activists were not able to follow up with police about the murders and ask why the reports were not followed by thorough investigations and why no one had ever been charged. Interestingly, the newspapers also remained silent about the killings.

The first of these murders involved two young men, aged 19 and 21, whose bodies were found at al-Ramliyeh sublet. Two months later a gay fashion designer was found naked and had been suffocated with a bag, in the gulf not far from Parliament House. Some three months later, another murder took place in Bab al-Wad, a popular suburb in the Algerian capital. The victim was a dance teacher – nicknamed Whitney, after Whitney Houston, for the complexion of his skin. He was found with his throat cut on the eve of the Festival of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha), the festival that celebrates the sacrifice of a sheep in place of Ibrahim’s son. The victim was murdered in his home and none of his possessions were taken. Locals reacted nonchalantly, including police officers, who felt that he had brought it on himself. The local newspaper did report the murder but did not indicate the possible motivation and, predictably, no one was ever brought to justice. Shortly afterwards, some one or two months later, a transsexual sex worker was murdered with a knife in Jaza’er Square near Port Saeed.

In the meantime, weekly demonstrations against the Algerian government were being organized and held by a left wing political party, the MTLD, led by Law Professor Wahran al-Karoumie. The demonstrations were largely inspired by the success of the Tunisian revolution (of January 2011) and they were relentless and growing in support. Al-Karoumie was widely respected and lauded by his students and followers alike. He was beginning to wield significant political leverage in the public arena. When a member of his party was murdered, Karoumie and his followers demanded answers. Two weeks later the government investigation claimed that two of the victim’s neighbors went to rob her and subsequently killed her, charges were laid. But shortly thereafter, al-Karoumie himself was killed and it appeared as though the incidents were related. He was murdered in the party office and no one was charged. He was survived by his wife and children. His students and followers accused the government of killing him and the entire country was galvanized against the government. Shortly thereafter, al-Nahar al-Jaza’eria published a front page headline stating that Karoumie was killed by his (male) lover.

Some time later the alleged lover and killer of Karoumie was arrested and put on trial. At the trial it was alleged that a condom, filled with the killer’s semen had been found at the scene of the crime. A train of witnesses, some forty men, took the stand to testify that they had had sexual relations with Karoumie. This instantly ended support and sympathy for him and eased pressure on the government as a consequence. The impact of this murder and its coverage was greatly felt in the underground gay community, with the occurrence of yet another unsolved murder of a gay man, this time during Ramadan.

*Originally published on July 9, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/murders-in-north-africa/ now discontinued.

Divination and Lebanese Christian Claims of the Miraculous

Let's get something straight. I have no childhood memories of women turning over their coffee cups and taking turns at reading fortunes. We did not live in tents and I didn't ride a camel to school, although I wish I had. My interest in the human endeavour to contemplate the future as though it is in some way viably accessible, began with a prehistoric IBM computer that was in my sibling's room. On that computer there was a software program for the I-Ching, or, The Book of Changes. This was my first encounter with the eastern philosophy of acausality and any endeavour to prophecy the future. As an adult, I spent years looking at divination from an Anthropological perspective.

Animal entrails, boiled oxen shoulder blades, oracles, sea shells, runes, sand, clouds, cards, numbers, vision quests, dreams, spirit possessions, talking to dead people, star and planet mythologies -- all crowded my explorations and vied for attention. Legend has it, Elvis Presley prophesied his own demise when shortly before his death he looked at a cloud and saw the face of an unhappy Jesus (I don't know if this is true).  We are a very creative species, when it comes to looking for ways to further confuse ourselves about the nature of reality and the place of our minds within it.

I visited two professional readers in Lebanon, one in east Beirut, near Sassine Square, whom I met at Cafe Najjar, and the other in Sarba, near Jounieh, at a cafe named La Tasse. In Jordan I had success in mercantile coffee cup reading but was asked to be discreet about it. I spent the better part of a year reading coffee cups for my family, friends and colleagues and developed a weekly ritual with
a colleague who seemed to possess some kind of gift of guessing.

This particular colleague was one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing of the Sibleen school bus in 1982. Back then, she was a late teen on her way home on one of the UNRWA's Vocational Center buses. Despite being clearly labeled, the bus was bombed by an Israeli airstrike during the brutal siege of Beirut. But eventually, as always, and in light of the ongoing carnage, people moved on from
the human debris. I tell my friend that her gift of seeing must be due to her facing death so closely. She describes to me in filmic detail how debris fell and instantly killed survivors who had crawled out of the burning bus with her and who were standing meters away from her when they got hit. I think of a short story by Nejmeh Habib, in which the author imagines those moments just before the bus was bombed and I tell her about it. She horrifies me with details of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, even though I spent sometime in pictorial archives and have familiarized myself with
what I thought was enough material to de-sensitize me. Evidently, I was wrong.

I recline in my seat as my friend continues with deciphering the symbols in the cup. I don't know where I'm going to find me a husband and three children, but she insists, and the boy comes first, then two girls. We do not need to have another discussion about why I won't marry the man from Tyre she had suggested to me. In the absence of the epistemic scaffolding needed to sustain a discussion on sexual orientation, we forgo such a discussion.

Lebanon had a way of connecting me to my cultural Christianity not possible in other contexts. It might be the Virgin Mary statues and shrines that you find on every second street corner, in stair wells or even out in the middle of nowhere, and in some areas of Muslim-majority concentrations like Saida. Or, it might be the locals' obsession with knowing you according to whichever confessionalism you were born into. One of the two saw me unusually declare Christianity on a daily basis.




Legend has it that Mother Mary made a miraculous apparition at Our Lady of Beshouat -- a tiny little town north of Ba'elbeck in the Beqaa Valley. Our lady of Beshouat first witnessed the miraculous apparition in 2006, when a visitor and his mother, two Muslim tourists from Syria, noticed that the statue's eyes were moving. Word got around and several people confirmed with similar reports.

It turned out to be a very lucrative summer for the small town, which until then was accessible by dirt road only. The site for the church goes back to the 1740s, where a statue of the virgin was found in one of the caves, resulting in the building of the church.

Reaching Beshouat was another one of my failures in Lebanon, it was snow season and the rental car had no muscle. Add to this the spate of kidnappings and road ambushes at the time and I had to contend myself with a distant promise to fulfill the quest in the future -- when Lebanon's far north would no longer be perturbed by rogue militias, road ambushes and kidnappings. Yes, I had aged and yes, I had officially become a cowardly adult. A younger Samar would have thrown caution to the wind and figured out a way to deal with quick sand and avalanches to reach Beshouat on the new year's eve.  Instead, I ended up having a minor car accident with a young man named Charbel! In addition to the legend of our Lady of Beshouat, Lebanon has several stories of miraculous magnitude. But by far, Lebanon's most posthumously active saint is Mar Charbel, born Youssef Makhlouf in 1828 and who died at seventy years of age.

The hermitage in which he spent twenty-three years of solitude has to be one of the most beautiful, quiet places on earth and is located in the town of Annaya, north east of Beirut. In the winter you can't see the valley below because of the fog and you are surrounded in hip high snow all around. In the summer the weather remains sufficiently cool because of the altitude and you get a good
chance to breathe easy and free your mind from the horrors of its daily content: car bombs, dispossessed refugees crossing from the Syrian border, chemical weapons, suicide bombers killing their next of kin, aid money being mismanaged and getting wasted, professional beggars swindling people, while people who are in actual need are too proud to beg. Growing up, Mar Charbel didn't mean much to me, although, perhaps he should have since a minority of Palestinians are also Maronites, especially those living in the far nothern Palestinian village, now razed, called Kifr Bir3em where my mother's family is from.

It wasn't until 2011 and when I was living in Berkeley that I came across the legend of Mar Charbel at a friend's house. My friend is a Catholic by wishful thinking, but you do find religious iconography throughout her decor. Her research expertise revolves around central America and Spanish literature. al-Andalus sums up the extent of her encounter with the Arab world. For this reason, I was surprised when I noticed a plaque from Mexico above her stove. The picture was of Mar Charbel with Spanish writing on the bottom thanking him for the miracle he performed in Mexico. The Plaque also shows two women (perhaps it's the same woman), with one bleeding by the way side.




I naturally, inquisitioned her about where the plaque came from, the story of the women in the picture, and if she knew who the cloaked guy was. She didn't know Mar Charbel and could only guess that he had performed a miracle on the woman.

Several years later, in Lebanon of 2013 or 2014, a Muslim refugee from Syria told of her miraculous encounter with the Saint, alleging he cured her cancer. The famous Egyptian actress, Elham Shaheen, claims he had cured her mother and appeared to her. The list of his alleged apparitions and spiritual surgeries is quite extensive and multi-national and the narratives have unusual commonalties. One young man experienced what might be linked to enlightenment during one of his meditations at the hermitage in Annaya and claims to have received severe burns on his upper arm shortly following his experience of what can be described as "oneness with God."

What I like about the Mar Charbel legend is that it portrays him as a universalist Christian, metting out miracles to non-Christians as much as followers of Christ, and he is said to have been a friend to prostitutes and other outcasts during his lifetime. When he was asked his opinion on taking up arms against the Turks he was against violent confrontation. It is somewhat ironic that Mar Charbel's
iconic face came, for a short period of time, to be seen as an indicator of allegiance to the Lebanese Phalangists of the early civil war period. al-Kata'eb and their crew were responsible for the most heinous massacres of Palestinian innocents the country ever saw, including the massacre not only of Christian but Maronite Palestinians, as is the case with the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp in Dubayeh in the 1970s. As Maronites and Phoenicians, distinguishing themselves from all that which is Arab, Muslim and inferior, al-Kata'eb proudly saw themselves as the true custodians of a Lebanon partitioned in their favour by the French after the world war. To this day, the country's president can only be of the Maronite order. So much of the Christian message is often lost on Christians and it is nice to be reminded every now and then what the message was supposed to actually be.

Arab Divination and Fortune-Telling

Arab traders brought coffee back to the peninsula from Ethiopia, where, legend has it, coffee beans were first discovered by a goat herder in that golden 9th century that marked the height of Arab civilization in many ways. It wasn't until the 15th century that coffee made it to Constantinople (modern day Istanbul/Turkey) and its preparation became less elaborate than the hours of boiling that Arabic coffee requires. Most of us, even throughout the Arab world, enjoy a variation on Turkish coffee as the more traditional forms of preparation of Arabic coffee have become less and less feasible. The difference between Turkish and Arabic coffee is primarily in the preparation. Arabic coffee usually contains crushed cardamon and because it is boiled for hours using hot sand (or weak embers), it leaves virtually no sediments. Turkish coffee on the other hand leaves that thick coat at the bottom and is prepared nowadays with an open flame.  From this, you would think that coffee cup reading began with Turkish coffee not Arabic coffee and therefore with the Turks, but I am not able to substantiate exactly where and with whom coffee cup divination began. 

Some scholars deduce that the practice was developed in line with tea-leaf reading practices in ancient China and among the Celts.  Taseography is the name given to divination based on interpretation of tea leaves and coffee sediments inside cups. The principle of the divination is the same, it is an art of identifying and interpreting symbols which can be taught and on which numerous books have been written.

The desert Arabs can certainly be credited with a unique form of divination known as Darb al-Raml (literally "the throwing of sand") which was honed into an extraordinary ritual. If you are lucky enough, you can occasionally find a practitioner of Darb al-Raml willing to share their art with you, particularly among the Bedouins of the Levant or the Peninsula. In more contemporary times, especially in light of a tidal wave of Wahhabi and Salafi influence, divination has become somewhat of a taboo, seen as belonging to pre-Islamic Jahiliya. There is a correct hadith in Muslim attributed to the prophet in which he says that the prayers of a person who seeks the advice of a fortune teller are invalidated for forty nights. What is more, some verses in the Quran clearly indicate that knowledge of the future is for God alone (see 6:59 and 27:65), and that humans would be doing ill to consult the Jinn to unlawfully receive information about the future, when even the Prophet himself had to contend with this unknowing (see 7: 188). Despite such interpretations, however, there is no universal consensus on the prohibition of Darb al- Raml, and millennial exegetes expressly permitted it (for example the Fatwa of the Egyptian Faqeeh of the Shafi3i school of thought, Siraj al-Deen al-Balqani who died in h. 805/ 1402 A.D.).

Salat al-Istikhara, or the Guidance Prayer, is the only form of "divination" that is not said to contradict Quranic commandment, as far as I know, and this is perhaps because the ritual requires the believer to ask God (and no other) for guidance through dream symbology or direct life events in relation to a specific matter. We can talk about al-Istikhara and Laylat al-Qadr during Ramadan in a different post. Let's go back to Darb al-Raml. The film clip below is from a Niazi Mustapha film (yes, this is the guy who gave us Bint  Ismaha Mahmoud and that awful film with a lesbian sub-plot called al-Mut3a Wal 3athab). Rab7a (a.k.a Koka) was filmed in 1945 and suffers some serious self-orientalism with its civilized bashawat and simple bedou. Rab7a, the film's protagonist, falls in love with an English gentleman and he with her, of course she has an evil cousin who wants to marry her! Added to this intentionally comic mix is the eccentric English woman who loves to paint everything in her path. I am not going to go into how servile this film was to the monarchy and the Ottoman and English regencies at the time because it's nice to put the postcolonial angst aside every now and then. I am showing this clip for its (not entirely accurate) depiction of the divination system they call "Darb al-Raml." Rab7a wants to know if she is going to see her sweetheart again and in her consternation about the future, her friend suggests that they should consult the sand. Her friend gives her the good news that the way is open to her fulfilling her heart's desire, moments later, however, her friends come to tell her that her father has agreed to her cousin's request to marry her. Disappointed, she declares that "even the sand is lying." 

I narrowly missed out on having my own experience with Darb al-Raml in Jordan. After I made several inquiries, I was told that a Bedouin woman had, several years earlier, been offering her services at a local marketplace in Amman, but only during Ramadan and the following Eid festivities, as this seems to be the time of year where things otherwise not permitted are accommodated (that and controversial prime time TV programming!). I was more successful with coffee cup readings, but this is a story for another post. In the New Testament (John 8:6), Jesus bends over and draws in the sand during his encounter with the town people, moments before he delivers his brilliant: "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." He does this in response to the pressure exerted on him in relation to how Mary Magdalene's fornication should be dealt with.  Was this the first instance of Darb al-Raml on record? Was Jesus trying to figure out if pardoning her would end well? I don't think so, but I couldn't help but make the association given the illegibility of what he drew in the sand that moment, a question that has inspired and haunted theologians for centuries.

Arab Filmmakers Who Feature Lesbians

I had the pleasure of seeing Rolla Selbak’s Three Veils at its San Francisco premiere at the Roxie theatre in 2011, and while I missed Cherien Dabis’ May in the Summer at the Sydney Arab Film Festival, I caught it a few months later at the Castro theatre in 2014. I’ve chosen to couple these two films together, because they are both predominantly in English and written and directed by Arab-American filmmakers. I also wanted to broaden the Arab-Diaspora filmic experience, to include the short works of the Lebanese-Australian filmmaker, Fadia Abboud.

You might remember Cherien Dabis’ debut feature, Amreeka (2009), or know her through her directorial work on Showtime’s The L Word. I recall that Dabis had once said that although she loved to explore themes of Arab migrancy, and the experiences those entail, and also loved to work on issues of women’s sexuality, to do both at the same time was somehow still elusive for her. In May in the Summer she seems to have made the attempt to bridge that divide. While the film is enjoyable and valuable on many levels, exploring the diasporic Arab’s relationship to family and homeland, it’s not exactly profound in its portrayal of a same-sex attracted sibling of the main character, May, who is returning to Jordan for her wedding.

I think, and I hope Dabis will forgive me if I’m wrong, there was a concentrated effort to make this film appeal to as mainstream an audience as possible. Therefore, having a same-sex attracted sibling is just enough to draw in a lesbian (and specifically Arab) crowd, expecting something of the sort from the L-Word director, while it is not enough to marginalize the film as a lesbian one. Nadine Labaki does this in Caramel too, but Labaki’s film was produced in a context where depicting female homosexuality is far more contentious. So, in a way, even though Caramel’s character, Rima, is never explicitly signified as lesbian, while Dabis’ is, Labaki’s Rima is far more audacious. But, it’s not a filmmaker’s job to please everybody (or even anyone), let alone me, and as long as queer Arab filmmaking is happening in a politically engaged way then we should support it.

I contrast Dabis’ Jordanian setting and active silence about Middle East politics, with the ridiculous caricature of Palestinian attitudes toward Israel in Shamim Sarif’s I Can’t Think Straight. Dabis fails to name the plane that interrupts an argument between May and her two sisters (while they luxuriate at a 5 star resort) as an Israeli fighter jet in Jordanian airspace. Instead, she is relying on the “Arab” portion of her audience to “get it.” So, while we are no longer in need of subtext and allusion to talk about homosexuality, we are now in need of those to talk about Israeli militarism. An Arab audience is now the counterpart of a queer audience that had once watched Calamity Jane and read between the lines.

It is a sad reflection of a pervasive reality that anyone (especially an Arab who wants to raise a critical view of Jordan’s facilitatory role in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) needs to be very careful about what they say, if they dare say anything at all, about the Israeli state.

On the other hand, Three Veils by Rolla Selbak is set in the US and does not venture into this complicated political territory. The film is really three films working synergistically to produce a singular narrative progression. It explores the relationship and interconnection between three women – one of whom, Amira, does not seem to be able to fully express her lesbian sexuality, largely due to the dominance of religious reservation. She has the misfortune of befriending Nikki, played by Sheetal Sheth (from Sarif’s lesbian-themed films, The World Unseen and I Can’t Think Straight), who is depicted as sexually fluid. I can’t get enough of films written, produced and directed by Arab (and sometimes) queer filmmakers. And interestingly, we have ourselves yet another safe depiction of an Arab lesbian character. It seems to be a requirement that our celluloid Arab lesbians of the twenty-first century be sexless and non-confrontational.

This makes sense in context of the difficulty surrounding the initiation of discussion of sexuality in general, women’s sexuality in particular, and women’s homosexuality even more specifically. And we have seen this sanitization and de-sexualization of the homosexual in parallel with Hollywood (and American TV) narrative progression. For example, before Queer As Folk exploded what is an acceptable depiction of gayness on the small (and big) screen, it seemed necessary to produce assimilated, sexless angels who do not offend, like Will in Will & Grace for example, or the figure of the sissy in many a Hollywood classic (for more reading on this, I highly recommend Rebecca Beirne’s Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millenium).

My favourite exception to this Arab lesbian celluloid rule is Fadia Abboud’s 12 minute short, In The Ladies’ Lounge (which you can watch here). Abboud is a Lebanese-Australia independent filmmaker and In The Ladies’ Lounge moves seamlessly between a Lebanese homoerotic past and a Lebanese-Australian homoerotic present. The film is unapologetically sexy. It was followed by Abboud’s hilarious web series (with very short webisodes that you can watch here) I Luv You But… which centers around the lives of a gay man and his lesbian friend, who are engaged in a sham marriage to appease their extremely homophobic families. Since you are able to watch these shorts online, I’m not going to spoil them for you with a review!

Are you still here? How great were those shorts? I hope Abboud gets some big investors behind her to be able to make her own feature film. As apolitical as her work can be (sexual politics of representation notwithstanding), her shorts communicate in a language that international queer, lesbian and bisexual women can relate to, especially those living in collectivist cultures and societies where familial ties can be all consuming. She tells the story of an entire generation of gay Arab youth in diaspora; it’s not everyone’s story, not all Arab gay youth don’t have the option to come out to their parents or subsequently enter into false marriages, but these false marriages do happen and the stories in her work are inspired by that strange reality. But Abboud normalizes this reality and even makes it funny and fashionable. There is great humor in her writing style that is distinctly her own and her directorial subtleties are able to express so much in so little time and with so little effort. Abboud’s problem is that she is in Australia, a country steeped in cultural provincialism when it comes to filmmaking and sadly suffers a monochrome queer counter culture. Had she been in the U.S., I suspect that she would have made several features by now. It’s never too late, and I hope to see this from her soon.

*Originally published June 25, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/arab-lesbian-films/ now discontinued.