Samar Habib with Lisa Dettmer on KPFA;s Women's Magazine.

Parvez Sharma’s Jihad for Love in Mecca

I first beheld Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad For Love at its Sydney premiere in 2007. As I sat to watch it, I felt as though my research career into gender and sexuality in the Arab world was unfolding before my very eyes. It was for this reason that I approached him in 2009 to provide the foreword to what became a seminal collection under the title Islam and Homosexuality. With Sharma’s latest film, A Sinner in Mecca, premiering in theaters nationwide this month, I’ve had to revisit his previous works to give the new film the critical reading it deserves. In contrasting the two films, it is evident that A Jihad for Love is about every other gay or lesbian Muslim who may be suffering religious persecution, while A Sinner in Mecca is about just one. For this reason A Sinner in Mecca is a very intimate filmic experience; Sharma really opens himself up to tremendous vulnerability, putting his deepest personal wounds on display for us to treat as an exhibit. It takes tremendous courage to display this kind of vulnerability and love.

At the outset, A Sinner in Mecca, is visually difficult to watch. The claustrophobia induced by the heavy crowding, the instability of the hidden camera Sharma takes with him throughout his pilgrimage, and the protagonist’s evident melancholia in digging into the dark recesses of his personal and familial history, all ensure that we have a necessarily unpleasant viewing experience. The absence of pleasure, however, is what points to the gravity of the subject of the film. The subject is Sharma himself, a gay Muslim man from India, whose early encounters with Sufi Islam are being challenged institutionally by the rise of Wahhabi influence globally. What is more, Sharma carries with him an ever-present, irrevocable grief – a relationship with his beloved mother who was never able to fully accept his sexual orientation and who is no longer with us. Sometimes, A Sinner in Mecca feels like an extended eulogy, not only for Sharma’s relationship with the most important woman in his life, but for the Islam he knew as a child: one of forgiveness, lightness and the intoxication of love.

Taking us through Mecca, we, a non-Muslim audience who is not permitted entry into the holy city, get to see what the Hajj looks like in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. We see scores of buses carrying pilgrims, we see far too much rubbish on the streets and intense over-crowding. We get to see the air-conditioned super malls featuring multinational companies like Starbucks and the deluge of commerce that the Saudi government has built into a “Mecca of Capitalism.” We see the remnants of a pre-Islamic history being slowly erased as the pilgrim continues on in his progress. The harshness of the Hajj experience is never decorated for us as anything other than hardship. It is a painful progress; it involves suffering and a great deal of confusion on both a literal and psychic level. It is through undergoing this process that Sharma finally emerges with an answer to his conundrum: would Islam [and by extension his mother] accept him as a gay man?

Sharma has made progress in his tireless pursuit of this existential question since A Jihad for Love came out in 2007. Back then, Sharma appeared to favor orthodox methodologies of interpretation in which homosexuality is forbidden. He appeared to take for granted that it is not theologically sound to question the interpretative tradition, or to situate the emergence of prohibition historically. While he fell short of saying modern or alternative interpretations are disingenuous, there was a level of un-interrogated acceptance that this may very well be the case. Sharma further illuminated on this point in his foreword to Islam and Homosexuality: “I do not feel that a purely theological solution to … the problem of the homosexual, is possible.” Instead, Sharma wished to focus on the “impact religious rulings have on believers’ lives. Theology and the rules that bind it often ignore the human experience and refer to homosexuality as an object, a behavior, a sin, without recognizing that sexual preference can be a major constituent of the religious self,” Sharma wrote in 2009. I could not help but feel that at least some of the filmmaker’s suffering could have been alleviated by some of the remedial, liberationist theology on this subject that we can trace back at least a thousand years with Hassan al-Basri and that filled the pages of Islam and Homosexuality. Had he done so, the title of the film, A Sinner in Mecca, may have been ironic if not different.

Ultimately, however, A Sinner in Mecca, is less about sexual orientation than it is about the centralization of Islam and its current confinement to Wahhabism as a fallacious, anachronistic and myopic site for Islam’s birth. When we enter the labyrinths of the pilgrimage, a site that draws Muslims from all around the world, that brings together men and women, Sunnis and Shiites, rich and poor, and when we are made participants in the drawn-out symbolism and rituals of the hajj, be they circling the Ka’ba or stoning the devil, then the epistemological scaffolding needed to talk about LGBT rights disintegrates completely. For this reason, A Sinner in Mecca devotes itself to talking about homosexuality and Islam in ways that are not terribly familiar to the film’s predominantly Western audience. On this topic, Sharma had reflected in 2009 that “I have witnessed the endless debates that diasporic Muslims engage in, in the cool, air-conditioned corridors of Western academia, employing languages of emancipation we have developed mostly in the West. In Cairo, in Delhi, and in Jakarta, the realities of life beyond the taps that run dry or the power outages that punctuate days and nights are completely different. The limited and limiting languages of Western labels and constructs are just not an option.” We can now add Mecca to the list of those sites in which the usual language with which we discuss emancipatory or liberationist theology is not able to function. Sharma’s answer to this conundrum is evident in both A Jihad for Love and A Sinner in Mecca: his focus is on the lived experience, the language of common humanity, the language of yearning for acceptance, the need to belong; the language of love, loss and suffering.

*Originally published on September 13, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/parvez-sharmas-jihad-for-love-in-mecca/ now discontinued.

Same-Sex Power and Sexuality in a Medieval Arabic Source

Holding of an 18th century manuscript
at the Royal Library in Copenhagen

The following is an excerpt from a chapter on same-sex sexual behavior and desire among women. The book the chapter comes from, Nuzhat al-Albab Fima La Yujad Fi Kitab, was written by a Tunisian scholar named Ahmad Ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi who died in 1253 A.D. A translation of this chapter, along with  translations from other sources, appears in Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850-1780 (New York: Teneo Press, 2009). 93-96.

Tifashi was from the Tunisian town of Tifash (hence his name) and he seemed to be someone who appreciated a good laugh. The book contains some truly brazen anecdotes that are sexually explicit even by today’s standards – they may make you blush, they may titillate you, or they may be deemed grossly offensive. Tifashi, however, should be appreciated for the seasoned scholar that he was. He travelled widely across the Arabic-speaking world, including Morocco, Egypt and Syria. His first book was about classifying gem stones, and there is another manuscript that is sometimes attributed to him that contains recipes and prescriptions for treating sexual ailments, but some scholars dispute that he is the author of Rujoo3 al-Shaykh ila Sibah. It is said that he studied the works of the famous philosopher, al-Kindi, but all biographical information on him is rather sketchy. He does tell us in the introduction to this book that it contains a collection of stories and tales that he had heard from fellow travellers. Some stories were told to him by those to whom it happened, while some stories were told to him second-hand (as is the case in the excerpt below). In 1992 a Beirut-based publisher, that was operating out of London during the Lebanese civil war, Riad El-Rayyess, published a modern edition of this book (edited by Jamal Juma). There was a French translation by René Khawam of the chapters involving male same-sex relations and eroticism, titled Les Délices Des Coeurs in 1971. The English translation of the French translation (yes, a translation of a translation) was published by Gay Sunshine Press under the title A Promenade of Hearts in 1988. I hope you enjoy this story for the cultural treasures it reveals, but most importantly for the triumph of its female protagonists in spite of the uninvited spectatorship of the narrators and ours! For further analysis of this text, see chapters 3 and 4 of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East.

One of the scholars in Damascus engaged me in conversation and
said that one of the highest-ranking Egyptian judges told him:
‘I went out one night to the cemetery, and this cemetery was for
the use of the Egyptian householders where they met their female
friends. It is a place where women gather every week, so they
are not forbidden to meet there and spend the night or use it as
a dwelling. Within the cemetery they have built residences, on
which a considerable sum of money has been spent,’” he said. “So
I decided that I would leave my home with the intention of staying
there with my family, supplying myself with whatever I needed
for sleep as well as food and hay for the mule and so on. I closed
the door to my house and darkness progressed with its lamp and
I traversed on my own, riding the mule, until the hour became
late and I arrived at the cemetery after sunset and at the onset of
darkness. And as I was walking amongst the graves, in a remote
place in one of the corners of the cemetery, I heard, in one of the
graves, a moaning and groaning and a kind of panting that strips
the mind and steals the heart. I had never heard anything like it and
I didn’t think anyone did it as such: with measured movements
and natural rhythms and sayings of internal rhyme that cause one
to forget the melody of strings and render the mistresses of the
flute invisible.

‘And so I steered my mule to the wall of the tomb and then I
climbed up and looked in, to find two women. The one on the
bottom was a Turkish concubine who was more beautiful than the
full moon and more balanced than the branch. She was white, soft
and busty, and on top of her there was a short woman, robust, nice
looking, clean clothes, except she didn’t look like the one below
her, as she grinded her and treated her to this talk. Meanwhile,
the woman below replied a little inadequately as though she was
learning from her.

‘And so when I saw this I could not hold myself together and I
yelled out at them and said: “Rise, God damn you!” And I rode
towards the tomb with the intention of locking them in, and then
calling on passers-by to discipline them. By the time I was at the
door, the one who was on top had got up, and the bottom one had
begun to get up, and so she said to her: “Stay where you are.” And
so she remained lying on her back and then uncovered her belly and
navel and her chest, by removing a blue robe that was on her, and
there appeared a chest like marble, and breasts like pomegranates,
and a belly like a mound of snow, in which the naval appeared as
a fat vial that has crystallized into a hot white curd, tinged with
redness. I had never seen anything with its greatness or pureness.
‘And then she said to me:

‘“Damn you, you beast, you oppressor, have you ever seen
anything like this?”

‘So I said to her: “By God no.” She said to me:

‘“Here is before you a rare feast that God has prepared for you, so
go on your way.”

‘When I saw and heard this I was stripped of reason and
morality and I could not control myself, so I said to her: “Damn
you, I have this mule.”

‘She said: “So I’ll hold it for you.”’

‘I alighted, and as God as my witness, I was going against
my nature in doing this, and then I gave her the reins and the whip
and I entered the tomb. I undid the flag’s knot and placed it on
my leg and then I loosened my pants and threw the end of my
pallium over my shoulder, and I inserted my hand and removed
my tail. I drew near the concubine and I bent over her and when
I brought the head of my penis to the lips and found their softness
and warmth, I did not feel anything other than the hooves of my
mule departing and the woman yelling: “I’ve let go of the mule.”
‘So I got up, devoid of reason and sensibility, and I went outside,
and there was the mule departing among the graves in the gathering
darkness. Since I lost sight of him, I did not know where he went,
but I ran after him in that condition: member erect, pants undone,
the flags on the top of my feet, my pallium tangled up—getting up
one minute and falling again at another.

‘And the mule continued in his early departure and I continued to
run after him, and moreover the damned woman, when she had let
him go, struck him on his waist with the whip, so the mule began
to move towards anyone who approached him and to kick at them
with his heels. I ran after him in a condition which if it had only
been a sketch on paper would have caused the melancholic much
laughter and stopped those in a hurry, so how much funnier would
it have been to see in reality!

‘And it so happened that the mule had passed his feeding time,
and he was better at finding his way to the city than the sand
grouse, and he continued to run and I to run after him, unable to
catch him, and so he would disappear in the darkness or someone
would find him and ride him and then I could see nothing more.’

* Originally published on September 4, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/same-sex-power-and-sexuality-in-a-medieval-arabic-source/ now discontinued.

A Micro History of Human Warfare

The terrible but not unexpected news came. "Your majesty, there has been another massacre by chemical weapon at the Rafah mine. It's the third one in as many days. We should hold off our mining operations until we know..."

"Nonsense!" The queen interrupted him, pushing off three smaller servants  who were in the act of attending to her. "Regather your troops, the work must go on. A few fallen soldiers is a small price to pay for what we have to gain in return. How many more days do you need to mine the great white mountain?" He fumbled hesitantly. A general was supposed to be cold and calculating but he could only think of his finest, lying twisted by the roadside. He was sending them to certain death and contrary to what the murderers believed, he had room for conscience and consciousness. He often wondered who they were and where they came from. He knew they were not forces of nature like water falling from the sky. These were technologies of warfare that they sported. Efficient killing things applied deliberately. They did not have the appearance or randomness of the natural disaster. He felt powerless against an enemy so mighty; how he wished he were back in the thick of battle of limb to limb combat. He had seen many of these and led the kingdom to great victories. 

                                                                          *** 

When news of the third massacre at the mine came, Arletta was at her station as usual, packing away the produce in the cellular granary of the hive. Distressed, she asked if anyone had seen her love but those who were returning from the site could not help her. Their heads were bowed and a certain look of defeat crossed their worn faces. It always comes without warning, it's faster than the speed of light, how quickly that cloud mass bursts over our heads. Without giving thought to what would happen if she left the production line, Arletta started running toward the mine. 

She ran and ran and ran and finally made it to the high road above ground. The linear battlefield was strewn with bodies of the dead, some were still writhing in agony. She looked into their faces and felt each of their pain and for a moment she was struck by her own selfishness. How could she be only

really interested in the survival of one in particular above the others? Ever since she was a little one, obedience of the queen and service of the collective had been impressed upon her. Individual ties and personal romances were heavily discouraged and now she could see why, because there were no guarantees, the one could be taken away at any moment, never to be seen again.

                                                                         *** 

Angelo sat at the kitchen table in quiet disgust and self-loathing. "Ants are people too," he said peering over his typewriter and looking the teenager and her mother in the eye.

"No they're not," protested the child with alacrity. "Their brains are so small, they don't even know they're dying."

"You have no way of substantiating that claim, but how comforting it must be for you to think that," he said quietly.

"You know," he continued after a long silence during which the landlady was thumbing through a photographic history of the Guatemalan civil war, "if you give them enough time they complete the work they are doing and then go back to the colony. They're breaking down the big chunks of food you left out last night into small enough pieces that they can then transport. When the 

mission is complete or in the absence of a food source, they have no interest in your table top or your kitchen. All they needed was a bit more time." He looked back at the typewriter and stared for hours at an otherwise blank page with the title: A Macro History of Human Warfare.

Better Than Sex: Queer Auteurship in the Age of Mass Media

An opinion formed too early in the game of life is no where nearly as valuable as a studied, carefully considered context. Ok, so preamble complete, what was the purpose of that? Simply that I am just now getting to write to you about the L-Word. And what a waste of film stock that was! I don’t know what I was thinking though, when in 2009 I was directing photography for a documentary filmmaker, and we were in Hollywood interviewing people involved in The L-Word. The show’s final episode had literally just aired days earlier. I would wax lyrical to anyone polite enough to listen about how people with talent don’t have the money to make good TV while the people with money don’t have the talent, and the L-Word was my favorite example. My gripe with the show, I would continue with the grace of a cactus, was that with that much responsibility and resources at their fingertips, it was a huge flop to see the discontinuous narratives, the incomplete character and story arches, the gratuitous stylization, the multitude of loose ends, the lack of vision and cohesion. Sadder than this was that when The L-Word came on the scene there was virtually nothing else for lesbian viewers to consume and the show developed a cult-following that remains with us. Viewers were so desperate for anything that remotely appeared to reflect us, our lives and our (supremely superficial) desires, that we lapped up the poor writing without so much as a wince.

I walked away from that experience wondering why I had, in the space of 24 hours, put my foot in my mouth more times than I could count, by telling people money doesn’t buy talent. Even if I was right, what was the point in pointing that out and hurting people’s feelings? But over the next six years I started to wonder what was really wrong with The L-World structurally, as a plotted and narrated television spectacle like every other. I came to the conclusion that it lacked an auteur and it was this that resulted in putrid chaos. I did rummage my brain and found a theoretical argument by Jacques Derrida that can help The L-Word’s epic narrative failures; we could say this is a feminist, de-constructionist anti-narrative that is rebelling against the patriarchal structures of beginning, middle and end or against the phallic, linear arrow of time. We could go down that vindication path if we so wished. I’m not going to, but please help yourself.

Instead, I want us to think of filmmakers who have managed to give us strong, queer female characters with very small budgets. And probably it was precisely because of those small budgets that they were able to produce compelling work. The success of these productions can be attributed, in large part, to the spirit of the author that pervades the text. I am going to take for example two queer filmmakers who have given us consistently cool, thoughtful content, and who also exhibit some old school auteurship that reminds us that filmmaking is an art.

The word auteur is simply the French word for author, and in film theory it refers to a filmmaker who has achieved a special status. A filmmaker becomes an auteur by virtue of signature techniques that can be identified, iconically, across their filmic work. Usually, an auteur is someone who has been making film over the course of a lifetime. We think of Stanley Kubrick as an auteur, we think of David Lynch as an auteur, or for TV, how about Joss Whedon? The status of auteur is not often relegated to women filmmakers and I’m really not sure why that is, beyond basic, institutional sexism. To deal with this omission is partly why I am taking a quick look at the auteurship of Fadia Abboud, an Australian-born filmmaker with Lebanese heritage, and Rolla Selbak, an American filmmaker with the complex origin-story of a Palestinian.

I am going by letters of the alphabet here, so let’s start with Abboud. I have to say that I was lucky enough a decade ago to watch some of Abboud’s earliest films. Experimental shorts, that included transgressive, queer oddities that juxtaposed something quintessentially Lebanese-Australian (of the late 90s/early naughties) with female homoeroticism. Abboud had shot these very short shorts with a queer Lebanese-Australian performance artist, whose stage name, if I remember correctly, was Wife. In one film, we see Wife hang out her laundry on the iconic Hills Hoist you find in most Australian backyards. Among her laundry items (which were also stage props) are a strap-on dildo and a bomber jacket with the words “Leb Dyke,” emblazoned on the back. Years later, in episode four of her web series I Luv U, But…, Abboud takes us back to the Hills Hoist, where an Arab lesbian couple are having a conversation about coming out to family, which changes into a flirtatious exchange. While the couple returns to the house, we’re left to visually contemplate the lingerie that’s blowing in the wind for a few seconds more. When the (fake) husband returns and we hear him say “Habibi, I’m home,” Abboud pans across to his neighbouring underwear, appropriately branded “Aussie Bum” (i.e. the erotic climax is deflated by a bummer! The bummer being the husband’s arrival. Don’t know what a bummer is? Ask an Australian).

Abboud captures Arab-Australian suburbia brilliantly in I Luv U, But… and her mise en scene is a fertile field of Lebanese-Australian cultural history. For example, if you are Arab and lived in Sydney in the late 90s, then you would know what the Bessemer cookware joke in Season 2 episode 1 is and you would have appreciated sighting Bessmer throughout season 1. Your mother would have been visited by that family friend who sells those orange, Teflon-laced pots and pans. You two would have heard your mother declare that they “last forever,” in justifying spending hundreds of dollars on the pans, and maybe you too overheard her complain, five years later, that forever was only five years. Abboud’s trademark is to take Arab things to do: smoking argileh, rolling vine leaves, drinking coffee and turn them into visual signifiers of ethno-racial identity in an Australian landscape. She then successfully infuses these images with (often comedic) homoeroticism. For example, in another one of Abboud’s very early shorts we are shown how to brew Arabic coffee as we see Wife’s butch lover prepare it. The rising and waning of the coffee being boiled can be suggestive for those who read between the lines. The scene ends with butch drinking the coffee by licking the rim of the coffee cup.

Speaking further of Abboud’s auteurship, few people know the story behind her use of an archival photograph of two Lebanese women in English suits with ties and Tarabeesh in her 12-minute short In the Ladies Lounge. Abboud found the picture in a store along Gemayzeh Street in East Beirut, much like the two protagonists of her short film, who stumble upon the poster in a shop in Sydney’s Western Suburbs. She later discovered that the picture was taken by Marie el-Khazan, whose work is archived by the Arab Image Foundation. Filmmaker Akram Zaatri, a co-founder of AIF, further illuminated that el-Khazen shot this picture in Zgharta in 1927. el-Khazen never married and died at the age of 80. Most of her photographs, all unpublished work, are of other women, Abboud had been told. When we get to her web series I Luv U, But…, we notice that same photograph, this time printed on large canvas, hanging in the background wall of one of the scenes in episode 3 of season 2. This is a moment of auteurship at its finest, when one quintessential artifact from one film migrates its significant way across to the next body of work. Thematically, the photograph ties Lebanese women who (seemingly) loved women, to their Lebanese-Australian counterparts eighty years later, while they struggle with similar social and familial pressures. Abboud renders this queer Lebanese history seamless rather than disjointed and Lebanese identity and culture as fluid and adaptive, even when hybridized in diaspora.

Abboud’s Club Arak exterior shot (at the end of season 1) is of The Imperial Hotel in Erskinville, where scenes from Priscilla Queen of the Desert were also shot. Club Arak, an actually queer Arab dance night, had been held at Sydney University’s Manning Bar before migrating to the more appropriate Erskinville location in its later incarnations. When cultural history is needed to decipher the mise en scene in this way, then we know we are dealing with an auteur. When the films are thematically in dialogue with each other, across a decade of production, then we also know we are dealing with an auteur.

Rolla Slebak is also a queer auteur to watch out for. At what at least appears to be a very young age, Selbak has already mastered a range of inter-related production skills. From directing to creating original movie soundtracks, to editing, script writing, producing and who knows what else, Selbak is a quintessential auteur with a very long career still ahead of her. In 2003, Selbak wrote, edited, directed and produced the feature-length Making Maya. Three Veils, released in 2011 again brought to life her own script with directing and editing credits to boot. In 2013 and 2014 Selbak wrote, directed, edited and co-produced the two-season web series shorts Kiss Her, I’m Famous. Let’s take a closer look at the distinctive features of these works.

Kiss Her, I’m Famous is a perfect, mainstream lesbian production, and is what The L-Word should have looked like had it had a creative brain behind it. Selbak’s auteurship seldom seems nostalgic, though, like Abboud’s is. In fact the lens filter of ethnicity with which the filmmaker oversaw Three Veils in 2011, is entirely suspended, retired even, for the making of Kiss Her, I’m Famous in 2013/14. Had the show done otherwise, it would not have convincingly simulated the object of its satire — reality TV in which whiteness is coded as universal.

There are so many competing signature moments across Selbak’s works that, like Abboud, entire chapters could be spent unpacking cultural histories and theories of representation. But for the sake of this argument, let’s look for traces of singularity across Selbak’s major works. When we do so, we find that the transmigration of the auteur from Making Maya, to Three Veils and onward to Kiss Her…, occurs at the site at which an unconscious sexuality seeps, surfaces, or begins to emerge. In Making Maya, which is a wonderful Indie film (up there with All Over Me and Personal Best), and in Three Veils, and again in Kiss Her…, Selbak’s same-sex encounters are always fresh, first-times. I don’t mean we are dealing with adolescence or virginity even if those are present. I mean this in a more literal sense, as an experience so immediate that the experiencer has not yet had time to mediate the rawness of what is experienced with concepts and constructs. There is a quasi-Zen encounter with the immediate, before one has had a chance to articulate the is-ness of what is (as lesbian, as sexual, as anything at all). Selbak’s characters encounter these moments of self-realization at different stages of their lives, and the homoerotic seems to be the gateway to these ritual passages. Repeatedly, Selbak captures the liminality between the homosocial friendship and the homoerotic attraction.

What’s more, the audience is never treated to prurience. In Three Veils, for example the encounter between Nikki and Amira is depicted as remedial, with Amira literally licking Nikki’s wounds, which we later find out were caused by a violent scuffle with her father. Without evacuating the erotic value of wound symbolism, this is not lust, this is not the desire that appeals to the voyeuristic gaze of a mass consumer. The same mass consumer who was very upset that they watched all of Making Maya “for just one lousy kiss.” (Let us ignore what it must mean for someone to wish to see actors that young do anything more than “one lousy kiss,” but let’s not ignore that the narrative simply did not require any more than what was depicted.) Meanwhile, Selbak’s web series Kiss Her…, is not at all shy about showing two seasoned adults having a good time on screen. Nonetheless, even so, the viewing pleasure is undermined when these sex scenes are repeatedly interrupted by a manic and incognito director, played by Selbak herself, whose concern is the composition of the shot. The “director’s” intrusion into the set, points to the constructedness of the images, inviting the viewer out of a potential stupor of fandom in which fantasy cannot be gleaned from fact. Such is the stupor induced in cult-following of celebrity and reality television, and at whose expense the show is making a joke. To succeed in Making Maya and Three Veils at capturing sensuousness without voyeurism and objectification is easier than the achievement of the same in Kiss Her, I’m Famous. If only because the latter, at least aesthetically, belongs to the genre of prurience. But with the “director’s” pointed interruptions, sex is depicted as work without it quite being sex work.

This is something the L-Word was not able to pull off, not even with Gloria Steinem making a guest appearance, or the numerous plot-line moments that cried “foul” at the voyeuristic male gaze, because the L-Word cashed in on this as much as humanly possible. And at least from a funding perspective, there was an implicit understanding that this contractual assurance between consumer and production studio must be observed if the show were to continue. And it continued, for seven seasons, even in the absence of palatable story-telling. And just in case you can’t remember what I’m talking about, I will leave you with the poster for the show’s final season. Yes, because we do spend most of our lives naked, with our eyes closed and heads thrust back slightly enough to reveal our necks but not too far back like someone who has fallen asleep in a chair.

*Originally published on August 23, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/better-than-sex-queer-auteurship-in-the-age-of-mass-media/  now discontinued.

Eye of the Beloved: An Excerpt

                                               A 9th century, Abbasid anatomical drawing of the human eye                                               From Justin Marozzi's Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Penguin, 2015)

The following is an excerpt from Eye of the Beloved, which is a work in progress and the sequel to Rughum and Najda. Rughum and Najda is a ficto-historical novel set in 9th century Baghdad. It was published in West Hollywood, by Oracle, in 2012. Listen to this on Soundcloud.

A gutted envelope from which protruded a terse hand-written letter lay in the open bedroom doorway. The forlorn author had been left deeply wounded by the desertion which had befallen her so suddenly and inexplicably, and she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the addressee was the single most awful calamity to have ever entered her life. And the addressee, who was lying in bed, eyeing the letter with the eye that was left open, while the other was smashed up against the mattress, did not entirely disagree with her assessment. In fact, at this low point of the addressee’s existence, the Dead Sea shore* of low points, she agreed wholeheartedly that she was a dream destroyer and a despicable failure. How she became instrumental in causing great suffering to a deeply good and patient being was something that her conscience would not permit her to turn away from. She genuinely believed that all good-natured people, among whom her former spouse was one, deserved to have their desires fulfilled. If she had wanted a lifelong marriage between them – as the addressee had always and repeatedly indicated was the only worthy goal of a relationship – then she deserved this. But, alas, our protagonist fell apart at a critical juncture in her life. At this point in her crisis she had turned the blame squarely inwardly. She felt that she had not been strong enough to weather the pressures that came with her career choices and the jeers of ruthless homophobes and racists. A childhood spent in the alleyways of a brutal civil war had made her particularly sensitive to injustice and oppression, the hint of which would cause her to react in heroic, albeit futile fashion against an insurmountable institutional wall. She was now, however, in the midst of shedding her sense of righteousness and coming to question whether her own intolerance for bigotry did not in fact contribute to bigotry and intolerance themselves. Books of Buddhist teachings and philosophy lined her reading cabinet, Lao Tzu’s soft philosophy of little (if not no) action was beginning to crystalize as an alternative to sleeve-rolling, fist bearing confrontation. The stoicism of the Greeks inspired her to seek redemption for a short fuse she had acquired through hereditary means and a childhood observing disinhibited violence. Scripture from every world religion, past and present vied for her attention, including the recent and the obscure, among them was the Book of Mormon, Rael’s Extra-Terrestrials Are Real and Ron L. Hubbard’s Dianetics.
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The moment the knife pierced Najda’s sleeping heart was also the moment her consciousness was disconnected from her body. She saw herself in Rughum’s bloodied arms and saw Antar drop his weapon and flee in a panic like a raging river. For years she dwelled as a constant companion with Rughum, and there were fleeting moments when she was able to make her presence and love felt  in symbolic ways that Rughum sensed but eventually dismissed.  They continued to meet in Rughum’s dreams and whenever she submerged her body with water, Najda was able to encircle her with warmth. But the sudden and most violent severance of Najda from her earthly vessel caused her to shoot out of the earth’s orbit, past the sun, and to travel into the furthest reaches of the galaxy where she spent the equivalent of a thousand years in solitude. She wandered the universe and sought answers to questions she had long held. She spent centuries alone on planets uninhabited by mobile life and created an extensive breach between her soul and her last incarnation. Of her previous lives on earth she seldom thought, only the last had left an indelible wound that remained tender to the touch. That wound, in part, was Rughum’s absence, but with her presence came a reminder too painful to bear. A thousand years of solitude and wandering the galaxy opens one up to the deepest insights, and she hit upon the realization that she could not run away forever. It would become necessary to return to earth.  Little did she know, that once returned to earth, she would spend an adult life gazing back at her cosmic hermitage in longing, through telescopes and at planetariums and observatories around the world which she would come to travel extensively. Little did she know as she gazed at the infinite spectacle of creation to which she was drawn, that it had once been her home and her playground.  Entire nebulae were nothing but wisps of smoke between her constellar fingers once; she had rolled out solar systems like puffs of smoke and played billiard with comets and black holes.

 Rughum lived with the horror of Najda’s absence for a lifetime made mercifully bearable by a gentle death. There was nothing or anyone who could take the place of Najda or compensate for that kind of loss. But with patience and submission you learned to live without breathing and to even make good of it. When put before circumstances such as these you cease to matter – care of others becomes your motive for continuation – bearing your pains with patience and acquiescence makes a great soul out of you. The suffering does indeed have some kind of purifying effect and you leave behind you a trail of great deeds that bring light, hope and joy into the lives of others, even as you might remain miserable.

 When Rughum was separated from her earthly vessel, she scoured the entire earth for Najda. She looked in every bloom, under every tree and in the river-ways. She searched the newborns and the young with dogged determination. But she could not find her. She decided she would resume human form again in the hopeful search for Najda. She did this across a millennium of lifetimes. And every time she reached dis-incarnation and regained knowledge of her soul’s memories, she returned to the lifetime where she met Najda and to the resolve she had made to find her. A thousand years of loves, of joys, of births and deaths, a thousand years of incarnating in diverse locations, in multiple genders and understandings, a thousand more years of accumulated experiences were not enough to put out the fire of that love – for in fact this was an eternal passion. This was a soul, a singular particle, that had long ago been split into two and when the disconnected parts had briefly joined each other, the cell memory was set ablaze with rapture. It must not be thought that because they had once been one that they were the same. In fact, each was very different from the other and not in some symmetrical opposition either. Their reconnection was now at risk for the changes each had undergone since their time apart. But it is said that the nature of a split particle is such that when one half undergoes a change so too does the other undergo a complementary change, irrespective of the amount of time and space that may separate them.

 A thousand years of reincarnations and Rughum’s resolve never waned, her love never faltered, though the same cannot be said of her hope. And yet she reached a point where she realized that even though her hope was weak and sometimes non-existent, she could not help but continue to do what she was doing across lifetimes, because her desire was unchanging. Sometimes all she could do was acknowledge this desire and acknowledge the absence of hope and wonder at the purpose of such an impossible stagnation. This was essentially her experience in the time she spent on earth in the physical absence of Najda. Her logic was rather more substantial than the effect of her despair. Her despair was caused by the trauma that desires are unfulfillable. But her logic fathomed that in the unfolding intricacies of time, the return to elegance was the inevitable outcome. Her logic knew just how tenacious Najda was and it told her that she would come to find her one day too and that therefore it must be – that to think otherwise would be illogical. 

Najda sat perched along the horizon, watching the sun turn over the equator as the earth spun its cosmic metronome. She could see the elements of life spread before her – from the tiniest particle to the largest land mass. She was aware of the ants, and the seeds and the blooms and the thoughts and dreams of the inhabitants of the cradle of souls. She had all but completely forgotten earth, with its wars and devastations. A thousand years of solitude and the tender spot of where her last wound had left its indentation had remained soft. She knew that what lay before her was a challenging lifetime to try and resolve the horror that had calcified around the tenderness and the only place in the universe where she could carry out the now pressing purification had to be here – here, at the site of an unresolved trauma; a trauma she had suspended in a vacuum of distance and space. She knew that once she entered the realm of molecules and particles, she would undergo a process of forgetting… Everything. The learning always begins from the darkness of the womb and outward into the light. This seemed the nature of things. Only an unconscious encryption of all that is, that was and might be could remain with her, in the cells of her body and the neurons of her brain. How deeply that vast ocean of all-knowing would be missed. Not even a thousand years around the sun were enough to answer the questions she had searched. She was hesitant to relinquish the peace and freedom of body-less-ness and the penetrating wisdom that comes with being free from ties to a time and place. How everything changes the moment you enter the world – how limited your understanding, how predetermined most of your actions become. But we come here to seek answers to questions that require experience and subsistence within the confines of the most lamentable human condition.  Soon everything will be looked on as though for the first time.

*The Dead Sea is the lowest point below sea level on earth

Sarkhat Untha and The “TIQ” in LGBTIQ

Sarkhat Untha (A Female’s Cry) is an Egyptian TV series made for Cable TV that first aired in 2007.  It has not received much by way of LGBTIQ-friendly media attention. Perhaps,  the “I” in LGBTIQ has never been anything but tokenistic, or perhaps,  at some stage, activists dropped the “I” and the “Q” out of LGBTIQ, citing irreconcilable political differences in their dogged pursuit of inclusion in hegemonic normativities.

Frankly, the “I” is extremely important in any discussion on gender and sexual diversity that is to take place in the Arab world, and particularly in the Egyptian context. Detractors often taunt gender and/or sexual minority persons with claims that their way of being, desiring and acting are contrary to the natural. Religious discourse wields great power and exerts tremendous influence over people’s lives, and I’ve often heard religious devotees desperately point out that God doesn’t make mistakes and that “He” made men and women to be together. The biology of intersex categorically frustrates this simplistic worldview, which holds many LGBTIQ people hostage (religious or otherwise). When they factor the existence of intersexuality, with its own set of variances, LGBTIQ believers can tell other believers “you’re wrong. God doesn’t just make male and female people, God makes all sorts of human beings who confound this general rule.”

According to seasoned scholar, Paula Sanders, Muslim exegetes from the medieval period allowed an intersex person to reach a certain maturity before designating them with a sex identifier (male or female). What this meant, was that an individual whose biological sex could not be discerned at birth, was raised without designation until such time that the person was able to decide on whether to live as man or woman. Until they reach this particular maturity, it was decreed that they should pray in front of the women but behind the men, in a kind of no-man’s land liminality (no pun intended).  Sanders is critical of the notion that a person still had to choose either a male of female designation, when the intersex body confounds and explodes this binary. While the biological ambiguity was noted and accommodated by these scholars, it was not intended to last a life time, how else were you going to arrange worldly affairs like marriage and inheritance? My understanding is that the exegetes saw gender (in instances of genital ambiguity) as not residing specifically in the body, but in the roo7 (the soul or spirit) of an individual. They were about a thousand years too early for the neither/nor queer morphology in which you are neither man nor woman or are either man or woman. That does not mean that the system did not produce exclusions (i.e. individuals who could not be accounted for systemically, like we have now with homosexuals who want to marry), it most certainly did, but it shows evidence of theological accommodations of people who existed outside the simplistic purview of the male/man and female/woman.

Thank you for bearing with me through my devotion to scholarship, back to popular culture. Popular Culture is where this struggle is at. Sarkhat Untha made it possible for millions of viewers across the entire globe to learn of and think about the difference between transgender and intersex, as doctors try to figure out which one of the two the main protagonist, Afifi, is. Night after night the spectacle of Afifi’s life would unfold, while a global Arab audience was consuming with tremendous curiosity. How many people were persuaded to empathize with an intersex child, who through no fault of her own was born with ambiguous genitalia; and who was socialized as male, after the midwife designated “his” sex according to the father’s wishes? I can’t think of anything more integral to initiating a discussion on homosexuality and transgenderism than intersexuality. What better way to re-educate ourselves about the gender and sexual continuum than this, where TV becomes pedagogy?
Still, the TV series has several dark sides, most important of which is the story of the real person on whom it was based without permission. Sally Mohamad Abd Allah sued the producers for stealing the details of Afifi’s plot line from her autobiography with the same title as the series. Abd Allah was a medical student at al-Azhar, while Afifi studied psychology at university. Both undergo a surgical procedure and subsequent gender transformation, which results in their expulsion from university prior to issuance of their degrees. Both become professional dancers and are attacked and vilified. Abd Allah should have been compensated by the producers who stole her life story and simply capitalized on her suffering.

Since her surgical procedure in 1988, Abd Allah has managed to obtain a court order permitting her to return to al-Azhar to complete her medical degree as a woman. She has also appeared on a number of television talk shows, but you know how poor the quality of journalism is on that level of mass media. For example, Sally appears alongside an intersex Lebanese woman, Antonila, on Wafa al-Kilany’s talk show al-Hakam, and you can watch an excerpt without subtitles here . You can see the prurience with which the typical talk show host from our region pursues LGBTIQ guests on their talk shows. They are interested in our most intimate and mundane details. When did we fall in love? What did we wear? And all those value judgements flying out across the globe, determining how we’re not quite human. It seems, for now, the subject under exploration in mass media, still reduces us to spectacles. We sacrifice something of our dignity and right to privacy (which is not a Western concept, please) when we come out publically to talk about gender and sexual diversity on our television and radio networks.

It won’t always be this way and I won’t leave you on this miserable note. So, I found something slightly less miserable to end on. I really did appreciate Amr Ellissy’s episode on Transgender and Transsexual persons for his program Be Wudooh, which aired in October 2014. Dr. Ellissy, however, still cowers to the conventional explanations when dealing with Sandy Ahmad’s Transgenderism, citing that her transition began after she had been sexually assaulted. It probably began with pre-historic fish that change biological sex in the course of their lifetime, but any way. Sandy Ahmad is a soft-spoken, articulate young woman and has created a facebook page quietly seeking to confound what we think we know about gender and sexual minority persons and the place of the sacred in their lives. There is still a great deal of confusion publically speaking over the differences between intersex and transsexuality, as is evident in the beginning of Ellissy’s episode, which is all the more reason why we need to be having these uncomfortable conversations until they cease to be uncomfortable.

I know why you are still here. Before you say something, I just want you to know that I know. I taught students like you. I have not just read what you read, I taught it. Intersex and Transgender are categories of a western scientific taxonomy that should not and cannot be imposed as an ideal of classification elsewhere in the world. Ok, got it, thank you.

*Originally published on August 8, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/sarkhat-untha-and-the-i-in-lgbtiq/  now discontinued.