Muslim, gay and suicidal

Khakan Qureshi

I know for some people, coming out can be difficult, while for others it can be liberating.

But we now live in times of heightened social sensibilities, political discussions and divisions, especially with social media. Saying that, being able to say you are gay or LGBT makes people take note. Change does not occur if we stay silent.

When reconciling being gay with faith all I can say is this: I read the Qur’an and the Bible when I was trying to come to terms with my sexual orientation 24 years ago. I read both scriptures and looked for answers. They offered me spiritual guidance – how to be a better person on Earth. I also read a few statements about “men sleeping with men”.

I placed these quotes into historical context. I thought about how it all fitted into modern times. I realised that for me personally, it didn’t matter.

Yes, I carried religious guilt for a very long time, especially when I found I was becoming more and more attracted to men. I was constantly thinking about what God or Allah would say or do to me when I died. I thought about hell, fire and damnation. I thought about being persecuted for all eternity and being ostracised from my family. I thought negative thoughts. I thought I would go crazy, crying night after night, looking for answers, looking for sex, looking for love. I contemplated suicide.

However, I also knew, according to the Qur’an, that suicide was definitely not the way to gain access to paradise.

I was on the brink of leaving everybody and everything. My family was in Birmingham and I hardly had any friends. At some point, I thought, who could I turn to? Who would support me? There was no-one like me, no-one I could turn to who could offer me help and support me through turbulent times.

So, I had to change my way of thinking. I had to LIVE. I had to learn to live my life the way I wanted. To do that, I took the greater positive information provided by the Bible and Qur’an. Be kind, generous, compassionate, supportive, loyal and so forth towards your fellow human beings, love your partner and other living creatures. I read and analysed the quote about Lot.

I asked questions of myself:

WAS it the Devil or Shaitan who created me this way, to be attracted to men. Was it a cruel trick that I was to be tested and punished or oppressed for the rest of my life? Or was it Allah who created me to be creative, express love for all mankind and be selfless in my devotion to someone who I would fall in love with or just love? Did it really matter if I fell in love with a man or a woman? I didn’t choose to be gay. Why would I want to choose to live a life of persecution, according to the ‘norms of society’? Who is ‘society’? WE are society.

Over the years, I find that Muslims, for whatever reason, place too much emphasis on what others think, whether it’s the neighbours, the community or the immediate family – so entrenched and indoctrinated by status and wanting children who can carry the name of the family ‘business’ or the ‘burden of the land’ back home in Pakistan or India, or within the UK for that matter. Being LGBT doesn’t even come into the equation because people are forced sometimes into being something that they are not.

Why do we care so much what others think? Are we so narcissistic that we consider what strangers think of us? Are we so full of self-importance or grandeur that we think that others may talk about us, even if they may be strangers within our own communities? The Qur’an or Islam doesn’t say that you should persecute others who may be different in their sexual orientation or sexual identity. It teaches modesty, humility, generosity and acceptance.

In hindsight, I think I was one of the more fortunate ones. My ‘coming out’ created friction for my parents and I chose not to see them for about a year. There was constant bickering; negative feelings and critical comments were made when I was in the room. The subject of sex, let alone being gay, was certainly taboo. I was definitely the elephant in the room. I couldn’t cope with how it made me feel, so I withdrew from the family home. I still had phone contact with my mother and she asked me to come home.

When I walked through the door, my father told me I was hurting and upsetting my mum. He had changed. He embraced me and said “I understand you’re in love. Your partner may not be who we wanted for you, but if he makes you happy that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter if you are gay. You are my son and we love you!”

That to me is the ultimate accolade of acceptance. If your parents can accept you, then you can forget what others think. Be true to yourself, try not to validate your actions with excuses and lies, be authentic, be who you are and live your life the way you feel is right for you. And be proud.


https://www.fsmag.org.uk/fs153-muslim-gay-and-suicidal

Muslims, the New Mormons

John Turner 

Patheos
December 10, 2015

In 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court — in upheld laws intended to disenfranchise Mormon polygamists. The 1882 Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act required voters to swear that they were not polygamists, and the Idaho Territory had passed a statute requiring voters to attest that they were not Mormons. In Idaho, church member Samuel Davis was convicted of conspiring to swear falsely in order to sidestep the recently passed statute. In Davis v. Beason, the Court ruled that “however free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal law of the country.” Idaho could disenfranchise Mormons, polygamists and monogamists alike. In Davis, the Court held that polygamy was an affront to the values of Christianity and civilization, which it viewed as inseparably connected. (See Sarah Barringer Gordon’s The Mormon Question).

Two years later (in Holy Trinity), the Court explicitly asserted that “we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.” As the polygamy cases suggest, the Court sought to uphold particular forms of Christianity.

As of early 1890, the U.S. government had the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a legal vise, and it was turning the screws. Courts had incarcerated thousands of church members, including high-ranking leaders (other high-ranking leaders went “underground” to avoid arrest). The U.S. government had revoked the church’s incorporation and seized valuable church-owned property. And federal judges were refusing to naturalize Mormon emigrants.

In the 2007 PBS documentary The Mormons, Ken Verdoia observed that in nineteenth-century America, to be called a “Mormon” was like being called a “Muslim terrorist” today. There was no shortage of accusations that Mormons in Utah in particular exacted violence on Gentiles, apostates, and romantic competitors (see Sherlock Holmes’s Study in Scarlet, for example). As Patrick Mason narrates in hisMenace of Mormonism, two Mormon missionaries were murdered in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South (in 1879 and 1884, respectively), and many other missionaries endured violence, threats, and harassment.

The “Muslim terrorist” / “Mormon” identification seems a bit of a stretch, but perhaps one could draw a more general analogy between the place of nineteenth-century Mormons in the United States and contemporary rhetoric about Muslims in America. My aim is not to draw an exact parallel but to raise some points of similarity.

Between its 1830 founding and 1846, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had endured several cycles of gathering, persecution, and exile in the Eastern United States. Initial objections to Mormonism centered on the church’s doctrine of gathering and the fear that once Mormons gained a majority in a particular city or county that they would tyrannize those who did not belong to their church. Once the Latter-day Saints reached Utah and announced their practice of polygamy, the latter issue dominated American anti-Mormon rhetoric, but the political conflict was as much about theocracy and sovereignty as it was about marriage and morality. Much as Protestant Americans doubted the patriotism of Catholic immigrants, so they insisted that the Mormon ethic of obedience to ecclesiastical leaders called their loyalty to the nation into question.

Were any of these fears about Mormonism well grounded? The 1857-1858 Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre created justifiable suspicions about whether the Latter-day Saints acknowledged American sovereignty and whether the Utah Territory was a safe place for outsiders. Latter-day Saints had some justifiable suspicions about American intentions as well. Still, by the 1880s, the idea that the Mormons posed a significant political or moral threat to the rest of the country was far-fetched at best.

Especially from the 1840s through the 1860s, large numbers of Mormons were emigrants (mostly from the British Isles), and many Americans warned about the dangers that Mormon emigrants posed to the morality and political fabric of the nation. As late as 1919, the National Reform Association (a once influential Protestant group that had lobbied Congress to insert an explicit declaration of Christianity into the U.S. Constitution) accused the church of bringing “great numbers of women and girls from other states and from foreign countries to Utah, and this for unlawful and immoral purposes.” A conference of the NRA called on the national government to expel Mormon members of Congress, ban the circulation of Mormon literature, and warn foreign governments about Mormon missionaries.

In the end, the U.S. government forced the LDS Church to abandon polygamy, and Mormons promptly became model patriots. The long history of the “Mormon question” in American politics, though, is a cautionary tale. For a half-century, Mormonism was a national political issue that occasionally took center stage (during the 1857-1858 conflict, the Mountain Meadows Massacre trials, and the Reed Smoot hearings of the early 1900s, for instance). Regardless of how one feels about the constitutionality of anti-polygamy legislation, Mormons even before they practiced polygamy had endured severe persecution and hostility.

Not surprisingly in light of its history, the LDS Church two days ago released a statement proclaiming that while the church is “neutral in regard to party politics and election campaigns … it is not neutral in relation to religious freedom.” As evidence, the church pointed to an 1841 Nauvoo, Illinois, ordinance promising “free toleration” not only to Mormons and Protestants, but also to Catholics, Quakers, Universalists, Unitarians, and — yes — “Mohammedans.”

Those rightfully appalled at Donald Trump’s insistence that all Muslim visitors to the United States are potential terrorists and should therefore be banned from entering the country should remember that anti-religious bigotry was woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century American politics and culture. The vitriol that late-nineteenth-century politicians of both parties employed against Mormons far exceeded what Donald Trump uses against Muslims today. And such ideas touched not only Mormons, but Catholics, Jews, and other groups as well. The free exercise of religion in American history has been contested, sometimes violent terrain.


John Turner teaches and writes about the history of religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at George Mason University. He is the author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012); and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), winner of Christianity Today‘s 2009 award for History / Biography. He also blogs for Religion in American History and has written for popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. You cannot follow him unless you find him in person.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/12/muslims-the-new-mormons/

Phil Ball: Confusing creeds sects in world of religion

Muncie Star Press
Phil Ball
August 21, 2015


I read the daily newspaper and get badly confused about events in Muslim countries.

This column is about religion, so if you think that I shouldn’t write about such, be my guest and tear up this column now.

In the Muslim world there are various sects--- and on and on. Then there are various political-military Muslim groups: ISIS or ISIL, Taliban, Al Quaeda, and so forth.

See why I get confused? And these various Muslim groups don’t get along or agree with each other or agree with other religions.

Why can’t Muslims all be as agreeable as us Christians?

Agreeable Christians? Well, hardly. Many of the wars in the past 2,000 years have pitted Christian sect against Christian sect. We’ve had Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics and they didn’t agree. In the Roman Catholic Church at one time in the Middle Ages there were three popes conflicting at the same time. And we Christians went on holy Crusades to fight the Muslims in the Middle East.

Then along came Martin Luther and the Protestant movement, and the Protestants split into dozens of sects, arguing and fighting.

Who were some of the first colonizers of America? The Puritans. They got violently kicked out of England by the regulars of the Church of England.

Here in good, old, simple, happy, Muncie, we’ve got so many religious sects that it is embarrassing. Look in the phone book! Some 43 different Protestant sects, each proclaiming some particular creed difference from all the others. Holy cow!

Then there are the “evangelists.” In my lifetime some icons of the Protestant experience have been:

• Billy Sunday. Radio and stage evangelist. Appeared on stage as a baseball pitcher preacher. This endeared him to his public.

• Aimee Semple McPherson. Famous radio evangelist 60 or so years ago. Always wore a white flowing robe, like an angel. One of her boyfriends was reported to be the comedian Milton Berle. She may have died of an overdose of sleeping pills or from walking out into the California surf and disappearing in the waves.

• Jerry Falwell. Virginia evangelist on TV as all subsequent big name evangelists were. Appearing on TV brought jillions of dollars into the evangelists’ coffers. Falwell started the Republican “Moral Majority.” It’s gone. He’s gone, too.But we still have the “Liberty University” that Falwell started.

• Jimmy Bakker and his mascara-painted wife Tammy Sue. He was constantly in the news for years. Gone without a trace, after a sex scandal.

• Pat Robertson. Still on TV.

• Jimmy Swaggart. On TV for years. He disappeared — maybe after a sex scandal, but now has returned to TV---old and grizzled and sour looking.

• Oral Roberts. Tulsa TV superstar evangelist. Once went up in his “prayer tower,” not to come down until the last million dollars of a fund drive was raised for his church. A grateful millionaire wrote a check for a million. Oh, happy day! Oral came down. The check bounced! He started Oral Roberts University and Medical School and Hospital. Some of this is still around. Some has been converted into commercial venues.

• Robert Shuler. Built the Crystal Cathedral in California. He died. The Cathedral became available recently at bankruptcy sale for several million.

• Norman Vincent Orange Peale. Famous NYC preacher. Wrote the “Power of Positive Thinking.” Anybody read it? I did years ago. I still do negative thinking.

• Billy Graham. Nice man. High point in his career was when he became the semi-official White House minister — for Richard Nixon. Was that really a high point? Minister for Richard Nixon?

• Ernest Angley. The worst wig and the worst accent in the history of TV evangelism. He’s still on TV. Look him up!

• Joel Osteen. The latest TV superstar man of the cloth. Neat wife. He has a great hair do!

Tempus fugit! Time flies. Protestant super star preachers come and go. Some leave no trace behind.

Should we Christians be proud of all of this past history of confusion and conflict? Hardly!

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,”so it says in the Bible.

Phil Ball is a retired Muncie physician and a contributing humor writer to The Star Press.



http://www.thestarpress.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/08/21/phil-ball-confusing-creeds-sects-world-religion/31947757/

Extremism Backlash: British Muslims Grapple With Faith, Patriotism

Extremism Backlash: British Muslims Grapple With Faith, Patriotism http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/extremism-backlash-british-muslims-grapple-faith-patriotism-n308726

NEPAL: A Muslim family rendered homeless after converting to the Wahhabi sect

September 4, 2014
Asian Human Rights Commission

The Terai Human Rights Defenders (THRD) Alliance in Nepal has informed the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) that a Muslim family of the Sunni faith, residing at the Gauri Village Development Committee in Kapilavastu District have been forced to flee their home as a result of converting to the Wahhabi sect on or around the 10 June 2014. Reports state that local Sunnis have destroyed their farm lands, their crops and their home and looted their property. Following the incident the family was forced to flee, in order to avoid further attacks.  They have sought assistance from the District Police and the District Administration Offices; however the police have downright refused to provide any assistance to them. Today despite an order from the Court, to restore their land and their freedoms to practice a religion of their choice, have not been able to return to their home and remain as refugees. 

US Muslims ask John Kerry for protection on Mecca pilgrimage

August 27, 2014
Lauren Markoe
Religion News Service

Concerned for the safety of U.S. citizens soon headed to Mecca, 27 Muslim-American groups are asking the State Department to better protect them from violence that has plagued those who have made the pilgrimage in the past.

A letter from the group sent Tuesday (Aug. 26) to Secretary of State John Kerry was prompted in part by a 2013 incident in which a group of Sunni Muslims from Australia threatened to kill and rape a group of Shiites from Michigan.

The letter reads:

“We urge you to take immediate action to protect American citizens who travel overseas to perform one of the five mandatory acts of their faith and ensure that Saudi Arabia addresses this urgent security matter in preparation for the upcoming Hajj pilgrimage.”

The pilgrimage to Islam’s most sacred place is required of all Muslims who are physically and financially able to make the journey to Mecca. The hajj takes place during the 12th month of the Islamic year and typically attracts 2 million or more faithful annually. This year it falls during the first week of October.

Last year, when the Michigan Muslims were attacked, neither Saudi nor U.S. authorities were responsive to their plight, said Mohamed Sabur of the Oakland-based Muslim Advocates, one of the groups that signed on to the letter.

U.S. Muslims on the hajj “need to know that the State Department has their backs,” Sabur said.

A State Department representative said in an email that the U.S. is committed to the protection of its citizens traveling or living abroad.

“We take seriously all reports of attacks or threats against U.S. citizens, including the reported attack on U.S. citizens during last year’s Hajj.”

The email statement continued: “While the U.S. does not have law enforcement personnel at the Hajj, our Embassy and Consulate General in Saudi Arabia are in close contact with their Saudi government counterparts. We urge all U.S. citizens traveling or residing abroad to register their location and contact information at https://step.state.gov/step.”

For most, the hajj is safe. But the huge gathering holds inherent risks, despite high-tech Saudi crowd control and anti-terrorism efforts, which include thousands of closed-circuit television cameras. The main danger in past years has been from stampedes: Between 1990 and 2004, more than 2,000 people were trampled to death on the hajj.

After last year’s attack, the Americans reported that Saudi authorities at first seemed ready to help, but then destroyed a video of the incident and otherwise made it clear that they would not follow up on the matter.

The Americans identified their attackers as Salafis — Sunnis who embrace a strict form of Islam that is widely practiced in Saudi Arabia.

The Americans also reported that the response from the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia was slow and disappointing.

“When they relied on the U.S. State Department, they didn’t come through, either,” said Sabur.

Thomas Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, said the Muslim-Americans’ request is “entirely fair.”

It’s “a central responsibility of the U.S. government to defend the rights of its citizens abroad, especially their right to religious freedom,” he said.

http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/27/u-s-muslims-ask-kerry-protection-mecca-pilgrimage/