Queer Life and The Muslim Mainstream

Queer Muslims exist. Yet they often dwell across margins of both the Islamic and the queer as they occupy positions deemed incommensurable. Through interpretive qualitative research with Shia Muslim hawzas — the “traditional” institutions authoring contemporary Shiism—and its scholars and teachers, this article explores the Islamic possibility of queer-embracing Islam. Identifying and analyzing the potentiality(ies) of both a queer-affirming and an anti-homophobic Islamic jurisprudence and related social formation, the article offers a critique of the stabilization of scholarly and jurisprudential Islam as essentially queer-exclusionary, situating this hegemonic discourse within the larger reification of Eurocentric modern/colonial secular progressiveness and forces of homocolonialism and homonationalism. Thinking alongside Shia ontotheology, the author concludes with the possibility of a dignified queer self differently entering the mainstream Muslim ummah in a liberatory praxis for both the queer as well as the Islamic.