Obviously, if Allah were an LPSG member, He would love all the forums equally.Matthew said:Hmmm. Wonder if Allah is an LPSG member. Which forum do you think would be his favorite?
I think, with hindsight, that I summed up the two possibilities for where this thread might be headed with my phrase about the climate of "fear and misinformation" in the Sudan. Consequently, the poster had to be either someone trying to break free from that fear and hatred, or someone who was overwhelmed by and unable to see beyond its rhetoric of hate. In the latter case, there was no chance for a few remarks on a message board to counteract a lifetime of fear-based (rather than love-based) preaching. Many of the imams of the Sudan are rather akin to (to pluck one example from the air) those hardline Baptist preachers like the late Estus Pirkle, whose whole aim is to scare people into conformity for fear of experiencing eternal hellfire and damnation - rather than to preach any kind of message of love.
The addition of homophobic rhetoric to Islam is a relatively recent 19th Century adjunct, at any rate, and hinges on an interpretation of the word "liwat" in the Quran... a word that means simply "people of Lot". It is stated clearly enough that the people of Lot were destroyed and cast into eternal damnation, but just what they did to deserve this fate goes unmentioned. Interpretations by Islamic scholars prior to the mid-19th Century AD favor them having been lovers of epicurean delights who indulged in all pleasures of the body and the flesh without concern for God or the passage of their soul into the afterlife. However, from the 1860s onwards, there appeared sudden concensus that this word referred exclusively to homosexuality, and it is now one of the more common curse-words used against gay men (with lesbians excluded, as in Victorian rhetoric, as this would lend credence to the notion of women having sexual desires).
Of course, I might as well write this in the sand, since as one of those liwat, I am nothing more than an animal, as has been made clear.
And so, instead, I shall enjoy the pleasant irony of Dr. Rock having become an unwilling advocate for organized religion's viewpoint in african's estimation. :smile:
Since there are few online sources with regard to my argument on liwat, I am including a list of:
Further literature:
Badruddin Khan, Sex, Longing and Not Belonging: A Gay Muslim's Quest for Love and Meaning (1997)
Stephen O. Murray & J. Will Roscoe (eds.), Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (1997)
Arno Schmitt & J. Jehoeda Sofer, Sexuality and Eroticism among Males is Moslem Societies (1990)