Today's tonic: "Protests during Pride. Pushback against LGBTQ events. Inside the fight galvanizing some conservative Muslims in Canada"

Counter-demonstrators in Ottawa June 9

Today's tonic: "Protests during Pride. Pushback against LGBTQ events. Inside the fight galvanizing some conservative Muslims in Canada" by Toronto Star staff reporter Omar Mosleh.

This fair and thorough piece does a good job detailing the various sides of the ongoing debates in our societies.  It does an excellent job detailing how Christian fundamentalists, who used to demonize Muslims and do everything they could to exclude them from Western societies, are now using Muslim conservatives to try to bolster their hateful, anti-LGBTQ agenda.  

The most interesting points of the piece for me are made by Anver Emon and Junaid Jahangir about the nuances on the issue amongst more moderate Muslims:  

"While the Navigating Differences letter highlights a conventional Islamic view — that sexual relations are only permitted in a lawful marriage between a man and woman and that medical transitions are only allowed for people with “biological ambiguities” — there are also Islamic scholars who point out that there is precedent in the Islamic tradition for recognizing non-binary genders, such as the khuntha, or someone with both sex organs (or hermaphrodite)...

"There have been debates in Islamic jurisprudence on whether a khuntha could lead prayers, a role traditionally restricted to men, says Anver Emon, Canada Research Chair in Islamic Law and History and director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto...

"...Junaid Jahangir, an economics professor at MacEwan University and co-author of “Islamic Law and Muslim Same-Sex Unions,” has written about how there is precedent of non-binary gender identities being recognized in Islamic societies, such as mukhannathun (effeminate men) and the khuntha.

"Jahangir, who is gay and Muslim,...told the Star in an email that mainstream Islamic discourse on LGBTQ issues doesn’t capture the full spectrum of views on the subject.

“Islamic texts offered such individuals prayer space between the rows of men and women. Even in recent times, there was a fatwa (religious edict) by a Sunni group of clerics in Pakistan permitting them to marry. This is apart from the permission on gender reassignment surgery from the highest bodies of both Sunni and Shia Islam,” he said.

“The Muslim position on gender and sexual variance is far more diverse than what the Christian right and the Muslim right would like us to believe.”