Article published October 08, 2007
Reading might enlighten the president of Iran
IRANIAN President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made some interesting statements during his visit to the United States two weeks ago.
While he seems to have modified his views on the Holocaust - he now partially accepts it - he made the outrageous but amusing statement that there are no gays in Iran.
This elicited spontaneous laughter from his audience. Like many other people in the Arab and Muslim world, he is unable or unwilling to see the elephant in the room.
Gays and lesbians have been part of the fabric of those societies just as they have been in the West and elsewhere in the world.
As long as they kept their sexuality away from the public square, a societal version of "don't ask, don't tell," they were left alone.
References to homosexuality abound in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu literature, both old and contemporary.Emperor Babar, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India in 1508, wrote candidly about his homosexual exploits in his autobiography, Tuzk-e-Babri.
Ismat Chughtai, perhaps one of the greatest Urdu fiction writers of 20th-century India, wrote about lesbian love in her short stories.
Had he bothered to read, Mr. Ahmadinejad would have found ample references to homosexuality in the history and literature of his own country.
In his 2005 book Saudi Arabia Exposed, John Bradley, a journalist who has lived in Saudi Arabia, writes about a thriving gay community in that country. Somehow the puritanical Wahhabi establishment has decided to turn a blind eye to all the cruising that goes on in public places in all major Saudi cities. If asked about the presence of homosexuals in their country, they would also deny it exists in the kingdom.
A recent documentary about gays and lesbians in the Arab and Muslim world has brought the issue into the open.
Six years in the making, the documentary that is titled A Jihad for Love was filmed clandestinely by Pervaiz Sharma, who is a gay Indian Muslim living in America.
It chronicles the societal and family taboos against homosexuality and the extreme hardship homosexuals endure in their daily lives.
Those who are brave enough to be open about their sexuality pay a heavy price.
Mr. Sharma was surprised to learn that despite being shunned, sidelined, persecuted, and despised by the religious hierarchy, most of them cling tenaciously to their faith.
Homosexuality has been part of human experience since the dawn of history.
It has been only in recent years that the subject has been brought out into the open in the Western world.
Political and social activism on gender issues has led to widespread recognition and acceptance of homosexuality as an alternate life style.
While open discussion of gay rights still makes many heterosexuals uncomfortable, an open public debate on the subject has had a positive effect.
The biggest stumbling block in the acceptance of gays and lesbians by the "mainstream" is the misplaced belief that gays and lesbians have a choice in their sexual orientation.
Like the psychiatrists who until a few decades ago classified homosexuality as a disease, they refuse to accept that a majority of gays and lesbians are born that way and have no choice.
For some, this realization comes after years of living in ambiguity and agony. If it were a simple matter of choice, then why would otherwise intelligent men and women subject themselves to a lifelong ordeal of public humiliation and castigation?
Science has yet to identify a "gay gene" that would explain homosexuality on firm scientific grounds.
It is a complex interplay of myriad factors that certainly include biology as well as cognitive and environmental factors.
Scientists have observed homosexual behavior in a large number of animal species. They run the whole gamut from primates to bison to elephants to giraffes to lions and even fruit flies. The point is not that we as the "highest life form" should know better; it is because some people are wired that way. It is not far fetched to think that God in His-Her infinite wisdom has rolled the dice a bit differently for some of His-Her creation.
Like the Iranian president, all major religions refuse to see the elephant in the room.
At any given time in a religious congregation, may it be a mosque, a church, or a temple, 5 percent to 10 percent of worshipers are gay (that is the range of prevalence in the general population). Perhaps instead of damning them to eternal hellfire, we could show some compassion for and understanding of our fellow human beings. Science will eventually catch up with this phenomenon. I wonder if religion will follow suit.
Dr. S. Amjad Hussain is a retired Toledo surgeon whose column appears every other week in The Blade.
Contact him at: aghaji@bex.net
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