LGBTQ people and Islam

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Within the Muslim world, sentiment towards LGBTQ people varies and has varied between societies and individual Muslims, but is contemporarily negative.^[1][2][3][4] While colloquial and in many cases de facto official acceptance of at least some homosexual behavior was commonplace in pre-modern periods, later developments, starting from the 19th century, have created a generally hostile environment for LGBTQ people. Most Muslim-majority countries have opposed moves to advance LGBTQ rights and recognition at the United Nations (UN), including within the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council.^[1]

Meanwhile, contemporary Islamic jurisprudence generally accepts the possibility for transgender people (mukhannith/mutarajjilah) to change their gender status, but only after surgery, linking one's gender to biological markers.^[5] Trans people are nonetheless confronted with stigma, discrimination, intimidation, and harassment in many Muslim-majority societies.^[6] Transgender identities are often considered under the gender binary,^[6] although some pre-modern scholars had recognized effeminate men as a form of third gender, as long as their behaviour was naturally in contrast to their assigned gender at birth.^[5]

There are differences in how the Qur'an and later hadith traditions (orally transmitted collections of Muhammad's teachings) treat homosexuality, with many Western scholars arguing that the latter is far more explicitly negative. Using these differences, these scholars have argued that Muhammad, the main Islamic prophet, never forbade homosexual relationships outright, although he disapproved of them in line with his contemporaries.^[7] There is, however, comparatively little evidence of homosexual practices being prevalent in Muslim societies for the first century and a half of Islamic history;^[8] male homosexual relationships were known of and discriminated against in Arabia, but were generally not met with legal sanctions.^[9][7] In later pre-modern periods, historical evidence of homosexual relationships is more common, and shows de facto tolerance of these relationships.^{[2][7][9][8][10]} Historical records suggest that laws against homosexuality were invoked infrequently — mainly in cases of rape or other "exceptionally blatant infringement on public morals" as defined by Islamic law.^[8] This allowed themes of homoeroticism and pederasty to be cultivated in Islamic poetry and other Islamic literary genres, written in major languages of the Muslim world, from the 8th century CE into the modern era.^{[7][8][11][10]} The conceptions of homosexuality found in these texts resembled the traditions of ancient Greece and ancient Rome as opposed to the modern understanding of sexual orientation.^[7][8][12]

In the modern era, Muslim public attitudes towards homosexuality underwent a marked change beginning in the 19th century, largely due to the global spread of Islamic fundamentalist movements, namely Salafism and Wahhabism.^[13] The Muslim world was also influenced by the sexual notions and restrictive norms that were prevalent in the Christian world at the time, particularly with regard to anti-homosexual legislation throughout European societies, most of which adhered to Christian law. A number of Muslim-majority countries that were once colonies of European empires retain the criminal penalties that were originally implemented by European colonial authorities against those who were convicted of engaging in non-heterosexual acts.^[13] Therefore, modern Muslim homophobia is generally not thought to be a direct continuation of pre-modern mores, but a phenomenon that has been shaped by a variety of local and imported frameworks.^[3][13] As Western culture eventually moved towards secularism and thus enabled a platform for the flourishing of many LGBTQ movements, many Muslim fundamentalists came to associate the Western world with "ravaging moral decay" and rampant homosexuality.^[14] In contemporary society, prejudice, anti-LGBTQ discrimination and/or anti-LGBTQ violence — including violence which is practiced within legal systems — persist in much of the Muslim world,^[1] exacerbated by socially conservative attitudes and the recent^[when?] rise of Islamist ideologies in some countries;^[13][15][16] there are laws in place against homosexual activities in a larger number of Muslim-majority countries, with a number of them prescribing the death penalty for convicted offenders.^[17]