LGBTQ, Progressive Muslims, and Fear Mongering
By: James Finn
Tags: Religion, Equality, Politics, Islam, LGBTQ

I have a friend on Twitter named Butterfly.

She’s the best! Progressive and passionately political. She loves Nancy Pelosi, hates Donald Trump, is on fire to stop the Republican assault on women’s bodies, and she’s a huge LGBTQ ally.

She spreads love and happiness with her digital artwork and with inspiring messages. Lately, though, she’s been pretty angry, and feeling attacked.

Why?

Butterfly is a Muslim —

Yes, she’s a real Muslim. She prays, she fasts, she knows her Quran, and she believes hijabs are cool if Muslim women choose them from a place of real freedom.

Butterfly is an American —

She engages in public discourse, speaks her mind, and fights for the causes she cares about. She’s chosen Twitter as her primary platform, and she has a pretty large reach with almost 20,000 followers. She gets her message out, and many people listen to her kind, reasonable voice.

Except when they don’t.

Butterfly draws a lot of toxic comments about her religion. People attack her all the time for being Muslim. People say all sorts of untrue things about her faith, painting it and her with a broad brush of fear and loathing.

Hardly unexpected, right? We all know Donald Trump and the Republicans use fear mongering to motivate their base and get out the vote. We all know they dog whistle to white supremacists, openly loathe Muslims, and indulge in the worst kinds of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

So, why should Butterfly be an exception?

The trouble is, I’m not talking about Trump and his supporters. She doesn’t listen to them. The abuse she takes every day comes from progressive, politically engaged people who vote Democratic and say they’re open minded.

Americans on both the Right and the Left fear Muslims —

According to the Pew Research Center, large pluralities of Americans associate Islam with violence. Conservative Republicans top the list at 66 percent, but almost one out of every three Democrats believes being Muslim predisposes a person to violence. Being a self-described liberal Democrat drops that percentage by only two points.

The fear is unfounded —

According to Dr. Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in a major 2017 Homeland Security analysis, violence committed by Muslims in the US is negligible — far lower than in the general population. Simply put, Muslims are not more violent than other Americans.

Muslim extremists have not been a significant threat —

Dr. Kurzman found that the total number of fatalities caused by Muslim extremists in the United States since 9/11 stands at 140.

By comparison, in 2017 alone, 267 Americans were killed in mass shootings not committed by Muslims. Almost twice as many people were killed in mass shootings in 2017 as were killed by Muslim-American extremists in the entire preceding 16 years.

Muslims in the US are killed just for being Muslim —

According to Kurzman’s data, Americans in 2016 had a 1 in 6 million chance of being killed by Muslim extremists. Muslim Americans themselves, however, had a 1 in 1 million chance of being killed because of their religion.

Both numbers are very small, but it’s worth noting that the average American Muslim is six times more likely to be killed for their beliefs than the average American is to be killed by Muslim terrorists.

Americans conflate Islam with Islamic extremists —

One of the reasons Butterfly has such a rough time on Twitter is that most Americans don’t know any Muslims. Most Americans don’t understand Islam because they have almost no exposure to it.

Very few Muslims live in the US.

According to Pew, Muslims represent just 1.1 percent of the US population, and their numbers aren’t growing much. By 2050, Muslims are projected to reach only 2.1% of total population.

And of the Muslims who DO live in the US, they concentrate in places like Detroit, Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. So in most places, percentages are much lower than 1.1 percent.

People fear what they don’t know —

I’m lucky enough to have lived in the Detroit area for many years, the same area Butterfly comes from. The region boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the US, with Dearborn and Hamtramck being majority-Muslim municipalities.

I don’t know how I might feel today otherwise, but I had tons of Muslim neighbors, and I came to know them as ordinary Americans with a pretty ordinary religion.

The mechanics who worked on my trucks were Muslim brothers from a large, welcoming family. Their mother makes the best braised lamb in the universe. Their house is always open to guests, including to me as an openly gay man.

My pharmacist was a Muslim woman. I did business with Muslim owned companies. I hung out with Muslim artists and intellectuals in a creative space downtown; writing stories and poems, reading them aloud, and debating politics and current events.

It didn’t take me long to learn that Muslim Americans come in all stripes, and that Islam is nothing to be afraid of.

It’s hard to hate or fear people you know —

I write that all the time when I’m discussing LGBTQ issues. It’s hard to hate people for being transgender or gay when you get to know them up close. It works the same way with Muslims.

Once you get to know REAL Muslims, you learn pretty fast that they aren’t terrorists, that they abhor ISIS, and that they’re not the judgmental religious hardliners some people portray them as.

But wait, I can hear people protesting already:

They throw gay people off roofs and beat lesbians with canes!

Let’s talk about the (pink) elephant in the room. I’m a gay man and an LGBTQ activist. Islam has little good to say about gay people, and certain Islamic nations treat LGBTQ people really badly. So, some people would say I must be a hypocrite if I don’t condemn Islam.

First, about those roofs —

Yes, ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, committed terrible atrocities against gay men and boys, including throwing them off roofs. They also committed terrible atrocities against huge numbers of Muslims who weren’t gay but who didn’t share their extreme beliefs.

ISIS is not Islam. Ordinary Muslims were victims of ISIS. Muslims all over the world despise ISIS and cheer its destruction.

Tarring all Muslims with the brush of ISIS isn’t just inaccurate, it’s seriously offensive to the Muslims who were victims of ISIS.

And yes, two lesbians were recently caned in Malaysia, in an act of “justice” that shocked much of the Muslim world. Malaysians considered the punishment (the first of its kind in living memory) to be regressive, and waves of dissent arose from all corners of Islam.

Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize something:

Islam is not LGBTQ friendly —

That’s a fair statement in general, from a strictly religious point of view. Most Muslim imams (religious teachers and community leaders) and muftis (scholars who issue non-binding religious rulings) have nothing good to say about homosexuality. While gender identity is another matter (with Shia Muslim authorities in Iran open to some gender reassignment), Islam isn’t very trans accepting either.

LGBTQ people living in some Muslim-majority nations have a hard time, and often more than just a hard time. Transgender and gay people can feel isolated and alone, and feel unable to lead fulfilling lives, and that’s a big problem.

Some Muslim-majority nations criminalize homosexuality, and sometimes hand out harsh penalties.

But Islam is not monolithic —

Harsh punishment for homosexuality is unusual even in some very conservative Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia, where gay communities thrive just below the surface of ordinary life. This article in the Atlantic backs up my own personal observations that gay men are discreetly thriving in cities like Jeddah, showing little fear of legal problems or punishment.

And while homosexuality is technically punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, experts believe that actually convicting someone of the offense is next to impossible given strict evidentiary requirements like four eyewitnesses to a sex act. Some men in Saudi Arabia have been executed for sex with other males, but it appears that they were convicted of either forcible rape or sex with underage boys.

In other Muslim-majority nations like Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey, homosexuality is not against the law. In Turkey, it never has been. Transgender people there have been able to legally change their gender on government documents since 1988.

Which brings us back to the United States and my friend Butterfly —

Like all my Muslim friends here, she’s accepting and affirming of my sexual orientation. Like many Muslims (and members of all sorts of religions) she accommodates her religious beliefs with the world around her.

She’s a progressive American I’m happy to call friend and ally.

Not only that, she’s the kind of loving, tolerant young person whose voice works to shape and influence belief and practice. When I see people attacking her for her religion, when they tell her that Islam MUST make her violent and intolerant, I want to ask them a question:

Are you trying to convince her to be an extremist?

That’s sure what it sounds like. When people insist to progressive Muslim Americans that Islam MUST be about oppressing women and LGBTQ people, my jaw drops.

First, young Muslim Americans are busy being Americans. They’re doing what all Americans do by adapting their faiths and themselves to a pluralistic society that values tolerance and individual freedom. Nothing about those values are inimical to Islam in either theory or practice.

Islam has a centuries-long tradition of religious tolerance. That fact shocks some people because of recent examples of extreme intolerance, but it’s historically true. And it’s that long tradition that people ought to be nurturing and encouraging.

Second, Muslim-majority communities in the US have proven to be extremely tolerant and accepting of diversity. Dearborn, Michigan is a thriving Detroit suburb with generations of Arab and Lebanese families making up a majority of the population. The city is safe, beautifully kept up, and well managed. In a development that might shock some of Butterfly’s detractors, it’s ‘party central’ for a lot of Detroit young people — overflowing with restaurants, bars, and clubs that serve alcohol.

On a personal note, I can attest that Dearborn is packed with gay Muslim men who are quite open about that fact, at least on Grindr.

Dearborn is the real face of American Islam —

It’s filled with people who take their religion seriously, as tolerant Americans who accept pluralism and secular government. Some residents are very religious, others aren’t. Some women choose to wear hijabs, most don’t. Dearborn schools offer GSA clubs for LGBTQ students, and LGBTQ adults associate openly and without fear all over town as valued community members.

I’m not saying everything is perfect. I know it’s not. I know that some Muslims, like some Christians, are very intolerant people who use their faith to excuse bigotry and to hurt people.

I know we have to work to change that —

I also know that loving American Muslims like Butterfly are part of that change. When an American (or Canadian, or Australian, or British) Muslim tells you they’re progressive, do people everywhere a huge favor.

Believe them!