10 - Sex, intimacy and older life in Muslim contexts

Summary

Introduction: de- Orientalising ‘older life’

Sex and gender remain contentious issues within many debates about the relationship between Islam and modernity (a term often used interchangeably with ‘the West’). The influence of these geopolitical fault lines extends to trends in scholarly research on Islam and Muslims. For example, after the terrorist attacks of 9/ 11, academic publications on women and Islam, especially in Middle Eastern contexts, multiplied exponentially (Charrad, 2011). This was followed by a rise in interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) issues in Islam. Political controversies in the West involving Muslims, such as the recurring issue of women's dress, are often framed in the mass media as problems about what Islam supposedly says about women and LGBTQ people.

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing body of work by Muslim scholar- activists, especially Islamic feminists that employ ‘multiple critique’ to address these questions (cooke, 2001). These works challenge patriarchal, heteronormative interpretations of Islam while also deconstructing stereotypes about Islam and Muslim that have grown out of historical Eurocentric viewpoints that accompanied, or even justified, Western colonialism (a phenomenon often referred to as Orientalism). They show that sex and gender are not recent fault lines in contemporary ideological claims of a supposedly intractable clash of civilisations between Islam and the West. Joseph Massad (2007), for example, points out that while contemporary Western ideologues accuse Islam of being too sexually repressive and homophobic, early modern Orientalists were dismissing Islam as too sexually permissive and queer friendly.

Such dualistic conceptions of Islam are exacerbated by the religion's critics’ and traditionalist defenders’ tendencies to highlight the more controversial aspects of Islamic law – often styled ‘Sharia’ and loaded by ideological baggage that the traditional concept of sharia did not carry – to support their positions. While legal texts are crucial sites for the construction of sex and gender in Muslim societies, these were not composed in isolation from their surrounding contexts or the influence of other texts. There are other sources that can illuminate lived experiences in different environments in different periods of history.