MEHAMMED AMADEUS MACK: As a researcher of immigration debates in Europe and how gay-friendliness is politicized within them, I am deeply aware of the way that perceptions of Islamic homophobia have been used to argue against engagement with Muslims, replacing outright racism against Muslims with a sophisticated form of sexual demonization targeting the Islamic faith.
[…] From the earliest contact points between the Christian and Muslim civilizations, Muslims were faulted not so much for their sexual intolerance as they were for their sexual permissiveness. Orientalism and colonialism both presented Muslims as perverts, prone to bisexuality, and were thought to have untamable sex drives.
Sex tourism in the permissive “lands of Islam” was born of this fantasy, and was practiced by a whole generation of the Euro-American gay intelligentsia, remnants of which continue in North Africa today.
However, it is in the last 20 to 25 years that perceptions of the Middle East as a homophobic inferno have really taken hold, changing the character of “us vs. them” arguments about Western influence in the Middle East into a “sexual clash of civilizations,” to borrow an unfortunate phrase.
Some critics, like Joseph Massad, have argued that the laws and ideologies restricting sexual freedom in the Arab world are often the result of conserved colonial-era laws, or emerged from a complex evolution which saw Arab societies (that had previously been judged as “perverse” in Western eyes) attempt to erase same-sex desire from Arabic heritage, a process which often happened in elite circles.
It is telling, as a widely shared article has shown, that the five Islamic countries with no anti-homosexual laws on the books were those never colonized by the British. More here.