Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia - Arts and Humanities Assignment Help

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Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Thousands of Indonesian men now identify as both “gay” and “Muslim.” How do these men understand the relationship between religion and sexuality? How do these understandings reflect the fact that they live in the nation that is home to more Muslims than any other? In this article, I address questions such as these through an ethnographic study of gay Muslims. I argue that dominant
social norms render being gay and being Muslim “ungrammatical” with each other in the public sphere that is crucial to Muslim life in Indonesia. Through examining doctrine, interpretation, and community, I explore how gay Muslim subjectivity takes form in this incommensurability between religion and desire. [Keywords: incommensurability, Indonesia, Islam, nation, homosexuality]

OF ANTHROPOLOGY, ISLAM, AND INCOMMENSURABILITY

Work in the anthropology of religion has long concerned itself with the relationship between orthodoxy and practice as well as the problem of making intelligible widely divergent religious beliefs (Tambiah 1990). Such problems of “cultural translation” (Asad 1986) within and across re- ligious traditions have been important to anthropology from its beginnings (Frazer 1915; Tylor 1958) and through many key moments of consolidation and innovation—for instance, in the work of Clifford Geertz, to whom I return at the end of this article. As anthropologists adjust to a world powerfully redefined—like it or not—in terms of a “War on Terror,” we confront a range of official and popular ideologies that portray religion, particularly Islam, as the source of unbridgeable difference. How can fundamentally conflicting understandings of religion and ultimate order regarding issues from jihad to same-sex marriage be understood and lived side by side in a diverse world?

SPATIAL SCALES AND NATIONAL BELONGING

The incommensurability between Islam and male homosexuality in Indonesia is shaped by local and national spatial scales. Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth, is home to more Muslims than any other country. Islam has spread through the archipelago since at least the 13th century, primarily through the trade networks that linked many coastal communities to each other and, via the Straits of Malacca, to the great commercial system linking the Far East with South Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and Europe (de Graaf 1970).

DOCTRINE

Most gay Muslims understand Islamic orthodoxy to be in- commensurate with sex between men, but no orthodoxy provides a complete roadmap for faith; each represents “a structure of ideas and practices that penetrates but does not encompass the lives of its practitioners” (Barth 1993:177). Although some gay Muslims recall hearing from religious authorities that homosexuality was sinful, the overarching concern with sexuality that they encounter is the proper channeling of heterosexuality into marriage. Islam is often referred to as a “sex-positive religion” in the sense that sex- uality is regarded as a gift from God and the right of every person: “In the quranic view of the world, physical love im- pinges directly on the social order” (Bouhdiba 1998:9–10).

In Islamic thought in Indonesia as elsewhere, the central concept organizing sexuality is that of marriage, which has historically been seen as a contract between families, not just two individuals.6 The sins against marriage in Islamic doctrine are typically adultery, premarital sex, and prostitution, not male homosexuality, because sex between men is assumed not to lead to children. If male homosexuality is mentioned, it usually takes the form of incidental refer- ences rather than sustained commentaries, as reflected in the scholarly literature on Islam in Indonesia.

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