Today, the Muslim world faces a cultural crusade which promotes homosexuality and transgenderism. It involves the transformation of social norms through anti-religious propaganda. For those of us living in Muslim countries, this propaganda is part of the Western agenda to ensure that also Muslims submit to the ‘new norms of morality’: fluid gender identities and redefined morals.
Within the last five years, we have seen a dramatic increase in the onslaught of ‘rainbow’ products, pride parades, and trans and homosexual characters in the media. ‘Cancel culture’ of those who differ from ‘liberal’ and ‘inclusive’ people is also rampant. The perspectives and claims of the LGBT movement have become not merely tolerated but championed. Within one generation, LGBT ideas and behaviours have gone from taboo to mainstream. How did we get here, and why should we care?
The Fall of the Theocentric Worldview
In Islam, Allah (swt) is the ultimate source of morality. Our very purpose of existence is to uphold Allah’s (swt) commands to the best of our ability. “And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me.” (Adh-Dhariyat 51:56)
Allah (swt) and His Messenger (sa) alone are the legislators of what is permitted and prohibited. Islam provides us with the framework for reflecting on these laws and discussing them – this is how the Fiqh tradition develops.
However, Western societies have adopted a materialistic worldview that glorifies human intellect and individualism. Starting around the seventeenth century, human reason and empirical data became the determining forces of morals in place of God. Revelation became largely discredited among Christians through geological and historical criticism of the Bible. Darwin’s theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century made it even more questionable. By the end of that century, Nietzsche declared that (for the Western man, at least) “God is dead.”
The Root of All Evil
The root of all evil is turning away from Allah (swt). With God no longer at the centre of human devotion, the individual’s self became the single most valuable entity. In other words, people began to worship their own desires.
A Christian theologian Carl R. Trueman traces the roots of this inflated modern notion of the self to the famous Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). He claimed that feelings are central to who we are and that an individual’s authenticity is tied to their outward expression of inner feelings. He believed that a person’s role in society does not determine his identity. Instead, their feelings determine who they are. A person must be allowed complete freedom of expression to achieve self-realization.
Other key determinants of this change in values include Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). All three rejected God, religion, and conventional morality, focusing instead on the material world, self-assertion, or sexual satisfaction as the means to human development and happiness. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) called for radical sexual freedom in the 1930s and beyond. In other words, one’s individual tastes and emotional responses determine right and wrong. Unsurprisingly, the defining figures of today’s Western ideologies were nearly all staunch atheists.
Impact on Physical Existence, Purpose, and Social Order
Just as our existence was stripped of higher purpose, so were our bodies. No longer were male and female bodies considered naturally complementary to each other. They are now material ‘stuff’ not bound by natural or divine laws and can be used without consequence.
Modern humans are born into this world demanding complete freedom from all external limitations, be they moral, religious, cultural, familial, or other. They now believe that any constraint or boundary hinders self-actualization. This mentality underlies why people clamour for accepting gender fluidity and sexual freedom.
The Sexual Revolution and the Pill
The above changes in morality led to the Western sexual revolution, which began in the late 1960s. Before the 60s, premarital intimacy and homosexual acts were taboo, and it was rare to find non-married couples living together. People were generally reserved about discussing intimate matters in both public and private. Before the first FDA-approved birth control pill in 1960, no effective contraception existed.
As a rampant cultural phenomenon, intimacy out of wedlock directly undermines the structure of society. The family has been the core of all stable societies, even in the modern West. Illicit intimacy (i.e., fornication or intimacy out of wedlock) was recognized as a direct threat to social stability. It undermined the family unit and risked the well-being of the mother and the child.
Similarly, until the 1930s, all major Christian denominations opposed artificial contraception. They considered it unnatural to separate the intimacy between husband and wife from possible reproduction. Hence, until as late as 1965, it was common to find contraceptives illegal in the United States and many European countries. It is noteworthy that Islamic law, compared to Christianity, has a more measured attitude toward these issues and allows specific means of birth control.
The birth control pill became the catalyst for the sexual revolution. As a more effective form of contraception, the pill allowed people to divorce intimacy from reproduction. In the secular Western society, where individuals focused on achieving maximum perceived happiness, nothing bound intimacy, reproduction, marriage, and morality. Men and women started living together before marriage, an arrangement once referred to as ‘shacking up’. Thus, love and commitment between two individuals became the only prerequisites for morally and socially acceptable intimacy.
By the 1980s, people did not need to be married, in love, or even committed to one another for their sexual relationship to be considered morally legitimate; they merely had to consent before engaging in the act. That brought about the demise of the nuclear family, followed by significant social dislocations, such as divorce, fatherlessness, delinquency, single motherhood, single mother and child poverty and so on. Women competed against men in the workforce – a new development for middle- and upper-class families – with kids returning to empty homes after school because both parents were at work. Without being anchored to reproduction, marriage, and morality, intimacy came to be seen as a matter of pleasure and individual fulfilment.
In contrast, Muslim-majority societies have resisted sexual decadence even after the introduction of the pill because they still consider laws and morality to be God-given. However, aggressive Western imperialism and internal weakness have made them increasingly vulnerable to the same trends.
The sexual revolution in the West may have been, in part, an extreme reaction to the “sex-negative” attitudes that have dominated Christian teachings throughout centuries. Celibacy has always been considered a high calling in Christianity. As a result of the sexual revolution, several sects of mainstream Protestant Christianity, as well as Reform and Conservative Judaism, have become more tolerant towards sexual freedoms.
The Gay Liberation Movement
The sexual revolution paved the way also for the gay liberation movement. Relations between two men or two women came to seem less objectionable because they were the result of mutual interest and consent. The civil rights movement, once specifically aimed at the protection and promotion of black civil rights, expanded beyond race to encompass gender and sexual orientation as well. Powerful groups in Western culture seeking sexual liberation falsely positioned themselves as an oppressed minority, similar to the victims of longstanding racial violence.
The term ‘homosexual’ was first coined in Germany in the 1860s as a medical term to study (and, if possible, to treat) individuals who had intimate relations with members of the same gender. Today, it has been elevated to the status of an identity. ‘Sexuality’ itself is a relatively recent word in the West. Traditionally, in both East and West, sexual behaviour has been something an individual does, not what a person is. However, homosexuality now refers to personal and social identity based on such feelings and behaviours.
Evolution of GID into Gender Dysphoria
Less than a decade ago, a person experiencing dissonance between their biological sex and gender identity (sexual orientation) would have been clinically diagnosed with a condition called Gender Identity Disorder. This term meant that one’s sex/gender was based primarily on biology. A mismatch between one’s external gender and one’s inside feeling as of the opposite gender meant a psychological disorder to be treated. Over time, however, Gender Dysphoria replaced Gender Identity Disorder as the condition requiring treatment. Those struggling to identify with their biological gender are now treated for the resultant feelings of anxiety and depression.
Today, it is unacceptable to do anything other than validate a person’s feeling that “I am in the wrong body.” One’s objective physiology and biology have lost all meaning in Western culture. You are free to ‘challenge’ and overcome this biological fact.
Religious Concepts Overtaken by Substitute Ideas
Furthermore, current moral and ethical discussions redefine traditional values and oppose religious teachings:
- Freedom: In western popular culture, this is understood as eliminating external barriers to achieve maximum happiness. In Islam, freedom is based on servitude to Allah (swt), which frees us from serving our desires, material things, and falsehood.
- Individual autonomy: The western ideas of individualism and ‘self-law’ mean that each person determines right and wrong without referring to a higher power. In Islam, Allah (swt) and His Messenger (sa) alone have the right to legislate.
- Authenticity: The modern West defines this as a complete expression of the inner self (thoughts, feelings, desires), whereas in Islam, we are our true selves as human beings only when we have submitted to our Creator and are in alignment with our Fitrah.
- Consent: In the West, any action a person takes is legitimised by one’s consent to do it, so long as there is no harm to others, especially in the case of sexual activity. In contemporary culture, the notions of ‘moral character’ and ‘virtue’ are often deemed old-fashioned and unnecessary. Therefore, how a person behaves sexually has no bearing on their moral character as long as the acts are consensual. In Islam, the Quran and the Sunnah define the categories of good and evil. They are not open to individual interpretations based on anyone’s consent.
The Cultural Crusade: A ‘planned psychological attack’
In 1989, neuropsychologist Marshall Kirk and social marketing and advertising executive Hunter Madsen co-authored the book “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s”. Both these Harvard-trained authors identified as gay, and their book served as a plan for normalising homosexuality in Western societies. Since its release, the book’s plan has been implemented in its entirety by members of the LGBT movement. Kirk and Madsen aimed to desensitise people through their campaigning. They sought to build on people’s baser instincts and destroy religious principles through a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda on the national media.
Over the past decade, there has been a significant growth of LGBT literature geared towards youth in particular. We also now see the release of an annual “Rainbow Book List” that provides updates on LGBT-themed books for children of all ages. Looking at the data from 2010 through 2020 (especially in the latter five years of this period), the representation of overtly queer characters in books skyrocketed. In the years following gay marriage legalisation, Sesame Street, SpongeBob, and other such cartoons also featured LGBT-identifying characters openly. Even though the Disney corporation is entertainment-oriented, it actively denounces ‘homophobic’ attitudes.
One popular means of teaching gender fluidity and sexual identity to students involves the “Genderbread Person”. This diagram uses a gingerbread man-like figure with a multicoloured brain as a teaching tool to explain gender and orientation.
Such cultural attitudes are becoming increasingly politicised and a form of neocolonialism. Earlier this year, in June, the US embassies in many Muslim countries tweeted in support of the pride month. Most recently, we have seen how Qatar faced severe criticism for its stance against normalising homosexuality. We have also seen films like Joyland, advertisements featuring transgender models and a weird dress sense of singers.
The current LGBT dialogue is presented as an honest conversation. We learn from the Sunnah of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (sa) that we are to “give everything its due right”. Therefore, Muslims believe in giving all people their due rights. Justice is central to Islam. In some instances, however, we disagree with what respect and dignity entail. In this context, these terms are used with precise definitions to imply that if one does not fully endorse homosexual behaviour, relationships, and family structures, one lacks respect for people’s dignity. That is a severe moral charge. This loaded terminology is then used as a social and political demonisation tool.
Muslims Beware
Most well-meaning and sincere Muslims are either complacent, helpless or both. They fail to realize that unlike the Haram acts of drinking alcohol and illicit (heterosexual) intimacy, the affirmation of same-gender relationships and transgenderism is presented as a positive moral cause. It is based on the human self, the place of sex and sexuality in human identity, and the proper balance between the individual and society. It is a discourse that appeals to universal notions of human dignity, justice, respect, and autonomy.
Today, as Muslims, we must be aware of the pivotal role of social and mass media in shaping public opinions. Likewise, we must stand firm ground within our Deen when deciding whether any new trend is good for us or not. We have a strong stand against such Haram acts as consuming alcohol and getting involved in illicit (heterosexual) intimacy. Hence, we must remain firm towards other clearly-Haram acts in our Deen, among which are also the expressions of LGBT. Numerous cultural crusades are in place for normalising LGBT agendas. We must understand that they purposefully appeal to such universal notions as human dignity, justice, respect, and autonomy. However, Islamic values and moral norms do not bend with time. Haram and Halal are defined to us by the Quran and the Sunnah. It is this purity of our Deen that makes it beautiful and everlasting.
Adapted from Islam and the LGBT Question: Reframing the Narrative, a paper published by Yaqeen Institute
About author
