People had spilled into the streets from all the office towers. What was eerily common: cellphones to ear, almost everyone had eyes peeled to the sky. I was in hyper-sensitive mode, my nerves probably as frazzled as anyone else’s when I boarded the Red Line on the Metro, which miraculously was still working. Were all these panicked people looking at me? Did that blonde woman just move away from me deliberately? To readjust my position on the impossibly crowded train, I put my backpack on the floor for a moment. A murmur arose from all corners—or was I imagining it? I hastily retrieved the backpack and put it back where it belonged.
By the next morning it was official. It was Muslim hands that did this. America would never be so safe to so many ever again. 9/11, they would call it. History would forever be divided into a before-and-after narrative.
Almost a planet away from the Muslim neighborhoods of my childhood that ricocheted with calls to prayer five times a day, I realized: Islam had American blood on its hands. And just like that—in less than twenty-four hours—I had no choice: I “came out” as a Muslim.
“Fuck you, Arabs!” a group of white boys yelled from across the quad of American University. “Go home!”
It was as if the word Muslim was branded on my forehead. The beard and skin color didn’t help. The fuss of coming out gay in India seemed a lifetime away. Xenophobia was hip. Beards, unlike today, were not. Ignoring the daily stares and comments, I focused on very special pleasures like seeing snow for the first time. I stuck out my tongue to taste a flake. It tasted like magic. Did it smell as pure as it looked?
“I don’t feel sorry for y’all,” my friend Katy had said. “See what black people go through every day. Intolerance and racism? We have known it for decades.” We agreed, though, that Muslim was the new Black.
It was only a year since I had moved to DC in 2000 to do double duty as an adjunct professor and master’s student. One of my friends, Fayaz, was a natural leader and told me about the group he headed of what he called “LGBTQI” Muslims, provocatively named after a chapter in the Quran. An interesting and dangerous choice. At the same time, I needed a thesis film. Osama bin Laden was Islam’s spokesperson. My thesis film, I grandiosely thought, would offer an alternative. Islam’s unlikeliest storytellers, gay and lesbian Muslims, were going to tell the story of the faith. And I started filming for what was called In the Name of Allah. Every chapter in the Quran begins with the phrase Bismillah (“In the name of Allah”). I, too, wanted to be a provocateur, and this could be the perfect vessel.
A filmed silhouette said, “You have to understand what life is like growing up as a gay person of color in this country.”
None of these LGBTQI types wanted to show their faces, so I was making a film of darkness where shadows talked. And pretty soon it would start feeling like a bad idea.
“What do you mean, ‘person of color’?” I said. It was honest, because I had no idea what he meant.
“You don’t know what a person of color is? It’s an appropriation of identity in a majority-white society. The rest of us are persons of color. There are entire movements based on this principle. I am surprised you don’t know,” said the silhouette condescendingly. In my opinion, white was also a color.
My subjects, the label-loving gays who were born and raised in the West, continually presented themselves as warriors of an “inclusive” Islam. They loved having all manner of conferences, funded perhaps by the same patrons who sponsored me. I became a familiar face. I attended conferences in DC, Toronto, and London. I filmed it all. Endless panels about “queer identity,” about “gender,” about “liberation theology,” about “a gender-neutral reading of the Quran.” Hours of wasted footage and money.
Whatever their behavior in their daily lives, these LGBTQI Muslims seeking newer labels every day became super-religious at conference time. Many, like me, consumed alcohol at gay bars after Isha (the final mandated prayer of the day), but during the day, conference time meant a daily performance of at least four or five communal prayers. Optics mattered to these conferencing Muslims. I filmed it all. Did they hook up? Frequently. In fact, I doubt that any were sober to wake up for Fajr, the dawn prayer. I certainly wasn’t. It was a strange rainbow utopia built in a suburban outpost of a cheaper hotel franchise. Anybody could be an imam (a leader of prayer), and then there was something I had never dared to conjure up: Men and women prayed together! This was a gay Muslim Disneyland that most Muslims on the planet would never recognize and would reliably condemn. Did these LGBTQI types know this?
What particularly turned me off was that some of the women would not even cover their heads while praying, and I remember being shocked and turned off too by the many visible female butt cracks of these devout Muslimahs decked out in tank-tops and tights. A part of the yoga-like praying in Islam involves bending down and resting your head on earth. The supplicants form neat lines behind each other. The Islam I had grown up with, at the very least, demanded a state of purity and the covering of the head as a sign of being in sacred space. Dressing modestly was ordained for both men and women. These people were like Muslim hippies! Perhaps I was too naïve or judgmental, as an FOB (“Fresh off the Boat”).
My thesis film, as expected, was a film about silhouettes and panel discussions. It would never have a life in the real world. I needed to be a real filmmaker. And I needed to make a film about the kinds of Muslims I would recognize with greater ease. That other film is what became A Jihad for Love. I had narrowly escaped being lost in the endless jungles of identity-politics-created acronyms like LGBTQIFOBPOC.
For sexual contacts online I also upsold myself as “Middle Eastern” since Indian, to me, meant unattractive. Surprisingly, Arabs were now hypersexualized anyway and the flavor of the month. And I looked like them!
I got my degree and I was done with DC. It seemed like a small town where racism and Islamophobia reverberated louder. My fellow graduates all seemed to be getting jobs in nonprofits and lobbying firms. This was not a future I had imagined for myself, even though it offered the security of a paycheck. I could have gone back to journalism, but I did not desire to be a mere interviewer. I wanted people to interview me. It was time to move to what had always been the Mecca of my dreams. The megalopolis that had teased my tongue with freedom, hope, and desire during my first US trip in 1998. I was New York–bound like millions before me had been for two centuries.
I’d received a job offer as TV producer for Democracy Now! It was a New York–based, leftie, “progressive” public TV and radio show, flush with post-9/11 and Bush-bashing rhetoric. We hosted people like Norm Finkelstein, Arundhati Roy, Michael Moore, and Cornel West.
Democracy Now!’s anti-“neo-con” harangues were familiar. The music of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti filled newsbreaks (no sponsors or commercials). The staff was made up of mostly white do-gooder Brooklyn hipsters. The kinds who would later perform their designated roles in what I can only call the 99-Percent Show near Wall Street. I was their proud acquisition. A Muslim immigrant POC gay man. A diversity hire! This crowd became tiresome quickly.
My long-distance Parisian boyfriend allowed me to occupy a tiny, musty room in his rent-controlled East Village garden apartment (for free), which he “shared” with a painter called Paul. In truth he visited only twice a year, and Paul (and now I) had it mostly to ourselves. In retrospect I cannot believe my fortune. Only a chosen few get to live for free in a private garden apartment in one of the most desirable NYC neighborhoods for almost three years. And it didn’t matter that my room was barely more than a hole in the wall.
Paul was HIV-positive, and I always had to remind him to take his daily cocktail of pills. I was not just his part-time caregiver and roommate. I cared deeply for him, emotionally. Paul finally succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses. My heart was broken. My soon-to-be-ex Parisian boyfriend lost the coveted lease. In New York losing a rent-controlled East Village apartment such as this was like losing the keys to the Taj Mahal. But then I had a new boyfriend nam
ed Keith and we moved in together.
My new job included filming protests. I heard familiar angst such as, “Dictator in Chief,” “Bush out of Iraq,” “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” The anger was palpable. But it lacked one basic cause, a rallying cry, and it’s a mistake the American (presumably Democratic) left makes all the time. These were disorganized leftie-warriors. Thousands gathered for a march on the East Side of Manhattan, many of them leftovers from the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999. Many were rag-tag revolutionary anarchists, smelling of weed and body odor. This is why the right is dominating in this country, I thought, and even said as much to colleagues. They put on power suits and lobby and schmooze with DC power brokers. How could anyone take these lefties seriously by comparison? The DNC tent was big, but with these types, it could easily collapse. Years into the future the “Left” remained a disorganized cacophony, undisciplined and leaderless, slogan-poor and without one singular cause, allowing Donald Trump his win.
I hated my job and was lucky to find both a producer and a seed grant for the film I truly wanted to make. So I worked hard at making myself completely unnecessary at the station, and they did exactly what I wanted. They fired me.
I jumped headlong into shooting A Jihad for Love. My first stop was Egypt, via France. It was not my first time in either country. Filming began haphazardly. There was no script and the subjects took years to find and convince. I remember meeting Ziyad, an escapee from a Cairo prison, who talked about the comfort the Quran gave him while he was imprisoned. Incongruously, we sat at Le Depot, a sex club near the Marais in Paris, talking about Islamic verses.
I filmed a lesbian couple, Maha and Maryam—the former a hijab-wearing second-generation French Moroccan who is one of the most devout Muslims I’ve ever met, and the latter her veil-less, less religiously inclined partner—in Cairo. Maha opened my mind immeasurably when she said, “People feel that a woman wearing hijab is either an extremist or oppressed, but for me, it sets me free.”
Maryam would become a prominent woman’s voice during Egypt’s revolution, though she never revealed her sexuality. Maha, in the early days, had told me she couldn’t even allow the word “lesbian” to slip past her tongue. Her shame and the spiritual violence she experienced was profoundly sad. It would take two years till Maha allowed me even to set up a camera.
Pretending to be a tourist, I filmed them surreptitiously in one of Cairo’s many tourist traps, Mokattam Hill, famed for its Saladin or Citadel mosque. They were more loquacious when I recorded interviews at a friend’s apartment in downtown Cairo. Maha yearned to go on Hajj but believed she couldn’t without somehow finding a mahram.
I challenged Maha with the 34th verse from the Quran’s fourth chapter, An-Nisa (“The Women”). This provocative Surah has been used by both Muslim scholars and Islamophobes. Referring to how husbands were to treat their wives, it in part said, “Beat them lightly.” Maha pointed out how dharb, the word that meant “beat,” was used in various other ways in the Quran, so it was contested. She was hardly the first Muslim I had met to use semantics and the context of the seventh century, which is when some Sunni Muslims believe the business of putting the scripture together, pen to paper, allegedly began. Using their own lineage, Sunnis say the third Caliph Uthman oversaw the completion of this enormous task two decades after Muhammad’s death. For the Shias, within six months of Muhammad’s death, his son-in-law and caliph number one, Ali, had a complete physical transcript of what until then had been entirely oral revelation to Muhammad. I told Maha how I felt the book needed to be immutable.
At the Madbouly bookstore near the soon-to-be-world-famous Tahrir Square we bought a thick tome called Fiqh al Sunnah (“Jurisprudence in the way of the Prophet”), surprisingly on the not-religious Maryam’s recommendation. Laudably she found a vague reference to female same-sex activity, and we even found a word for it—al-Suhaq. The punishment was “to let them go.” She squeezed Maha’s hand and said, “See, there is no punishment.” Maha’s reply surprised me: “Sometimes I want to be punished.”
They would later come to New York because they had final-cut privileges. I took them to the historic Malcolm X Mosque in Harlem. I gave them an abbreviated history of the Nation of Islam. I told them why I was not taking them to the $17 million, partially Saudi-funded glitzy marble mosque on 96th Street. Its first imam, Sheikh Muhammad Gemeaha, was an Egyptian who fled the US after claiming that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy, adding, “If it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.” His anti-Semitism went further, blaming Jews for the spread of “heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs.” Anti-Semitism is distilled into many Muslim minds at a very young age. So is the idea that Muslims and Islam are superior to the rest of the world.
My film needed to tell the stories of men like Ziyad, too—people who actually lived with the consequences of their lifestyles. I would seek them out in Muslim countries. I couldn’t ask for government permission. I would film guerrilla-style. I was afraid and yet thrilled to be on an adventure that would take me to twelve countries. I would always hide my tapes in my checked baggage with a prayer. Because this was raw footage, the faces of my interview subjects were not yet concealed. In Egypt, for example, there could be real consequences for Maryam and Maha. Taking even greater precautions, I filmed several minutes of touristic footage at the beginning and end of every tape, in the unlikely event that custom agents in these countries would seize and watch the tapes.
Funding came in spurts. The stories I filmed spanned the many geographies of Islam, different cultures, different languages, and different kinds of Muslims. I would not allow my work to paint Islam as a problematic monolith.
After years of paperwork, US immigration services finally allotted me the coveted designation of an “alien of extraordinary ability.” This was no joke—it was a real visa category that many sought and only a few got. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were aliens of extraordinary abilities just like me! The Brazilian soccer phenom Pelé was one, too.
I started appearing on panels again, categorized as “brown,” “Muslim,” “progressive Muslim,” “immigrant filmmaker,” “queer activist,” “person of color.” Invitations piled up. One panel described me as someone whose work “addresses a critical force field.” I was flattered. They said my work addressed “Muslim sexual diversity, community, voice, and rights” and “raises a number of thorny questions about political representation and commercial support.” Heady stuff.
I was the compliant Uncle Tom or the house-Negro of gay Muslims. I could conveniently be put on display as a last-minute inclusion of “diversity” into leftie events that were still very white. Was the “white man’s burden” a real thing?
I had no particular admiration or patience for the ivory towers of the academy. But I hypocritically basked in the attention coming from them. In truth I was penniless, surviving only on rent-free luck. And I was not even a proven filmmaker yet. I hid my shame by dressing smart in designer hand-me-downs from my DC cousins.
Many labels making me a novelty could be stuck on my back. Thus at the conferences they invited me to, I purposely decided not to use the “academese” that they didn’t know I knew so well. I told stories instead. I happily shared memories about the delights of Muslim festivals like Eid al-Fitr and the Eid I feared, Eid al-Adha, while growing up in my tiny North Indian hometown, which was a twenty-minute ride away from one of the world’s most puritanical schools of Islam.
The hosts were gratified to find the “real thing.” I had actually lived the abstractions and concepts that existed for them only in books and Wikipedia. Major plus! I spoke with an accent! A Muslim Uncle Tom?
We took money kindly provided by Jewish funders and foundations. The “LGBTQI Muslims of color”-types raised questions about my political intent. I was part of a Jewish propaganda machine, they claimed. I was familiar with anti-Semitism. Anyone who grows up Muslim is. And if they claim they h
ave no idea where it comes from, they are either lying or are ignorant of the complex history of our faith’s relation to Judaism. But I was surprised it came so openly from these enlightened lefties who claimed they were fighting the good fight. I was proud of my Jewish-Muslim collaboration! At fundraisers we held for the film, my producer David and I joked, “We are an unlikely Jewish-Muslim collaboration. And it’s mostly nonviolent!” On cue, it always brought laughs and, we hoped, larger checks.
“You are naïve,” said the indignant Muslim LGBTQI. “You will do great damage to the truly Islamic content of your work, because it will be labeled a Jewish conspiracy.” These same people later said the finished film was “too Islamic”!
Imran, one of the conferencing Muslims, did become a close friend. One day we sat sharing our first-time stories. “You go first,” he said, “mine will take forever.”
“I got to choose it,” I told Imran, and in an instant I was transported to the eighties. “It was a class thing. Muhammad was a lower-class Muslim. I loosened the drawstring on his trousers because I wanted to. The pitiless summer sun scorched everything, but our small white room was cool, and there was nothing I wanted more than to take off his white trousers.
“There had been an argument at home and I had driven the ten kilometers on my father’s Bajaj scooter to the Nau Gaza Peer, a Sufi shrine. The heat and the dust clouds were overwhelming. Only a few sickly and dehydrated pigeons had dared to venture out with me.
“Nau Gaza Peer was a mystic’s mausoleum. Legend had it that the mystic was nine meters tall. Another said that the grave’s size changed every time it was measured. The mystic was a magic man of infinite wisdom, my mother told me, because he was both Hindu and Muslim. I was a sickly child, and my mother, with her head carefully covered, would bring me to the shrine often so that we could observe the ritual of covering the mystic’s grave with a piece of fabric, which she hoped would cure my bronchitis!
A Sinner in Mecca Page 7