I go inside. Asthagfirullah! A scary cop sat on a chair. I had a position before I was arrested, in the family, in the neighborhood. The biggest asshole called me Mr. Ziyad. And this man spoke to me like a child. The worse head man, Fakhry Saleh, walks in.
“Strip, kneel.”
He talked to me like a dog. I got down on all fours. I must have done the wrong position because he said, “No, no, this will not do. Get your chest down and your ass up.”
I said, “I can’t,” and I was crying.
And he said, “All these things you are doing will not cut any ice with me. Be quick about it, we’ve got work to do.” He shoved my underwear almost up my nose. “Red, you bitch, you sharmuta! Red? Do you have no idea? Real men wear white or sometimes black. Fucking cocksucker.” He said, “Shut up, everything is clear in front of us.”
First, he looked and felt me up. Suddenly, six doctors came in. What is there about my anus? They all felt me up, each in turn, pulling my buttocks apart. They brought this feather against my anus and tickled it. After the feather came the fingers. Then they stuck something bigger. I begged for mercy as it was hurting a lot. I could now feel that my ass was bleeding. Fakhry instructed the men to wear gloves to avoid touching the blood. I wept, but these men had no emotion, none at all.
Fakhry said after, “Why didn’t you cry when men put their things in you?” I wanted to spit on him. But I was still crying.
A Jihad for Love was released in late 2007 to great success: good reviews and free worldwide travel. I got the blessing of free travel to twenty-two countries. I tried to learn to forget the death threats, emails, trolls, and fatwas calling for my death. There would be more in the future.
But my own spiritual damnation lingered.
My years of study had taught me that practically no one knew the fact that a sexual revolution of immense proportions came to the earliest Muslims, some 1,300 years before the West had even “thunk” it. This idea of carnal plurality was exactly the kind of unthinkable, unimaginable Eastern innovation the prudish Christian world feared and derided. It was Islam’s at least fourteen-centuries-old sexual revolution, which had included equal gender rights. Post-colonization, a political Islam was on the ascendant. That traditional sexual candor was lost in the rhetoric spewing from loudspeakers perched on mosques in cities from Riyadh to Marrakech to Islamabad. It is often said that, unlike for some of the Catholics of our time, sex has never been (the original) sin for Islam. This is one more reason Islam supremacists have to gloat. Islamic “Homophobia,” which the West needs to understand, is really a post-colonial construct left behind by the hastily departing empire builders after the Second World War. India, for example, had 400 years of sexually tolerant Muslim rule where eroticism was celebrated in many forms. This celebration went back even further when you look back at the supposedly Hindu versions of many Indian cultures that gave us the Kamasutra and Khajuraho. Then came the British colonizers for 200 years, who singlehandedly destroyed centuries of sexual freedom. When they were departing with their prudish, Victorian-style values declaring sex dirty, they left a penal code that makes homosexuality punishable to this day. For centuries, the prudish Occident, all the way up through Victorian and Edwardian scholars of the Orient, while writing about Islam’s Ottoman Empire and other Eastern peoples, had spoken about the “licentiousness” and debauchery of the caliphs. Beautiful young lads were being used for sexual pleasure, they fumed. Clucking around with notions of racial superiority, these Occidental ancestors to white supremacists and the alt-right believed everything that was non-Caucasian needed to be colonized or destroyed.
I imagined most returnees from the lavish courts of Muslim empires would have been emissaries and ambassadors and must have always returned home with longing for what they were leaving. Yet these sated returnees publicly depicted a distinctly un-Christian sexual hedonism of “a lesser people.”
In my Q&As for Jihad I talked about the wrongs of history. The colonizers left, but in practice their sex-averse penal codes remained. Islamic societies saw a religious revivalism greater than ever before. Theocracies like Iran were born. The discussion about sex and sexuality moved from what had been in the realms of courtly life, poetic fantasies, and even other arts, to the bully pulpits of the mullahs. The policing of morality by the state and, if applicable, the religious state, had begun. The increasingly loud theocracies or even your neighborhood imam were erasing centuries of sexual freedom. The same Islam that had not only tolerated but openly celebrated homosexuality was now being used to justify the 2001 government-sanctioned pogrom against gay men in Egypt—America’s “enlightened” friend in the Middle East.
In the middle of my travels with the film, in December 2007, I got a text from a friend in Lahore. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. CNN showed footage of Bhutto’s last rally at Rawalpindi’s Liaqat Ali Park. Her microphone was branded with its manufacturer’s logo, Shahid, which means “martyr” in Urdu. Bhutto’s death was the final nail in Pakistan’s political coffin. The world had never seen a Muslim woman like her. A United Nations report concluded, “Ms. Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken.” Pakistan was a land of rumors. Some said that the president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, deliberately ignored her repeated requests for additional security. But because Musharraf’s son and daughter-in-law had been early supporters of my work, I chose the rumor that said al-Qaeda was responsible.
Benazir was my mother’s icon and thus mine. Celebrity, geographical proximity, the charismatic impact only a beautiful and powerful Muslim woman can have on a formative gay male mind—all of these were contributing factors. I was fifteen when Benazir, whose name meant “like none other,” entered my imagination. My mother had just bought the autobiography of the Dukhtar-e-Mashriq, or “Daughter of the East,” and insisted that I read it as well. I was soon swept up in a world of intrigue and the violence of feudal politics that had spelled doom for her father when he was hanged by the tyrannical, soon-to-be dictator Zia ul-Haq.
My mother had often spoken of wishing to visit Pakistan, a land where ancestral history was left behind in mindless violence. Whatever happened in Pakistan was important to Indians, and vice versa. Many years later, when I was a student in Washington, DC, Ms. Bhutto and I actually (un-Islamically) shook hands as she finished speaking at my university. I told her how my Indian mother idolized her.
“That’s very special,” she said in her impeccable Oxford English.
Her life was a testament to the latent strength of all Muslim women. Benazir ruled the very-Muslim country of Pakistan twice. Her death struck me as a loss for Islam. The religion had surprisingly proved that women could lead nations. She was the first to do so. This was the beginning of a period of both success and despair for me.
We had all survived the Bush era and we were in 2008. Globally loved, A Jihad for Love was creating minor celeb status for me.
“Enjoy it, won’t last,” my friend Adham texted sagely. One morning in late October, I turned the pages of a dog-eared Quran to prove a point to Keith, who did not have a religious bone in his body.
“There is no compulsion in matters of faith, Surah 2, Ayah 256,” I said. “See! There! Islam doesn’t force anyone to become Muslim or to have faith, even. Muhammad built the region’s, and Islam’s, first democracy.”
He laughed at my need for him to know this. I merely wanted us to be able to quash a rumor (that was already rife) if someone ever asked us. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, shared his middle name, Hussein, not only with the Iraqi tyrant Saddam but also the most revered Shia imams. His opponent, John McCain, fielded questions about Obama’s faith, despite the latter’s insistence that he was a Christian.
I knew this would happen. Using Islamic patriarchy, a sheikh could make the argument that children inherit the father’s religion. But Obama Senior was an atheist. Barack met him only once and was raised by his wh
ite Kansas grandparents among Protestants. If rigid rules of Wahhabism were followed, both father and son could be considered apostates for having left the religion. In Saudi Arabia apostasy carries the death penalty.
On November 4, 2008, as New Yorkers sensing history being made euphorically poured into the streets, it seemed for a night that the race divide was forever shattered. In Harlem, 125th Street was filled with thousands, including Keith and our friends, glued to giant TV screens that had been set up at a few public places or in bars and restaurants. It was almost like everyone was united by a sense of prescience that Obama would win. I stayed home, kneeling before our television set. I prayed in the Muslim way, formally, repeatedly, for Obama to have God’s favor. As NBC called the result, I heard firecrackers and shouts of jubilation from the streets. Barack Hussein Obama had won the biggest US presidential victory in history with 69.5 million of the popular vote.
Some evangelicals saw him as the coming of the Antichrist. For others, he was the Black Jesus. In a few years, he would become a fallen prophet. I always believed that humanity’s last battles would be fought on the front lines of race and religion. And as every single Republican tried to block any decision Obama ever made, I realized once again how deep the fault-lines of prejudice and racial injustice ran in this country. The birth of the Birthers and the subsequent Tea Party were all you needed to realize that Obama, a brilliant and charismatic orator, tactician, and president, was trapped in the racial-paranoia cycle that these new entities were mere fronts for. Segregation was just a few decades gone, yet many in America’s right wing could not tolerate a black family in a very White House built in part by slaves. For some, it was as if Obama never existed. For others, he was the “uppity Negro,” and the KKK needed to be brought back. Thus, the racist Tea Party and the Birthers were born. Donald Trump was one of their heroes.
For me, America’s most storied black ghetto, Harlem, was home. And Harlem was changing. Young white couples with fresh babies seemed to be migrating uptown in hordes. Keith and I found a sticker outside our building. It had an ominous “X” sign with the words “Whites Out Of Harlem” printed on it. There must have been others. We laboriously peeled it off and trashed it.
In my corner of this neighborhood, what I sometimes jokingly called Upstate Manhattan, I lived surrounded by black ladies who churched. Those were heady days. For me personally, Barack and Michelle’s very own Camelot is a forever kind of thing.
It was still too early to realize that Obama in the long term would be seen as the black president who was unable to heal Black America’s long-broken heart. How could this one man correct such enormous historical wrongs? Was just his elevation enough? It was too early to know how much the majority-white Republicans would cripple him by refusing to sign anything that had the name Obama on it. They made his name poison, and his race lay behind every single time the Republicans said no to him. Obama’s rise was directly proportional to the rise of racism. Some on the right were now reorganizing like never before with even a catchy new name, The Tea Party, and predictably all their events were almost all-white. As this nation’s first black president, Obama was already carrying an immense burden. Yes, history would remember him. But would it be just for his race and how much it affected his ability to achieve?
Two weeks after Obama’s election, my feared Eid of the Sacrifice arrived. Bullets ricocheted in my beloved Bollywood. Bombay, a city of 20 million people, was taken hostage by terrorists for three nights. One hundred sixty-four people were killed. This strategically scattered killing spree struck terror into every heart and would form just one of many blueprints for future attacks in Brussels and Paris.
The terrorists came from Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba (ironically, “Army of the Pure”), the group responsible, shared some of the Wahhabi ideology of the future ISIS. I felt torn between my two identities as an Indian and a Muslim. The thought that these men had timed their attack to coincide with the Eid that marks the end of the Hajj sickened me. Bollywood was ruled by three megastars—all Muslim. Shahrukh Khan, Amir Khan, and Salman Khan were quick to denounce the carnage. They were uber-sensitive of their public Muslim identity. They wore black armbands and didn’t celebrate the festival. In Hindu-majority India, these Khans had transcended religion. Their soundbites, like those of hundreds of Muslims on TV, were attributed not to Islam but to “the minority community.” This phrase had always been a subtle but reliable way to prevent unrest in post-partition India.
The bloodbath in Bombay shook me to my core. India, with its more than 140 million Muslims, was number three on the highest-Muslim-population nations list. This was India’s 9/11.
NYC entered the holiday season with its endless parties. At one of them, I listened in horror to a diamond-and-daiquiri-dripping Indian socialite opine on how the blasts in Bombay would improve box-office numbers for everybody’s new favorite movie, Slumdog Millionaire. She was just one of the many “deeply concerned” Indians and Pakistanis in the room that night pledging to hold marches and benefits.
It would have been easy for me to pontificate from thousands of miles away.
Benazir and Bombay, which both broke my heart, also gave me an opportunity to realize the parts of me I was wrestling with to build my public identity. I was already one of the world’s most public homosexual Muslims. The United Nations courted me for a speaking engagement. The EU was not far behind. I got to meet Michelle Obama. Powerful stuff.
A Zionist group within the UN invited me as a symptom of how bad Islam really was. I was naïve. This event unfolded in Geneva on UN ground. Hours after landing I discovered the real agenda. Sitting on a panel where this group wanted to showcase me as one of the other oppressed Muslims sharing the table, I launched into why my hosts were against any view I held of Palestine and Israel. I made a strong case against the occupation and was politely asked to leave. It was a crash course in how my words now held weight and had to be used responsibly.
But my notoriety expanded among the conservative Muslims. I was a marked man—publicly labeled an infidel for my blasphemous argument that Islam and homosexuality could coexist. Following the release of the film, some religious opinion condemned me for the sin of apostasy. One fatwa provided extensive, supposedly Quranic evidence and quoted from the “Judgment on Apostates” section of the curriculum used in Saudi schools:
An apostate will be suppressed three days in prison in order that he may repent. Otherwise, he should be killed, because he has changed his true religion, therefore, there is no use from his living.
Reacting to the fatwa, me, and the film, a commentator on a Saudi website posted, “If I could kill him with my own hands I would. But I am sure Allah will take care of that.”
I was doing well on the speaking circuit but was also tired of “the gay Muslim” that always prefixed my name.
My internal alienation from the activism scene, the assassination of Bhutto, the attacks in Bombay, and more made me feel far removed from my heritage as a Muslim. I knew I had to do something about it. I felt like a minority in multiple ways. I was gay among disapproving Muslims. I was Muslim among xenophobic Americans. And I was Muslim among gays who could never relate to the power of a faith that burned inside me, despite many of its leaders naming me a kafir, a disbeliever, a big sin in Islam.
I decided it would soon be time to make good on my Beirut resolution from 2010: to go on the Hajj.
The devout Muslim subjects of my film longed for and feared the Hajj. I felt as though I owed my going to myself and to them. Unquestionably millions of gay people had performed Hajj over the centuries. But none had made a film about it, using mainly an iPhone, and with no government permission from a regime that would love to imprison or behead me. If I could pull it off, it would be a world first. There are hundreds of thousands of Hajj videos online, but to construct a film by being inside the 3.5-million-strong crowd all by myself is one of the most dangerous things I have ever done. My agenda for the film was clear: I would reveal the real—
what until now had been an almost “secret”—Hajj. This would be truth-telling without a Saudi minder or fixers or even a crew. If I were to succeed, this footage needed to be unlike anything the world had ever seen. It would be from inside the grit, sweat, and tears of my pilgrimage. It would essentially be the Saudi Arabia they, the House of Saud, don’t want you to see.
There are only a very small number of visual accounts that exist of the Hajj and call themselves films. I, like several other journalists, accurately refer to them as “junket films.” They amount to nothing more than the Saudis showing off. I know the process. First make sure you are an all-Muslim crew. Then get “permission” papers by providing IDs, pretending to be or actually being real journalists, and adding obsequious letters of intent: all sent to the (universally despised) Ministry of Hajj. Final product—“the film” of the Hajj is exactly how the Saudis want it to be seen: the greatest show on earth, and they (the Saudi monarchy) are pulling it off every year. One of those junket films even included talking heads of various departments in the Saudi bureaucracy, including the all-important Ministry of Hajj. The so-called “filmmakers” who make these videos are usually accompanied by a minder.
There was no doubt in my mind that the Saudis had me on some no-fly list. I slipped in only because they are processing millions of visas at Hajj time. You would not expect the man who had made the world’s very first film on Islam and homosexuality that generated a huge amount of (Google-able) news to head to Saudi Arabia, where beheading was a weekly ritual for crimes that included homosexuality (with some sharia stipulations met). And here I was, deciding to do exactly that. As a Muslim I was embarking on the greatest journey of my life. The filmmaker part of my brain said: There was no way I would not film it.
A Sinner in Mecca Page 10