Queer Muslim, Devout Muslim: the slippery politics of British homosecularism

Muslims in the Global North are routinely categorised using ‘good/moderate’ and ‘bad/extreme’ labels that implicitly privilege secularism above overt religiosity, and political quietism over activism. 

At the same time, Islam and queerness are often construed as antithetical given assumptions that homophobia is inherent to the religion. The existence of queer Muslims confounds this construction and many queer Muslims report facing both hostility and excessive curiosity in LGBTQ+ spaces.

In this seminar I draw on ethnographic interviews with 40 participants including queer Muslims, heterosexual Muslims and queer non-Muslims to ask how the queer-Muslim intersection complicates the ‘good-bad’ dichotomy. I argue that queerness is understood as a marker of secularism in British liberal society meaning that Muslims who present queer identities or have queer friends are more likely to be interpreted as ‘good/moderate’. 

Furthermore, a widespread discomfort with religion in mainstream queer spaces, sometimes termed ‘homosecularism’, means that those queer Muslims who downplay their religiosity or distance themselves from Islam altogether find greater acceptance than those who display symbols of their faith. As a consequence, several queer-Muslim organisations have been formed to help members navigate the simultaneous challenges of homophobia, racism and Islamophobia. Some members of these groups have partially embraced the role of ‘moderate’ Muslims, emphasising their social progressivism or adherence to Sufism, while others explicitly disrupt the ‘good-bad’ dichotomy by refusing to perform liberal identities or to disavow the wider British Muslim community. 

I ultimately show that the queer-Muslim intersection presents a highly heterogenous social landscape that eludes convenient categorisation and demands we deconstruct simplistic binaries. This has wider implications for the way with think about queerness, religion and the politics of representation.

About the speaker

Jonathan Galton is an anthropologist at the Thomas Coram Research Unit (UCL) in the final year of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship researching ‘Progressive Islamophilia and the British Queer-Muslim Intersection’. He is the author of Fake Gods and False History: Being Indian in a Contested Mumbai Neighbourhood (UCL Press, 2023) which draws on fieldwork conducted in 2017-18 during his PhD in the SOAS Anthropology Department.

Image by Tanushree Rao via Unsplash