"Queer Jews, Queer Muslims" with Adi Saleem and Shanon Shah
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Welcome to the new books network.

As-salamu alaykum, listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. I'm Claudia Radvin, and I'm here, as usual, with my co-hosts, Hizamir, Saeed Khan, and Chella Ward. This episode of Radio Reorient is all about understanding the epistemological relationship between Muslimness and queerness. We spoke to Adi Salim about a book he edited called Queer Jews, Queer Muslims, Race, Religion, and Representation.

Adi is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, whose current work focuses on genealogies of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as they affect contemporary France. He was also joined for the conversation by Shannon Shah, the author of one of the chapters in the volume. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the book, so we won't say too much more about it now, but let's listen in. Hi, everyone.

Hi everyone, As-salamu alaykum and thank you for joining us for another episode of Radio Reorient. My name is Chela Ward, I'm here with my co-host Claudia Radovan and we're going to be having a conversation with Adi Salim and Shannon Shah about their new edited volume, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims. Thank you both so much for joining us and I'm going to pass to you Claudia to ask the first question. Thank you so much Chela and welcome to our guest today. So

One of the reasons we wanted to speak to you both today was the recent publication of the book that you edited, Adi, and you contributed a chapter to Shannon called Queer Muslims, Queer Jews. Could you tell us a bit about the book and how it came about? Yeah, so the book Queer Jews, Queer Muslims, Race, Religion and Representation. So it just came out, I think, a few months ago, but it had been in the works for about

five, six years at this point. So we had a, with Shannon, we had a symposium in 2019 at the University of Manchester. Shannon just reminded me before we started that that was the day of the election on December 12, 2019. So we had voted in the morning and then we'd rushed to

the university and we had our symposium then and the idea was actually not specifically to place

queer studies or queer theory in relation to Jewish studies and Muslim or Islamic studies. It was much broader than that. So the symposium was called Gender and Sexuality in and around Judaism and Islam. So we had very different approaches, some people working very strictly from within queer studies and queer theory, some from feminist studies, some from trans studies. We also had

my good friend, Imam Ludovic Mohammed Zahed, who's known as...

as the first French gay imam. And he's still in France with a congregation in the south of France. And he was there in conversation with Rabbi Elie Sarah, who is the rabbi, I believe she still is the rabbi at the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue. And so they had a conversation about curing Islam and Judaism, really from a theological perspective. So it's really, really quite...

quite broad. And Shannon, I had never met actually before that day. And I'd invited him to come and give the keynote. And he'd spoken, I believe, on the topic of LGBTQ inclusion and the securitization of Muslims. But what really got me interested in Shannon's work was his book, which

which was, and correct me if I'm forgetting the title, The Making of a Gay Muslim, which was really about gay Muslims in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. And Malaysia really caught my eye because I'm from Singapore. And so I thought to myself, here's this queer scholar working on Islam and from Malaysia, right?

absolutely had to invite him to do the keynote and thankfully he uh he agreed and some months later we were all talking uh various people from the the symposium other people who weren't a part of the symposium like david halperin who um contributed uh and afterward to to the uh to the volume and slowly the idea really out of a collaborative process so it's a bit weird for me to kind of think of myself as the editor of the um of the book because it really felt like a

Like a collaboration among everyone. We're all in contact. It kind of came out from the series of sharing of perspectives and knowledge and so on. So a few months later, that sort of coalesced into a book project that took far longer than any of us could have expected, but I suppose we should have expected.

I wonder whether we can start by talking about that David Halperin chapter that you mentioned. It's very typical of me to want to start talking about the book at the end of the book. So let's kick off by talking about the afterword. And you've mentioned there, Adi, when you introduced the book, you mentioned the

lots of kind of different ways of contextualizing this term queer, right? You talked about kind of queer theory, um, trans studies. You talked about kind of lived experiences, gay Muslims, but you also put it into this kind of broader network of, um, what might be called kind of activist disciplines or at least disciplines that arise in the wake of, of historic injury. I'm thinking of feminist studies, for instance. Um,

And David Halperin's chapter is really about kind of trying to think about the meaning of this term queer. And he gives the history of that term that many of us are familiar with. That's to say, a term that comes about as a term of abuse historically and is then reappropriated to give a name to sexualities and genders that are beyond gender.

straight or binary paradigms of sex and gender that were popularized under European colonialism. So he gives kind of that story that many people are by now familiar with, the story of reappropriation. But he also points out that queer has two very different usages, you know, inside and outside of academia. Within academia, we talk all the time about queer history, queer theory, queering as a verb as well.

And that's, in a way, not exactly the same thing or it doesn't exactly overlap with the way that the term queer is often used, you know, in the real world outside of academia, where we talk about people being queer. People will say I'm queer, for instance. They don't necessarily mean I'm queer as in I'm informed by queer theory necessarily. So those are two slightly different things.

And there's been very recently in queer studies, a lot of interesting work around trying to understand queerness beyond an identitarian category, right? So asking the question, if queer doesn't name just an identity or, you know, a specific sexual orientation, then it might be a

Might it come to name something else? Might it come to name some kind of marginality or perhaps even something that is oppositional with dominant paradigms of relation or colonial paradigms of relation? I think Halperin has this great kind of one liner that reads something like, after all, you know, there are some gay people who are not terribly queer. So it's this kind of opposition between queer as an identitarian category and queerism.

queer maybe as some kind of oppositional possibility, way of thinking from the point of view of marginality. Can you tell us a little bit more about this term queer and what it's doing in the book?

Yeah, so right at the end, that quote that you have from Halperin, I think it's fascinating because it, so just to say it again, that there are some gay people who are not terribly queer. It immediately kind of gives you a sense of what queer may be or what queer could be. But then it also leaves something pretty uncomfortable behind because the opposite of that is then that

is that some straight people are terribly queer. Now, that also, you know, and there can be a truth to that, certainly, but there's something uncomfortable about saying that, given the history of the term itself and the reclamation of the term and the kind of radical queer politics, particularly around the period of HIV, AIDS activism in the 80s and 90s.

So what we're left with, I think, is this tension between different versions of what queer is. Queer as identity, queer as sexual identity, something that nevertheless is important in the concept of queer itself. And on the other hand, queer as something that's not so much of a noun, but perhaps a verb, as in too queer, too

to critique and so on, or to think against the norm. And the idea...

Queering the text, exactly. So, you know, going back to someone like Michael Warner in his book, The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner is providing an example in this book of queer theory that's not just a critique of heterosexuality or even heteronormativity, but much more fundamentally of normalization. So for someone like Warner to think queerly is really to think against the norm or, you know, in the way that he puts it, regimes of the normal, right?

But it's also more than that, I think, because we have the problem of all political ideologies. And, you know, because I'm a scholar of France, I think very quickly of Republicanism or universalism and all political ideologies tend to present themselves as fundamentally against other norms that exist.

that there is already an established norm that we are going to critique and dismantle and propose something new. And there's something revolutionary about it. There's something radical about it. You know, in the case of republicanism, it's against the norms of monarchy, of sectarianism and so on. So then we have a follow up question that might be well answered.

Can we say that republican ideology in France, being a way of thinking against the monarchy or sectarianism, is queer? Well, you know, I think that's ultimately misguided because it mistakes queer for simply opposition to something or the critique of anything. But it's not about particular norms, I think. You know, to think queerly is not simply to present oneself as against a particular ideology, but to be fundamentally critical of identity categories themselves,

and also the normalization of oppression, especially under the veneer of progressivism and of individuals subsumed under such identity categories. So to be queer is then to be suspicious, not just of norms, but of normalization, which includes the contemporary normalization of a defang, commodified,

commercialized form of queerness. You might think of Queer Eye, for example, or sort of Amazon with kind of rainbow colors, rainbow banners during Pride Month, you know, corporations and so on. And it begs, I think, the larger question, which I think is, you know, we're all scholars here who are interested in decoloniality as well. It begs the larger question, why is it that in our contemporary moment, it is so easy for people

slogans, concepts, theoretical tools that are forged in a radical activist or academic space to then be commodified and subsumed by centers of power, you know, be that governments, be that universities or the institutions, be that corporations. I,

I think that's, that's a question that, uh, I'm going to kind of refrain from trying to answer now because I, I, I fear that that would take up the rest of the, of the podcast, but I think it's, it's worth keeping and keeping in mind as, as well. Um, and if, if, um, anyone is listening, it, um, you know, wants to take one thing away from what I'm saying. It's, it's really to think clearly is really not to be fooled by an ideology that normalizes marginalization through kind of vague abstract language, language of, uh,

progress or universalism or so on. I really like that. And what I would add to with Hal Prince afterward is, you know, just to go back to what you were saying, Shella, about how he starts off by identifying like kind of the popular usages of the concept queer and then the way it's thought of in academia. And they're sort of doing different things and

I think that kind of, so I'm a sociologist by training. So I, I sort of think this way when I come across concepts like identity as well, how is a concept like identity used in popular settings? Um,

well, for shorthand, let's call them folk usages of identity versus more analytical or scholarly usages of identity. Not that folk usages can't be scholarly and not that scholarly categories can't, you know, seep into folk or popular usages, which I think is important to remember with the term queer. But in terms of the term identity, I think then, you know, problematizing this category can help us to answer how people

something that is meant to spark analysis for some people, a term like queer, can become sort of a stable identity category. I mean, looking at what happens to a term like identity can help us figure that out as well. Because to me, identity could mean

how you are categorized, who is doing the categorizing. Have you categorized yourself a certain way? Has someone else categorized you a certain way? If someone else has categorized you, how much power do their category, does their category of you hold sway over your categorization of yourself? And I think for Jews, Muslims, queer people, this is a very live question, right? In terms of how the state or the media categorize us versus how we want to categorize ourselves.

But then there's also the layer of identity that's about, well, what's my understanding of myself? Is there a core part of myself that just doesn't change? Or is there a part of myself that can profoundly change because of some experiences, because of some new insights that I've gained about myself and my life? Again, that's a very live question for people who think of themselves as either Jewish, Muslim, queer, or whatever other

other category of being you can think of, right? And then to me, the next level is then thinking, well, does it make sense to identify myself in a certain way if there's no one else that identifies in this way? And so there's this idea of identifying because it gives you collective belonging and

And that collective belonging can either be an act of power where you demonstrate that you are more powerful than these other people who identify in other ways. Or is it a form of resistance? We are all identifying this way because we are trying to name an oppression and therefore we name ourselves in order to react against that oppression.

oppressive system or mechanism or whatever, right? So already we are seeing these different layers that say in popular usage, you don't really come across when people say, oh, you know, my identity, my identity is I'm queer. And they don't, they don't actually clarify and say, well, am I talking about categories? Am I talking about self-understanding? Am I talking about collective belonging? Like what, what am I, what do I mean when I say this? And in that sense,

you know, it's kind of the inverse of what Halprin is saying about the word queer, where

sort of in popular usage it seems to be doing too little work it seems to be narrowed down whereas in an analytical way we're trying to open it up to more possibilities of resistance analysis and so on and kind of the opposite thing happens with identity like as scholars we want to pin it down like what exactly do you mean when you say identity but in folk usage it sometimes just means everything people use it and you're like well what what are they actually referring to

And I think when you put those two things together, queer identity, you know, when someone says, oh, well, my queer identity is important for me as opposed to my gay identity or my trans identity, right?

I think this kind of thinking of these two moving parts can really help as well. And again, I'm not going to try and answer this to say, well, is this way or that way? It's just about juxtaposing. Yeah, like I said earlier, what is the scholarly objective that we have or the analytical or activist objective that we have? And then what's just the popular shorthand that we are resorting to when we use these terms, right? Mm-hmm.

Just to pull on that thread a little bit further, could you tell us a bit more about the other terms in the title, Jews and Muslims? What are the parallels between Jewishness and Muslimness in relation to queerness? And are there dangers like the danger of a false equivalence in treating Muslimness and Jewishness as direct parallels?

So, yeah, that's a really, really good question. So, as you know, I'm appointed as an assistant professor in Romance languages at the University of Michigan, but also in the Center for Judaic Studies program.

And I'm one of two Muslim scholars of Jewish studies on this campus, which means that I think quite a lot about the question of Jewishness and the question of Muslimness in comparison, in contradistinction, and in parallel. There are certainly...

challenges to doing that. And it becomes apparent, I think, to anyone who, you know, and there's probably a very small number of these people in the world, but to anyone who is a publicly identified or identifiable Muslim scholar of Jewish studies, it's already a position that is somewhat suspect from

the perspective of many different individuals who may hold very different political beliefs and opinions. And I think that positionality is kind of interesting to explore because it shows us already how Muslimness and Jewishness seem to be already pitted against each other from the beginning so that you walk into a terrain that seems to have been

already organized in a particular way and already pushing you to sort of take positions in particular ways in order to then have legitimate discourse. So

The reason I begin with that is that I think it's important to think about how this state of being, this state of affairs, rather, is not a natural one. It's not one that was always going to be the case. It's one that has a very particular history in the post-World War II period and has a lot to do, I think, with the development of the field of anti-Semitism studies in

in particular the turn that it takes after the establishment of the State of Israel and the conflation of opposition to the project of Zionism and to the crimes committed by the State of Israel in the subsequent decades and the preceding decades, of course, the conflation of that with anti-Semitism, or maybe a better way to put it is the...

the deployment of by specific scholars. I'm thinking of people like Robert Wistrich, for example, one of the most influential historians of anti-Semitism who's done more than anyone, I think, to establish the hypothesis that would later be called the new anti-Semitism theory.

So folks like Wistrick, you've got institutes, say, at the University of Indiana University. You've got the Vidal Sassoon Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. And it is that Vidal Sassoon, if you are

You're wondering, but these institutes, these centers, the this group of influential academics, not to mention the the the influence of wealthy donors that fund these institutes end up directing a lot of the research that is happening.

perhaps not directly, but, uh, or at least setting the conditions for how this research is, um, is, is conducted. Um, at Yale, there used to be, it's not the current, if you look up, I can't remember the name now, but if you look up the, the, uh, Yale antisemitism centers or whatever it's called, it's not that one, that one, which is led by Mara Samuels at the moment, uh, was the replacement for an earlier, um, uh,

I think it was called the Yale Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism or something like that, that was led by, I'm forgetting his name, but the director of that institute had very clearly said that the mission of this institute is to prove that

the significance of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. So, you know, if we're speaking as scholars, we don't start out with a goal to prove something and then find the evidence to then back up that information. We work from the evidence that there is, and then we form our arguments, our conclusions, and so on from the evidence that there is, rather than

kind of looking, you know, almost cherry picking information that can then be used as justification for something that we've already decided is true. So that institute to Yale's credit was shut down because there wasn't any evidence of scholarly activity. This is in, I think, the mid-2000s and was replaced by the current institute that Maurice Samuels is running today. But this is a long-winded way of basically saying that Yale

The very question of the danger of constructing a parallel is already prefigured by several decades of intellectual activist work by a group of people to essentially weaponize anti-Semitism against the political movement of liberation for Palestinians, which we may call anti-Zionism.

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And I think just to add very quickly to that, we can see this unmasking of any false equivalences or false oppositions between Muslims and Jews now in the responses to the genocide that's happening in Gaza. I haven't been to every single Palestine solidarity protest in London, but I've been to a few and I try and embed myself in different parts of the protest with my friends. And I have seen

queer Jews, you know, like Placard saying, I'm a queer Jew, I'm for Palestine solidarity, queer Muslims, queer Christians. There are Jewish groups there. And

And I think the use of the word queer and trans with some of these groups is very interesting to me because it kind of problematizes the kind of easy dichotomy I introduced earlier. I mean, we have to start somewhere between what's a popular usage of queer, what's an analytical usage of queer. I genuinely think with these groups, they are sort of claiming the word queer as an oppositional category because they are resisting the kind of homonormative,

Um,

hijacking of any kind of response that's critical of Israel, right? To say, oh, but how dare you? If Hamas came into power, do you know what they'd do to all you gays and lesbians, right? So that's kind of the bait that's always being used for anyone who wants to oppose the genocide. But there are these groups that are showing up and they are self-consciously saying, I'm a queer Jew, I'm here at this protest. And there are Jewish liberation groups that are there as well. So I think there is this unmasking that's happening. You just won't see it

uh, visibly represented in any kind of free media coverage. Right. So, so, so, so Shannon is, is, you know, a hundred percent right about, about the contemporary unmasking. Um, and, you know, I, I saw it myself at the, at the encampment that we had at the university of Michigan, uh, that was, uh, which, which coincided with, uh, with, with the Jewish, um, holiday of, um, of Passover. And there was a time where you kind of really had this very clear, visible, um, uh,

you know, example of Jewish Muslim solidarity where you had, um, you know, Jewish and Muslim students who were, uh, gathering together and, and, and observing, um, um, Shabbat together, lighting candles together, um, and then, uh, praying, uh, Friday prayers, uh, to, together, uh, side, side by side. It was a very sort of clear convergence of, um,

of what we've we've led to think you know a parallel that we've led to we've been led to think is uh is dangerous but another unmasking also takes place uh you know a century ago two centuries ago not in a positive sense but in you know you only have to read um any 19th century anti-semite to realize that huh the parallels between islam and judaism

the parallels between two branches of what at the time would be called the Semitic race between Arabs and Jews are very important for these anti-Semites in order to make their argument about the dangerous nature of Jewish presence in Europe. For Voltaire, going back to the 18th century, for example, Jews are just a particularly degenerate

And from Voltaire onwards, you have a range of anti-Semitic thinkers going all the way to someone like Troumont in the 19th century, who writes on the inequality of races.

um, this emphasis on, um, on kind of almost forming the idea of the Jew through a dialectic between, um, the East and, um, and, and Jews between blackness and Jews between Muslims and Jews between Arabs and Jews, other Orientals, um, and, and, uh,

and Jews. And one, you know, just because, just one more example, just because it's the Olympics in Paris, you know, this is an example from the 20th century when the Algerian

was making its way down the Seine, they threw flowers, maybe roses, into the Seine, marking the massacre of Algerians in 1961. Now, what happens in 1961 and who exactly is culpable in 1961? Well, you have police officers who are culpable for this massacre. You also have a certain Maurice Papon. Maurice Papon, who

was the he was the chief of police I believe during the Paris massacre but he also was the

Secretary General for the police in Bordeaux during World War II. And he was responsible for the deportation of more than 1600 Jews. And so in the figure of Maurice Papon, who, by the way, would go on after the 60s, also in 1961, he's awarded the Legion of Honor by Charles de Gaulle.

And by the end of the decade, he's elected a member of the National Assembly. He served several terms. He serves later on in the late 70s and early 80s in the cabinet of the Prime Minister Raymond Barr under the President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He only ever faces any sort of...

sanction in 1998 when he's convicted for crimes against humanity, but not in relation to the 1961 massacre, but in relation to the deportation of Jews to Drancy, the internment camp. But he was released from prison four years later. So I think in the figure of Maurice Parpon, who really escapes

any form of punishment that we think is due to someone who commits crimes against humanity, not just once, but multiple times. There was also the Shahon subway massacre.

we have someone who brings together the very dark and bloody history of Jews and Muslims in Europe. And I think that's another parallel that is very important to talk about, one that has been overshadowed by the weaponization of anti-Semitism in the contemporary period and the subsuming of Jewish identity under white supremacist identity. Now I've said it, that will piss a few people off.

I think it leads us on to our next question really well, though, in terms of what role does coloniality play in shaping the patterns of queerness that you've identified in the book? And obviously, you've spoken a bit about just now.

I think to me, the role that coloniality plays, I mean, there's the obvious stuff, right? So I come from Malaysia, Adi's from Singapore, you know, the British Empire basically exported, you know, its own Victorian mores of sexuality over its empire. And these are the laws we've kind of inherited in post-colonial states that get weaponized by post-colonial states in the interest of authoritarian rule.

I sort of think that is the less interesting explanation because it's so obvious. I think the more interesting explanation has been pioneered by scholars such as Abba Mahmood and Joan W. Scott, where they kind of question, they're kind of querying, if you like, the origins of secular governance or liberal governance. You know, so what does secularism mean?

In a country like France now, to be secular is like, oh, well, you know, we're French, we're secular, we are pro-women, we are pro-LGBT, and anyone who is not secular is against all these things. And Joan Scott is like, uh-uh, no way, because your Republican values were misogynistic for more than a century, right? Like women just were not considered equal citizens and they did not have the right to vote. Fact.

So this equivalence between secularism and gender equality and LGBT values is just another tool to prop up white Eurocentric coloniality. And this hasn't ended. We see this happening now. And I think the more interesting argument that Sabah Mahmood makes is that

a lot of post-colonial states are reproducing this kind of logic of secular governance, but in countries like Egypt and Malaysia and so on, they are doing it with the flavouring of Islam. This is basically secular governance in the style of your colonial masters, but with the label of Islam slapped on it, right? This is the kind of logic that you're employing. And in this kind of logic of secular governance, you are still weaponising gender and sexuality. You are still weaponising

religious minorities to sort of prop up the system. And I think when I talk this way, it almost sounds like I'm saying down with secularism, down with liberalism. I'm not saying that. I think but for analytical purposes, what we have to do is deprive these concepts of innocence. Like we just have to know how they work. And I think this is one way that coloniality has worked. It has like set the

the tone for how we think about the secular and the liberal and how gender, sexuality and religion relate to these concepts and how they're meant to be governed. I think if we speak about coloniality, we also are speaking implicitly about capitalism. And if capitalism is, you know, the best sort of, you know, succinct definition of capitalism that I've ever come across is capitalism

Interestingly enough, not from Marx, but from a friend and colleague of mine, Daniel Nemse here at the University of Michigan, who calls capitalism, he refers to it as something vampiric. And he refers to it as something that makes some people live better

well, that makes some people live worse so that others can live better. And I think if we're talking about coloniality and we're talking about capitalism, we're talking about systems that from the very beginning have to have inequality built into it. These are not systems of thought or systems of practice that can exist without inequality, without maintaining inequality,

And a great way to maintain inequality, of course, is to make you believe that there is something inherent, biologically superior, even before biological racism, even before scientific racism, to make you believe that there's something rooted in you, in your blood.

that makes you fundamentally better than someone else. And this translates into all sorts of different practices. And so we have all of these examples that Shannon sort of touched on as well, that, okay, if the indigenous peoples of...

of the Malay world, for example, or of West Africa, for example, of Australasia, for example, or even of the Indian subcontinent, don't have these exact same strict binaries. And we think about it really often.

the modern world is made out of these oppositions of binaries that, you know, going back to that question of what queerness is, it seeks to disrupt those binaries specifically. Well, if these people don't have these strict binaries and if they don't conduct themselves in accordance to these sexual values, then it only goes to show that there is something inferior within them.

That we must we must step in and essentially save them from themselves. So sexuality right from the beginning of colonial conquest becomes a central feature in justifying domination in maintaining domination and justice.

And more importantly, I think, in maintaining the idea of fundamental inequality rooted in the body. So I think that's another thing that's worth thinking about in relation to coloniality and Quinn is particularly in the way that we've tried to approach it, I think, in this book.

So you have both of you kind of very deftly drawn us a map there of the way that these systems of oppression are kind of articulated around queerness. And we could go around the houses having an argument, I think, about what the prime mover is of those systems of oppression. Right. Is it capitalism? Is it coloniality? Is it heteronormativity? And there are various kind of different ways that that story could be told. That's a story of oppression.

historicizing and how we want to narrate history also. But I want to kind of

flip us to the other side of this question, to the kind of the flip side of those systems of oppression. And I want to, in a sense, return us to something that has really always interested me about queer theory, which is, you know, this notion of alternative epistemologies, you know, ways of thinking through these dominant structures of oppression. And when I was reading, Adi, the introduction that you wrote for this book,

Especially I was thinking about these alternative epistemologies and I was sort of reading, I think, between the lines of your argument in the introduction, something about alternative histories too, that queering might be something to do with writing a new history of the world or queering the history of the world.

And that section of your introduction made me think about that famous thing that the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz says about queerness when he gives that definition of it as a kind of ideality, saying queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world, end quote.

So I guess I want to kind of throw it open and we're coming, I suppose, towards the end of the conversation. What sorts of other worlds, alternative epistemologies, potentialities do you hope that this book might make possible? So I don't I don't have the the the ego, I think, to imagine that that this book will make anything possible. I don't.

I would be incredibly surprised if it did. But I see it more as a kind of collective expression of desire for something more that may or may not be fulfilled within our lifetimes. And that desire for something more, I think, is, you know, you mentioned earlier,

Alternative history. So I think that's an interesting term because we're not used to thinking about history as having an alternative. And I say we, maybe not as historians, but sort of generally speaking as a kind of reading public

or even a non-reading public, especially as is the case in the United States with the ongoing defunding of education and the attacks on education at all levels.

We have an understanding of history as well. This is just an objective collection of facts. And, you know, this battle happened then, this thing happened then, and so on. And maybe, maybe yes, maybe no, we'll draw something on that to kind of explain the present, to maybe chart something about the future. But the idea of talking about alternative histories, I think, already brings to the question the contingent nature

of history, that nothing is sort of written in stone before it happens, that history is actually very messy. And I think that goes back to something that David Halprin talks about in his afterword, that part of what a queer approach to history is, is reckoning with how messy humanism

human encounters are, how messy the ways that we see ourselves are, the way that we interact with each other and so on, that it isn't the case that people have a specific identity and that determines the way that they act and they interact with each other.

It also isn't the case that it was written in stone that, you know, you would have this or that event in this or that moment. So many things had to happen, in fact, in a way that

and almost seem arbitrary and happenstance for a specific event to have taken place. So from that perspective, we're also forced to reckon with, well, what's left out of history? So what's left out of the archive, for example? There are entire events where we only have archives that document events

perspectives and interactions by colonizers, for example. Well, what happens then? How do you think about what it was like for colonized subjects to undergo a certain event? What that event might have meant for them? So the archive is filled with silences that an approach of alternative history

might help us to imagine. And so here I'm getting very close to Saidiya Hartman, I think, and her concept of critical fabulation, which seeks to not necessarily rewrite history or write a new history,

but to tease out those moments at which the silence is just deafening within the archives. And what might we do with that in the present to think about alternative futures? Well, one thing is to do away with the idea of inevitability. We're often told that capitalism is essentially the natural solution

organization of the economy that is based on human desire that is based on our kind of animalistic needs is the regulation of those animalistic desires and needs that leads us to something like like capitalism so it's almost inevitable that we have we have a capitalist world order and

that there is nothing outside of capitalism, there's nothing better than capitalism. We've kind of reached the pinnacle there. Well, that consensus clearly is fraying. And I guess this is a long-winded way to say, I don't know what forms of alternative futures might be possible. But I think by definition,

These are things that we don't really know that have to emerge out of struggle, out of struggle together, that will not be written by some great genius in a book for others to then follow, but may then be but may be described in such a book from.

activity that is taking place around in that particular moment. You know, we might think of queer theory as really being an example of this. You know, it isn't the case that a bunch of queer theorists, David Halperin or Gloria Anzaldúa or Judith Butler sort of

sat around and decided, well, we're going to invent this thing called queer theory. You know, David has a very nice passage in the Optiway where he says, HIV AIDS had already created a highly diverse group of despised, marginalized or disadvantaged people branded with the stigma of sexual or social deviance.

who refused admission to the scene of social belonging in contemporary societies. They were, and they were felt to be, in that proper sense, queer. That is where queer identity comes from. And I think what he's kind of pointing out, which is helpful for us as we think about alternative futures, is that intellectuals don't matter that much. I think we can be helpful in terms of

of describing something, maybe putting something in language that is, you know, at its best accessible. I know that's not something that we're often associated with, but at our best, that's what, that's why I think we do best. We foster conversation. We foster dialogue. We foster meetings. We...

We put into words things that are already happening. We describe them as best as we can in the hopes that people will take them and do something even more with what we've written, you know, in a sort of dialectical nature, so to speak. Yeah.

I think one of the things that Halprint does as well is tells us how we can help as scholars. And one of the things that's given me a lot of inspiration and comfort is when he talks about KJ Dover and KJ Dover's 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality. And he's like, this guy is a straight man. He doesn't see himself as a queer theorist, but he's just a good historian. He does meticulous history and

to show us how sexuality and sexual relations and intimate relations worked in antiquity and how it makes it just so difficult to claim that the Greeks either were gay party animals the way we see them now or how they just weren't. It was just different. It was more complicated than that.

And I think that opens up possibilities for someone like me as well, who is not immersed in queer theory. I'm first and foremost, a sociologist of religion, qualitative ethnographic, but still a sociologist. But it's made me think like, you know, my chapter is about how I have received through my lived experiences, you

you know, the teachings of not just the Muslim sacred texts, but also Christian and Jewish sacred texts. But then now as an academic scholar of religion, how then I produce knowledge about these traditions and about gender and sexuality, but how it's always through the prism of my lived experience as well, right? Now, this has made me think of something new that's not in my chapter, right?

But, you know, so I'm aware that, say, in the Quran, you know, the thing that I have grown up thinking about and deconstructing for myself is verse one of Surah Al-Nisa, chapter four, the women. In a way, it talks about God created, you know, every soul and its maids and from there created many different men and women.

And there is an Islamic feminist, modernist interpretation of this to say, actually, this is an egalitarian verse, right? It doesn't distinguish between, you know, power relationships between the sexes. But this is also a,

The Khwaja Sara and Hijra communities of South Asia also have this reading of this verse, but they have it with a twist. For them, this verse is telling you that initially creation was androgynous. The first human was androgynous. It's only later that you have these divisions of what is male and female. And this is how they find belonging as the gender cultures in Muslim South Asia.

And I think in the book, there is someone, I think Adi mentions, I forget the name of the scholar who says, but this tradition exists in rabbinical Judaism as well. You know, the interpretation of Genesis chapter one, verse 27, you know, God created humans in the image of God and from there created male and female.

It's the exact same type of exegesis. This means that the first person, Adam, was androgynous, right? So immediately by looking at these sorts of exegetical histories in Judaism and Islam, something is asking us, something is forcing us to ask, well, what's going on, you know, with these resonances?

And it took me a long time to figure out that the missing piece is Plato's Symposium, which is summarized very nicely in the song The Origins of Love in the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about how in this creation myth, we are all perfect spheres and we have all the genders encapsulated in us. But it's the God Zeus who like splits everyone. And forevermore, we have become separate genders looking for our other half.

Now, this already is interesting in itself, but I think what possibilities are open, you know, by David Halperin saying, just be a good historian, be a good theologian, be a good classicist, be a good sociologist.

I think by doing these things, we uncover things like what is this hidden history of Greco-Roman heritage that we are making invisible when we talk about Jews and Muslims? Who is the hidden dialogue partner in this room? It is this Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, right, that has survived in some way. And I don't see that a lot in a lot of scholarship about gender, sexuality and religion. So, yeah,

I don't know, that was a bit of a messy answer, but I think the possibilities are there. Let's just be good historians, be good classicists, be good social scientists, and then see where this takes us.

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Okay, so I feel like...

we we have to wrap up but i feel like i've sort of been baited to say a million things at once um as someone who is you know absolutely involved in various projects around querying the ancient world um and certainly thinks that that these are projects that should speak more to each other um but also as someone who absolutely detests the term graco roman with every inch of her being so i feel like i want to jump off in a million different directions at once but but

Fortunately, maybe for our listeners, I'm not able to because of time. I do want to...

Finish, though, by saying what we've not said. In a sense, you both very neatly wrapped up Adi by saying, in a sense, what Halperin and Gloria Anzaldúa and Judith Butler don't say. And then Shannon, by making reference to what Ken Dover in Greek homosexuality doesn't quite say. We're both kind of talking a little bit about the unsaid or at least the unsaid within kind of normative ways of doing this project of querying.

And I'm thinking about the unsaid of this podcast, too, because I'm thinking that many listeners, as they listen to this...

may well be in a sense surprised to hear the easiness with which queerness and in particularly Muslimness are put together in this podcast. And I think the reason that they'll be surprised is not because there is any antipathy between Muslimness and queerness, of course, but because of this very deep seated Islamophobic idea that Muslimness is kind of antithetical or Muslimness is, is by definition homophobic, right? It's by definition queer phobic. And,

And so we haven't really sort of named that objection to this work. And I'm glad we haven't named it because I sometimes think that work that is focused around justice can spend so much of its time doing what someone say it's called clearing objections, right? Responding to these kinds of bad faith objections that it doesn't get any time to do the work of what someone say it calls in recording the caliphate dreaming.

Right. Doing the work of actually thinking about, well, what is this new history of the world? Never mind whether the Greeks and the Romans really were queer or really were not queer. That's kind of putting us in hock to a sort of historical positivism. Let's do the dreaming work of thinking, you know, well, if we read the sources in this way, what does that do for how we can imagine these alternative futures that we're driving towards? So I'm glad that we haven't kind of got caught up in that kind of deep seated,

Islamophobic objection to this work. I'm grateful to you both for helping us to think beyond those kinds of very reductive views

uh identitarian characterizations but also islamophobic characterizations um of islam and i'm sure um to to various different kinds of extents in different ways we could say the same about reductive ways of understanding jewishness so thank you both so much this has been a really very very interesting episode um and thank you to our listeners um also for listening we hope that you'll join us again inshallah for another episode of radio reorient

This is Radio Reorient, the decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? You're listening to Radio Reorient, exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post-Western.

Now, let's discuss what we've heard with... Hizamir. Jella Ward. Saeed Khan. And Claudia Radovan. So this conversation presented us with a really great opportunity to discuss not just the book as part of the conversation, but also an issue that's emerged in the wake of October 7th and the...

the wave of resistance and protests that came in its wake, particularly around some of the conversations about pinkwashing and the kind of links that have been made between Islamophobia and queerphobia, the idea that, well, more the criticism that's levied at a lot of the protesters in

in the West, in the global North, about how if you were queer in Palestine, you'd be brutalised. I've seen tweets, you'd be hung from a crane, that sort of thing. That kind of ignorance and Islamophobic trope that if you are queer or part of the LGBTQA community, that you would be persecuted, yet here you are protesting for Palestinian rights. But we got to talk about so much more than that as well.

I think that is actually a really important thing to bring up, because one of the things that those dangerous kinds of pinkwashing narratives do is they try to divorce the queer from the decolonial. Right. They try to make what is essentially a very racist and very Islamophobic argument that queer folks would by definition be in danger in a free Palestine. And so therefore, you know, they shouldn't go out and protest for free Palestine. Right.

which is totally turning reality on its head in the sense that queer folks have been a really important part of the pro-Palestinian movement. They know how to organise. There's a long history of queer activism that means that they've been not just in numbers terms, important parts of the pro-Palestine movement, but also in organisational terms. They've really known how to call large scale protests and to keep people safe and to do all that kind of important safeguarding work that goes on as part of a movement.

But the reason that I think that kind of bad faith attempt to divorce the queer and the decolonial in that way is so dangerous is because actually, you know, the queer and the decolonial, when we think about it, very naturally kind of sit together. When we think about the sorts of...

regimes of gender, regimes of sexuality that were imposed on the world through coloniality, many of those regimes are the same oppressive regimes that much of queer activism is fighting against, right? So, so the history of these types of, um,

anti-oppressive activisms are actually very, very closely related. If you look at something like, you know, the work of someone like Maria Lugones, right, her article, Heterosexualism and the Colonial Modern Gender System, which she published, this is kind of early 2000s work now, she published that in, um,

Hypatia, which is a journal of feminist philosophy, that made very, very clear that the sorts of paradigms of gender and sexuality that we call straight paradigms are in most cases around the world colonial paradigms imposed by European powers onto populations that were much more diverse in gendered and sexual terms than colonizers wanted them to be when they came there. So I think

That was a really important part of the conversation was to kind of speak against, as you say, that pinkwashing, not just in that specific scenario, but the way that that relies on a racist and Islamophobic attempt to divorce the decolonial from the queer when actually those two movements have always and completely understandably gone hand in hand.

So I kind of want to mind this pinkwashing a bit more, because obviously it's something that I'm thinking about for something else I'm writing.

And it seems to me that the heart of pinkwashing is, as you say, racist, islamophobic. But I would also add orientalist. And the reason why I would specifically want to add orientalist, like not because it's, you know, just a synonym for the other two, is because it casts, the heart of it is casting the Islamic as transgressive. Okay.

Why is it transgressing against? It's transgressing against those norms that the West considers to be its own. And thus, so the argument goes, for those who are in favour of the pinkwashing, that Muslims will do this, they transgress Western norms, therefore they are not worthy of any sympathy or help or anything like this. And I think it's important to always understand

understand the deeper kind of work going on behind these kinds of accusations being leveled? Well, I think that that speaks volumes to the whole notion of

how intersectionality has now become the villain, particularly among anti-decolonial movements, because intersectionality integrates various communities, which of course then counters what the colonial project was all about, which was divide and rule, divide and conquer. I think at the same time, though, we have to be mindful within certain discourses, and in this case specifically within the Muslim discourse, how

how the idea of queerness then becomes a divisive point when it comes to efforts made by communities to try to build coalitions because of these bigger enemies and adversaries to the community. I think what's interesting there is also how it kind of shows that

the problem of falling into the personal over the political. And, you know, what I mean by that is if you look at the pro-Palestine movement, it's actually a really good example of a movement where we have managed and inshallah, we continue to manage to prioritize the political, that's to say, the liberation of Palestine over the personal. There are people who disagree within the pro-Palestine movement about certain things.

There are people who, you know, perhaps not perhaps wouldn't stand shoulder to shoulder with each other in any other situation except on a march for the liberation of Palestine. You see flags next to each other that you might think in other circumstances might not necessarily customarily sit that close together.

But what's happening there, I think, and the pinkwashing argument tries to say, well, it's hypocritical then for those two things to sit together. But actually, it's not hypocritical at all. What it is, is political over personal. What's happening there is people are making a political alliance.

you know, where there are always differences in kind of smaller ways within that alliance. That's how politics works, right? You have to work out where you have enough in common and what you want politically that you might be able to overlook some of the ways that you might not have things in common personally. So I think,

The Profile Sign Movement is such a good example because it's also been an example of teaching people how to do political organising over the personal. And for me, that asks then another interesting question about this kind of identitarian trap that we sometimes fall into when we're talking about queerness or queering or queer theory. And I wonder, you know, to what extent

it happens in disciplines that want to think about muslimness too because one of the interesting things about that term queer and we discussed this claudia and i with with ardy and shannon as well is that the term queer can can describe a sexuality or a spectrum of sexualities a group of sexualities a way of understanding sexuality a reorienting of sexuality but it can also describe um

set of epistemological approaches or a way of understanding the world or a way of decolonizing to queer something doesn't necessarily mean if we talk about queering history, for instance, we don't necessarily just mean doing the history of queer people. We mean doing something different with history, decolonizing history, you know, reorienting history to come back to the theme of this season. So we're

what what the distinction i'm trying to make there is that the queer means something to queer something is a is a political thing to do you know rather than simply just a description of an identity category of people i think that shows us maybe by analogy something interesting for muslimness too that one of the things that always struck me is interesting about the project of reorient that it isn't about muslimness in an exclusionary or an identitarian or uh

a ethnocised or ethno-nationalistic sense, right? It's not just about better describing people who think about themselves as Muslims or describing them in a less orientalising way. It's actually about thinking about Muslimness as something ontological, something political, something epistemological. So in that sense, I wonder whether the queer and the idea of queerness, you know, might actually be able to show us something interesting for thinking about critical Muslim studies too.

And I wonder whether that might be a place where we should stop. We have sort of arrived at these big questions about the epistemological stakes of the project of reorienting. There's something I think about discussing history that gets very quickly to these kinds of epistemological questions about how we do that history. So I'm really grateful to Ardy and to Shannon for sharing.

allowing us to have this really wide-ranging conversation, even though, as you'll hear in the interview, I didn't agree with them at every turn. I thought the sorts of epistemological questions they were asking were really important, and it's obviously a really interesting, important book. So thank you to them. Thank you also to our listeners for listening. Inshallah, we'll see you next time for another episode of Radio Reorient. As-salamu alaykum. As-salamu alaykum.

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