“…with actual Muslim scholars cowed into silence, the academy yields a crop of ‘progressive’ Muslim profs who teach a deconstructed Islam for the world’s urban progressive elite,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown has tweeted. The December 5, 2020, Twitter thread from this American convert to Islam who has become a leading apologist for all things Islamic, including slavery, further illustrates a previously discussed growing conflict between Islamic doctrine and LGBT agendas.
As Brown specified in his thread,
I’ve heard of a prominent prof who taught students all about “Islam & lgbtq” but never taught them the massive, massive majority view of Islamic tradition or Muslims worldwide on the topic/s.
Such Muslim academics had simply become dime-a-dozen woke activists, Brown noted with disappointment:
This replacement clergy may rail against the system (and I agree with many of these points and rail along with them), but no more than any other committed, activist prof. Their Muslimness, their theism, their connection to Tradition has been squeezed out of existence.
Academia’s monolithically politically correct atmosphere even restrained Brown from identifying the Muslim mavericks whom he respected in the Ivory Tower:
There are certainly exceptions (I’d name them but don’t want to toxify them), but many I’ve seen actually despise their own religion. They argue with passion that it never really existed. Exactly what students need to see for the immune response to work. Muslim problem solved.
Brown’s professions of orthodoxy are strangely out of place at Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). He directed the Saudi-established ACMCU for four years until 2019, and has since continued on the faculty. Despite this Wahabi pedigree, ACMCU has ironically taken a consistently progressive line on all matters relating to modern Western “sexual state” policies.
ACMCU’s Facebook page, for example, posted on October 21, 2021, a petition from the leftist religious group Faithful America. “Matt LaBanca was a beloved Catholic elementary school music teacher—until the Bishop of Brooklyn fired him for marrying the man he loves,” the petition description noted. It denounced the “hateful discrimination” against LaBanca and called for his reinstatement.
Numerous ACMCU social media postings on Facebook and Twitter have also expressed opposition to restricting abortion, even though Islamic doctrines offer considerable reservations about abortion. Yet ACMCU’s Bridge Initiative against “Islamophobia” tweeted on September 23, 2021, an article against “Using Islam to Critique the Abortion Ban” in Texas. Pillorying pro-life sentiments as a form of American reactionism, the tweet summarized from the Muslim author’s arguments:
Such comparisons perpetuate anti-Muslim views about the inherent barbarism & brutality of Islam, & refuse to acknowledge the white Christian nationalism at the heart of anti-abortion legislation in America.
By contrast, Brown himself would hardly appear woke to many with his defense of Islamic law, which in Muslim theocracies including Iran’s Islamic Republic has had horrific consequences for homosexuals. As he tweeted on December 14, 2020,
Islamism apparently also says that Shariah should be implemented either in “a nation state” or in a “caliphate”. So? Last I checked in a democracy people can publicly advocate for understandings of law they think are best. Unless that’s not ok? Maybe just Muslims can’t?
This willingness to accept Muslim-majority might making right contrasts with Brown’s concerns that American lawmakers tolerate dissent by individuals like him from pelvic left policies. As he pleaded in a November 7, 2020, tweet,
I hope the Democratic Party will embrace the federated character of the country’s laws & governance, recognize that lots of Americans think the extreme progressive social agenda is insane, and not try to impose it nationally.
As Brown explained in a tweet reply,
I’m Muslim and I’m quite concerned by some gender/sexuality elements of the progressive agenda. Lots and lots of Americans are. Their views are grounded in faith, natural law and often practicality. But no sense debating this!
Brown’s fellow Muslim scholar, Shadee Elmasry, has similarly noted uncompromisingly rigid LGBT pieties. “In any debate on transgender ideology, how many seconds pass before they accuse you of ‘opening up trans people to violence,’” he tweeted on July 14, 2022. As he has noted in public discussions with Brown, “fascist liberals” relentlessly use state power to persecute all heretics from LGBT orthodoxies, Muslim or otherwise.
In the face of such realities, Brown has had to abandon his prior vision of tactical political alliances between Muslim and LGBT groups. He had advocated a “soft liberal, pluralistic society” in which “different groups” would “pursue their own moral, religious vision or lifestyles under a shared protection of rights.”
Ideologues such as the Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar have made this platform impossible. She triumphantly tweeted with her rainbow profile icon on June 1, 2022, “Happy Pride Month! We won’t stop fighting until all LGBTQ+ Americans can live free from discrimination.” As Brown has said to Elmasry, some Muslims “have jumped in the Kool-Aid completely” and Brown’s “Muslim sister” Omar “has made it effectively impossible for me as a Muslim to support her program.” “What universe are people in that they think it is halal?” he asked of LGBT promotion; in particular, “Muslims shouldn’t dance in gay pride parades.”
Alternatively, the American Islamic scholar Yasir Qadhi, a not-so-reformed Muslim and hater of Israel, has argued in webinars that Muslims ally with other religious conservatives against LGBT societal sexualization. He correspondingly responded in an October 13 tweet to recent uproar in heavily Muslim Dearborn, Michigan, over “LGBTQ+ books in schools that contain sexually explicit material.” As he wrote,
People of all different faiths coming together to stop indoctrination of children in schools. Conservative Christians and Jews need to understand that Muslims are their allies in wanting a purer and morally upright society.
Qadhi’s example highlights the futility of trying to harmonize the sexual revolution’s “my body, my choice,” ideology of radical autonomy with Islam, a word that means “submission” to Islam’s numerous religious rules. Qadhi himself compared in a December 8, 2018, tweet how the “thought of eating pork or bacon disgusts us” with the vice of “speaking ill” gossip. This reflects thereby the bizarre aversions some Muslims have to canonically unclean, supposedly evil pigs. That such non-reeducated Muslims display distaste and disapproval towards unnatural sexual behaviors and gender identities is unsurprising.
Beyond faculty lounges dominated by novel woke etiquette, rank and file devout Muslims are frank in expressing their revulsion toward LGBT behaviors. This presents enormous difficulties for Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as the final article in this series will examine.
