Full Transcript for The Capaciousness of the Tradition: Islam, Sexuality, and the Wound of Berlin

very West. He thought 00:03:28.990 --> 00:03:31.310 he was attacking. Yeah, that is the core irony 00:03:31.310 --> 00:03:33.909 we have to unpack. So to really understand the 00:03:33.909 --> 00:03:37.009 mechanics of how that happened, how a whole civilization 00:03:37.009 --> 00:03:40.250 shifts from beautiful poetry to rented vans, 00:03:40.370 --> 00:03:43.610 we are going to have to unpack some really profound 00:03:43.610 --> 00:03:46.129 cultural shifts. We have to look at the mechanisms 00:03:46.129 --> 00:03:48.389 of colonial history. And we have to completely 00:03:48.389 --> 00:03:50.810 reevaluate our definitions of human identity. 00:03:51.289 --> 00:03:53.349 Yes. So I want to jump straight into the mindset 00:03:53.349 --> 00:03:55.530 of this attacker because the primary essay we're 00:03:55.530 --> 00:03:58.169 working from starts with a sort of diagnosis. 00:03:58.349 --> 00:04:00.849 Right. A historical diagnosis. Yeah. And to make 00:04:00.849 --> 00:04:03.210 this diagnosis, the author leans on a historian 00:04:03.210 --> 00:04:07.069 named Thomas Bauer, specifically his work. It's 00:04:07.069 --> 00:04:09.449 called A Culture of Ambiguity. A really essential 00:04:09.449 --> 00:04:13.009 text for this topic. It really is. Now, I've 00:04:13.009 --> 00:04:15.620 read a lot of history. But Bauer makes a claim 00:04:15.620 --> 00:04:18.959 about classical Islamic civilization that fundamentally 00:04:18.959 --> 00:04:23.180 disrupted how I view the past. How so? Well, 00:04:23.220 --> 00:04:25.519 we are so used to seeing historical religion 00:04:25.519 --> 00:04:28.660 depicted as this rigid, black and white, highly 00:04:28.660 --> 00:04:32.240 punitive monolith. But Bauer argues that for 00:04:32.240 --> 00:04:34.980 the vast majority of its history, Islamic civilization 00:04:34.980 --> 00:04:38.180 was defined by its extraordinary tolerance for 00:04:38.180 --> 00:04:40.220 ambiguity. We really need to spend some time 00:04:40.220 --> 00:04:42.480 on this word ambiguity. Yeah, let's unpack that. 00:04:42.639 --> 00:04:44.360 Because in modern English, it has a slightly 00:04:44.360 --> 00:04:46.399 negative connotation. Right, like you're being 00:04:46.399 --> 00:04:48.959 evasive. Exactly. If I say you're being ambiguous, 00:04:49.040 --> 00:04:51.920 it implies you're being vague or, you know, you 00:04:51.920 --> 00:04:53.579 just haven't done the work to find the right 00:04:53.579 --> 00:04:55.660 answer. But Bauer is talking about something 00:04:55.660 --> 00:04:57.819 entirely different. What's his definition? He 00:04:57.819 --> 00:05:00.569 is talking about a structural civilization. comfort 00:05:00.569 --> 00:05:04.089 with plurality. It's the capacity of a whole 00:05:04.089 --> 00:05:07.829 society to hold multiple, sometimes totally contradictory 00:05:07.829 --> 00:05:11.189 truths in suspension without feeling the psychological 00:05:11.189 --> 00:05:13.889 panic to resolve them into one single dominant 00:05:13.889 --> 00:05:15.970 role. Okay, let's ground this for you listening 00:05:15.970 --> 00:05:18.769 because plurality can sound, you know, very abstract. 00:05:19.389 --> 00:05:22.329 What did this comfort with ambiguity actually 00:05:22.329 --> 00:05:25.509 look like in the day -to -day operation of classical 00:05:25.509 --> 00:05:29.220 Islamic society? Well, it manifested at the very 00:05:29.220 --> 00:05:32.199 highest levels of theology and law. Give me an 00:05:32.199 --> 00:05:35.439 example. Imagine a society where you have multiple 00:05:35.439 --> 00:05:39.720 legally valid readings of the exact same Quranic 00:05:39.720 --> 00:05:42.009 verse. Wait, like different interpretations? 00:05:42.529 --> 00:05:44.569 Not just different interpretations, but actually 00:05:44.569 --> 00:05:47.290 different vocalizations of the text that changed 00:05:47.290 --> 00:05:50.290 the nuance of the meaning. And they all coexisted. 00:05:50.350 --> 00:05:53.850 Wow. Yeah. You had competing schools of jurisprudence, 00:05:53.910 --> 00:05:57.430 the Maliki, the Hanafi, the Shafi, the Hanbali, 00:05:57.529 --> 00:05:59.790 which were entirely different legal traditions 00:05:59.790 --> 00:06:02.129 with completely different methodologies. And 00:06:02.129 --> 00:06:03.990 they didn't just tear each other apart. No, they 00:06:03.990 --> 00:06:05.629 didn't go to war to annihilate each other at 00:06:05.629 --> 00:06:07.889 all. They explicitly recognized each other's 00:06:07.889 --> 00:06:10.519 legitimacy. That is wild. Right. And action might 00:06:10.519 --> 00:06:12.399 be considered totally forbidden in one school 00:06:12.399 --> 00:06:14.959 and entirely permissible in another. And the 00:06:14.959 --> 00:06:17.379 society just absorbed that friction without collapsing. 00:06:17.740 --> 00:06:20.379 I was really trying to visualize how a society 00:06:20.379 --> 00:06:23.660 functions like that because our modern instinct 00:06:23.660 --> 00:06:26.939 is that laws have to be uniform. If it's illegal 00:06:26.939 --> 00:06:30.339 here, it has to be illegal there. We demand consistency. 00:06:30.699 --> 00:06:34.240 We do. And the image that kept coming to my mind 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:37.480 while reading Bauer's work was a massive suspension 00:06:37.480 --> 00:06:39.779 bridge. Oh, that's a good way to look at it. 00:06:39.839 --> 00:06:42.699 Yeah. Think about it. If you look at how a suspension 00:06:42.699 --> 00:06:45.680 bridge is engineered, its genius is that it is 00:06:45.680 --> 00:06:49.319 explicitly designed. to sway and flex under the 00:06:49.319 --> 00:06:51.160 weight of different winds, right? Right, and 00:06:51.160 --> 00:06:53.300 the friction of different traffic. Exactly. The 00:06:53.300 --> 00:06:55.899 shifts in atmospheric pressure, that flexibility, 00:06:56.160 --> 00:06:59.180 that structural ambiguity, is exactly why the 00:06:59.180 --> 00:07:01.379 bridge doesn't break. It absorbs the tension

00:07:01.379 --> 00:07:03.620 of the environment. It needs that give. Right. 00:07:03.759 --> 00:07:06.800 But then, as we move into the 19th and 20th centuries, 00:07:06.939 --> 00:07:09.639 under the immense pressure of colonial modernity, 00:07:09.779 --> 00:07:12.259 it's as if the engineers of the Islamic world 00:07:12.259 --> 00:07:14.519 just panicked. They looked at their swaying bridge 00:07:14.519 --> 00:07:18.209 and got terrified. Yeah. They looked at the rigid 00:07:18.209 --> 00:07:21.569 steel and stone structures of the European powers 00:07:21.569 --> 00:07:23.889 that were suddenly dominating them, and they 00:07:23.889 --> 00:07:27.350 mistook their own flexibility for weakness. And 00:07:27.350 --> 00:07:30.149 so they decided to encase their entire suspension 00:07:30.149 --> 00:07:33.810 bridge in solid concrete. That analogy perfectly 00:07:33.810 --> 00:07:37.110 captures the mechanism of what Bauer calls a 00:07:37.110 --> 00:07:40.050 civilizational loss of nerve. A loss of nerve. 00:07:40.189 --> 00:07:42.810 That's a powerful phrase. It is. And this is 00:07:42.810 --> 00:07:44.550 the critical mechanism we have to understand. 00:07:45.339 --> 00:07:48.040 The hardening of Islamic thought wasn't some 00:07:48.040 --> 00:07:50.699 sudden surge in authentic religious piety. Right. 00:07:50.779 --> 00:07:53.899 It was a symptom of a profound collapse in civilizational 00:07:53.899 --> 00:07:57.009 confidence. When the Islamic world collided with 00:07:57.009 --> 00:07:59.670 Western colonial modernity, when they faced the 00:07:59.670 --> 00:08:02.110 military, economic, and cultural dominance of 00:08:02.110 --> 00:08:05.009 the British and the French, the trauma was immense. 00:08:05.410 --> 00:08:07.370 I mean, it must have been world shattering. Completely. 00:08:07.589 --> 00:08:09.610 Internal reformist movements looked at their 00:08:09.610 --> 00:08:11.730 own complex swaying traditions and they felt 00:08:11.730 --> 00:08:13.410 ashamed. Because it didn't look like Europe. 00:08:13.550 --> 00:08:16.250 Exactly. They felt it looked backward or disorganized 00:08:16.250 --> 00:08:18.689 compared to the hyper -categorized rigid structures 00:08:18.689 --> 00:08:21.250 of the Victorian colonizers. So like you said, 00:08:21.269 --> 00:08:24.350 they poured the concrete. Suddenly. Ambiguity, 00:08:24.350 --> 00:08:27.149 that beautiful, necessary sway of the bridge 00:08:27.149 --> 00:08:29.930 came to feel like a mortal threat to their very 00:08:29.930 --> 00:08:32.710 survival. But pouring concrete over a suspension 00:08:32.710 --> 00:08:35.289 bridge doesn't actually make it stronger. It 00:08:35.289 --> 00:08:38.230 just replaces flexibility with certainty. And 00:08:38.230 --> 00:08:40.929 certainty, when it is that absolute and defensive, 00:08:41.149 --> 00:08:44.230 is incredibly rigid. And what are the physics 00:08:44.230 --> 00:08:47.529 of a rigid structure? When it encounters a sudden 00:08:47.529 -->

00:08:50.750 opposing force. It snaps. It cannot sway. It 00:08:50.750 --> 00:08:53.889 cannot absorb the impact. It just shatters. Bauer 00:08:53.889 --> 00:08:56.710 calls this modern condition brittleness. Brittleness? 00:08:56.990 --> 00:08:59.490 Yes. We have moved from a culture of ambiguity 00:08:59.490 --> 00:09:02.450 to an ideology of brittleness. It is a mindset 00:09:02.450 --> 00:09:05.669 that has entirely lost the capacity to hold tension. 00:09:05.850 --> 00:09:07.490 Which brings us right back to that street in 00:09:07.490 --> 00:09:09.750 Berlin. It does. If we apply this historical 00:09:09.750 --> 00:09:12.429 diagnosis to the 21 -year -old attacker in that 00:09:12.429 --> 00:09:15.149 van, it completely changes how you have to view 00:09:15.149 --> 00:09:18.320 him. He isn't some ancient warrior of an unyielding 00:09:18.320 --> 00:09:20.759 faith. Not at all. He is the ultimate manifestation 00:09:20.759 --> 00:09:23.960 of this modern disease of brittleness. His ideology 00:09:23.960 --> 00:09:26.919 is so incredibly fragile that it literally shatters 00:09:26.919 --> 00:09:28.899 upon contact with difference. That's exactly 00:09:28.899 --> 00:09:31.179 what happened. He looks out through the windshield 00:09:31.179 --> 00:09:33.820 at a crowd of people at Christopher Street Day. 00:09:34.159 --> 00:09:37.809 People who are different. who represent a plurality 00:09:37.809 --> 00:09:40.450 of human existence, who don't fit into his concrete 00:09:40.450 --> 00:09:43.710 boxes, and his ideology cannot tolerate the tension 00:09:43.710 --> 00:09:46.529 of their mere existence. The anxiety of that 00:09:46.529 --> 00:09:49.429 ambiguity is just too much. Right. It's so overwhelming 00:09:49.429 --> 00:09:52.309 that his only psychological recourse is to try 00:09:52.309 --> 00:09:54.909 and destroy the source of the tension. And that 00:09:54.909 --> 00:09:57.330 is the profound tragedy at the center of this 00:09:57.330 --> 00:10:00.549 narrative. He believes with every fiber of his 00:10:00.549 --> 00:10:03.330 being that he is acting in the name of a 1400 00:10:03.330 --> 00:10:07.029 year old tradition. But he's not. No, he is entirely 00:10:07.029 --> 00:10:09.590 cut off from it. He has inherited the frantic 00:10:09.590 --> 00:10:12.149 brittleness of the modern era, the trauma of 00:10:12.149 --> 00:10:15.330 that civilizational loss of nerve, not the capaciousness 00:10:15.330 --> 00:10:17.830 of the classical Islamic tradition. He has no 00:10:17.830 --> 00:10:20.230 share in it. None. He has absolutely no share 00:10:20.230 --> 00:10:22.909 in that older Islam that could hold contradiction 00:10:22.909 --> 00:10:26.120 as a mode of meaning. He is a modern man. dealing 00:10:26.120 --> 00:10:28.460 with a modern anxiety using modern violence. 00:10:28.820 --> 00:10:32.000 Okay, but if classical Islam wasn't this rigid 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:34.840 system of concrete laws and punitive certainty, 00:10:35.059 --> 00:10:37.600 we have to establish what it actually was. Yes, 00:10:37.659 --> 00:10:39.860 we need to fill in that blank. Because you can't 00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:41.799 just say, oh, it was ambiguous and leave it there, 00:10:41.860 --> 00:10:44.740 right? What did that lived reality actually look 00:10:44.740 --> 00:10:46.600 like for the millions of people who inhabited 00:10:46.600 --> 00:10:49.220 it? The sources are really adamant that if we 00:10:49.220 --> 00:10:52.299 only look at the legal rulings, we are completely 00:10:52.299 --> 00:10:56.000 missing the reality of the civilization. To understand 00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:58.700 the texture of that lived reality, we have to 00:10:58.700 --> 00:11:01.740 turn to Shahab Ahmed's monumental work, What 00:11:01.740 --> 00:11:04.259 Is Islam? Such an incredible book. It really 00:11:04.259 --> 00:11:07.220 is. Ahmed's core thesis is a direct challenge 00:11:07.220 --> 00:11:10.159 to how we study religion today. He insists that 00:11:10.159 --> 00:11:13.460 we cannot reduce Islam merely to fiqh. And fiqh 00:11:13.460 --> 00:11:15.639 is the legal system, right? Yes, fiqh is the 00:11:15.639 --> 00:11:18.840 Islamic jurisprudence, the rigid yes and no of 00:11:18.840 --> 00:11:21.440 the legal scholars. If you only read the law 00:11:21.440 --> 00:11:23.639 books, you get a highly distorted view of the 00:11:23.639 --> 00:11:26.299 society. Like judging modern America only by 00:11:26.299 --> 00:11:29.460 reading the tax code. Exactly. To correct this, 00:11:29.500 --> 00:11:31.399 he introduces this concept of the Balkans to 00:11:31.399 --> 00:11:33.639 Bengal complex. When I first read that phrase, 00:11:33.759 --> 00:11:36.019 the Balkans to Bengal complex, my mind immediately 00:11:36.019 --> 00:11:39.019 just went to a map. The geography of it is staggering. 00:11:39.340 --> 00:11:42.159 It covers a massive area. We are talking about 00:11:42.159 --> 00:11:44.940 a continuous swath of humanity stretching from 00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:47.200 Eastern Europe down through the Middle East, 00:11:47.220 --> 00:11:49.960 across Central Asia and deep into the Indian 00:11:49.960 --> 00:11:52.590 subcontinent. But Ahmed isn't just drawing a 00:11:52.590 --> 00:11:55.009 map, is he? No, not at all. He's trying to describe 00:11:55.009 --> 00:11:58.350 an atmosphere. Exactly. He is mapping a vast, 00:11:58.450 --> 00:12:01.669 interconnected cultural and psychological sphere 00:12:01.669 --> 00:12:04.710 that existed roughly from the 14th to the 19th 00:12:04.710 --> 00:12:07.470 centuries. And Ahmed shows that for the vast 00:12:07.470 --> 00:12:10.070 majority of Muslims across this massive region, 00:12:10.389 --> 00:12:13.690 Islam was not lived as a strict adherence to 00:12:13.690 --> 00:12:16.330 a list of rules. What was it then? It was lived 00:12:16.330 --> 00:12:20.009 as a vast capacious and completely self -contradicting 00:12:20.009 --> 00:12:23.169 exploration of meaning. The culture

was intensely 00:12:23.169 --> 00:12:25.669 comfortable with holding seemingly opposed ideas 00:12:25.669 --> 00:12:28.549 in the exact same space. And the sources give 00:12:28.549 --> 00:12:31.230 us such vivid, almost jarring examples of what 00:12:31.230 --> 00:12:32.809 this looked like on the ground. We aren't just 00:12:32.809 --> 00:12:34.909 talking about abstract theological debates in 00:12:34.909 --> 00:12:36.750 a university somewhere. Right. It was part of 00:12:36.750 --> 00:12:38.950 daily life. We are talking about societies that 00:12:38.950 --> 00:12:41.830 actively produced and celebrated wine poetry. 00:12:42.129 --> 00:12:44.429 Which goes directly against the legal prohibition 00:12:44.429 --> 00:12:47.399 of alcohol. Exactly. You had deep philosophical 00:12:47.399 --> 00:12:50.500 traditions that questioned the very nature of 00:12:50.500 --> 00:12:53.480 revelation. They commissioned stunning figural 00:12:53.480 --> 00:12:56.899 paintings and miniatures, even though some legalists 00:12:56.899 --> 00:12:59.659 strictly forbade the depiction of the human form. 00:12:59.879 --> 00:13:01.879 Yeah, the art is a perfect example of that contradiction. 00:13:02.159 --> 00:13:05.480 And you had the profound, ecstatic Sufi contemplation 00:13:05.480 --> 00:13:08.259 of beauty existing right alongside the rigid 00:13:08.259 --> 00:13:11.179 law. And very often, those two things were in 00:13:11.179 --> 00:13:13.740 open public tension with one another. And the 00:13:13.740 --> 00:13:16.120 crucial point on... makes is that to be Muslim 00:13:16.120 --> 00:13:19.620 in this context was to inhabit that very tension. 00:13:19.899 --> 00:13:21.960 So it wasn't a flaw in the system. No, it was 00:13:21.960 --> 00:13:24.200 a system. It wasn't about choosing the law over 00:13:24.200 --> 00:13:26.539 the poetry or the philosophy over the law. It 00:13:26.539 --> 00:13:28.159 was about living within the friction between 00:13:28.159 --> 00:13:30.759 them. That is so hard for us to grasp today. 00:13:30.980 --> 00:13:33.500 It is. And to understand the emotional depth 00:13:33.500 --> 00:13:36.139 of this, our sources bring in Anne -Marie Schimmel's 00:13:36.139 --> 00:13:39.370 classic text, Mystical Dimensions of Islam. A 00:13:39.370 --> 00:13:42.590 beautiful book. Yes. Schimmel maps out a world 00:13:42.590 --> 00:13:44.590 where the fundamental orientation of the faith 00:13:44.590 --> 00:13:46.990 wasn't about avoiding punishment. It was about 00:13:46.990 --> 00:13:49.809 the path toward union with the divine. This section 00:13:49.809 --> 00:13:52.370 of the reading completely dismantled my preconceptions, 00:13:52.429 --> 00:13:55.809 because when we think of the greatest, most universally 00:13:55.809 --> 00:13:59.210 revered voices of Islamic civilization, the figures 00:13:59.210 --> 00:14:01.929 who are still quoted today, like Ibn Arabi, the 00:14:01.929 --> 00:14:04.309 brilliant philosopher mystic. Right. Or Rumi, 00:14:04.490 --> 00:14:06.690 whose poetry is still a bestseller all over the 00:14:06.690 --> 00:14:10.409 world today. Or Hafiz or Rabia of Basra. The 00:14:10.409 --> 00:14:12.570 heavyweights of the tradition. Yeah. These towering 00:14:12.570 --> 00:14:14.610 figures, the architects of the Islamic imagination. 00:14:14.970 --> 00:14:18.269 They did not speak the language of rigid punitive. 00:14:18.279 --> 00:14:20.480 law. No, they didn't. They spoke the language 00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:24.000 of love. Their entire vocabulary was built on 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:27.279 longing, heartbreak, and the absolute annihilation 00:14:27.279 --> 00:14:29.960 of the self in the presence of God. We have to 00:14:29.960 --> 00:14:32.120 pause and consider the mechanism of how this 00:14:32.120 --> 00:14:35.360 changes a society. In this mystical dimension, 00:14:35.820 --> 00:14:38.220 the human heart's yearning for beauty wasn't 00:14:38.220 --> 00:14:40.580 seen as a worldly distraction. It wasn't a sin. 00:14:40.740 --> 00:14:42.820 No, it wasn't a temptation pulling you away from 00:14:42.820 --> 00:14:45.179 religion. It was the very engine of religion 00:14:45.179 --> 00:14:48.309 itself. The mysticism provided the emotional 00:14:48.309 --> 00:14:50.909 vocabulary for the entire civilization I really 00:14:50.909 --> 00:14:53.970 want to press on this because it runs so completely 00:14:53.970 --> 00:14:57.090 counter to the puritanical narrative we are fed 00:14:57.090 --> 00:15:00.409 today. You're saying that the intense human desire, 00:15:00.649 --> 00:15:03.009 the yearning we feel when we encounter profound 00:15:03.009 --> 00:15:05.629 beauty, wasn't viewed as a sin that had to be 00:15:05.629 --> 00:15:08.549 repressed and locked away, but rather as the 00:15:08.549 --> 00:15:11.269 actual vehicle that drives a person closer to 00:15:11.269 --> 00:15:14.409 the divine. Yes, exactly. And the mechanics of 00:15:14.409 --> 00:15:16.789 how they articulated this are fascinating. It 00:15:16.789 --> 00:15:18.730 is most beautifully illustrated in the Persian 00:15:18.730 --> 00:15:22.149 poetic tradition through the concept of the Shahid. 00:15:22.330 --> 00:15:24.370 The word translates to the witness, right? Correct. 00:15:25.189 --> 00:15:28.309 In this poetic and spiritual tradition, gazing 00:15:28.309 --> 00:15:30.889 upon a beautiful human face could literally be 00:15:30.889 --> 00:15:33.889 an act of spiritual contemplation. That is amazing. 00:15:34.190 --> 00:15:36.529 Yeah. The physical beauty of a human being, the 00:15:36.529 --> 00:15:39.629 symmetry, the grace, was viewed as a physical 00:15:39.629 --> 00:15:42.990 trace, a reflection of the ultimate unseeable 00:15:42.990 --> 00:15:45.409 divine beauty. So by loving the physical, you 00:15:45.409 --> 00:15:48.690 are witnessing the divine. Exactly. The tradition 00:15:48.690 --> 00:15:51.289 understood something incredibly profound about 00:15:51.289 --> 00:15:55.440 human

psychology. They recognized that the intense, 00:15:55.519 --> 00:15:58.679 earthly, erotic longing to be completely undone 00:15:58.679 --> 00:16:01.080 by love, that feeling of losing your mind and 00:16:01.080 --> 00:16:03.399 your ego because you were so captivated by another 00:16:03.399 --> 00:16:06.000 person. Right, that overwhelming feeling. Yes, 00:16:06.019 --> 00:16:08.659 that feeling is the closest analogy we have as 00:16:08.659 --> 00:16:11.440 human beings to the soul's longing for God. They 00:16:11.440 --> 00:16:13.279 did not flinch from the erotics of the soul. 00:16:13.419 --> 00:16:16.320 They harnessed it. But wait, how does a society 00:16:16.320 --> 00:16:19.000 organized around that kind of intense poetic 00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:22.399 vulnerability actually survive? That's the logical 00:16:22.399 --> 00:16:24.639 modern question. Because modern fundamentalists 00:16:24.639 --> 00:16:27.220 argue that you need rigid laws to make a civilization 00:16:27.220 --> 00:16:30.379 strong. The essay seems to argue the exact opposite. 00:16:30.679 --> 00:16:33.279 It suggests that a civilization organized around 00:16:33.279 --> 00:16:36.009 love. beauty and the profound longing of the 00:16:36.009 --> 00:16:39.009 human heart is actually infinitely stronger and 00:16:39.009 --> 00:16:41.529 more resilient than the brittle ideology of the 00:16:41.529 --> 00:16:43.850 attacker in the van. And the historical record 00:16:43.850 --> 00:16:46.909 completely backs that up. This suppleness, this 00:16:46.909 --> 00:16:49.190 emotional and cultural flexibility is actually 00:16:49.190 --> 00:16:52.070 the secret mechanism behind how Islam became 00:16:52.070 --> 00:16:54.110 a global religion. Because it wasn't just conquest. 00:16:54.590 --> 00:16:58.330 Exactly. There is this pervasive modern myth. 00:16:58.909 --> 00:17:00.970 often repeated in Western political discourse, 00:17:01.190 --> 00:17:04.190 that Islam spread primarily at the point of a 00:17:04.190 --> 00:17:07.630 sword, that it was an endless wave of violent, 00:17:07.730 --> 00:17:10.730 top -down military conquest. Right, the whole 00:17:10.730 --> 00:17:13.609 convert or die narrative. Yes. But when you look 00:17:13.609 --> 00:17:16.450 at the historical texts, the mechanics of its 00:17:16.450 --> 00:17:19.150 expansion were entirely different. The faith 00:17:19.150 --> 00:17:21.650 spread along trade routes. It spread through 00:17:21.650 --> 00:17:24.109 the lodges of the Sufi mystics. The sources bring 00:17:24.109 --> 00:17:25.970 in Richard Eaton's study of the Bengal frontier 00:17:25.970 --> 00:17:28.329 as like the perfect case study for this mechanism. 00:17:28.650 --> 00:17:31.650 When Islam moved into Bengal, it wasn't a conquering 00:17:31.650 --> 00:17:33.910 army forcing peasants to convert under threat 00:17:33.910 --> 00:17:36.529 of death. Not at all. Eaton shows how it took 00:17:36.529 --> 00:17:40.130 root through slow agrarian settlement. You

had 00:17:40.130 --> 00:17:43.109 these mystics known as peers. and holy men who 00:17:43.109 --> 00:17:45.849 went out into the uncleared forests. They physically 00:17:45.849 --> 00:17:47.930 wove themselves into the local landscape. They 00:17:47.930 --> 00:17:49.890 did the hard work. Yeah, they helped clear the 00:17:49.890 --> 00:17:52.289 land. They established local shrines. They became 00:17:52.289 --> 00:17:54.910 mediators in local disputes. They integrated 00:17:54.910 --> 00:17:57.470 Islamic cosmology with the local agrarian cycle. 00:17:57.809 --> 00:18:00.750 And we see this exact same mechanism replicated 00:18:00.750 --> 00:18:03.549 across the globe, from the sub -Saharan cultures 00:18:03.549 --> 00:18:06.250 of West Africa all the way to the island networks 00:18:06.250 --> 00:18:10.410 of the Indonesian archipelago. Islam moved with 00:18:10.410 --> 00:18:13.039 merchants and Sufis. And because it was so flexible, 00:18:13.180 --> 00:18:16.240 right? Yes. Because it was not a brittle, rigid 00:18:16.240 --> 00:18:19.599 monolith, it had the capacity to adapt. It could 00:18:19.599 --> 00:18:22.779 absorb local traditions. It translated its core 00:18:22.779 --> 00:18:25.099 metaphysical truths into a thousand different 00:18:25.099 --> 00:18:27.819 local idioms. Which a rigid system just can't 00:18:27.819 --> 00:18:30.779 do. A brittle, rigid ideology cannot do that. 00:18:31.019 --> 00:18:33.940 If you are rigid, your only tool for expansion 00:18:33.940 --> 00:18:37.190 is conquest and enforcement. If the local culture 00:18:37.190 --> 00:18:39.690 doesn't fit your concrete box, you have to smash 00:18:39.690 --> 00:18:42.349 the culture. But a supple, confident faith can 00:18:42.349 --> 00:18:45.230 cross the globe by invitation, adaptation and 00:18:45.230 --> 00:18:47.710 integration. Okay, so this brings us to what 00:18:47.710 --> 00:18:50.230 the author of the essay openly admits is the 00:18:50.230 --> 00:18:52.049 hardest part of the conversation. And honestly, 00:18:52.210 --> 00:18:53.910 it is the most crucial part for you listening 00:18:53.910 --> 00:18:56.670 right now because it forces us to confront our 00:18:56.670 --> 00:18:59.589 own deeply held modern assumptions about identity. 00:18:59.849 --> 00:19:02.710 It's a challenging topic. It is. If this classical 00:19:02.710 --> 00:19:05.650 Islamic world was so capacious, so comfortable 00:19:05.650 --> 00:19:08.089 with ambiguity, and so deeply invested in the 00:19:08.089 --> 00:19:11.680 poetry of human desire, well... How did it actually 00:19:11.680 --> 00:19:14.240 govern sexuality? Right. Because the modern contrast 00:19:14.240 --> 00:19:17.079 is so stark. Exactly. Because today, the clash 00:19:17.079 --> 00:19:20.900 between modern Islamism and LGBTQ identity is 00:19:20.900 --> 00:19:23.619 presented as absolute, like a war of annihilation. 00:19:23.859 --> 00:19:26.400 This is the pivot point of the entire deep dive. 00:19:26.480 --> 00:19:28.559 And we have to tread very carefully here. We 00:19:28.559 --> 00:19:31.200 must rely strictly on historical facts, resisting 00:19:31.200 --> 00:19:33.720 both modern progressive attempts to retroactively 00:19:33.720 --> 00:19:37.519 find pride parades in the 16th century and conservative 00:19:37.519 --> 00:19:39.819 polemics that project modern homophobia backward 00:19:39.819 --> 00:19:41.630 in time. We have to look at what was actually 00:19:41.630 --> 00:19:44.150 there. Exactly. To do this, the essay relies 00:19:44.150 --> 00:19:46.990 heavily on Khaled al -Ruayhib's essential study 00:19:46.990 --> 00:19:49.750 before homosexuality in the Arab Islamic world, 00:19:49.930 --> 00:19:53.890 1500 to 1800. Okay. And the central, undeniable, 00:19:53.890 --> 00:19:55.910 heavily documented premise of his research is 00:19:55.910 --> 00:19:59.329 this. The modern Western category of homosexuality, 00:19:59.329 --> 00:20:02.049 and along with it, the demand for a state -recognized 00:20:02.049 --> 00:20:04.630 sexual identity, did not exist in the classical 00:20:04.630 --> 00:20:07.619 Islamic world. And the essay is incredibly precise 00:20:07.619 --> 00:20:10.680 about the mechanics of this absence. This wasn't 00:20:10.680 --> 00:20:12.599 a case where people were just heavily repressed, 00:20:12.660 --> 00:20:14.720 hiding in the shadows and afraid to speak its 00:20:14.720 --> 00:20:17.450 name. No, it wasn't the closet. Right. It wasn't 00:20:17.450 --> 00:20:19.930 a silence born of fear or the threat of the secret 00:20:19.930 --> 00:20:23.430 police. It was the literal absence of the conceptual 00:20:23.430 --> 00:20:26.309 category. The concept simply wasn't there. The 00:20:26.309 --> 00:20:29.609 idea of the homosexual as a unified, defining 00:20:29.609 --> 00:20:32.269 psychological identity simply had not been invented. 00:20:32.609 --> 00:20:35.730 What Elroheb does so brilliantly is unpack the 00:20:35.730 --> 00:20:39.589 profound differences in how that culture categorized 00:20:39.589 --> 00:20:42.130 human behavior compared to how we do it today. 00:20:42.680 --> 00:20:45.400 He shows that pre -modern Arab Islamic culture 00:20:45.400 --> 00:20:48.140 made very sharp distinctions between behaviors 00:20:48.140 --> 00:20:50.920 and feelings that our modern world fuses together 00:20:50.920 --> 00:20:53.799 into a single, inescapable identity. We really 00:20:53.799 --> 00:20:55.400 need to break down those distinctions because 00:20:55.400 --> 00:20:57.119 this is where the modern mind really struggles 00:20:57.119 --> 00:20:59.119 to comprehend the past. We want to put it in 00:20:59.119 --> 00:21:01.500 our boxes. We do. So what were the different 00:21:01.500 --> 00:21:04.339 categories they used to map this territory of 00:21:04.339 --> 00:21:07.220 desire? El -Ruwayhib outlines a tripartite distinction. 00:21:07.599 --> 00:21:10.460 Okay, three parts. First... there was the passionate 00:21:10.460 -->

00:21:13.859 often chaste love of a beautiful youth this was 00:21:13.859 --> 00:21:16.980 not hidden it was celebrated openly often in 00:21:16.980 --> 00:21:20.420 exquisite poetry by incredibly pious respectable 00:21:20.420 --> 00:21:23.440 and even married men it was seen as a testament 00:21:23.440 --> 00:21:26.220 to the refinement of one's soul so having these 00:21:26.220 --> 00:21:30.250 feelings made you refined not a sinner yes Second, 00:21:30.410 --> 00:21:32.509 there was the general aesthetic appreciation 00:21:32.509 --> 00:21:34.410 of male beauty, which we already touched on with 00:21:34.410 --> 00:21:36.910 the concept of the Shaheed. The culture was obsessed 00:21:36.910 --> 00:21:38.829 with the aesthetics of the male form. Right. 00:21:38.950 --> 00:21:41.150 And the third category. The third category was 00:21:41.150 --> 00:21:45.170 the specific physical sexual act of liwa, which 00:21:45.170 --> 00:21:47.769 roughly translates as sodomy. And this is the 00:21:47.769 --> 00:21:50.529 crucial point. The jurists, the legal scholars 00:21:50.529 --> 00:21:53.069 absolutely did condemn the physical act of liwa. 00:21:53.210 --> 00:21:55.170 OK, stop right there. I really need to push back 00:21:55.170 --> 00:21:56.910 on this or at least play devil's advocate because 00:21:56.910 --> 00:21:58.769 I want to make sure the logic holds up. Go ahead. 00:21:59.339 --> 00:22:02.519 If the legal scholars strictly condemn the physical 00:22:02.519 --> 00:22:06.400 act, how did these highly respected, pious, religious 00:22:06.400 --> 00:22:09.559 scholars get away with publicly writing ardent, 00:22:09.559 --> 00:22:12.380 passionate love poetry to beautiful boys? It 00:22:12.380 --> 00:22:14.880 seems like a contradiction to us. Totally. Wouldn't 00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:16.839 a judge read that poem and say, aha, a confession, 00:22:17.119 --> 00:22:19.759 throw him in jail? How did a society reconcile 00:22:19.759 --> 00:22:22.099 the poetry with the law? You are looking at the 00:22:22.099 --> 00:22:25.000 past through the lens of modern post -Freudian 00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:27.700 psychology. Okay, explain that. You are assuming... 00:22:27.900 --> 00:22:31.579 that a poem about desire is proof of an underlying 00:22:31.579 --> 00:22:34.920 unified sexual identity that inevitably leads 00:22:34.920 --> 00:22:38.059 to a specific physical act. The classical jurists 00:22:38.059 --> 00:22:39.720 did not think that way. They didn't connect the 00:22:39.720 --> 00:22:42.480 two? No. They did not attach the sin to the feeling 00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:45.460 of love or to the aesthetic appreciation or to 00:22:45.460 --> 00:22:48.859 the person's soul. The sin... if the jurors were 00:22:48.859 --> 00:22:50.680 going to invoke it, was attached exclusively 00:22:50.680 --> 00:22:53.220 to the physical act itself. The act, not the 00:22:53.220 --> 00:22:56.119 thought. Exactly. And unless four eyewitnesses 00:22:56.119 --> 00:22:58.380 literally saw the act occurring, which is the 00:22:58.380 --> 00:23:00.859 impossibly high evidentiary bar set by Islamic 00:23:00.859 --> 00:23:04.519 law, there was no crime. Wow. So because the 00:23:04.519 --> 00:23:06.700 law was incredibly narrow and only focused on 00:23:06.700 --> 00:23:09.640 policing a very specific physical action, it 00:23:09.640 --> 00:23:12.039 accidentally, or perhaps intentionally, left 00:23:12.039 --> 00:23:14.759 this massive, unpoliced, imaginative space for 00:23:14.759 --> 00:23:17.400 the expression of same -sex desire. Precisely. 00:23:18.119 --> 00:23:20.460 The law's prohibition of a particular physical 00:23:20.460 --> 00:23:23.940 act simply never colonized the broader imaginative 00:23:23.940 --> 00:23:26.059 space of the culture. The bridge could still 00:23:26.059 --> 00:23:30.279 sway. Yes. The poetry, the yearning, the aesthetic 00:23:30.279 --> 00:23:33.240 appreciation, all of that flourished openly without 00:23:33.240 --> 00:23:36.099 contradicting a person's religious identity or 00:23:36.099 --> 00:23:39.269 destroying their social standing. A man could 00:23:39.269 --> 00:23:41.829 be a revered scholar of Islamic law, a devoted 00:23:41.829 --> 00:23:44.750 father, and the author of passionate poems to 00:23:44.750 --> 00:23:47.390 a young man. And his society did not see those 00:23:47.390 --> 00:23:49.690 things as a contradiction. They did not demand 00:23:49.690 --> 00:23:52.109 he choose a side. And the texts go even further 00:23:52.109 --> 00:23:53.849 when it comes to the concept of gender itself, 00:23:54.029 --> 00:23:56.309 showing that it wasn't just a rigid binary either. 00:23:56.529 --> 00:23:58.769 Right, which is another modern assumption. The 00:23:58.769 --> 00:24:01.630 sources cite Everett Rawson's work on the Mukanathun. 00:24:01.849 --> 00:24:03.789 I had honestly never heard this term before. 00:24:04.029 --> 00:24:06.390 Who were they and how did they fit into the society? 00:24:07.039 --> 00:24:09.619 The Mukanathun were gender -liminal figures in 00:24:09.619 --> 00:24:11.960 early Medina. Meaning they crossed gender boundaries? 00:24:12.480 --> 00:24:16.160 Yes. These were biological men who lived, dressed, 00:24:16.380 --> 00:24:18.960 and were socially received as something distinct 00:24:18.960 --> 00:24:22.099 from the standard masculine norm. They often 00:24:22.099 --> 00:24:24.839 occupied specific social roles, sometimes as 00:24:24.839 --> 00:24:27.299 matchmakers, musicians, or entertainers. Okay. 00:24:27.440 --> 00:24:29.900 And what is most historically significant about 00:24:29.900 --> 00:24:32.640 Rawson's work is that it proves these figures 00:24:32.640 --> 00:24:35.279 were present at the very origin of the Islamic 00:24:35.279 --> 00:24:38.319 community. They lived in Medina during the life 00:24:38.319 --> 00:24:40.740 of the Prophet Muhammad. So they weren't a later 00:24:40.740 --> 00:24:43.140 decadent addition, like some corruption of

the 00:24:43.140 --> 00:24:44.940 original faith. They were there at the genesis 00:24:44.940 --> 00:24:47.490 of the faith. Yes, they were. While their social 00:24:47.490 --> 00:24:49.569 status was sometimes debated or marginalized 00:24:49.569 --> 00:24:52.470 by later scholars, the undeniable fact of their 00:24:52.470 --> 00:24:55.210 visible presence in early Islamic history proves 00:24:55.210 --> 00:24:57.470 that the conceptualization of gender in early 00:24:57.470 --> 00:25:00.750 Islam was vastly more capacious, flexible, and 00:25:00.750 --> 00:25:04.269 complicated than modern polemicists on any side 00:25:04.269 --> 00:25:06.230 of the political spectrum are willing to admit. 00:25:06.450 --> 00:25:09.210 So let's look at the board for a second. We have 00:25:09.210 --> 00:25:12.430 this massive historically documented imaginative 00:25:12.430 --> 00:25:15.490 space for same -sex desire. We have a culture 00:25:15.490 --> 00:25:18.009 that completely separates acts from identity. 00:25:18.309 --> 00:25:20.769 We have gender liminal figures present at the 00:25:20.769 --> 00:25:23.170 birth of the community. We have revered scholars 00:25:23.170 --> 00:25:26.650 writing love poems to men. All historical facts. 00:25:26.849 --> 00:25:29.670 Which begs the million -dollar question. If that 00:25:29.670 --> 00:25:32.230 was the lived reality for centuries, how on earth 00:25:32.230 --> 00:25:35.710 did we end up with the rigid, violent, exclusionary 00:25:35.710 --> 00:25:39.109 Puritanism of the Berlin attacker? Where did 00:25:39.109 --> 00:25:41.569 this extreme brittleness regarding sexuality 00:25:41.569 --> 00:25:44.470 actually come from? To answer that, the essay 00:25:44.470 --> 00:25:47.470 pivots to the historical research of Afsaneh 00:25:47.470 --> 00:25:50.269 Najmabadi, who studies Iranian modernity, and 00:25:50.269 --> 00:25:52.250 Drozhievi, who studies the Ottoman Middle East. 00:25:52.349 --> 00:25:54.410 Two incredible scholars. They both track the 00:25:54.410 --> 00:25:56.349 mechanism. of a massive historical disruption. 00:25:56.589 --> 00:25:59.549 They document how that older, fluid, capacious 00:25:59.549 --> 00:26:02.170 economy of desire was systematically and deliberately 00:26:02.170 --> 00:26:04.910 heteronormalized. Heteronormalized. Yes. It's 00:26:04.910 --> 00:26:07.569 forcibly flattened into the rigid modern binary 00:26:07.569 --> 00:26:09.730 of hetero versus homo. And this flattening happened 00:26:09.730 --> 00:26:11.750 under the immense crushing pressure of Western 00:26:11.750 --> 00:26:14.009 modernity during the 19th and 20th centuries. 00:26:14.250 --> 00:26:17.049 How exactly did that happen? I mean, was it forced 00:26:17.049 --> 00:26:19.869 on them by colonial armies or did they do it 00:26:19.869 --> 00:26:22.710 to themselves? It was a complex mixture of both, 00:26:22.769 --> 00:26:25.509 driven by the internalization of the colonizer's 00:26:25.509 --> 00:26:28.170 gaze. The colonizer's gaze. Yeah. As European 00:26:28.170 --> 00:26:30.829 powers began to dominate the Middle East militarily 00:26:30.829 --> 00:26:34.029 and economically, European travelers, missionaries, 00:26:34.029 --> 00:26:36.509 and colonial administrators encountered this 00:26:36.509 --> 00:26:39.210 fluid sexuality and the ubiquitous homoerotic 00:26:39.210 --> 00:26:43.390 poetry. And the Victorians were horrified. Well, 00:26:43.410 --> 00:26:45.950 yeah, they were Victorians. Exactly. They labeled 00:26:45.950 --> 00:26:49.589 the Islamic world as decadent, perverse, and 00:26:49.589 --> 00:26:52.730 effeminate. They used this supposed moral decay 00:26:52.730 --> 00:26:55.549 as a primary justification for their colonial 00:26:55.549 --> 00:26:58.349 rule. They essentially said, you are weak and 00:26:58.349 --> 00:27:00.690 conquerable because you are sexually deviant. 00:27:00.809 --> 00:27:02.990 And the tragic part is the reformists within 00:27:02.990 --> 00:27:05.430 the Islamic world actually believed them. Exactly. 00:27:05.589 --> 00:27:08.109 When Ottoman and Qajar elites looked for ways 00:27:08.109 --> 00:27:10.089 to modernize and resist European domination, 00:27:10.529 --> 00:27:13.109 they didn't just import European telegraphs and 00:27:13.109 --> 00:27:14.849 military tactics. They imported the culture. 00:27:15.289 --> 00:27:18.150 They imported European Victorian morality. They 00:27:18.150 --> 00:27:20.650 rewrote their penal codes based on French and 00:27:20.650 --> 00:27:23.349 British models. They literally purged their own 00:27:23.349 --> 00:27:26.109 classical poetry, translating and editing it 00:27:26.109 --> 00:27:28.950 to erase the male pronouns. Erasing their own 00:27:28.950 --> 00:27:31.490 history. Yes, frantically trying to hide their 00:27:31.490 --> 00:27:34.430 own history of same -sex desire just to appear 00:27:34.430 --> 00:27:37.190 civilized in the eyes of London and Paris. They 00:27:37.190 --> 00:27:38.910 poured the concrete over their own suspension 00:27:38.910 --> 00:27:42.269 bridge. This is the ultimate tragic irony of 00:27:42.269 --> 00:27:52.839 this entire deep dive. It really does. Right. 00:28:07.119 --> 00:28:16.480 It is a... profound, almost unbearable irony. 00:28:16.740 --> 00:28:19.500 The men driving these vans, believing they are 00:28:19.500 --> 00:28:21.380 striking a righteous blow against the corrupting 00:28:21.380 --> 00:28:24.119 influence of the modern West, are without knowing 00:28:24.119 --> 00:28:27.140 it, the most thoroughly westernized men in the 00:28:27.140 --> 00:28:29.559 room. That is just wild to wrap your head around. 00:28:29.759 --> 00:28:32.460 They aren't defending classical Islam. They are 00:28:32.460 --> 00:28:34.740 defending the ghost of Victorian Puritanism. 00:28:34.900 --> 00:28:37.859 They have internalized the moral panic and the 00:28:37.859 --> 00:28:41.319 rigid binaries of their former colonizers, and 00:28:41.319 --> 00:28:43.500

they have tragically mistaken those colonial 00:28:43.500 --> 00:28:46.859 imports for ancient divine law. That is just 00:28:46.859 --> 00:28:49.460 a staggering realization. They took the concrete 00:28:49.460 --> 00:28:52.279 that the colonial engineers poured over the suspension 00:28:52.279 --> 00:28:54.660 bridge, forgot there was ever a bridge underneath 00:28:54.660 --> 00:28:57.140 it, and convinced themselves the concrete is 00:28:57.140 --> 00:28:59.119 sacred. That is exactly the mechanism of their 00:28:59.119 --> 00:29:01.940 radicalization. Now, um... We need to pause here 00:29:01.940 --> 00:29:04.480 and make something very explicit. Yes. The argument 00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:06.940 here is incredibly provocative. And whether you 00:29:06.940 --> 00:29:09.380 agree with it or not, it forces us to look at 00:29:09.380 --> 00:29:12.059 how Western liberalism operates on a global scale. 00:29:12.900 --> 00:29:15.240 Now, we are strictly exploring the historical 00:29:15.240 --> 00:29:17.660 and sociological arguments laid out in our source 00:29:17.660 --> 00:29:20.730 texts. We aren't taking sides here. Right. We 00:29:20.730 --> 00:29:23.269 aren't endorsing a political stance, but it is 00:29:23.269 --> 00:29:25.750 vital to explore this next section impartially 00:29:25.750 --> 00:29:28.109 because while the sources offer a devastating 00:29:28.109 --> 00:29:31.009 critique of modern Islamists, they also offer 00:29:31.009 --> 00:29:33.150 a profound and potentially very uncomfortable 00:29:33.150 --> 00:29:36.950 critique of the modern Western approach to sexual 00:29:36.950 --> 00:29:39.519 identity. This brings us to the work of Joseph 00:29:39.519 --> 00:29:42.519 Massad, specifically his highly debated book 00:29:42.519 --> 00:29:45.400 Desiring Arabs. A very controversial text. It 00:29:45.400 --> 00:29:48.299 is. Massad offers a fierce critique of what he 00:29:48.299 --> 00:29:51.339 provocatively calls the gay international, which 00:29:51.339 --> 00:29:53.799 is his term for the global, heavily Western -funded 00:29:53.799 --> 00:29:56.940 campaign to universalize the modern Western framework 00:29:56.940 --> 00:29:59.200 of gay identity and export it to the rest of 00:29:59.200 --> 00:30:01.220 the world. Right, because if we just spent the 00:30:01.220 --> 00:30:03.619 last half hour establishing that the classical 00:30:03.619 --> 00:30:05.880 Islamic world had a completely different, highly 00:30:05.880 --> 00:30:08.180 nuanced way of organizing desire and identity, 00:30:08.380 --> 00:30:11.420 then taking a modern Western template and forcing 00:30:11.420 --> 00:30:13.779 it onto other societies might not be the universal 00:30:13.779 --> 00:30:16.480 act of liberation it is often framed as. Exactly. 00:30:16.700 --> 00:30:19.180 Mossad argues that imposing this Western template 00:30:19.180 --> 00:30:21.920 onto societies that historically never organized 00:30:21.920 --> 00:30:23.900 their intimate lives around confessional identities 00:30:23.900 --> 00:30:27.400 causes real, tangible damage. Let's look at the 00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:29.740 mechanics of why that is. We have to examine 00:30:29.740 --> 00:30:31.740 the mechanics of Western liberalism to understand 00:30:31.740 --> 00:30:35.079 why. The Western demand, the demand that you 00:30:35.079 --> 00:30:37.660 must name yourself, that you must publicly declare 00:30:37.660 --> 00:30:40.420 your sexual identity before the state and society 00:30:40.420 --> 00:30:43.200 to be considered authentic, grows out of a very 00:30:43.200 --> 00:30:46.920 specific European cultural soil. Right, the Enlightenment. 00:30:47.079 --> 00:30:49.779 Yes, it centers entirely on the concept of the 00:30:49.779 --> 00:30:52.849 sovereign individual. It is the post -enlightenment 00:30:52.849 --> 00:30:56.549 conviction that the self is only truly free when 00:30:56.549 --> 00:30:59.150 it is publicly categorized, legally recognized 00:30:59.150 --> 00:31:01.710 by the state and protected by rights. It's the 00:31:01.710 --> 00:31:03.789 core philosophy behind the concept of coming 00:31:03.789 --> 00:31:06.009 out, isn't it? The idea that if you don't publicly 00:31:06.009 --> 00:31:08.410 declare your identity, you are inherently living 00:31:08.410 --> 00:31:11.250 a lie or suffering under oppression and that 00:31:11.250 --> 00:31:14.069 public visibility is the only path to true freedom. 00:31:14.230 --> 00:31:16.890 Exactly. But Mossad points out that this is simply 00:31:16.890 --> 00:31:18.930 not the axis around which Islamic civilization 00:31:18.930 --> 00:31:21.089 turned. They had a totally different center. 00:31:21.250 --> 00:31:24.410 The classical Islamic anthropology, its understanding 00:31:24.410 --> 00:31:27.210 of what a human being is, was completely different. 00:31:27.410 --> 00:31:30.349 It did not center the sovereign individual. It 00:31:30.349 --> 00:31:33.109 centered the ummah, the collective community. 00:31:33.329 --> 00:31:36.390 In that historical framework, a person's inner 00:31:36.390 --> 00:31:39.029 life, their private desires, and their intimate 00:31:39.029 --> 00:31:41.769 actions were strictly a matter between themselves 00:31:41.769 --> 00:31:44.650 and God. The realm of the private was fiercely 00:31:44.650 --> 00:31:46.809 protected? It was almost sacred. It was neither 00:31:46.809 --> 00:31:48.690 the business of the state nor the business of 00:31:48.690 --> 00:31:51.369 the mosque to interrogate your inner life. God 00:31:51.369 --> 00:31:53.849 was the only judge of the unseen. So forcing 00:31:53.849 --> 00:31:56.970 visibility actually changes the system. By introducing 00:31:56.970 --> 00:31:59.069 the Western demand for public confession and 00:31:59.069 --> 00:32:01.990 state recognition, Mossad argues that the gay 00:32:01.990 --> 00:32:04.930 international actually incites a violent backlash. 00:32:05.309 --> 00:32:07.630 How so? By forcing people to publicly

identify 00:32:07.630 --> 00:32:09.630 with a category that local authorities associate 00:32:09.630 --> 00:32:12.529 with Western cultural imperialism, it forces 00:32:12.529 --> 00:32:15.109 the state to police behaviors that, historically, 00:32:15.450 --> 00:32:18.069 it would have simply ignored under the veil of 00:32:18.069 --> 00:32:20.750 discretion. So it was a culture of profound discretion. 00:32:21.109 --> 00:32:23.430 But the expert analysis in our sources points 00:32:23.430 --> 00:32:25.490 out that this discretion is a double edged sword. 00:32:25.630 --> 00:32:27.950 Right. It's not exactly a perfect utopia. No, 00:32:28.009 --> 00:32:31.589 it absolutely cut both ways. And we cannot romanticize 00:32:31.589 --> 00:32:34.930 the past. Classical Islam was not some progressive 00:32:34.930 --> 00:32:38.230 liberal utopia that celebrated sexual minorities 00:32:38.230 --> 00:32:40.910 in the way a modern pride parade does. Right. 00:32:41.009 --> 00:32:43.349 They weren't marching in the streets. No, it 00:32:43.349 --> 00:32:45.470 did not celebrate them as a distinct, empowered 00:32:45.470 --> 00:32:49.329 identity group. but crucially because it never 00:32:49.329 --> 00:32:51.549 demanded the confessional declaration of sexual 00:32:51.549 --> 00:32:54.869 identity it also never demanded the modern inquisition 00:32:54.869 --> 00:32:58.160 into it it did not celebrate but it also did 00:32:58.160 --> 00:33:00.759 not hunt. Consider what this means for our understanding 00:33:00.759 --> 00:33:03.839 of the Berlin attacker. It means that his obsession 00:33:03.839 --> 00:33:06.180 and the obsession of certain strains of contemporary 00:33:06.180 --> 00:33:10.180 political Islamism with policing, exposing, and 00:33:10.180 --> 00:33:13.579 violently excluding sexual minorities, none of 00:33:13.579 --> 00:33:15.460 that is the recovery of an authentic Islamic 00:33:15.460 --> 00:33:17.759 past. Not at all. The classical scholars wouldn't 00:33:17.759 --> 00:33:19.900 even recognize his behavior. It is a completely 00:33:19.900 --> 00:33:22.599 modern pathology dressed up in old clothes. It's 00:33:22.599 --> 00:33:24.599 that brittle certainty Bauer described forged 00:33:24.599 --> 00:33:27.109 in the trauma of the 19th century. turned into 00:33:27.109 --> 00:33:30.490 a deadly weapon in the 21st. The violence is 00:33:30.490 --> 00:33:33.210 the tragic end result of losing civilization 00:33:33.210 --> 00:33:36.359 confidence. When a culture loses the confidence 00:33:36.359 --> 00:33:38.599 to let the inner life remain between the individual 00:33:38.599 --> 00:33:41.220 and the divine, it panics. It has to control 00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:43.759 everything. Exactly. It demands conformity, demands 00:33:43.759 --> 00:33:46.500 to see everything, categorize everything, and 00:33:46.500 --> 00:33:49.460 violently police everything that doesn't fit 00:33:49.460 --> 00:33:52.180 the newly imported concrete mold. So hearing 00:33:52.180 --> 00:33:54.599 all of this history, you know, the immense capaciousness 00:33:54.599 --> 00:33:57.319 of the early centuries, the poetry, the tragic 00:33:57.319 --> 00:33:59.480 flattening by colonialism, the modern crisis 00:33:59.480 --> 00:34:02.200 of identity, it naturally leads to the question 00:34:02.200 --> 00:34:04.390 of where things stand right now. for believers. 00:34:04.690 --> 00:34:07.430 Right. Is this beautiful, flexible suspension 00:34:07.430 --> 00:34:10.570 bridge of a tradition purely historical? Is it 00:34:10.570 --> 00:34:13.170 trapped in a museum? Or is it alive enough to 00:34:13.170 --> 00:34:15.590 adapt to the realities of believers living today? 00:34:15.969 --> 00:34:18.750 The sources emphasize this is not a dead historical 00:34:18.750 --> 00:34:22.190 artifact. There is a live, rigorous, and often 00:34:22.190 --> 00:34:24.690 very tense theological debate happening within 00:34:24.690 --> 00:34:26.690 the tradition right now. And it's happening on 00:34:26.690 --> 00:34:29.789 the tradition's own terms, right? Exactly. For 00:34:29.789 --> 00:34:32.250 example, the essay introduces the work of Scott 00:34:32.250 --> 00:34:36.309 Kugel. In his book, Homosexuality in Islam, Kugel 00:34:36.309 --> 00:34:39.309 attempts a radical theological recovery. He offers 00:34:39.309 --> 00:34:41.849 a complete rereading of the story of Lot. The 00:34:41.849 --> 00:34:44.389 story of Lot, which is shared across the Abrahamic 00:34:44.389 --> 00:34:46.969 faiths in the Bible and the Quran, is usually 00:34:46.969 --> 00:34:50.010 the definitive, unassailable text used by clerics 00:34:50.010 --> 00:34:53.329 to condemn same -sex relations. How does Kugel 00:34:53.329 --> 00:34:56.090 manage to reread it? What is his mechanism for 00:34:56.090 --> 00:34:59.489 reinterpretation? Kugel dives deep into the linguistic 00:34:59.489 --> 00:35:02.639 and historical context of the verses. He argues 00:35:02.639 --> 00:35:05.099 that the story of Lot is not actually a condemnation 00:35:05.099 --> 00:35:08.159 of love or consensual same -sex desire or the 00:35:08.159 --> 00:35:11.280 quest for intimacy. Then what is it about? He 00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:12.920 argues that the sin of the people of Lot was 00:35:12.920 --> 00:35:15.260 fundamentally about coercion, sexual violence, 00:35:15.400 --> 00:35:17.860 and a profound violation of the sacred laws of 00:35:17.860 --> 00:35:20.300 hospitality. They were attempting to assert power 00:35:20.300 --> 00:35:22.539 through assault. Okay. Based on this reading 00:35:22.539 --> 00:35:24.619 and a broader theological framework that emphasizes 00:35:24.619 --> 00:35:27.440 God's expansive justice, Kugel makes the case 00:35:27.440 --> 00:35:29.639 that the Koran, when read without the accumulated 00:35:29.639 --> 00:35:32.480 prejudices of later centuries, can fully embrace 00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:35.420 gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims. Now, the 00:35:35.420 -->

00:35:37.780 sources also balance this by bringing in Kesh 00:35:37.780 --> 00:35:41.159 Ali's book, Sexual Ethics and Islam, because 00:35:41.159 --> 00:35:43.719 it's important to note that Kugel's view is not 00:35:43.719 --> 00:35:46.420 the universally accepted standard. It is highly 00:35:46.420 --> 00:35:49.920 controversial. Yes. Google's reading is intensely 00:35:49.920 --> 00:35:53.239 disputed by many mainstream jurists who argue 00:35:53.239 --> 00:35:56.360 he is stretching the text to fit modern sensibilities. 00:35:57.019 --> 00:36:00.659 Kesha Ali provides a much more measured, academically 00:36:00.659 --> 00:36:03.159 cautious survey of the landscape. She takes a 00:36:03.159 --> 00:36:05.840 different approach. She does. She shows how much 00:36:05.840 --> 00:36:09.340 of what passes for a timeless, unchanging ruling 00:36:09.340 --> 00:36:12.659 in Islamic law is actually historically contingent. 00:36:12.809 --> 00:36:14.389 Meaning it was shaped by the politics of the 00:36:14.389 --> 00:36:16.630 time. Exactly. Meaning it was shaped by the specific 00:36:16.630 --> 00:36:19.409 political and social anxieties of the time and 00:36:19.409 --> 00:36:21.789 place it was written. But she also acknowledges 00:36:21.789 --> 00:36:24.130 how much the classical sources actually settle. 00:36:24.269 --> 00:36:26.829 And she points out the real methodological challenges 00:36:26.829 --> 00:36:29.289 in trying to stretch classical jurisprudence 00:36:29.289 --> 00:36:31.489 to accommodate modern human rights frameworks. 00:36:31.710 --> 00:36:33.530 But the point the author of our primary essay 00:36:33.530 --> 00:36:36.889 makes by citing both Kugel and Ali isn't to declare 00:36:36.889 --> 00:36:39.349 one side the theological winner, right? We aren't 00:36:39.349 --> 00:36:41.409 here to solve Islamic theology. No, that's not 00:36:41.409 --> 00:36:43.710 our goal. The point is to prove to you that a 00:36:43.710 --> 00:36:47.429 serious, rigorous, real debate exists right now 00:36:47.429 --> 00:36:51.719 conducted by serious believers who And if we 00:36:51.719 --> 00:36:54.500 connect this back to the overarching theme of 00:36:54.500 --> 00:36:58.199 ambiguity and brittleness, a confident faith, 00:36:58.400 --> 00:37:01.420 a civilization that remembers its own capaciousness 00:37:01.420 --> 00:37:04.219 can hold this debate. It can tolerate the friction. 00:37:04.730 --> 00:37:07.110 It can tolerate the tension of Kugel and his 00:37:07.110 --> 00:37:09.429 conservative critics arguing over the texts. 00:37:09.610 --> 00:37:12.250 It can absorb that friction without collapsing 00:37:12.250 --> 00:37:14.650 and without resorting to violence. It is only 00:37:14.650 --> 00:37:17.789 a brittle faith, one terrified of ambiguity and 00:37:17.789 --> 00:37:20.210 difference, that feels it has lost the argument 00:37:20.210 --> 00:37:23.170 so thoroughly that it needs a rented van to settle 00:37:23.170 --> 00:37:25.670 a theological dispute. And the essay brings us 00:37:25.670 --> 00:37:28.130 all home by tying it back to the core text of 00:37:28.130 --> 00:37:31.289 Islam itself. It points to a specific verse in 00:37:31.289 --> 00:37:34.519 the Quran, Surah 30, verse 22. is a verse that 00:37:34.519 --> 00:37:36.840 explicitly states that the creation of the heavens 00:37:36.840 --> 00:37:38.800 and the earth and the diversity of human tongues 00:37:38.800 --> 00:37:41.639 and colors are a sign of God. Think about the 00:37:41.639 --> 00:37:44.940 absolute devastating contrast there. The attacker 00:37:44.940 --> 00:37:47.039 in Berlin looked out through the windshield at 00:37:47.039 --> 00:37:49.039 the vibrant diversity of the Christopher Street 00:37:49.039 --> 00:37:52.619 Day crowd, and his brittle ideology saw a mortal 00:37:52.619 --> 00:37:54.980 threat that had to be violently eliminated. He 00:37:54.980 --> 00:37:57.579 saw something to destroy. But the very text he 00:37:57.579 --> 00:37:59.460 claims to defend, the text he likely memorized, 00:37:59.760 --> 00:38:02.440 looks out at the irreducible variety of the human 00:38:02.440 --> 00:38:04.869 condition. the different ways we love, speak, 00:38:05.070 --> 00:38:09.010 and exist, and calls it divine. So as we wrap 00:38:09.010 --> 00:38:10.909 up this deep dive, I want to take you back to 00:38:10.909 --> 00:38:13.119 where we started. back to that street in Berlin, 00:38:13.340 --> 00:38:17.360 back to that tragic day in July 2026. The ultimate 00:38:17.360 --> 00:38:19.800 tragedy of that young man in the van is that 00:38:19.800 --> 00:38:22.099 the very capaciousness he could not tolerate, 00:38:22.320 --> 00:38:25.559 the immense, messy, beautiful, swaying diversity 00:38:25.559 --> 00:38:28.500 of that crowd, is not actually a modern Western 00:38:28.500 --> 00:38:30.960 gift to Islam. It's really not. As our sources 00:38:30.960 --> 00:38:33.139 have painstakingly shown, from the poetry of 00:38:33.139 --> 00:38:35.039 the Shahid to the gender -liminal figures of 00:38:35.039 --> 00:38:38.260 Medina, that capaciousness is Islam's older gift 00:38:38.260 --> 00:38:41.110 to itself. The true task ahead. as the essay 00:38:41.110 --> 00:38:43.570 argues so powerfully, isn't about constantly 00:38:43.570 --> 00:38:46.010 sharpening a dichotomy between Islam and the 00:38:46.010 --> 00:38:48.269 modern world as if they are locked in an eternal 00:38:48.269 --> 00:38:50.449 war of civilizations. We hear that narrative 00:38:50.449 --> 00:38:54.369 so much. We do, but it's false. The task is the 00:38:54.369 --> 00:38:57.150 arduous work of recovering a civilizational confidence. 00:38:57.710 --> 00:39:00.489 A confidence that, for centuries, successfully 00:39:00.489 --> 00:39:03.510 held the longing, the love, the ambiguity, and 00:39:03.510 --> 00:39:06.130 the irreducible variety of human beings without 00:39:06.130 --> 00:39:08.949 shattering. We love things to be clean, binary, 00:39:09.309 --> 00:39:12.960 and visible. broken or not broken, gay or straight, 00:39:13.260 --> 00:39:16.940 east or west. But human history, the complexities 00:39:16.940 --> 00:39:19.239 of human desire and the depths of human faith 00:39:19.239 --> 00:39:22.460 defy that kind of clinical machinery. The suspension 00:39:22.460 --> 00:39:25.059 bridge of classical Islam was built to sway with 00:39:25.059 --> 00:39:27.460 the complexities of the human heart, not to be 00:39:27.460 --> 00:39:29.780 encased in the concrete of 19th century Victorian 00:39:29.780 --> 00:39:31.960 morality. And that leads to a final thought I 00:39:31.960 --> 00:39:33.300 want to leave you with, something to mull over 00:39:33.300 --> 00:39:35.960 long after this deep dive ends. We've just explored 00:39:35.960 --> 00:39:38.599 how a 19th century Western idea about sexual 00:39:38.599 --> 00:39:41.820 order was so... successfully disguised that people 00:39:41.820 --> 00:39:44.800 today will literally kill to defend it, genuinely 00:39:44.800 --> 00:39:47.639 believing it to be an ancient sacred truth. It's 00:39:47.639 --> 00:39:50.380 chilling. It is. It forces us to turn that lens 00:39:50.380 --> 00:39:53.420 on ourselves. What deeply held traditional beliefs 00:39:53.420 --> 00:39:55.440 in your own life, your own religion, or your 00:39:55.440 --> 00:39:57.760 own culture are actually just recent imports. 00:39:58.380 --> 00:40:00.599 How much of what we confidently call timeless 00:40:00.599 --> 00:40:03.079 is just a rigidness we invented yesterday to 00:40:03.079 --> 00:40:04.699 soothe our own modern anxieties.