II. Middle East and North Africa

In recent years, countries from the Atlas to the Persian Gulf have seen brutal crackdowns or cleanup campaigns aimed at “deviant” sexuality or gender expression.  In Egypt between 2001-2004, police arrested and tortured hundreds or thousands of men for homosexual sex.  Since then:

• Egypt started arresting men again in late 2007, after a three-year hiatus and with a new turn of the screw: targeting people living with HIV/AIDS. 
• In Morocco in the same period, police falsely accused men at a party of staging a “homosexual marriage”; political Islamists marched in protest against “immorality,”thousands strong, to the house that had hosted the offending gathering.
• In Kuwait, at the same time, authorities rounded up over a dozen transgender people under a new law against “wearing the clothing of the opposite sex.”

Similar examples have taken place in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. These have all the marks of moral panics: they go beyond simply enforcing the law, and aim instead to rid society of a deeply frightening enemy.

Patterns of abuse

Law clearly enables the crackdowns. All the countries in the region criminalize homosexual conduct between men (and some between women)—except Israel and, at present, Iraq (where evidence is rapidly mounting that some militias are targeting non-conforming men and women for torture and murder).

Some outsiders mass these laws together as products of Islam, pure and simple.  This is not true. The four Sunnischools of shari‘a, and Shi‘ite jurisprudence, all indeed impose penalties up to death on homosexual conduct under certain circumstances. Saudi Arabia enforces a particularly strict version. Iran’s codification of shari‘a into a penal code is similarly rigid. However, shari‘a is not at stake in most of these countries.  Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, all criminalize homosexual sex under secular laws with fines and prison terms—laws that mostly have colonial origins. Islamists may march for stringency in Morocco, but the law they want enforced is not Islamic in origin.

Secular, authoritarian regimes—facing down demands to democratize from leftist movements as well as Islamic dissidents—seem as likely to carry out crackdowns on sexuality as religiously-based ones, if not more so. (Reports from Saudi Arabia suggest sporadic, large-scale arrests targeting men who have sex with men, but are insufficient to deduce a pattern. Iran regularly arrests and tortures men, women, and transgender people under suspicion of same-sex conduct, but there is no real indication that arrests or executions have increased in recent years.)

A different perspective comes not from looking at the highly publicized cases involving men, but from listening to lesbian and bisexual women.

A Palestinian lesbian organization says, “We deal with women and the basic issues of body, movement, not being free to leave the house.” They face—as one Lebanese activist says—a subtle and continuous regime of “violations of women’s rights over their bodies and choices.”

They face, in other words, a complex cultural system that controls people’s bodies and sexualities. Law, custom, economy, and family are all implicated as well. This means the crackdowns may connect to fears that norms for gender and sexuality are shifting or breaking down. Women who defy those norms and men who escape them are equally at risk. It is worth remembering that the law under which Egyptian men are tried for same-sex conduct was originally a law targeting women in prostitution.

Culture and politics, daily life and law, are equally at issue, then. An Iranian lesbian who started an internet site for other women says: “What are the most important things lesbians need? They need somewhere to be safe, to find other women, to be able to communicate with them. The major problem is the family and the culture.” She adds, though: “There is the law beyond that. If you can get knowledge to your family and get them to accept you, you still have to worry about the law and your life, about what happens if the larger community discovers you are a lesbian. There is no respite: when you think you are safe at home, you could step out on the street and be arrested.”

Challenges and chances

In most of the region, civil society is under severe attack. While even highly restrictive countries have allowed selected NGOs limited freedom to operate since the 1990s began, the limits are tightly drawn. Human rights organizations suffer especially from harassment, bureaucratic restrictions, surveillance, and arrests. Governments are quick to use any pretext to discredit them before the broader public—making it doubly risky to take up divisive or difficult issues. Legal constraints, together with lack of resources, make it hard even for sympathetic NGOs to investigate rights abuses shrouded in stigma or secrecy: many simply cannot collect the information.

Internet use has burgeoned in the region. It has also been vital in developing a gay and (to some extent) lesbian or transgender identity and community. The advantage is that it lets people communicate who would never have dared or had the means before. However, much communication remains anonymous, impersonal, and mistrustful. Since most of the websites used by such communities to meet and socialize are Western gay ones, (despite a vigorous blogging community in Iran and Egypt), people articulate their identity and community almost entirely in borrowed terms or bricolage. Getting wired remains expensive. Dependence on cyberspace accentuates economic divides.

Most governments censor the Internet, as they censor other information.  Almost anything about sexuality falls under the rubric of pornography. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries try to block most gay sites. In Iran and (massively) in Egypt, state authorities have taken advantage of cyberspace’s anonymity to entrap and brutalize men.

These examples affirm that sexual rights (like all human rights) in the region cannot exist without progress toward democracy: curbing police powers, establishing rule of law, ending censorship, and freeing civil society. Despite hopeful indications in some countries earlier this decade, that progress is largely blocked. In Egypt, for instance, the government carefully split the democracy movement while the U.S., afraid of Islamism, stood aside. U.S. policy since 2001 has talked of freedom while in practice too often damaging or discrediting democratic forces.

Islamist popular movements have not gained power anywhere in the region except Iran. That very fact gives fundamentalism a dissident prestige, and in countries like Egypt and Morocco it threatens to monopolize opposition politics. Embattled sexual rights activists obviously fear that democratic openings will bring political Islam to power. In some places, particularly Egypt, secular human rights activists have been able to forge expedient alliances with Islamists over core issues such as arbitrary detention and torture. It is not clear whether those alliances—necessary for the moment—have sparked a commitment among Islamist activists to integrating human rights principles with belief.

In the long run, it must be remembered that much of modern political Islam has been, paradoxically, a democratizing force within the faith: a popular movement shaking the power of judges and scholars. There is no intrinsic reason—though there may be strong sociological ones—why a similar populist drive within Islam could not support politically as well as theologically democratic tendencies. Some organizations—in Europe, South Africa, Indonesia—are already sounding out the space for such support

HIV/AIDS has been largely unreported and invisible in the region. However, in the Maghreb, MSM have been able to organize and do outreach within the parameters of AIDS prevention. Despite government inaction, awareness of AIDS and informed thinking about sexuality are growing among youth. Several popular Egyptian actors spoke out in 2008 against the crackdown on HIV-positive men.

The medical profession remains in the sway of 19th century European myths about sexuality. In Egypt, Iran, the UAE, and other countries, doctors administer torturous forensic anal exams to “prove” male suspects’ homosexuality. Programs to train doctors of almost every kind in approaches to sexuality and gender are urgently needed. In a few countries, doctors and lawmakers together have laid out a relatively liberal approach to transgender people: Iran and Egypt have allowed gender reassignment surgeries and change of identity for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, in both countries police arrest and torture transgender people, even with medical papers.

Sparse information on sexuality in the region—or related rights violations—goes beyond the borders. What reaches the Western press mostly draws on anecdotes or travelogues. Misinformation can spread; underground activists in the region have little control over what is said or done on their behalf abroad. One activist cites the “growing Western interest in the Arabic LGBT movement” as “annoying at first,” but says local activists need to find ways to take charge of it, “to elaborate it into something positive.”

What are movements doing?

In a few places, like Egypt and Morocco, sexual orientation and gender identity issues have begun to enter the agendas of some mainstream human rights movements. Now, unlike in earlier years, there are lawyers to defend people when they are arrested, and voices to speak up in the press.

These vital developments were not won through identity politics. Those have misfired disastrously as a way of claiming rights in much of the Middle East; the urge of some western LGBT activists to unearth and foster “gay” politics in the region is potentially deeply counterproductive. Rather, the mainstreaming was won largely by framing the situations of LGBT (or otherwise-identified) people in terms of the rights violations, and protections, that existing human rights movements understand. It meant speaking about people who endure torture, or arbitrary arrest, or violation of their privacy--rather than about “gay” people seeking community or equality. Talking about rights rather than identities, and seeking support from mainstream movements (vulnerable as they are), is the way those protections are likely to move forward significantly in the foreseeable future.

No country shows much hope of lightening legal penalties through legislative action. Where legislatures have intervened (as with Kuwait’s new dress code law) they have been driven by moral panic to make things worse. In a few countries—Egypt is one—there are limited possibilities for reinterpreting existing legal provisions through strategic litigation.

Religious law does not rule in most states, but it affects and inflects secular law and its enforcement. Possibilities around shari‘a-based protections need to be explored. Shari‘a’s stringent punishments for sex crimes are coupled with extremely high standards of proof—which, if put into practice, amount to safeguards for personal privacy against state surveillance.[8] One liberal Iranian ayatollah has urged strictly adhering to these standards in order effectively to eliminate executions for sodomy or adultery.

Even offering legal defense in the places where it is possible requires finding and training lawyers willing and able to take the cases. Reforming medical attitudes means working with conservative professional groups often dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Both these tasks need creative approaches, from inside and outside the region.

Some activists imagine new paths to political visibility. One Maghreb group described a plan to get members to mark their election ballots, “I vote as a gay citizen.” They also hope ultimately to mount a petition against their country’s sodomy law, but add that they need a national or international NGO to promote such an effort for them. “It is necessary to say that since our organization remains in secrecy our modes of pressure remain very limited, under the threat of prison, disappearance, or death.”

In a few places, courageous activists have won real social space for LGBT communities. Lebanon, which has a functioning LGBT center that hosts public discussions and cultural events, is the foremost example. There, too, cultivating alliances with other human rights movements has been a key to success. The leading LGBT group’s active role in supporting relief efforts during the 2006 war gave it a credibility invaluable in a worsening political situation.

While rights claims may need to be detached from identity, there is a desperate need for building community. Young people are particularly subject to exploitation and despair.  Studying case files from the Egyptian crackdown in 2001-2004 reveals a grim figure: most of those arrested and tortured were under 25. Emerging into sexual maturity, they found no community to warn them about social and political dangers, no mentors to protect them from the police.

“We need information,” says the founder of an Iranian lesbian Internet site. “We translate 60-70% of what we put on the web, and the rest we write ourselves, about our own experiences. We give women the basic knowledge they are not sick—translating all this information and putting it in one place.”

She adds, “We believe that we should aim at the family, not the government. We can’t fight with the government, nor can any government outside change the Iranian government. I don’t believe that people can fight directly with the homophobic society. You should fight with the homophobia inside yourself.”

Even moving from cyberspace to personal contact takes time, and courage. “It is not important to get ourselves in the Iranian press,” she says: “instead, for now, we can find opportunities to talk one-on-one to reporters about their attitudes.” Many activists envision such small outreach projects. A Palestinian lesbian reflects, “The moment we start giving lectures on homosexuality in schools, it would be a good achievement.” She adds, “It may take five years.”