EVENT TRANSCRIPT: An Insight Into the LGBT Muslim Experience
DATE: 13 JANUARY 5:00 P.M – 6:00 P.M
VENUE: ONLINE
SPEAKER: KHAKAN QURESHI, SOHAIL AHMED, ELIZABETH AREF-FEAR
EVENT CHAIR: CHARLOTTE LITTLEWOOD
Charlotte Littlewood:
Hello, and thank you so much for joining us this Friday evening. And this evening’s talk is going to be one that will be deeply personal, and one in which we’re going to go through the experiences of three different LGBT-identifying Muslims. These experiences are very different in nature, but all of the persons here this evening have faced huge challenges in their lives owing to their identities. So we are going to be looking at that, and we’re going to be hearing from them. And then we’re going to be looking at how they have turned those experiences into the wonderful work that they do now in the UK, for communities for minorities and for those that are struggling in their identities. So I think with no further ado, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Khakan Qureshi. Many of you tuning in this evening, I’m sure will be aware and will know of his experiences in November last year, being a speaker at Wood Green Academy School, on being an LGBT Muslim and the opposition he faced, the death threats he’s faced, and the ongoing discussion about how we can teach equality and tolerance in schools, and how we can keep our LGBT Muslim community safe. So Khakan is going to talk to us about who he is, his identity, how he came to terms with his identity, his experience, and the amazing work that he does do. So I’m going to offer the floor over to Khakan to start.
Khakan Qureshi:
Hi, my name’s Khakan, I identify as a gay Muslim, my pronouns are he/him. And I’ve been out for about 30 years, I’ve always identified as being a gay Muslim. And one of the roles that I have is that I’m the founder of a South Asian LGBT social support group called Finding A Voice, which has been running for a few years now and part of my remit, I suppose, is have also been a Stonewall LGBT school role model and diversity role model, which enabled me to access academic institutions, and just basically share my personal experiences of coming out, being gay, Muslim, and being in an interracial relationship. And I’ve been doing that for a number of years. But in the last few years, my profile has been raised simply because I was caught up in the LGBT school row in Birmingham, whereby I advocated the schools and the teachers who wanted to introduce and educate their children about diversity, inclusion and equality, which included LGBT families, as well as you know, single parent families and people with disabilities and people of colour. And that obviously went on for about a year, in which I experienced burnout. There were a lot of questions raised about, you know, how can somebody I identify as gay and Muslim, that I had to be either one or the other. Then again, more recently at Wood Green Academy, I was invited in by a teacher who just wanted to share my successes and achievements, to enable and empower young Muslim students that you know, you can overcome prejudice and discrimination. And the theme of that event was diversity in the face of adversity.
Now, I’ve been to that Academy previously back in 2020, whereby it was very much a multicultural school. They were very welcoming, very inclusive, very warm, and they had conversations, we had lunch together, and it was not an issue. Whereas I found that this time that the school pupils had obviously come from a faith based Islamic school, not too far away from the Academy itself. And they had come in and already they were showing some level of hostility. Prior to my visit, they were asking the teachers not to have me in the school because it goes against their teachings and their ethos of being Muslims. And then they allowed me to go into the school.
Prior to that the teacher did follow me up and say, look, these children are sensitive about their culture, about their faith. Please try and avoid speaking about religion or scripture, or even quote any texts from the Quran. And obviously, me identifying as a gay Muslim, I said, well, talking about Islam, and being Muslim is a part of my story, and especially in relation to my coming out, because my father was the founding member of Birmingham Central mosque. And you know, both my parents adhere to the five pillars of Islam. So I said, I can’t deny that fact. It’s part of who I am, and parts of my makeup. So that was on Monday. And then obviously, on the Tuesday I went in, and the conversation started as it normally does, it’s quite affable, quite amenable. And then somebody raised a question to say, how could I say that I’m gay and Muslim. The teacher obviously had to interject.
At that point, again, the atmosphere changed. Because the teacher and my mindset was that I’m just going to talk about my personal story about coming out and how I overcame prejudice and discrimination. But unfortunately, the ripple effects was everybody homed in on the fact that I had the audacity, I suppose, to say that I’m gay and Muslim, whereby what we were trying to say is that, you know, as a person coming through a number of issues, whether it’s familial or personal or religious, that was over able to overcome it all, and sort of face up to reality, face up to who I am, have quite a successful, happy relationship and career. But everybody just wanted to focus in on that I couldn’t be gay and Muslim, which was quite upsetting for me, because I thought, you know, from the prejudices I faced when I was coming out all the years ago, at the height of Section 8, HIV and AIDS, and the discrimination faced through the media and by other communities towards LGBT back then, in the 80s and early 90s. I thought that by now, with same-sex legislation and the Equality Act, that things would have progressed a great deal. But in the last few years, unfortunately, it has highlighted to me that we have very much a long way to go in terms of education, especially when it comes to not necessarily just LGBT plus sexual identities, but also the intersectionality of being somebody who is part of the LGBT community but also they are dear or wanting to adhere to their faith and religion.
As I said, I tried to apply myself to the tenants or the principles of Islam, whereas people, and I’m not going to say it’s all Muslims, it’s, but it’s some people, and especially the Muslims that I’ve encountered in the last few years, they are so entrenched, I suppose, in their mindset, or their outlooks that you know, even 15-16-17 year olds will not accept me for who I am. And that, to me, is quite upsetting and quite disturbing, because, for example, if they’re born and bred here in the UK, and they go through a British education system, I still can’t understand, it’s quite perplexing that they have this archaic mindset and this homophobic attitude. So I would say we’ve got a long way to go in terms of education, and education just has, it’s not necessarily just in the schools, but it has to be within families and within communities as well.
If we can get, I don’t know, faith leaders and teachers around the table and have a major discussion about it, where I think we could be halfway there in terms of allowing people to just accept and acknowledge that we’re part of a very inclusive and diverse community.
Charlotte LIttlewood:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I really hear you there on the importance of education. I think, when we’ve gone through everyone’s experiences on this panel, we’ll come back to that and look at what can be done around education and what is everybody’s thoughts about the situation facing education at the moment with regards to teaching on equality. I wondered if you would be able to share with us a little bit of what you faced after the incident became public about the school. I know that the Five Pillars news site went and made a short sort of film in front of the school and did a lot of journalism, if you can call it that, on their side, how did that affect you? And what did you face then on the back of that publicity?
Khakan Qureshi:
Well, to be honest, I didn’t know at the time that this presentation because as I said, I’ve entered many schools, and it’s not been an issue, as such. And I didn’t realise that it was going to be recorded and go viral in the manner that it did. It was only afterwards, I think it was on Wednesday, that a colleague of mine actually stated you’ve gone viral. I was a bit kind of in the dark, and I didn’t know what she was talking about. And then finally, when somebody posted a video and says, this is what’s happened Khakan, are you aware of this, and the way they’ve edited that video, it makes me look as if I don’t know what I’m talking about and that all the Muslim pupils there, they were very much antagonising me. Also, I do feel for the white male teacher who was within that classroom, who for all intents and purposes, he did appear to come to my defence, but it just so happens that because the conversation had turned towards 9/11, and I had prompted that, to be honest, because somebody had asked me if I had ever claimed to be Muslim, and not gay, or could I not just say that I’m gay, and not Muslim? You know, because there’s this claim to being Muslim. She said, she said it didn’t sit comfortably with her. And I said, the only time I’ve stepped away from calling myself Muslim is during 9/11, when there was a lot of negative stigma and prejudice towards Muslims, we were all being targeted wherever shape or form.
As it happens, I did receive an awful lot of death threats online, and abuse from a number of people who some of them would initially make out as if they’re here to support me. But then some would create false accounts. And I did report it to the police that unfortunately, because it didn’t constitute hate crime, they deemed it as hate speech, because there was no real substantial attack. It was all online. What they advise is that I blocked a little report. And obviously now, even though it’s several months later, I’m still feeling the ripple effects of that, because initially, the amount of abuse that I received from majority young Muslims, or at least they claimed to be, piling on…
Charlotte Littlewood:
I have here that you faced such abuse as ‘burn in hell’, ‘go slit your wrists and drown in a pool of acid’ and ‘throw yourself off the highest building available’.
Khakan Qureshi:
That’s correct, yeah. I think one of the more unnerving and disturbing ones for me was somebody had posted privately a message with what appear to be body parts, and said that if I’m ever in the UK, this is what I will do to you. So obviously, there was a threat there. And, again, I explained that to the police. And because it was an anonymous account, was that I blocked it and reported it. But obviously, they would act on something like that if they happen to come to the house and maybe smash a window in or threaten me in the street.
Charlotte Littlewood:
So it has to get to that point before you get offered any kind of protection?
Khakan Qureshi:
Yeah.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Wow.
Khakan Qureshi:
I didn’t think that’d be the kind of person who would reach out to an organisation’s support, specifically victims of hate crimes support. But I have done that. And they have helped me enormously in the last few weeks, you know, we have one to one sessions for about 10 minutes. That’s helpful in itself to talk about it.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Do you feel safe living in Birmingham?
Khakan Qureshi:
I feel that I’m healing now. But obviously, only last night, and a couple of nights ago, I received, you know, a couple of more comments and private messages saying you’re pathetic, and you shouldn’t state that you’re Muslim and you are not part of the ummah, which is really unfortunate, you know, because as I said, some people are very direct and very vulgar in their abuse, whereas some people appear to a bit more friendly initially. But if I tried to engage in civil discourse with them, then it turns to the dark side, really. So that doesn’t help either because it’s a false sense of security.
Charlotte Littlewood:
The final thing I’d like to ask about you and your experience here is how are you feeling about continuing in your work going into schools. Has this in any way made you feel worried about doing that? Is that still something you’re passionate about and want to continue doing?
Khakan Qureshi:
I still very much want to do that. But I’ve always been the kind of person who’s been very open and receptive to going any environment and facing up to, you know, what I would deem as a positive experience, to all intents and purposes, but it’s made me very much more mindful of accessing academic institutions or being invited to speak. Recently, I was at Warwick University, and I was invited by the LGBT network. But as soon as the students took out their camera, their smartphones or laptops straight away, it raised my anxieties. And I was asking, what are they going to do with this? And they all said, no, we’re only going to keep this information for academic reasons. But throughout the whole presentation, it was quite unnerving, to be honest, because I just thought, well, there’s a number of Muslim students here, where are they going to take this? And again, more recently, I’ve been invited to speak again at another school. And I know that the majority of them are Muslim students, and are having a conversation with a partner to say do I go in. And so it has made me more mindful.
Charlotte Littlewood:
It is incredibly impressive that you keep going, though, and we’re going to hear that across the panel here this evening. Just how impressive all of you are in the work that you all do. And I think it’s incredible that you are so bravely continuing to go into schools after this because this is absolutely terrifying. And no one should face the kind of opposition that any of you here on this panel face. And towards the end of this talk, we’ll look at it a little bit about how the UK could be doing better. But thank you so much for that introduction, Khakan. Thank you for being here, and sharing with us. Sohail, I would like to move to you. Welcome, I’m glad that you managed to get the link to work. I’ve known you for a long while now. And your story is particularly harrowing. And I would really appreciate it if you would be able to share some of that with our listeners this evening.
Sohail Ahmed:
Yeah, so I come from a Pakistani background. So my family are from Pakistan. I was born here. I was born in London. So I’m British born and bred. And when my parents initially came, I have to start from the beginning to explain all of this, when my parents came to the UK, they settled in London. And they were originally from a more moderate form of Islam, relatively speaking. It was when I was around six years old, that they almost converted to this very radical form of Islam, known as Salafism or otherwise known as Wahhabism. If someone doesn’t know what that is, I would describe it as the form that is officially practised in Saudi Arabia, the form of Islam. They were radicalised, my parents, by another family that lived in the same tower block as us. And initially the changes were less concerning. They were just kind of physical changes in terms of their physical appearance. My father first started to grow a short beard, then a much longer one, my mother started to first wear the headscarf, which just covered the head, then the hijab, which is the full gown that covers the whole body and then later the niqab which also covers the face except for the eyes, and then later even covered a hands with gloves.
Incidentally, as a child seeing this, I felt I didn’t like it, the change was too sudden. And I remember not wanting to hold my mother’s hand in public because I thought as a child, I thought this was strange. I thought it was very strange and odd. And my mother noticed the reticence in me and said ‘How dare you, you’re going against Allah’s religion, are you rejecting Allah?’ And then that’s when the more concerning, when I started to be exposed to kind of more concerning things, I was taught that there is a never ending war between Muslims and the kuffar, the infidels, that the UK is enemy territory, that I am living in enemy territory, that you aren’t really British, you’re Muslim, you’re not British at all. The British government pretends that Muslims have citizenship and are one of theirs but that’s a lie. That democracy is a sham. That there’s a shadowy group at the top that controls everything and they want to destroy Islam and Muslims.
Interestingly, also, any pictorial representation of faces, either animal or human, were banned, which meant all my childhood photos were destroyed. As well as this my favourite teddy bear. My mum brought out a large pair of scissors and I remember this like yesterday, and she literally beheaded the teddy bear in front of me. As a child, I was mortified and I was traumatised. Now I find it funny. But my mother gave the teddy bear back to me, the headless teddy bear, to play with, but I didn’t want to play with it. Yeah, music wasn’t allowed and I could go on. But they started to attend a mosque that was nearby that had been set up by someone called Ivan Baz who was at the time the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia himself. And I was told at both the mosque and at home that when the scholars say the time is right, the Islamic scholars, that we will all rise up and fight jihad, physical jihad as in war, against the infidels to kuffar. I was also told that the best way a Muslim can die is by martyr in battle.
So as a child, and I only realised this in retrospect how horrifying this is, but as a child, I wanted to die in war, fighting for Muslims against the kuffar. It didn’t seem strange to me at the time, because that was my life. But yeah, that’s the kind of background I come from.
I was radicalised at around the age of six. Around the age of eight, that’s when I started to realise that I had same sex attractions that I was attracted towards the same sex. Initially, I thought that this was normal and everyone was like that. Quickly, I realised that that’s quite abnormal in the sense, not as in there’s something wrong with it, well, I believed at the time there was something wrong with it, but in the sense that it was, I was odd, I was different. And that I wasn’t being accepted by my peers in school, if I ever mentioned it. Incidentally, at around the same time, I came to learn in a sermon at mosque that the punishment for homosexuality is either execution, being thrown off a high place, being stoned to death, or either being thrown off a high place and then stoned to death. After that, for a decade after that started, you know, up until the point I kind of self de-radicalised, I lived my life in fear, utter and complete fear, fear that I would be hurt, either by my family or by others, if they found out. Fear that I would be rejected, that my parents would kick me out, which, in the end, they actually did when they found out. a fear that they had somehow so every time they kind of pulled me out of my room, I was afraid they’d found out and they could kind of see the fear on my face, And they would say, ‘Why are you afraid, we’re just calling you up to just speak to you?’
So as a consequence of that, I mean, when I heard the sermon, I can still remember it to this day, my blood ran cold and a chill went down my spine. And I was just utterly terrified. As a consequence of all of this, I started to experience childhood depression, quite severe depression, and quite severe childhood anxiety, for the fear over being found out. I didn’t realise this at the time again, a mental illness is taboo in my community. So that was never discussed. And I never brought it up. That was normal for me. I thought that I was evil, that I had done something wrong, and that this was a punishment from Allah that was being inflicted upon me. Because I was a bad person, that I was a deviant, that I was disgusting, I was reprehensible. And I started to hate myself, like actually hate myself. And I lived like that for over a decade. So my childhood wasn’t a very happy one.
That’s when I tried to kind of fix myself. I started to look at the fatwas, the legal edicts or the rulings that the Salafi scholars had written mostly in Saudi Arabia, online on how to kind of cure oneself of this affliction or this disease. And there were a number of solutions that were presented, chief among them becoming more religious and devout, or marry a woman. Right? In my teenage years, when I was 17, I tried to convince my parents to help me get married, and I’m grateful they said no, because I would have not only ruined my life, I would have ruined the life of some poor woman who wouldn’t have known. Before that, I became more religious, and more devout, and given the form of Islam I had been exposed to, was so extreme and radical, I became more radical, more radical than even my parents. And around the time of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, I was kind of being constantly exposed to this. This is a war against Islam. We Muslims need to defend Muslim lands. It’s an obligation on every Muslim to fight jihad, physical jihad, as in violence, and defeat the invaders. And with the constant kind of press with respect to these civilian casualties, I became very angry, very emotional.
Incidentally, regardless of whether you agree with the Iraq or Afghanistan war decisions, I think everyone listening can agree that it’s palpably absurd that the UK and the US and other NATO allies went into Iraq and Afghanistan simply because they wanted to kill Muslims, or destroy Islam. But that’s what I was being told. And I believed it because it conformed with the ideology I had been exposed to. So this is all the Salafi milieu at the time. My anger boiled over and whilst I didn’t do anything, and this is difficult to say, I am extremely ashamed to say that I began to consider committing, planning and committing an attack in London.
Thankfully, I pulled myself back from the brink, because my internal moral compass took over. I just felt it was wrong. I had been taught all my life that you can’t be friends with non-Muslims, because you have to hate kuffar, but pretend to be nice to them from the outset so that they might convert to Islam. But I had no Muslim friends, and I knew my non-Muslim friends actually liked me as a person, that they also felt friendly, they thought they were my friends as well as they were.
So I kind of started looking for interpretations of Islam within the Salafi kind of framework, which is still radical, by the way, that argued that terrorism is actually impermissible. Thankfully, I did find them, I found it in a book, which actually I saw on the front had been given some funding by, I think it was the British government, but I don’t know what programme it was. And in that book, it didn’t say that committing terrorism is wrong because it’s bad and evil or because you’re harming innocents. It didn’t say that. It provided a very technical legalistic argument as to why terrorism is disallowed. It said that because you are a British citizen, you have a provenance, so to speak, or a legal agreement with the British government to abide by the law, and as such, you cannot attack that country. And because you are a British citizen, you can’t. But if you’re not a British citizen, and you’ve arrived here, say illegally, then that agreement doesn’t apply to you. I, thankfully at the time that stopped me, and I’m grateful for that. But there’s a number of issues with that. Firstly, what if you’ve arrived here illegally, right? If you follow that form of Islam, and by the way, I’m not saying this as a form of Islam, I’m saying this specifically, very Islamist extremist kind of Salafist ideologies.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yes, I was just going to ask, surely there are many other arguments against terrorism through other interpretations.
Sohail Ahmed:
Yes, there are absolutely. Of course there are. Incidentally, in the same book, it also said, ‘Oh, this doesn’t apply if someone insults Prophet Muhammad, you’re allowed to kill them on the spot’. Like literally this book, it’s insane. And yeah, I kind of stopped myself. And eventually I started to have doubts about this form of Islam I had been exposed to, with respect to kind of sexual slavery, as I said, practised, with respect to very narrow-minded kind of Sharia law, with respect to kind of stoning people to death, which is essentially torturing someone to death.
Charlotte Littlewood:
How did your family respond to you challenging and exploring other interpretations of Islam at this point?
Sohail Ahmed:
Well, at this point, I didn’t tell a single soul, I hadn’t even told my parents that I was even thinking about doing this, the whole attack thing, and then pulling from the brink. And the rest, I kept it to myself. And I’m not entirely sure why I did that. But I think I knew that my parents weren’t as extreme as me at that point. And I knew they would disagree with that. So I didn’t tell them. I didn’t even tell any of my friends. But when I started to actually have doubts about all this stuff that I had, that I believed in, not the idea that one, that there’s a never ending war, and that you are supposed to establish an Islamic empire, ie a caliphate, and then take over the whole world essentially, or at least attempt to. I saw a lot of hypocrisies there with respect to being against the West invading other countries, but then believing that you should invade other countries and annex them into the Islamic Empire. The idea that you criticise the West for slavery, but then actually said slavery is permissible yourself when it comes to Muslims. Which again, this isn’t all forms of Islam, not even the majority, but specifically, the form of Islam I was brought up in.
After that, the doubts festered for a good five years. I was always the scientist, I always loved science. And there was one thing that bothered me, which was that I didn’t believe that evolution existed, yet, the consensus amongst scientists and evolutionary biologists was that evolution is true in the sense that we all come from a single common ancestor. I understood the scientific method. Call it cognitive dissonance but that led to a chain reaction, which led to a domino effect, where when I accepted evolution, I started questioning all the other different things I had been exposed to, with respect to my form of Islam. I questioned all of them. I started to study progressive Islam, genuinely progressive Islamic, pro-LGBT, pro-women’s rights, that sort of thing. I eventually became a very progressive Muslim. And that’s when I again started to look at homosexuality. Because at this stage before this, I hadn’t actually, I didn’t believe homosexuality was a real thing. I just thought there were feelings that were deviant, I didn’t think there was an actual identity known as gay. I didn’t believe that because my form of Islam rejected that, indeed, as do virtually all forms of Islam.
Charlotte Littlewood:
That’s very interesting. As you just said there, this notion that the identity can’t exist, and it’s just a feeling of something that is being pushed by quite a few organisations that are trying to agitate against LGBT teaching in schools. So there’s an organisation called SRE Islamic, and I’ve listened to a few of their talks. And that’s exactly what they say that this is a feeling that can be prayed through, can be tackled, actually, the reason why young men habit and they talk about young men predominantly they don’t, we’re going to come to Liz, who as a woman has a very interesting perspective and experience. But it talks about men predominantly, and it’s put down to core relationships with fathers leading to these feelings that can very well be controlled and prayed through which I found alarming that that is an organisation that goes and speaks to parents and trains parents and trains other organisations.
Sohail Ahmed:
Absolutely. I myself was later exposed to exorcisms to try to fix myself once my parents found out. It’s when I became progressive. I eventually started to have arguments with my parents, because they would say something, they would say racist things against white people and stuff about the non-Muslims, and they would say anti-women stuff, including my mother. And I would argue with them because I’ve always had this thing inside me about fighting for justice. When I see something that isn’t right, I speak up against it. And one day, during an argument, my anger boiled over. And by this stage, I hadn’t exactly left Islam, I was doubting, I was agnostic. I said, ‘You know what, I’m not even sure if Allah exists, if God even exists.’ Immediately, my dad said, ‘Get out’, pointed to the door and said, ‘Get out’.
I packed my bag, put everything in there. Everything that I could fit, it was just a small backpack. And I found the cheapest hotel I could find. I didn’t realise hotels are very expensive, even the cheapest ones. So eventually, after a day, literally just a day later, I went to my grandmother’s, I didn’t tell her the whole story, but I just told her that I was doubting Islam and that they kicked me out. I didn’t tell her anything about the gay thing, because there was a good chance that even she would kick me out. My grandmother got angry and called my parents saying, ‘How dare you kick him out just for having doubts. Why don’t you just talk to him?’, and that’s when my parents apparently said, ‘Can you put him on the phone?’, and my grandmother gave me the phone.
Just to explain what I’m about to say, just a few weeks before this point, I had actually come out of my room, went to my parents, and I said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you’. And I almost told them that I was gay, but I chickened out last minute. So they went, ‘You know that thing you were going to tell us a few weeks ago, we know what it is now’. I’ve never been that afraid of my entire life because I genuinely thought my life was at risk. Genuinely. And that’s not an exaggeration. They convinced me to come home, somehow, they promised that they wouldn’t hurt me. A promise that they actually did keep to, in their defence, if I can even say that. And I went back home. And my father took me out to the garden because he didn’t want my siblings overhearing. I’m the eldest. And it was just a torrent of abuse. How dare you? You’re disgusting. You’re an abomination. He asked me. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I told him the truth. I said, no. He said, Have you ever had a boyfriend? I told him the truth. I said, no. He said, Have you ever done anything with a guy? I lied, and I said no. And yeah, he basically said, ‘You can stay here on only one condition. You agreed to be exorcised’. I had nowhere to go. Reluctantly, I agreed. I had no other choice.
Literally the next day, I went out and I was still a university student. Then I went to the housing department at the university and I explained to them my situation, and I said, I need a place to stay and this is urgent. I did find a place but that was only available in three months’ time. So for three months, I had to stay there and endure exorcisms. At one point they even suggested using violence during the exorcisms. That’s when I put my foot down and I said no, I’m not going to allow that to happen. So they did abide by my wish. But during the exorcisms and it’s strange, but my head wasn’t twisting around or anything like that. It was making me lie down, touching my forehead, reciting the Quran over me, making me bathe in holy water, making me eat holy honey, strange things like that.
Whilst rationally, I knew that I was not possessed, my inner animalistic emotional brain started going, what if you are possessed, and somehow my emotional side overcame my rational side. It’s really strange. And I became suicidal. And I attempted to take my life. My dad walked in on me, realised what I was doing, and said, ‘No, whatever you do, never kill yourself’. I agreed to that. And a few days later. I moved out. I’ve visited them once or twice, but the relationship was irreparable. And I’ve not been in touch with them. Until very recently, I hadn’t been in touch with them for eight years. They said, ‘Look, we know you’re going to do this thing and you are like this, but don’t tell anyone because everyone will shun us and no one will marry your sister because they’ll think being gay runs in the family.’ And then asked, ‘Wait, if they think it’s genetic, why do they say that there’s no such thing as being gay and that it’s entirely down to one’s choice?’ My dad just said, ‘I don’t know’. But I could see he began to doubt himself but he never said it out loud. And at one point, he did say, ‘I don’t know what to think anymore’, when I was kind of trying to convince him. After that he denied ever saying it but he definitely did say that. And at one point, my mum came into my room while the exorcisms and stuff were happening and she was crying. I felt so horrible for her for crying. And she kept saying, ‘You can’t be this way. You can’t be this way. Allah wouldn’t make you this way. It can’t be. It can’t be.’ And then she left the room. And as she was leaving the room, she kept repeating it. ‘It can’t be true.’ She was trying to convince herself.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard your story. You’ve told me your story. And I’ve heard your story. And every time I hear it, again, it has the same impact on me, you know, it is heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking. And there’s not much more anyone can really say and I wouldn’t want to input. And I wouldn’t want to add to what you’ve said in any way. I’ve got a lot of questions that we’re going to come to at the end, and I realised we’re taking up a lot of time already. We’re gonna move to Liz now. But I want to ask a little bit about the foreign funded mosques and the preachers and about what the UK government can do, again, to help. But Liz, could we come to you and hear a perspective from a woman, which would be very interesting.
Elizabeth Aref-Fear:
Yeah. I mean, my experience is very different because I come from a non Muslim family. So very briefly, I converted to Islam about a decade ago. I would say prior to that, I was a very liberal, pro-LGBT, human rights activist. And the LGBT issue was one of the ones that when I was coming to Islam, I was like ‘Well, what about this issue? What about that issue? ‘And luckily, I had a very nice friend who’s still a really good sister of mine that was like, ‘Well, I have gay friends, it’s not a problem, why should it be a problem?’ So I came in thinking, you know, this really kind of liberal form of Islam. It’s not incompatible with what I believe, but then I came to believe that being gay was wrong, it was the belief that I was generally indoctrinated by, I’m going to say indoctrinated because it’s junk, isn’t it? Is that it’s okay to feel that way because it means a feeling that’s just how you made but you just don’t do anything about it. And I hadn’t really kind of really explored and understood my bisexuality.
It started when I was a teenager and I wasn’t a Muslim then, obviously, but I had a friend that said that straight men don’t like bi women. So I suppose I didn’t really explore it, I’d always be more into men at that point. And then not long after I converted to Islam I got married. I did think about what about the issue was but it was like well, you know, it’s not a sin if you don’t do anything, just kind of don’t think about it. Have a marriage. We eventually got divorced. I would say it was a bog standard orthodox, Muslim, conservative marriage. It wasn’t Sohail’s end of the scale, but he was of north African background, the husband, we were both the typical kind. I was the zealous convert wanting to do the right thing, a pretty bog standard conservative, LGBT is wrong. But you know, I wouldn’t harm anybody or anything like that, you know.
After I got divorced, I kind of went through a premeditated phase of my headscarf. I got divorced. I was away from that kind of cultural community. I was just in a different space. And I kind of went through a bit of a transition. Because looking back I realise even when I was married, and I took my scarf off, I was still in quite a conservative headspace, but I started exploring other things like my sexuality, talking about things with friends. And I’d always say, oh, I’m bi curious, and my friend was like, no, don’t think like that. I think there was some ingrained homophobia there. I only came out about a year ago and he helped me work through that idea to suddenly have this label thing. And it’s something that I’ve discovered a lot of women, non-Muslim as well, won’t admit they’re bi. There’s this whole thing that, well, maybe you’re just curious, or maybe you like women, not all women, but you’re not going to like all women just like if you’re heterosexual, you’re not going to like all men.
So I found that the whole bi thing was generally quite murky and a bit odd. But then, in terms of the discrimination, I felt, well, I came out, I just texted my family, friends, and they’re all pretty cool with it. But again, I don’t have Muslim family, not to hate on the Muslim community. But obviously, you know, my family. My stepmom was a bit more conservative, and my dad, sort of British, culturally Christian, some are more Christian than others, but generally they’re a pretty open minded family. Nobody really, nobody cared, just normal. The Muslim friends that I did tell there were surprised, but you’ll find again, these are much more liberal Muslim friends. I didn’t tell other Muslim friends that I knew were more conservative. That may seem like I chickened out. But I did a public thing online, like I openly identify as bi, I have come out, but I haven’t had those conversations with those people because, quite frankly, I just don’t want those awkward discussions. If they have a problem with it, then that is their problem, not my problem. I don’t want to also assume somebody’s going to have a negative opinion. That’s something that I have to deal with. I’ve just left those conversations alone because I don’t want to get into arguments or to feel odd. People, I think, no, and we’ve just got on with it.
What I’ve discovered, I’m saying for about the kind of intersectionality of hate. Obviously, I don’t have experience of being a gay man. But being a bi woman, right? It’s been really interesting. The whole thing around misogyny and how that relates to being Muslim and a Muslim woman and being a bi woman, I found from my experiences, whenever I’ve had millions of conversations about this, but the theme that runs across Muslim and non-Muslim spaces, is I don’t think people take bi woman seriously. They think it’s like an add-on or whatever. But through conversations with Muslim men, you know if I’ve been trying to buy clothing through a certain cultural community or have dating conversations, my general conclusion is, they don’t seem to have a problem with it. Because I don’t think they take it seriously. Which sounds like that’s a better thing. But it’s not. It means I don’t think they really get the idea of a woman having agency over her own sexuality. I think it’s like, well, you still like men, so that’s the main thing covered. You’re obviously looking for a boyfriend because you’re talking to me, or just like many non-Muslims, they go, ‘Oh, well, I work for XYZ, I don’t think we need to say what those things are all their kind of sexual fantasies’, which again, isn’t based on the idea that I may or may not want to do that. It’s their fantasy coming from, I’m going to be honest and say it out loud, the whole threesome thing. It’s their idea of I’m a man and I want two women. They don’t actually think about what’s the woman’s role in that or how women feel. It’s all about them. It’s the misogyny that’s really come out of it. I don’t want people to not have a problem with it because they’re misogynist, they should not have a problem with it, because they respect my own agency and my own sexuality.
I’ve noticed that when they get, for example, a conversation with a British Maghrebi man, when I said I wasn’t interested in being somebody’s co-wife, he then went and gave me a tirade of abuse, about how I’m a disgusting Muslim woman. I’m not actually quoting him. What did he say? I’ve got the block here. Please don’t try and be smart. Islam is clean. He came out with all kinds of misogynistic things, and I have so many insults. You don’t even look 33, plus, you look Jewish, don’t say you’re a Muslim. Anyway, I’ll ask Allah to guide you next time. Next time, tell people you like to have sex with dogs and blame Allah that made you like that, like you’re crazy to get married, do anything, cows, animals, excuse me, it’s obviously poor English. So he made some sort of suggestion about the whole threesome and diminishing women’s agency, and didn’t seem to have a problem. I did not suggest that out there. As soon as I would turn down the polygamy, his expectations of women, then comes a torrent of abuse. So it’s basically a double standard. When they don’t get what they want, they will insult me as a woman. There’s a selfishness. There’s a double standard. I don’t think they even really understand or know what they’re bisexual is. And they certainly don’t see women as people in control of their sexuality.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, I think agency really comes through, the issue of agency. I realised that we, because we have had such powerful testimonies this evening, we are quite quickly running out of time now. We do have questions from the audience and any more questions you can put into the chat. I think this is a really interesting question and I’ll kind of open it to the floor and if people can respond quite succinctly, so we can all have a go at responding to this if we all want to. But there are charities, the question is posed, there are charities that promote homophobia. And there are links to these lists of charities that have been shown to promote homophobia. Should these charities lose their charitable status? The person who asked the question also says there are charities that promote misogyny as well. So please do respond.
Khakan Qureshi:
I’ve just had a quick read of the two articles posted. And I would 100% say that, yes, they should lose their charitable status. It might mean that somebody, one or two individuals within that organisation might have said these homophobic or misogynistic statements, but at the same time, if they’re representative of the organisation, then they should lose their status. Because, as I said earlier, we’ve got the Equality Act in place, we’re trying to make a very equitable and equal society at large, especially here in the UK. So really, we shouldn’t be having or promoting individuals or organisations that are quite rightly so, pushing more archaic mindsets and attitudes, because as I said, from my experience, you know, I came out 30 years ago, and here I am now in 2022, or 2023, and we’re having young people coming through school, having very much homophobic attitudes, and admiring people like Andrew Tate and a few others who are very much misogynistic in their attitudes, and people are pushing more and more homophobic, lesbo-phobic, transphobic, biphobic, and it’s unacceptable. When we are endorsing charitable organisations, such as the ones mentioned here, it doesn’t help us people who are active actively becoming involved in the community, coming from a grassroots data saying we want to change society, we want to change the outlook, we don’t want to have this very conservative mindset that we grew up in, we’re trying to change it. If you’re positively promoting organisations, which continue to have websites, people, social influences, etc, going on about rubbish, really, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t help our cause. Otherwise, we might think between the three of us what’s the point? Why are we putting our heads on the chopping board?
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, you’re all involved in charities and charitable work, and charities are there to serve communities and these particular charities in this list, I’m sure about community support. And you cannot have, I would totally agree with you, charities that are acting to actually break down our communities and increase extremism and division in society. And Sohail has also talked about foreign funded and controlled mosques and preaching hate preaching in mosques. So we’ve got another area within the UK where we could have tougher challenges, and I expect that would be echoed across the pane, if I’m not wrong.
Sohail Ahmed:
I think they should be delisted. And the reason why I say that is because when you firstly, in order for an organisation to be able to become a charity, there are a certain number of legal requirements in order for them to do so. It confers a level of trust that you’re doing something good, something beneficial for society. Given those two things, I do not think it is appropriate for organisations that are clearly trying to seek to divide us. And this is not just on the LGBT issue. This is also in reference to very extremist Islamist ideology and you don’t have to be an Islamist to even be homophobic, right. And that’s what I wanted to mention as well, the fake news about the Prevent referral.
We had a meeting with CT yesterday and we discussed the news of the Prevent referral, one of the action points that the university published, had do this, do that, and then it was also Prevent, make referrals to Prevent or possibly make that. And essentially, the agreement with the CT officers and everyone involved with Prevent was that Prevent isn’t there to promote British values per se and it’s not there to police political thoughts, even if they may be outside the so called Overton window. It’s there to stop any form of radicalisation or deal with any form of radicalisation that may lead to a CT-related event as a counterterrorism issue.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. It was falsified, there were no Prevent fires, it does not fall within Prevent. It is not conducive to a cohesive Britain. And if it had gone further, you could say that it invited death threats. But it is not, as you say, radicalization and terrorism in space before that
Sohail Ahmed:
There have been instances of homophobic related terror events, so you can’t discount the possibility that someone who is virulently homophobic may also have ideological inclinations towards extremism. But that is very closely looked into. There are two levels within the Prevent process. First, the police look at the referral. And then they decide, okay, if this needs further looking into, then a multi agency panel then looks at it more deeply. There’s two checking mechanisms. And yeah, Prevent isn’t a spying programme. They don’t have the capacity. That’s not what they do.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, I agree. I’m a former prevent practitioner myself. Yes, Liz.
Elizabeth Aref-Fear:
I think we need to see a zero tolerance approach, I think there’s a real kind of leeway that’s given in terms of faith communities when it comes to, you know, this is about inclusivity, across the board, misogyny, anti-LGBT rhetoric, antisemitism, all kinds of things. And I’m sorry, homophobia is homophobia whether it comes from a religious community or not. And I think zero tolerance, otherwise, it’s just going to carry on as it is.
Sohail Ahmed:
There’s a significant double standard with respect to how we deal with homophobia from non-Muslim parts of society, as compared to Muslim parts of society. The homophobia that comes from the Muslim community, because it’s almost an inconvenient truth, everyone turns a blind eye to it, or just says, oh, that’s just how they think, that’s normal, let’s just move on. That’s dangerous.
Elizabeth Aref-Fear:
Yeah, it’s dangerous to society. Also, what about queer Muslim kids? They’re caught in the crossfire of all this, they deserve safe spaces.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Everyone, we have just a few minutes left, and we have so many questions. It’s a shame, really, that we don’t have more time. But I would like to end on this question, because this is something really important that listeners need to hear and pass on to their friends that may need help. And we have a question here that says, I have Muslim friends from quite conservative backgrounds who are not happy in their lives, how can one effectively support them without being labelled a white saviour? Also, maybe if you could talk about any support services that are out there, but also how to avoid being embroiled in the political debate over what it is to support the LGBT Muslim community? Would anyone like to wrap up with that one?
Sohail Ahmed:
If I could, I would say that there’s this strange idea that somehow by arguing for LGBT rights and promoting these human rights values in communities that are not originally Western in origin, that somehow if one is white, then one is taking part in colonial imperialist mentality. I completely reject that assertion. I think that we live in a multicultural society and that if you want multiculturalism to work, then we must all be able to have these discussions. That means communities should be criticised, if justified and we should have a discussion. There needs to be openness. If there is no openness, if you shut it all down, right from the outset, how on earth are you supposed to deal with the issue if you can’t even talk about it?
Elizabeth Aref-Fear:
The term ‘bigotry of low expectations’ comes in. It’s about society as a whole and about the communities, and I feel like, because I’m white for lack of a better word, that people have problems with me because, calling out Islamism, they just feel like I’m attacking brown people. No, I’m a Muslim, and I’m talking about Islamism here. This is an issue. Why don’t people want to address it?
Charlotte Littlewood:
Yeah, the racialising of this situation could be something that when someone’s helping someone in that situation is to remove the racial lens from this. It’s not useful and it’s not important. It is about identities and sexual identities and religious identities, that’s what we’re talking about. And what about any kind of support platforms that somebody could be signposted towards?
Khakan Qureshi:
Well, obviously, there’s my group, Finding A Voice, which is based here in Birmingham, but there’s also other organisations, there’s some online support groups, there’s Facebook as well, but also reaching out to individuals, like Liz and myself, such as through Twitter. We don’t mind helping individuals. But going back to that question about how to effectively support an individual, I think sometimes it’s about what are you doing in the first instance to help your Muslim brethren and sisters, but at the same time, it’s like, if they are choosing to block you out, for whatever reason, and they bandy the phrase white saviour around, sometimes it’s about informed choices, and if they choose not to take your take heed of your advice and support, and step away, that’s the best thing you can do, really. But at the same time, educate yourself, equip yourself with the knowledge through Google, research, now we’ve got books out there, there’s satellite groups, contact them and see what they can offer as well. Because if they’re not listening to good sound advice on a one to one basis, or even from groups that support LGBT, then maybe leave that individual alone and let them make life decisions. We can’t help everybody. That applies to racial issues as well.
Charlotte Littlewood:
What a wonderfully insightful response that was. To all of you, thank you so much for being so personal and brave and sharing with us your testimonies this evening. We have looked at issues in education, we’ve looked at organisations that are pushing against LGBT space, we’ve discussed extremist interpretations and Islamist extremism, foreign funded mosques and hate preachers, and the difficulty that this space really faces. We sadly didn’t get to move on entirely to how the UK can do more but hopefully, we’ll be able to have a discussion in the future and unpack that further, but just hearing from you, hearing your experiences and sharing it in that way was really emotional and insightful and enlightening. And thank you all.
Elizabeth Aref-Fear:
Thanks for having us and yeah, do get in touch, reach out on Twitter or via email. If anybody’s got any further questions that we don’t have time to cover today, then please just get in contact.
Charlotte Littlewood:
Good evening and thank you.