The seeds of acceptance are being planted in some traditionally very
conservative countries.
By Nemat Sadat for The Diplomat
In the past year, even as Nigeria, Uganda and Russia have legislated
anti-gay measures, civil society in Afghanistan, Iran and India have
been on the cultural offensive to promote LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning) rights.
In Afghanistan, my pioneering coming out on Facebook last August has
become engrained in the popular culture of a collectivist nation that
still believes being gay is against Islam. Since I started my
campaign, millions of Afghans have heard me talk on the airwaves or
have read my words in print or on the web. While LGBT rights in
Afghanistan are virulently resisted, they are no longer a foreign
concept. Six months ago, I endorsed Dr. Ashraf Ghani for president of
Afghanistan in this year’s election and since then LGBTIQ Afghans have
mobilized a rainbow bloc to vote for the former academic. As
Afghanistan heads for a runoff election, gay Afghans now have a voice
and visibility when a year ago they were dormant and had nothing.
In neighboring Iran on Valentine’s Day, pop queen Googoosh released a
queer music video on her website, infuriating the Islamic Republic’s
theocratic rulers. Googoosh’s tribute to a lesbian couple couldn’t
have been better timed as it coincided with the twenty-fifth year
anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie
for publishing The Satanic Verses. Googoosh’s pro-LGBT publicity is a
huge leap from a time in 2007 when former President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, at a talk at Columbia University, denied the existence of
gays in Iran.
And last week in India, the United Nations debuted a Bollywood music
video to promote the acceptance of gay relationships in the world’s
largest democracy. Bollywood’s solidarity with LGBT will serve as a
potent force multiplier as its audience, estimated at three billion,
overlaps with the roughly 80 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia,
where homosexuals are still criminalized for their sexual orientation.
The pro-LGBT push in Afghanistan, Iran and India will only amplify as
elite and commoner debate the value of human rights versus intolerance
stemming from illiberal, religious and superstitious beliefs. How can
a nation ever become civilized when it forces its own citizens—from
cradle to grave—to live in constant fear and shame and be marginalized
to the fringes of society?
Iran and Afghanistan are fertile ground for a gay rights movement as
both countries wield enormous soft power that could nudge the world’s
1.6 billion Muslims towards a sexual revolution. In the late twentieth
century, Iran and Afghanistan transformed the ideological landscape of
the Islamic World. As the Islamic revival grew in the 1970s, the rise
of the twin fundamentalist revolutions—Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to
power in Iran and the Mujahedeen’s resistance and eventual triumph
over Soviet communism in Afghanistan—altered the world’s geopolitical
map.
As Khomeini’s Iran went to war with Iraq and the communist Afghan
regime became entrapped in an imbroglio—both countries grew
anti-American and a wave of Jihadi fervor swept across the world,
causing secularists as far away as Algeria and Yugoslavia into
retreat. In Western Europe, the children of many Muslim immigrants
regressed into a state of religiosity as the globalization of Jihad
spread Islamicization to the Occident.
Today, gay Afghans and Iranians with the help of their more
established Indian counterparts can set off another global crusade;
this time mobilizing a sexual revolution throughout the developing
world. All three countries in this triad had rich and ancient cultures
predating Islam that embraced the third gender and homosexual love. So
it’s odd today that gay rights would even be contested given all the
evidence that validates homosexuality as an innate trait.
Millions of Afghans, Iranians, and Indians live in territories in the
diaspora where gay civil unions or same-sex marriage is the norm. More
can be done by these immigrant communities to end the homophobia and
repression in their homelands, just as the Bollywood Stars, Googoosh,
and I have done by firmly standing for LGBT equality.
Another weapon at the disposal of gay Afghans, Iranians, and Indians
is demography. All three countries are experiencing a youth bulge. The
under-25 cohort represents 65 percent of Afghanistan and about half of
Iran and India’s population. Young people everywhere are becoming
increasingly gay affirmative as the proliferation of communication
exposes and expands the gay rights movement.
Pessimists will say that legalizing the status of LGBTIQ in
Afghanistan, Iran and India is impossible when bigots outnumber gays.
If that defeatist attitude held sway then gays living in the sixteen
countries and parts of Mexico and the U.S. where same-sex marriage is
allowed today would have never even attempted to overcome the tyranny
of the majority. Gays everywhere must continue to fight for their
freedom and persuade their opponents to support their cause. As the
seeds of a gay spring germinates in Afghanistan, Iran and India, it is
possible to begin to imagine the day when the rainbow flag will
proudly soar over the skies of Asia.
Nemat Sadat is a human rights activist and a Kellogg College student
pursuing a master of studies in creative writing at the University of
Oxford. Sadat is a former professor of political science at the
American University of Afghanistan. He is writing his first novel and
lives in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @nematsadat.
More:
http://thediplomat.com/2014/
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