Islam and Queer Theory

I really want to enjoin upon you a glowing description of the squirmy little puppy that is pressing itself into my arm and making it difficult to type, but, having not procured quite the perfect picture of him, nor yet having lived with him for a whole day, I’m going to save him for a whole post later in the week. I will only say that my own dog, Ash, is very annoyed with this ridiculous new addition to our household. Ash is a real dog, mostly poodle. Whereas as this new thing is called a Cheweenie.

Of course I should want to obsess about a puppy while the world burns. It’s the modern way. I’ve often wondered what ordinary people do in times of war, when they aren’t in the thick of the conflict. What do they think about? How do they occupy themselves? Back in the old days, everybody would work on making stuff to support ‘the effort’. Now there isn’t any effort, by anyone. The whole thing is effortless, languid, bitter. It’s not even really a war. It’s just a caustic, decadent landscape burned by fury around the edges, and sometimes a little closer in.

I shouldn’t do this to myself, by I did, yet again, click on Huffpo this morning. The big block of angry headlines overwhelmed me. As I sifted through, I discovered, yet again, that the real problem is not a coherent religious ideology that is trying to take over the world, but, of course, some westerners’ irrational fear of such an ideology. Republicans, if you couldn’t guess. I’m not a Republican any more so I don’t care, but I do find it fascinatingly perverse that we can’t talk about what’s going on without a frantic, angry faction screaming about how evil the Other is. And not the Terrorist, the Republican. They have become one and the same, for some people.

Way back in the 90s, back when you could still get a college education, I read a whole lot about both Islam and queer theory. Being a Christian even then, I felt how clever the total destruction of language would be. God not only uses language, but values it so highly that he himself is called The Word. If you can destroy words, tipping them over and pouring all the meaning out of them, fiddling around to try to make them mean something else, you will be sure that you have won something, you will have scored off God.

But so also did I find reading about Islam so very interesting. I spent most of my time in books and articles about the very brutal Algerian war with France. (And we wonder why the west is going up in flames.) I love France and Africa. But my experience of Africa was an Africa shaped and colored by France. Grudges run deep, don’t you know. You can’t colonize half the world and not eventually have some of your own blood on your hands.

Islam is in itself, even if it’s not ‘militant’, a colonizing force, whether by violence or by conversion. It is spreading all over the world, it’s language, it’s theology banging in, as the west once did, to what is already there. In some places it is more gentle, in other places violent, but everywhere it is growing more and more. As the mind and language of the west pours itself languidly out, trading a life of intellectual substance for the grasping, angry materialism that’s been seeded in the western heart for quite sometime now, Islam has a fertile plane to do its own particular work.

And what is the particularly clever threat of islam? Whereas the modern queer theorist played around with words, emptying them out of themselves, Islam has its eye on the body. What do you do with your body? Who gets to have one? Who gets to be seen? Who gets to have a voice? Not women. Not in North Africa and the Middle East anyway.

Why should women get to have bodies and voices? In Christian terms, differentiated gender is critical because of God’s redeemed relationship to humanity. Jesus rescues for himself a bride, a bride that he clothes and cares for and loves. She is arrayed in beauty. She is not covered completely in black, her eyes and face never feeling the light of the sun. She has a voice, to sing out love for her creator and redeemer. She doesn’t sit in the back, shrouded, but rather sits in splendor, in a place of honor. The queer theorist doesn’t want the woman to be a woman, or the man to be a man, but the true Islamist doesn’t want the woman to be there at all.

Everything is about the gospel. Even if we’re not allowed to talk about it, it’s all we’re speaking about. Everything in some way points to who God is and what he is doing in the world. We are everywhere tripping over the ugly lies that we tell about him, and maybe occasionally seeing a glint of truth. The voice in the body, or, to go all Frenchy, la voix, says something about God and his love for us. How we use it and what we say with it says just as much about what we think of him.