This panel brings together four papers that reflect on various levels of ambiguity in Islamic discourses on gender and sexuality, from legal classifications of the intersex body, to social responses to homoerotic literature, and queer experiments with communal piety. The four papers span very different historical contexts, from medieval transregional legal discourse, to early modern South Asia, to the contemporary United States. The papers also reflect distinct methodological approaches: ethnography, close readings of classical legal texts, and reception history of popular literary texts.
While scholars have recognized the ubiquity of erotic and homoerotic themes in classical Islamic literatures, they have neglected an important historical question: How did specific communities of early modern Muslims engage with classical texts featuring erotic themes? My paper addresses this question by analyzing early modern Indian commentaries on the Gulistan (Rose-Garden). I argue that the production, circulation, and materiality of these manuscript commentaries reveals the influence of the Gulistan in the everyday cultivation of Islamic ethics, beyond the royal courts that are the loci of existing studies. Commentators approached the Gulistan through a paradigm I call the “ethics of erotics.” Experiencing and discussing different forms of desire, including same-sex desire, was part of this framework, but acting upon them was not. In this gap between desire, language, and action lay the possibility of ethical cultivation.
This paper presents a novel analysis of khunthās (intersex individuals) as a third ontological category in certain classical Māliki and Shiʿi legal discourses. While intersex individuals are sometimes seen as a third legal or social category in Muslim contexts, no studies have demonstrated that they were recognised as such ontologically. Adopting historical, textual, and legal-hermeneutical approaches, I examine several classical Māliki and Shiʿi legal texts spanning the 11th to the 16th centuries. I argue that some of these jurists challenged the binary interpretation of sex, advocating for an alternative exegesis that accommodates khunthā as an ontological third category. To highlight the implications of this approach, I contrast the non-binary perspective with binary interpretations in legal cases of marriage, clothing, inheritance, and prayer. This analysis reveals the differing legal rights assigned to khunthās, offering a historical foundation for contemporary Muslim intersex individuals to advocate for their civil rights within their societies.
This paper examines classical Shāfi‘ī opinions regarding the khunthā as represented in Abū Ibrāhīm Ismā‘īl bin Yaḥyā al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar of al-Shāfi‘ī’s al-Umm (Dar al-Sha‘b, 1968, 6 vols.) and contextualizes them within a history of legal discussions of non-binary bodies. While al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820) and al-Muzanī (d. 877) prepared legal arguments that recognized a legal category that straddled the gender binary between male and female, they did not employ this legal category to recognize an ontological being other than male or female. They recognized the khunthā as a person whose genital variations made them difficult to categorize legally as male or female but employed the juristic concept of certainty to evade the difference between the social reality of non-binary bodies and Qur'an texts that spoke only of male and female created beings.
Current trends in feminist Muslim scholarship highlight radical uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity as fruitful ground for theological reflection and Islamic ethics. But what do uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity look like in practice? How is uncertainty lived and felt, and how might it be a foundation for Muslim piety? Playful Piety: How American Muslims Play with/in Islam explores how contemporary American Muslims cultivate pious subjectivities through various forms of playfulness, and how tradition and authority are negotiated in these processes. I suggest that playing could be the praxis for a feminist theology of uncertainty. My present case study explores how a queer Muslim devotional circle “plays with tradition.” Through analysis of my ethnographic data I argue that playing is a legitimate form of Muslim piety and offers novel epistemological and theological approaches to tradition, especially for marginalized Muslims.