In June 2015, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state-level bans on same-sex marriages are unconstitutional. This judgment legalised same-sex unions throughout the country.
At a juncture[júngk-chu(occasion,मोड़)] in world politics when both the LGBT community and Muslims face pressure from majoritarian forces of various hues, one man has shown the difference that compassion towards minorities can make, and how Islamic law has inclusive interpretations that support this compassionate attitude.
His name is Daayiee Abdullah, and he is America’s only gay Imam.
Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, African-American Imam Daayiee grew up a Baptist in the late 1950s when his hometown was still the hub of the automobile and music industries and hadn’t yet fallen into the manufaturing decline that has now overtaken it.
The son of cosmopolitan, college-educated parents, his coming out as gay after his high school years was met with a sense of acceptance within his nuclear family. Yet, he may not have known then that he only just embarked[em'baak(enter,प्रवेश)] on the path of introspection, and that the tenets[te-nit(belief,सिद्धान्त)] of Islam would be an inextricable[in'ek-stri-ku-bul(unresolve,अनसुलझा)] part of that process.
For it was not in the U.S. but amongst members of the Uighur Muslim community in faraway China that Imam Daayiee discovered, in the early 1980s, what ultimately became his lifelong religious and scholarly pursuit — the philosophical foundations of Islam, particularly what he calls the “inclusive interpretation” of its holy text.
Years of rigorous[ri-gu-rus(strict,सख्त)] academic study of the Koran followed, drawing not only on his interaction with scholars in China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Syria, Cuba, and Mauritius, but also on his own graduate background in U.S. law.
Imbibing[im'bI-bing(absorb,सोखना)] those learnings, Imam Daayiee realised that in Islam the bias[bI-us(partial,पक्षपात)] against counter-currents such as homosexuality “came not from the Koran itself but from the interpreters, depending on the culture and their time periods, how they approached and understood it.”
Some interpretations of the Koran are “hidden because of the way they dictate how you are supposed to understand it,” the Imam said, adding that what was sometimes missing was tadabbur, or the process of critical interpretation and exegesis[ek-si'jee-sis(explanations,व्याख्या)] , the pondering[pón-du-ring(thoughtful,विचारमग्न)] of the subtler layers of meaning.
Deeply absorbing the lessons of his multi-region research into Islamic law, Imam Daayiee decided to bring the message home to the U.S. In 1999, he returned to Washington D.C. Within a few years he enrolled in a chaplaincy programme at the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in nearby Virginia.
Yet, what he soon came to realise was that the gay Muslim community in the U.S. was facing enormous[i'nor-mus(big,बड़ा)] societal pressures and needed more spaces and resources to address their emotional and spiritual needs.
“I became an Imam because of issues happening in the Muslim community, particularly the gay Muslim community,” he said, noting the case of a young Muslim man who died of HIV, and for whom the Imam performed last rites after the man’s own family refused to do so.
He has since defied numerous[nyoo-mu-rus(many,बहुत से)] stereotypes and taboos, including leading prayer sessions where men and women pray together, establishing an online, multi-nation teaching colloquium[ku'low-kwee-um(seminar,सभा)] of scholars called the Middle East Institute and counselling Muslim families on issues relating to freedom of choice for the younger generation.
Imam Daayiee’s answer to rising Islamophobia in the U.S. and elsewhere is simple: do not live down the values that people ascribe[u'skrIb(attribute,श्रेय देना)] to you out of hatred or ignorance.
Speaking of the Muslim community, he said, “Individuals have to demonstrate the best of who they are. It doesn’t mean that people won’t be angry or fearful, but just because people say things it doesn’t mean those things are true. If you don’t demonstrate those things to be true... you don’t own those names.”
He had praise for the peaceful response of Arizona Muslims to armed bikers surrounding a Phoenix mosque in May 2015. “I am very proud that they did not respond to those knuckleheads['nú-kul,hed(stupidity,बेवकूफी)] in a negative way,” he said.
The Imam always keeps things light, laughing often through a conversation peppered with jokes and allusions to his love for cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny.
Taken together, the Imam’s humanistic interpretation of the Koran, his inclusive vision for inter-faith conversations and international scholarly exchanges stem from his belief in individual liberty, at some levels a quintessentially[kwin-tu'sen-shu-lee(distinctive,विशिष्ट रूप से)] American value.
“I have a vision that every human being is like a kaleidoscope[ku'lI-du,skowp(complex pattern,जटिल परिस्थिति)],” he says. “Depending on the light that you allow through it, and how you twist and turn it, each individual is going to be uniquely different.”
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