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Colonialism, culture wars and fundamentalist politicians have restricted sexual freedom
IN THE 13th and 14th centuries two celebrated male poets wrote about men in affectionate, even amorous, terms. They were Rumi and Hafiz, and both lived in what is now Iran. Their musings were neither new nor unusual. Centuries earlier Abu Nuwas, a bawdy poet from Baghdad, wrote lewd verses about same-sex desire. Such relative openness towards homosexual love used to be widespread in the Middle East. Khaled El-Rouayheb, an academic at Harvard University, explains that though sodomy was deemed a major sin by Muslim courts of law, other homosexual acts such as passionate kissing, fondling or lesbian sex were not. Homoerotic poetry was widely considered part of a “refined sensibility”, he says.
The modern Middle East views the subject very differently. A survey by Pew Research Centre in 2013 found that most people in the region believe homosexuality should be rejected: 97% in Jordan, 95% in Egypt and 80% in Lebanon. In 2007 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, told a crowd of incredulous students at Columbia University in New York that “in Iran we don’t have homosexuals”. In 2001 the Egyptian Ministry...