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I wish to express my gratitude to Jordache Ellapen, Michael Gilsenan, Eva Mroczek, Ram Natarajan, Winnifred Sullivan, and Nurfadzilah Yahaya for their feedback on this paper as it developed. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at CSSH for their generous engagement with the paper, and Andrew Shryock and David Akin for their invaluable editorial guidance.
INTRODUCTION
A professor at the National University of Singapore, who, in addition to his secular academic credentials, is also a nationally recognized Islamic religious leader, caused a public furor recently for making homophobic statements. Describing homosexuality using words like "cancers," "impurities," and "corruption," he arrived at the conclusion that it needed to be "cleansed." These remarks soon caught the attention of a disapproving public that accused the professor of producing hate speech. Many Muslims immediately jumped to the professor's defense. His utterances should not be regarded as hate speech, they reasoned, because not only had he every right to exercise his academic freedom, but he was simply performing a religious duty by reminding Muslims of God's disapproval of homosexuality. By making these arguments, the supporters who sought to rehabilitate the professor's reputation reiterated and reproduced his anti-homosexual sentiments. This incident represented a new and emerging homophobia among Muslims in Singapore, who have historically never expressed such overt rejection of homosexuality. Through a close analysis of this incident and its aftermath, I will account for the shift in attitudes that caused Muslim believers to identify homosexuality as a problem that merited condemnation. In doing so, I make a case for how we ought to understand Muslim homophobia.
Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by Muslim homophobia. I take homophobia to mean "a psychologized fear or hatred of non-normative sexualities" (as defined by Tom Boellstorff) or "hatred and violence faced by people who engage in same-sex sexuality" (as defined by Don Kulick).1By attaching "Muslim" to this phenomenon, I am referring to how Muslim believers seek justification for homophobic attitudes in their religion. In their reasoning for why homosexuality should be rejected, Muslims in Singapore cited the founding texts of the Quran and the Hadith, especially the Quranic verses that condemn the acts of the tribe of the Prophet Lot (i.e., the people of Sodom and...