Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms: Taqwa (Introspection) and Barzakh (Liminality and Paradox)

Abstract

Through Orientalism, EuroAmerican hegemony constructs nature and sexuality to control ideas and resources around Muslims and nonhumans. EuroAmerican colonizers introduced to Islamic theology the very association of sexuality with “natural/unnatural.” As a result, claims by numerous Islamic scholars that homosexuality is forbidden in Islam because it is “unnatural” echo Orientalist constructions of nature and sexuality. This thesis draws from intersectional queer Muslim perspectives to question Orientalist constructions of nature. I examine academic literature, artistic mediums, and political realities to theorize Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms (QMEF). Reckoning with the “paradox” of their identities, queer Muslims offer non-linear temporalities that reject Orientalist binaries between humans and nature, queerness and Muslimness. Dismantling Orientalist binaries, I argue that Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms (QMEF) instead embrace the barzakh (liminality and paradox) of queer/Muslim and human/nature relationships. I first outline a QMEF to facilitate dialogue between queer and Muslim environmental literature over different points of time. I then analyze Saba Taj’s there are gardens at the margins, a mixed-media visual arts exhibition highlighting queer Muslim relationships, to demonstrate how barzakh can negotiate new temporalities and relationships for queer Muslims and nonhumans. I also examine moments of QMEF during the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey, which show queer-Muslim coalition and blips of breakage in linear time. In these examples, I unpack how queer Muslims embrace contradictions, bringing opposites together as a whole. This thesis thus demonstrates how QMEF heals separations between queerness and Muslimness, human and nonhuman creation