Sexual Rights and their Discontents: Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī on Homosexuality and the ‘Islamic Family’

Taking Y ū suf al-Qara ḍā w ī as an example, this article suggests looking at neo-conservative Islamic dis- course on homosexuality in connection with the enduring vehemence with which this discourse upholds religiously framed notions of marriage and the family while continuously making adaptations on questions of women’s rights in order to accommodate political and societal change. In his writings, al-Qara ḍā w ī systematically treats the topic of homosexuality in connection with the central theme of his programme of wasa ṭ iyya gravitating around the legitimate ‘Islamic’ family which actually proves to be a hybrid of national state sanctioned familism and a decontextualised ideal of sexual difference as an eternal ‘cosmic’ princi- ple. While contributing itself to their politicisation, Islamic discourse constructs both family and sexuality as lying beyond the reach of (secular) politics. Naturalised and sacralised notions of marriage and sexuality thereby warrant a realm for religious authority to rise to legitimately speak in public. So far, research on homosexuality and Islam has largely focused on religious and juridical qualifications as well as on questions of categorisation. The main argument presented here is that the ideological zeal in Islamic discourse on the topic is always also more basically directed against any attempt at transferring the language of (secu- lar) rights to issues of gender and sexuality.


Introduction
Taking Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī as an example, this article suggests looking at neo-conservative Islamic discourse on homosexuality in connection with the enduring vehemence with which this discourse upholds religiously framed notions of marriage and the family while continuously making adaptations on questions of women's rights in order to accommodate political and societal change. Given al-Qaraḍāwī's ideological proximity to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and his local influence up to 2011, I will contextualise his positions mainly with reference to Egyptian politics of gender and women's rights. So far, research on homosexuality and Islam has largely focused on religious and juridical qualifications as Page | 248 well as on questions of categorisation. 1 Complementing this research, the main argument presented here is that the ideological zeal in Islamic discourse on the topic is always also more basically directed against any attempt at transferring the language of (secular) rights to issues of gender and sexuality.
In Egypt, as in other countries of the Arab region, the by now hegemonic understanding of the family as the basic unit of state and society and as the core institution of a nationally defined and planned 'reproductive arena', 2 constitutes the object of conflicting interpretations and ideologies. 3 Since independence, authoritarian regimes have made political use of women's and gender issues, putting competing oppositional forces against each otheramong others, in the case of women's rights movements and Islamic forces. On the institutional level, Islamic Personal Status Law as it has evolved in Egypt since the 1920s has enshrined the hegemony of religious normativity over the private sphere in the framework of the modern secular nation state. At the same time, since the turn of the 19 th to the 20 th century Islamic reformist discourse has not only contributed to the more general trend of institutionalising marriage, it has also been crucial in sexualising marriage, with sexuality being conceived of as a natural human condition in need of moral as well sanitary regulation. 4 The fusion of religion with naturalised notions of marriage and heteronormative sexuality that has thus emerged until today serves as a powerful tool for articulating Islamic opposition to women's human rights inside the family or, more recently, opposition to 'gender feminism'. 5 At the same time, it precludes any accommodation with and even more so any form of recognition of sexual orientation as a basis for rights claims-independently of more explicitly homophobic attitudes and the question whether homosexuality is interpreted as inherently natural or as a question of choice. A telling symptom of the complex dynamics at stake here is the position expressed by the influential Egyptian intellectual, Muḥammad ʿImāra, a crucial figure for guiding the reception of modernist Islamic thought in the Arab-speaking world, on radical feminism leading to the propagation of homosexuality. 6 The issues of homosexuality and of homophobia in Muslim societies are most of the time discussed in relation to the growing visibility of transnational LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) activism. Often, contemporary repressive attitudes in the region are seen to contrast with supposedly more fluid premodern cultures of sexuality. 7 An important line of research therefore concentrates on the introduction and evolution of modern notions of sexual perversion and homosexuality as deviating from normalised heterosexuality. 8 Another major research focus is on emerging marginal or non-normative sexual identities at the intersection of local socio-cultural vocabularies and the language of international gay rights activism. 9 In this literature, Islamism and/or conservative Islam are seen to be key factors, while the political stakes involved are less discussed. What do conservative Islamic forces do when they define social problems in terms of moral decadence, the break-up of gender norms and, more particularly, the breakup of sexual mores? And why are heteronormative marriage and the family so central to any definition of an authentically Islamic as well as natural order to be protected against current perils of disintegration and cultural Westernisation?
The reading of al-Qaraḍāwī suggested here attempts to show how naturalised and sacralised notions of marriage and sexuality are linked to the political history of the region as well as to the intellectual trajectories of modern and contemporary Islamic thought. It combines approaches from sexuality studies with women's and gender studies. In a first section, I briefly discuss relevant research on homosexuality in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. A second section, containing the core of the argument, starts by looking more closely at marriage and sexuality as strategic sites for gendered as well as gendering processes of state and nation building in the Arab region since the late 19 th century. The creation of Islamic Personal Status Law is a case in point here, instituting the interlocking of the private-public divide with the definition of a sphere for Islamic law to make its 'public appearance through state law'. 10 This situation turns the family into an anchor point for politicising Islam with the help of the family and vice versa while rhetorically de-politicising both. At the same time, the idea of the conjugal family as a realm of personal liberty and autonomy has allowed for the blending of liberal ideas with Islamic moral standards. 11 The last part of the paper presents a close reading of selected texts by al-Qaraḍāwī in order to illustrate how the firm separation of sexuality from rights-be it individual or collective (i.e. minority) rights based on gender or sexual orientation/identity-operates in Islamic discourse. It will be argued that al-Qaraḍāwī's programmatically anti-homosexual stance serves to protect the family and sexuality from secular notions of rights on the one hand and from liberal Muslim critique on the other.

Framing Homosexuality and Islam
Research on sexuality in Arabic-Islamic societies began as part of academic Orientalism. A typical case in point is Georges Henry Bousquet's L'éthique sexuelle de l'Islam, published in 1953. Bousquet's general focus was Islam's assumed lack of concern for marriage as a stable moral and social institution. From the start, the author stresses the difference between 'our' understanding of marriage and Islam:

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Le 'mariage' en langue arabe, se dit nikâh', c'est-à-dire 'coït'. Sans attacher à ces sortes d'arguments philologiques plus d'importance qu'ils n'en ont, il faut prononcer que cela donne bien l'essentiel de la conception islamique de cette institution. Nous continuerons à user du terme 'mariage', mais je me demande s'il n'yaurait pas intérêt à conserver le mot arabe comme terme technique pour désigner une chose qui, certes, a des rapports avec notre mariage, mais aussi en diffère considérablement. 12 Since the 1970s, connected to the critique of both Orientalism and emerging conservative religious forces in the region, scholars from the Arab region have suggested novel readings of Islamic literary as well as normative sources on gender, the body and sexuality. 13 Notwithstanding significant differences between them in terms of discipline, sources and methodology, they were all concerned with demonstrating the richness and diversity of Islamic representations of sexuality in contrast to Western traditions as well as in contrast to contemporary conservative trends in Islam. More recently, Thomas Bauer has further developed this line of thought applying the concept of a 'culture of ambiguity' to premodern Islamic history in general. 14 Since the 1990s, sexuality studies have gained new impetus from developments in gay and lesbian studies as well as from queer theory. Homosexuality now became a major topic-leading for the first time to an area studies version of the constructivism vs essentialism debate. 15 Over the last two and a half decades, an impressively rich scientific literature has developed that historicises and contextualises same-sex sexuality and desire in different regional and periodical settings mainly based on literary and normative sources as well as on Islamicate science (i.e. philosophy, astronomy, medicine etc.). Researching the entangled history of modern representations of sexual desire in the Arab world, Joseph Massad has provided important new insights into major shifts in how secular as well as Islamic intellectuals conceived of sexuality as a natural phenomenon and a psychological fact. 16 Massad, as others, puts major emphasis on the contemporary emergence of gay or queer identities connected to transnational gender activism and its effects in the region. He pushes his critique of what he calls the Gay International to completely deprecate it-which in turn has raised strong opposition, not least from activist quarters in the Arab region. 17 Other studies contextualise the different strategies and forms of activism employed on the ground to critically examine and assess their impact. 18 Sahar Amer programmatically pleads for recognising the hybridity and interculturality of Arab LGBTQIA communities and identities: The question that I am raising here is not whether naming should take place (I strongly believe that it must), or even whether Western discourses on sexuality are relevant to the Arab world (I firmly believe that they are relevant). Rather, what I interrogate is the almost exclusive reliance by Arab activists on Western terminology and Western paradigms of same-sex sexuality. What I object to are the kinds of names that are selected by Arab gay activists to speak about homosexuality, and how these names fail to empower and delay much-needed social change in Arab societies today. By adopting foreign terms and gender categories that mimic Western sexual politics and by dressing sexual preference in foreign linguistic garb, Arab gay activists unwittingly end up supporting a culture of shame that ultimately undermines Arab identity and leads to the further isolation of Arab gays and lesbians from their own socio-historical and literary traditions. 19 In the quarrel over specifying sexually defined identities and subjectivities, Amer suggests engaging with the necessarily hyphenated character of Arab LGBTQIA communities that are both anchored in local traditions and 'interdependent with global realities'. 20 The focus on cultural and intellectual history as well as on questions of identity and subjectivity in research on homosexuality can be seen to supplement Middle East women's and gender studies that privilege structural factors determining gender relations such as law, politics, and the state as well as socially constructed forms of agency. 21 In reverse, studies on homosexuality seem to sometimes underestimate the role played by secular regimes and state law. In her introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on the topic of 'Lesbians, Sexuality and Islam', Huma Ahmed-Ghosh writes: For Muslim communities, especially in recent decades, the politicization of 'conservative' Islam has pointedly impacted same-sex relationships through the imposition of strict 'Islamic' moral codes. By labeling alternative sexualities as 'deviant', oft quoted verses (mentioned in these articles) from the Quran have been used to legitimize these fatwas and policing of people's sexuality. 22 The author further argues that 'sexuality was historically viewed as "fluid", with rare public strictures'. 23 Today, on the contrary, 'we are seeing harsh laws dictated by conservative Islamic regimes and courts challenging this sexual fluidity and replacing it with harsher sentences to ensure heterosexual conformity'. 24 Likewise, Muslim gay activists, when engaging with the critique of religious conservatism in the name of liberal or progressive Islam likewise contribute to putting Islam at the center of the debate on homophobia. 25 In what follows, I suggest looking more closely at the historical, legal and po-

Family and sexuality in Islamic Personal Status Law
Since the late 19 th century, the realm of law comprising marriage, the family and inheritance started to be conceived as Personal Status Law, subsequently rendered in Arabic as aḥwāl šaḫṣiyya. 26 During a first phase, Personal Status Law in Egypt as elsewhere in the region stayed relatively free from direct Europeanisation. Until the first half of the 20 th century, legal change was implemented most of the time by way of procedural laws and the introduction of basic formal requirements for registering marriages. Yet, at the same time, the definition of marriage and the family was fundamentally transformed in religious reformist as well as in liberal nationalist discourse. Companionship between the spouses and mutual solidarity came to be considered basic elements of marriage as the basis of a stable and healthy family. 27 One of the major functions of the new family was the production of self-regulated and well-educated children as valuable future members of the national community. The conceptual shift that elevated the conjugal family to an essentially national and civilisational concern enhanced the role of women as wives and mothers. Female education, domesticity and the cultivation of women's inner qualities now became a chief apprehension of-male as well as female-proponents of social and moral reform. 28 Giving birth and raising children was considered a publicly relevant matter that necessitated new measures of control and discipline. 29 Very much in line with contemporary European ideas, motherhood and female domesticity were interpreted as the fulfillment of women's natural temperament. In addition to endeavors that aimed at the 'policing of families', 30 the modern conjugal family was turned into a privileged site of affective bonds of love and intimacy that were legally recognised, socially accepted as well as morally and culturally valued. Targeted educational and health campaigns, the media as well as popular culture more generally concurred to establish the conjugal family in opposition to 'traditional' or 'informal' familial settings not only as a normative model but also as desirable and conducive to happiness. 31 Islamic Personal Status Law constituted an intrinsic part of processes of state building and nation building. In response to colonial modernity, women and the family became important sites for the defense of national as well as religious authenticity.

Sexual Rights and their Discontents
family opened up new possibilities for negotiating political loyalties and identities. 32 In public debates as well as in legal discourse-again very much echoing European ideasmarriage and the family were increasingly seen to be natural as well as sacred phenomena lying beyond the reach of secular law and policy making. 33 During the inter-war period, Egyptian jurists and legislators started to classify aḥwāl šaḫṣiyya as comprising the 'natural qualities' of human beings according to the separate 'system' (Ar. niẓām) of the family. 34 At the same time, Personal Status Law actually did transform gender relations. The strictly hierarchical relationship between the sexes sanctioned by traditional Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) was reinterpreted to be tuned in to national concerns of socio-biological reproduction as well as to notions of moral and social progress. 35 In contrast to modern Islamic Personal Status Law, traditional Islamic law had conceived of marriage as a strictly private bilateral or synallagmatic contract (muʿāwaḍa). According to its technically legal definition in Sunni fiqh, the effect of a validly-contracted marriage was to establish legitimate sexual relations between a man and a free woman (as opposed to a female slave) thus safeguarding legitimate off-spring and controlling the transmission of wealth. Upon marriage, the husband acquired the exclusive right to sexual intercourse with his wife and to control of her person, whereas she acquired property of the dowry and the right to marital maintenance. 36 In principle, the dissolution of marriage was just as much a purely private act as its contracting. This is especially true for the unilateral dissolution of marriage on the husband's initiative, or repudiation (ṭalāq). This perception clearly differs from the nationalist-reformist reformulation of marriage and the conjugal family. Supported by state-sanctioned ideological and legal familism, the institutionalisation of Islamic Personal Status Law in the framework of the modern secular state created a specific institutional formula linking the realm of the private or personal sphere to religious authority.
It is because the legal formation of the family gives the concept of individual morality its own 'private' locus that the shariʿa can now be spoken of as 'the law of personal status'-qanun al-ahwal al-shakhsiyya. In this way, it becomes the expression of a secular formula, defining a place in which 'religion' is allowed to make its public appearance through state law. And the family as concept, word, and organizational unit acquires new salience. 37 Islamic Personal Status Law institutionally and programmatically fused religion, gender and the family. 38 The issues of 'woman' and 'family' became sacralised as a result of the political construction of both, the secular (or the non-religious) and the religious 'as dis- Page | 254 crete conceptual categories' enmeshed with the highly gendered separation of public and private spheres. 39 '"The woman" and "the family" were the last domain left to the religious, over which they were in principle free to rule'. 40 At the same time, 'woman' and 'family' were turned into sites of ideological competition.
Confining shariʿa to domestic matters politicized the family both as a sphere of intimate, affective relations and as a repository of group identity of which religious affiliation was a defining legal and moral characteristic. (…) Languages of privacy that entered the legal discourse around personal status matters concurrently with the limiting of the shariʿa's jurisdiction served to create 'the family' both as a private space and one which was central to political order. 41 While for secular women's rights activists, Personal Status Law turned out to be difficult to directly challenge due to its being linked to the realm of religion, religious forces politicised the family turning it into a model for a liberated as well as Islamic social and political order. 42 Based on her study on female voices of the religious awakening in Egypt since the 1970s, Ellen McLarney shows how the Egyptian Islamic intellectual and activist Hiba Raʾūf ʿIzzat by claiming a political role for women inside the family, questions both the depoliticisation of the family as well as the privatisation of religion. 43 Only more recently, resulting from the institutionalisation of human rights since the beginning of the new millennium, secular women's rights activists in Egypt as elsewhere in the Arab region have gained new grounds for criticising Personal Status Law while at the same time risking more than ever to be considered allies of authoritarian regimes and international donors. 44 Page | 256

Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī and his interlocutors
Qaraḍāwī wholly endorses the modern notion of the conjugal family as the basic unit of society and the state. 53 In his early book The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam mentioned above, al-Qaraḍāwī defines gender primarily as being based on marriage and the family.
Qaraḍāwī's approach in this publication is pretty straightforward: he has written a traditionalist text that emphasizes women's obligation to safeguard social morality through circumspect demeanor in public and obedient behavior in their maledominated families. 54 However, over the years, having had to accept certain adaptations in women's roles to accommodate ongoing socio-economic and political changes-like female salaried work, the increase of female headed households or the political participation of women not least in Islamic parties-al-Qaraḍāwī all the more strictly upholds gender hierarchy or qiwāma (male superiority justified with reference to Quran 4:34) 55 and the complementarity of the sexes as expressions of sacredly as well as naturally ordained principles detached from its traditionally patriarchal context of support and protection. 56 For this purpose, heteronormative conjugal generativity is foregrounded as a gendering trope that immunises marriage and the family against secular as well as liberal Muslim critique.

Sexual Rights and their Discontents
respect of 'family values' as a human right. 59 The same language of international human rights allows al-Qaraḍāwī to claim Islam's particularities (ḫaṣāʾiṣ) as compared to other 'religions of the book' which, according to him, all share the same basic concern for marriage and the family as 'sacred' institutions 60 -an idea completely absent from traditional Islamic law. Al-Qaraḍāwī particularly mentions repudiation and polygyny as examples of Islam's specificity. He thereby simultaneously positions himself against a longstanding tradition of inner-Muslim critique of these legal institutes. Similar arguments are employed when criticising secular women's rights from an Islamic point of view. Thus, a declaration issued in 2013 by the International Union of Islamic Scholars (al-Ittiḥād al-ʿālamī li-ʿulamāʾ al-muslimīn) headed by al-Qaraḍāwī on the topic of The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and UN declarations against violence against women, claims recognition of the principle of gender complementarity in Islamic family law (as opposed to gender equality) in the name of 'religious diversity' (al-tanawwuʿ al-dīnī). 61 The declaration therefor objects to interpreting legitimate gender differences as conducive to (illegitimate) violence against women. As a consequence of this attitude, for instance, the concept of marital rape as a criminal offense is axiomatically rejected. While constantly referring to Islamic normativity, the model of marriage and the family propagated by al-Qaraḍāwī is actually very much modelled after the hegemonic national conjugal family briefly outlined above. Marriage and the family are considered by al-Qaraḍāwī the basic unit of state and society providing for the moral, the social as well as the biological reproduction of humankind altogether-having children being declared one of the most important aims of marriage. Al-Qaraḍāwī considers the protection of the family a religious and a social duty of husband and wife as well as of society at large. 62 He even declares marriage to be 'sacred'. 63 Besides unfounded divorce, major threats to marriage and the family are subsumed by al-Qaraḍāwī under the notion of 'libertarianism' (ibāḥiyya). 64 This means the following: unregulated abortion, illicit sexual intercourse, extramarital children or unmarried mothers, nudism, transnational conventions protecting reproductive and sexual rights and finally, as the most dangerous, homosexuality. 65 Al-Qaraḍāwī mentions as particularly perilous the public lobbying for the recognition of homosexuality (or sexual deviance, šuḏūḏ) and the publicising of homosexual marriage and homosexual families.
According to al-Qaraḍāwī, the spread of homosexuality not only causes epidemics and moral disease, but it also leads to the final extinction of the human species. Generativity actually lies at the core of al-Qaraḍāwī's argument. It serves to establish an inextricable link between gender, nature and religion based on essentialised notions of sexual difference as a manifestation of eternal principles. Sexual difference is portrayed by al-Qaraḍāwī as a cosmic norm and a divinely ordered state of affairs. 66 Sexual reproduction is taken as a proof to the fixed natural as well as divine condition of men and women. By linking the heteronormative conjugal family to both 'nature' and 'religion', this definition of sexual difference allows al-Qaraḍāwī to claim a privileged voice for Islam in current public debates on the 'crisis of the family'. 67 In addition to constituting a hierarchical system of complementary rights and duties with clearly defined social functions, marriage and the family are also portrayed as leading to personal completion. When addressing his readers, al-Qaraḍāwī interpellates the contemporary Muslim as someone who looks for happiness and personal fulfilment in accordance with Islamic legal guidance. In order to properly function, according to al-Qaraḍāwī, the family has to be based upon companionate marriage. 68 Marriage and the family are portrayed as a refuge for clearly defined and personally rewarding gender identities with motherhood and fatherhood constituting the most gratifying tasks in life. 69 Al-Qaraḍāwī idiosyncratically and out of any context quotes the famous line written by the Egyptian nationalist poet Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (d. 1932) praising the mother as 'a school' (madrasa) whose education would lead to the education of the (whole) nation (šaʿb). 70 According to al-Qaraḍāwī, children have to be considered a divine gift. He underlines the social and moral merit of legitimate descent (nasab) based on marriage in contrast to the tragic fate of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. 71 Last but not least, al-Qaraḍāwī accepts the idea of a natural sexual drive or instinct (ġarīza) that needs to be channeled through marriage. Accordingly, he considers sexual fulfillment for men as well as women in the framework of marriage legitimate-even though, he adds, marriage involves not just the body but 'the whole human being '. 72 According to al-Qaraḍāwī, the true believer expects more from marriage than simply sexual satisfaction. To live as true believers, he stresses, both men and women need to be instructed on Islamic principles and precepts. 73 They should thus be enabled to live up to their being responsible for their own conduct. The accountable Muslim subject is an important component of al-Qaraḍāwī's definition of marriage and the family. He insists that men and women should freely choose their partner after having seen him or her and after having talked to him or her in order to make sure that they match on the social, the educational, the moral and the psychic levels.

Sexual Rights and their Discontents
'traditions' that do not allow women to choose or even to see her partner prior to the conclusion of marriage. According to al-Qaraḍāwī, women should be the 'masters of themselves'. 75 The modern Muslim subject addressed by al-Qaraḍāwī appears to be very much a 'properly gendered moral person', 76 invested with will and virtue rather than simply externally controlled. 77 Al-Qaraḍāwī's model of the 'Islamic' family fuses the basic characteristics of the modern national Egyptian family as defined by the secular state with foundationalist references to Islamic normativity as well as to naturalised notions of sexual difference. This fusion also allows for partial adaptations over time especially with view to women's salaried work and access to political participation. 78 Here, the rhetoric of naturalisation and sacralisation of gender can be seen to relieve the family's hierarchical structure from delivering the moral and material rewards of the 'patriarchal bargain'. 79 As a consequence, male superiority is immunised against historicising critique.
This last point also needs to be seen as being linked to the author's opposition to competing interpretations of Islamic law, especially different versions of Islamic feminismeven if this term as such is contested in Arab countries. 80 Not surprisingly, al-Qaraḍāwī strictly refuses female-as opposed to male-readings of Islamic sources in the name of the all-embracing project of 'insāniyya islāmiyya' (or Islamic humanism). During an emission of the program al-Šarīʿa wa'l-Ḥayāh broadcasted by Al Jazeera TV on June 15, 2008 on the topic of "Women in the noble Koran", al-Qaraḍāwī does not only oppose initiatives like the UNESCO conferences on Islamic feminism but categorically dismisses any idea of identity based tafsīr or iǧtihād altogether. 81 According to him, only formal scholarly credentials (and especially the necessary linguistic capacity) qualify for authorised interpretations of religious texts. In order to promote his own brand of wasaṭiyya in the highly competitive field of mediated transnational Islam, al-Qaraḍāwī not only dismisses Islamic Feminism during the emission but also other positions labelled by him 'extremist'-notably those who declare women's voice as ʿawra and request the complete exclusion of women from the public sphere.
When it comes to reproductive and sexual rights, al-Qaraḍāwī, again in line with official Egyptian politics, has equally made selective concessions-concerning for example certain cases of abortion, contraception or in vitro fertilisation. However, in these cases, he  ǧasad al-marʾa). The conference was intended to back recent legal amendments on this highly contested issue that had been politicised since the 1990s. 83 In his booklet, al-Qaraḍāwī actually makes only slight concessions compared to earlier statements on the topic. Far from approving legal prohibition he concedes that, from an Islamic legal perspective, there are no irrefutable objections to prohibiting female genital cutting-even if he himself declares other methods like conscious rising more commendable for encouraging change. More importantly, al-Qaraḍāwī persistently frames the problem of female genital cutting as one of sexual morals and public health-thus deliberately omitting rights based approaches. He bases his arguments on Islamic law, more particularly on the notion of 'public interest' (maṣlaḥa ʿāmma) to raise questions of health and social change.
Al-Qaraḍāwī's treatment of homosexuality, or, in his words, sexual deviance (šuḏūḏ), follows the same overall logic of sacralising and naturalising the conjugal generativity. Anti-homosexual arguments further help to categorically separate the sphere of intimacy and sexuality confined to the legitimate Islamic family from the realm of secular legal rights. At the same time, arguments about homosexuality are again intrinsically linked to questions of religious authority. Condemning šuḏūḏ, al-Qaraḍāwī simultaneously defends his pretense to controlling the interpretation Islamic law. Already the definition of homosexuality raises theological questions and hence possibly opens new spaces for competing forms of inner-Muslim politicisation of gender and sexuality. Al-Qaraḍāwī therefore categorically objects to any kind of accommodation of homosexuality based on (liberal) religious or biological determinism.
In an article analyzing al-Qaraḍāwī's view on homosexuality, Scott Kugle and Stephen Hunt argue that Islamic 'neo-traditionalist' homophobia is actually the expression of a perceived crisis of Muslim masculinity-with non-heterosexuality being seen as a threat to masculine identity and authority. 84 According to Kugle and Hunt, al-Qaraḍāwī defines homosexuality as sinful desire of individual Muslims and as a perversion that is part of a threat against Islam and social order inspired by the West. In equating the innate disposition to believe in God (enshrined in the semantics of the Arabic word fiṭra) with an inborn heterosexual orientation, al-Qaraḍāwī, according to the authors, at least implicitly equates 82 al-QARAḌĀWĪ 2007. In transnational feminist circles, the wording of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)  Sexual Rights and their Discontents homosexuality with unbelief. As far as Islamic tradition is concerned, the authors rightly stress that, contrary to the existing sources, al-Qaraḍāwī states that the sharia is clear and univocal, excluding from discussion any of the documented differences in opinion let alone alternative contemporary readings of sacred sources. At the same time, according to the authors, al-Qaraḍāwī 'misunderstands and distorts' the basic concept of 'sexual orientation'-thus referring to a term employed by Muslim gay activists who claim theological recognition for their sexual inclination. 85 The source Kugle and Hunt are analyzing is again an emission of the TV program al-Šarīʿa wa'l-ḥayāh broadcasted on Al Jazeera on June 7, 2006, under the title of 'Innate human nature' (fiṭra). 86 As usual, it is the host of the program, ʿAbd al-Ṣamad Nāṣir, who introduces the key terms for discussing the topic alternately labeled in Arabic as homosexuality (miṯliyya) or deviance (šuḏūḏ). These terms are: fiṭra, Islam, Islamic law, human rights as well as relevant psychological classification. In general, during the emission, al-Qaraḍāwī advances rather predictable neo-conservative positions on the topic. He repeatedly states that innate human nature (fiṭra) as such is heterosexual and that therefore there cannot subsist any truly natural inclination or predisposition for being attracted to persons of the same sex. Al-Qaraḍāwī continuously slips from the Quranic terminology of fiṭra to the notion of nature tout court (ṭabīʿa) with the familiar biologistic connotations attached to it when he refers, for instance, to the makeup of the reproductive apparatus (ǧihāz tanāsulī) of men and women as a proof to the binary gender order and heterosexual attraction as fundamentals of human existence. According to al-Qaraḍāwī, homosexuality does not only contradict innate human nature but also jeopardises the common interest (maṣlaḥa). Acceptance of homosexuality in al-Qaraḍāwī's view inevitably leads to decadence and finally to the extinction of mankind altogether. Asked about the Islamic legal sanction for homosexuality, al-Qaraḍāwī classifies it as illicit sexual intercourse (zinā)-irrespective of the complexities of classificatory systems in traditional Islamic law. 87 Given the differences between the Sunni schools of law with regard to the concrete form and degree of punishment, al-Qaraḍāwī nevertheless recommends to dispense with mildness when choosing from them. Without further explication he asserts that female homosexuality (siḥāq) is to be punished less harsh than male homosexuality (liwāṭ). 88 Concerning homosexuals who repent and seek to overcome their 'degenerate' sexual inclination, al-Qaraḍāwī suggests offering help and assures his listeners of the clemency of 'us Muslims'. On the other hand, he insists on the especially reprehensible character of publicly exposing or propagating same-sex-relationships. 88 Literally siḥāq refers only to the same-sex act between women (tribadism), while liwāṭ literally refers to the anal intercourse, but from the context it seems that al-Qaraḍāwī is referring not only to the sexual act.

Conclusions
Given the central role played by marriage and heteronormative generativity in foundationalist arguments for and competition over religious authority, there is no room in al-Qaraḍāwī's version of neo-conservative Islamic discourse for conceiving of and recognising sexual rights. In his writings, al-Qaraḍāwī systematically treats the topic of homosexuality in connection with the central theme of his program of wasaṭiyya gravitating around the legitimate 'Islamic' family which actually proves to be a hybrid of national state sanctioned familism and a decontextualised ideal of sexual difference as an eternal 'cosmic' principle. Actually, while contributing itself to their politicisation, Islamic discourse constructs both family and sexuality as lying beyond the reach of (secular) politics. Naturalised and sacralised notions of marriage and sexuality thereby warrant a legitimate realm for religious authority to rise to legitimately speak in public. At the same time, Islamic discourse continuously and variously reconfigures the functionality of marriage and the family in reaction to changing social and political demands. The opinions expressed by al-Qaraḍāwī in each of the cases discussed above, in spite of their adaptive pragmatism, all converge to foster the empowerment of religion to publicly claim authority over the realm of the private sphere, intimacy and sexuality. Seen from this angle, neo-conservative anti-homosexual attitudes are not necessarily and certainly not solely incited by transnational LGBTQI activism in the region nor are they exclusively targeted at activist groups or individuals. Rather, there exists a specific historico-political context that generates particular forms of ideological investment of the heteronormative conjugal family. At the same time, al-Qaraḍāwī's attitude on homosexuality as formulated during the respective TV emission analyzed above is not completely incompatible with what Kecia Ali has described as a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of more compliant Islamic positions. 89 These kinds of connected yet shifting ideological fault lines do not allow for easy generalisations on Islam and homosexuality.