Quran forbids homosexuality? Understand the origin of anti-LGBT laws in countries like Qatar

The target of intense criticism, Qatar has been trying to convince the world that it will not persecute LGBT fans during the World Cup. That is, as long as they don’t look LGBT. They cannot, for example, show their affection in public. Things like holding hands in the street, kissing each other on the mouth or even waving a rainbow flag remain risky in this conservative country.

The persecution of the LGBT community is one of the most sensitive issues in this edition of the Cup, which opened on Sunday (20) with the match between Qatar and Ecuador. The tension is expected to last until the last game on December 18 – leaving behind an unresolved issue and a local community in disarray.

Qatar’s penal code stipulates that sex between men is punishable by up to three years in prison. Sex outside of marriage, including homosexuality, can be punished with up to seven years in prison. Islamic law, sharia, suggests the death penalty for gays, but there is no record that the punishment is actually implemented there.

According to the organization Human Rights Watch, persecution also happens through the so-called Community Protection statute, which allows detention for up to six months without a formal charge for the crime of “violating public morals”.

In a recent report on Qatar, Human Rights Watch documented at least six cases of beatings and five cases of harassment of LGBT people in custody since 2019. Also according to that entity, the regime required transgender people to undergo conversion therapy. In response to the allegations, Qatar claimed that the report contains false information, including the existence of official conversion centres.

A report in the British Guardian newspaper further suggested that the Qatari regime is blackmailing some homosexuals. The government promises them safety if they help the authorities find other LGBT people so they can be arrested and punished.

Like other countries with an Arab culture, Qatar relies on Islam to ban, persecute and punish lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It’s not just a religious issue, but how that faith is used. Some Christians, after all, also turn to the Bible to condemn and persecute homosexuals.

The Qur’an, the book that serves as the basis for Islam, uses the story of Lot’s reign to condemn sexual relations between men. The text does not provide for punishments, however. It is later, in Islamic jurisprudence, that these punishments begin to appear in writing. They include flogging and stoning, depending on the source.

It is complicated, however, to think about Islamic societies having only their texts as a source. In his classic essay “Orientalism”, Palestinian critic Edward Said criticizes precisely this textual approach to Islam, which ignores lived realities.

Historians know that, until recently, Islamic empires tolerated — and sometimes celebrated — same-sex relationships. There is a vast collection of homoerotic poems, for example, dating from the medieval period. Turkish and Persian illustrations explicitly record sex between men and between women.

The irony is that it was in part contact with European cultures that led Islamic societies to systematically condemn and punish homosexuality from the 19th century onwards. Europeans associated a supposed oriental decline with homosexual practices. Populations in Muslim-majority territories have internalized these ideas. Several anti-LGBT laws that exist in this region were initially imposed by European settlers, and later maintained by independent governments.

These official laws and practices do not, however, mean that LGBT life does not exist in Qatar. As in other repressive countries, including the neighboring UAE and Saudi Arabia, local populations —and the foreign community— find ways to live out their sexualities and gender expressions.

But they now fear that Qatar will intensify persecution and punishment in retaliation for all the attention and criticism the regime received during the weeks of the World Cup.