Islam and Queer Muslims
Mohamed Abdou, Mohamed Jean Veneuse Islam and Queer Muslims Identity and Sexuality in the Contemporary World 2019, March A thesis submitted to the...
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The Ph.D. is a forthcoming book. Nonetheless, in an effort to provide an overview of this interdisciplinary and transnational project I’m offering the table of contents, this chapter, the Bibliography and Appendix till the impending release.

Abstract

This Ph.D. is an ethnographic-activist-based project. It first examines the genealogy of popular nationalist-statist and religious enforcements of postcolonial cisheteronormativity in Egypt through the examination of two case studies, the Cairo 52 case in 2001 and the transgendered case of Sally Abd Allah in 1982. It then presents my fieldwork, which documents my ethnographic narrators’ resistance to these narratives. Specifically, my fieldwork investigates the neocolonial/neoimperial conditions that inform the circulatory geopolitical relationship between Islam and queerness in non-Western societies such as franchise-colonial Egypt and settler-colonial U.S./Canada, in an age where sexual and gender diversity is a hallmark of neoliberal ‘secular’ modernity, whose advent historically exposed Arabs, North Africans, and Muslims, if not all non-Europeans, to a plethora of false competing dualisms, such as secular/religious and heterogeneity/homogeneity, as well as discourses such as homonationalism (al-qawmiyyat al-mīthlīyat) and pinkwashing (al-ghaseel al-banafsajiy). My fieldwork participants offer decolonial, gender-based, readings and formulations of queerness through their diverse and complex experiences, which evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories that characterizes most Western/non-Western political queer scholarship. While the spiritual initiatives of diasporic queer Muslims clarifies the urgent need for a radical, decolonial, reinterpretation of Islam, the revolutionary participation of queer Egyptians in the so-called ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter’ offers crucial challenges to both discourses on gender/sexuality in the Middle East and academic and activist literatures on radical and revolutionary social action. In this dissertation, queer Egyptians, and queer Muslims in particular, appear as single theorists of radical political activity, not the co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of the ‘Gay Empire’. This exploration of queer interventions in revolutionary Egypt will force radical social theorists to consider postcolonial/decolonial queer politics as a primary basis for determining the shape and course of future revolutionary theory and praxis in this current xenophobic and Islamophobic geopolitical moment. Utilizing intersectional/assemblage based theories, I argue that strictly adopting sexual discourses, in the absence of accounting for colonialism/imperialism as well as engaging postcolonial, critical race and feminist discourses, is insufficient to narratively/analytically understand the dynamic nature of Arab and Muslim gender and sexualities in these Islamophobic conditions.

Acknowledgements

How can one speak of acknowledgments and summarize the innumerable lives that have challenged, supported, shared, and breathed life into this dissertation and me, and without which neither would see daylight. Following eight years of fieldwork, research, writing and editing, how am I to deliver a eulogy honoring those whose bodies fell in Tahrir Square, were dumped in the desert and fished out of the waters of the great river Nile after the uprisings? How am I to do justice to those who have been forcibly disappeared and are languishing in punitive prisons dedicated to missionizing human misery and sadistic suffering? How do I reconcile and pay back what was entrusted to me to relay while contending with the infinite debt I owe others? Somehow I am expected to do this hierarchically, to act as an authority figure calculating and ordering in my acknowledgments those deemed relevant. All there is infinite debt and responsibility at work here, compounded and multiplied beyond recount that I can only now forfeit to a generous, benevolent Creator. For the truth is my loves, you have all left trembling and attesting to Jacques Derrida’s words: “I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: My obligations to the other others whom I know and do not know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows, my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to […] those who do not speak my language and to whom I neither speak or respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this is for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family.”

My infinite debt, love and gratitude to the Creator, Allah, my mother, my father, distant relatives, and ministering angel of a sister, Marwa. All of you sacrifice of yourselves every day to breathe life into me. I pray your hearts and that of others forgive my shortcomings towards you, for I stand guilty of being indebted to you all for eternity. Thank you for your grace, love, and benison.

I am particularly indebted to my supervisors Adnan Husain, and committee members Scott Lauria Morgensen and Dana Olwan for their counsel, relayed and transmitted knowledge, for challenging and emboldening my spine and tongue and standing up for me on countless occasions, as well as their faith in me, which, thesis aside, has given me much to reflect on regarding myself and my relationships with others so far into my life. I am indebted as well to the members of the dissertation’s examining committee, Drs. Wilson Chacko Jacob and Eleanor McDonald, for taking the time to convene, read, and to listen patiently to what little I have to say and what this thesis aims to contribute within and across a multiplicity of disciplines and fields. To my research and fieldwork participants in Egypt and Turtle Island, neither the dissertation nor I would be standing here defending without you. Bring your ears closer to my lips. To you all, I say: ‘I love you’, was never meant to be written. I am humbled knowing you and am eternally grateful for you trusting me with your narratives, stories, words and lives that give further meaning and purpose to mine. I pray I convey but a partial measure of your radiance.

To my teachers, elders, friends, communities, students, allies and those who have stood in love and solidarity, thank you: Robert Lovelace, Sarita Sarivstava, Frank Peace, Richard JF Day, Villia Jefremovas, Joaquim and Larysa Voss, Katherine McKittrick, Trish Salah, Linda Jessup, Karen Dubinsky, Susan Lorde, Bonita Lawrence, Taiaiake Alfred, Ashanti Alston, Vivian Salah-Hanna, Biko and Yasmine, Gustavo Eseteva, Jacqueline, Laith Marouf, Yafa-Zein, Saja Marouf, Gretchen King, Sabine, Chadi, Fehr, Tarafa, Breanne, Krista, Corey, Ko-Ko, Wahtha, Ahanu, Susan Delisle, Leen, Gill, Mohga, Maysam, Deepa, Tiane and Mat, Rawan and Wael, Alaa, Salah, Abeer, Michelle Hartman, Dahlia, Fatima and Milad, Mubeenah, Hameed, Farah, Doaa Abdelaal, Dina Wahba, Urooj Arshad, El-Farouk, Troy Jackson, Yasir S. Abdullah, Tamer Mowafy, Sarah Mangle, Sayyida & Scott, Monica, David, Perick, Pancho, Chivis, Kris, Noor, and my brothers and sisters in Chiapas and Oaxaca, the Fahmy and Bayoumi, and Hafiz-Al-Rahman families, the entire Queen’s Students for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) cohort of 2015-2018, the Queens University Muslim Student Association (QUMSA), the Queen’s Gender, Sociology, and Development Studies departments, as well as the faculty and first Queen’s Cultural Studies unit of 2010-2011, AKA, EPIC, OPIRG, volunteers and staff at CFRC, members and non-members of the Sleepless Goat and workers at Sipps cafés, and doubtless many others. To the unwavering and dedicated Sheelagh Frame, Angela Pietrobon, and Nancy Wills, Editorial Assistants.

Dedicated to the children, to womyn, to the elderly, to queers, to people of color, to the poor, to the differently abled, and the wretched who are always the first to endure, grieve and be marytered. If this collective struggle to see through this earth’s rebellious rebirth denotes our fall then it is an honor to undergo it while by your side. Fyodor Dosteovsky once wrote, “even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object – that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!” If there is to be hope, it demands that we see through an avalanche by betraying our countries to save one another. In the words of Vladimir Pecherin, "How sweet it is to hate one's native land, to desire its ruin, and in its ruin to discern the dawn of universal rebirth."

Thank you Creator, Allah, for the countless blessings I have been afforded. Whatever shortcomings exist in the text are my own doing which I take full responsibility for, and whatever goodness exists is by Your will and that of the participants and those who have guided and taught me. Rabbi Ishrah Li Sadry, Wayassir Li Amry, Wahlul ‘Uqdatan Min Lisany, yafqahu Qawly (Moses’ prayer in the Holy Qur'ān: My Lord! Expand for me my breast! Make my affair easy for me, and untie a knot from my tongue, that they may understand my speech) (20: 25-28).

La Fe no se vende (Faith is not for sale).

A Note on Transliteration & Translation

In general, because the interviews were conducted in colloquial Arabic dialects, usually Egyptian, I have used a modified version of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies’ (IJMES) system to transliterate terms and expressions in a way that reflects their spoken pronunciation. However, for consistency, when reporting important concepts and terms used by my participants that are also well-established in Modern Standard or Classical Arabic (particularly terms that are part of Islamic tradition), I have rendered these according to the IJMES system, while still conveying the flavor of Arabic/Egyptian colloquial expression and the rich complexity of what and how my participants state what they state. I maintain diacritical marks, although I have not altered transliterations of direct quotations from published material. All of the translations from Arabic, whether from colloquial dialects or Modern Standard/Classical Arabic, are my own, unless otherwise indicated. This includes archival research and oral interviews, as well as supporting written materials (e.g., newspaper articles, Islamic and Arabic texts). The only exceptions are Qur’ānic citations, all of which, unless stated otherwise, are from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York, NY; HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017).

Chapter 2

Theoretical Frameworks & Methodology

From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1991: 1)

Introduction

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere argues that no pedagogy that dreams of being “truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates.” True liberation must move beyond the neocolonial/neoimperial framework of capitalist nation-states that produces globally racialized, gendered, and sexualized, Orientalized, and dehumanized non-Western unfortunates who must be saved or overcome. For Muslims in the post-truth world, the alternatives presented by the colonial model of nations are to either become multicultural, liberal-progressive, assimilated good Muslim settler subjects or neofundamentalist, conservative Salafi-Wahhābi jihādis. This is magnified for queer Muslims. Debates on Islam and same-sex practices, particularly in Islamic studies and within Muslim communities, all too often begin with predetermined assumptions/conclusions about queerness that have obscured its entanglement in the construction of settler-and-franchise colonial societies. On the one hand, this leaves queer Muslims the choice between a so-called accepting and superior West and, on the other hand, an intolerant and savage terroristic Islam and East. To liberate ourselves, we must rediscover what it is to dream dangerously – to reimagine ourselves and reclaim our own decolonial, non-authoritarian, Arab, Muslim, North African, and Indigenous models of governance, non-materialist ethical-political values, and spiritual knowledge systems.

To liberate our colonized minds and free our hearts and souls from the false binary, reactionary, choices before us, decolonized knowledge production and education are vital. As Audre Lorde states, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This dismantling and rebuilding has less to do with engaging in high-theory, itself a culturally specific and privileged way of knowing, than with teaching ourselves how to symbiotically fuse theory and praxis. This will enable critical thought and acceptance of criticism such that we can exactly determine and contextualize what we are fighting against and for. Thus, liberatory theory arrives from and is grounded in social movement experience and praxis.

Accordingly, to develop my queer Muslim critique, I draw on some of my participant’s non-ideological and tenuous non-Western identifications and their affinity with post-anarchism’s anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist ethico-political commitments, which arise from their involvement in the Tahrir Uprisings of 2011. I identify and seek to understand my participants’ non-Western understandings of queerness and the circumstances under which they embrace, reject, or attempt to transcend the Western category of queer identity. I also draw on my own positionality and social movement experiences in Turtle Island, Egypt, and Chiapas (Mexico). I am a first generation settler-immigrant of Arab and North African Egyptian descent living on colonized, traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land, studying at Queen’s University, a neoliberal academic institution, and my non-ideological affinity and identification as a Muslim anarchist or anarca-Islamist. By anarca-Islam, I mean an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, egalitarian, and feminist Qur'ānic anarchistic interpretation of Islam.

My work is part of the anti-racist feminist and transnational queer diasporic literatures and is inspired by the decolonization theories that have emerged from Indigenous discourses and queer Indigenous and Two-Spirit studies in Turtle Island. Indigenous discourses are particularly critical of Western Eurocentric understandings of queerness, agency, and resistance. They insist that the struggle against cisheteropatriarchy cannot be separated from the struggle against settler colonialism, which transnational queer theories tend to elide given how queerness is snarled in the relationship between settler-and-franchise colonial societies that are symbolically and materially related. Radical Indigenous scholars argue against reform or multicultural neoliberalism, which play to the cisheteropatriarchal capitalist nation-state politics of integration and recognition. Although varying in their decolonial visions, radical Indigenous scholars often emphasize engagement with non-statist frameworks of decolonization; they privilege land-based struggles, recognizing the way that land itself structures relationships to and with space, time, autonomy, spiritual notions of kinship and understandings of polygamy, as well as gender and sexual relationship practices.

In contrast, although Arab, Muslim, and North African scholars and activists often offer imminent critiques of neoliberal capitalism, with a minority critical of nation-states, they tend to Eurocentrically take franchise postcolonial nation-states for granted. This occurs despite the fact that Islamic socio-political and economic principles are antithetical to capitalist nation-state frameworks. This dissertation seeks to disrupt the neocolonial/neoimperial logics associated with the signifier ‘queer’ in order to explore a distinctive ontology, epistemology, and genealogy of gender and sexual ethics that cannot be explained outside non-authoritarian and non-capitalist interpretations of Islam as a form of spirituality (ruhaniyat), faith (īmān), and religion (dīn). This is necessary not only because of queerness and Islam’s unique geopolitical figurations in the contemporary world, but also because Arab and Muslim conceptualizations of masculinities/femininities are currently being challenged by both non-statist Islamist movements such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, and by secular-nationalist Egyptian military dictatorships such as that of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi.

In this dissertation I distinguish between Islamic principles and Muslim cultural practices. I engage both religious and cultural approaches to reflect queer Muslims’ struggles, within Muslim communities, queer circles, and broader societies, to theologically justify and reconcile their queer and Muslim identities. Although I consider the theological debates that transnational queer studies tend to elide, my objective is not simply to extend Islamic studies’ discussions on whether or not same-sex practices are sexually licit or forbidden in Islam, at the expense of dismissing broader colonial/imperial conditions that frame the former debate. Engaging in the theological debates nonetheless is necessary, as when I discuss, in Chapter Three, the case study fatwā (related religious adjudications) issued by al-Azhar University, a pre-eminent institution for Islamic religious studies, regarding Sally Abd Allah’s transgender body.

Methodologically, I draw on two social scientific and historical studies of sexuality/gender in Islam, namely Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety and Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs and Islam in Liberalism, as well as my own fieldwork experiences to develop a decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist methodology that I call queer Muslim critique. My queer Muslim critique is based on the understanding that the Western instrumentalist notion of desire attached to the word queer cannot explain queer Muslims’ lives and desires in Islam. My fieldwork shows how the cisheteropatriarchal conceptualizations of masculinities/femininities, which have been shaped by ongoing Western colonial/imperial encounters, are being performed, negotiated, transformed, and subverted by my research participants. Queer Muslim critique is an extension of a methodology I refer to as anarchic-Ijtihād, which I used to construct anarca-Islam.

As a subject and subject-less critique, queer Muslim critique challenges neo-orthodox Muslim scholars who argue that same-sex practices are an immoral Western imports. It also challenges Western citizen-diasporic Muslims who refuse to acknowledge the mutually constitutive roles of settler colonialism, imperialism, postcolonialism, anti-Blackness, sovereignty, self-governance, decolonization, land-based struggles, and questions pertaining to subalterneity and indigeneity in the broader geopolitical construction of queer Muslim subjectivities, specifically in relation to complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North America.

Theoretical Frameworks

Throughout this thesis, the principal theories I examine and intend to fuse, are transnational queer critiques; Arab and Muslim feminisms; postcolonial, settler-colonial, and decolonization theories; and schizo/psychoanalytic and post-anarchistic social movement theories. I use these literatures and theories to explore what is referred to as the bio and necropolitics or political economy of the life and death of same-sex practicing Arabs and Muslims.

This synchronistic fusion, which is heavily indebted to my Egyptian participants’ discussion of these literatures, is part of an ethical-political project to dismantle the belief amongst non-Muslims that Islam is rabidly queerphobic, and the belief amongst Muslims that gender, sexuality, and desire in contemporary Islam can only be envisioned through binary dichotomies. My goal, which is to create a space for Muslims and non-Muslims to decolonially speak of gender, sexuality, and desire, is dependent upon the cohesive joining together of these ethical-political theories and philosophies.

Transnational Queer Theories, Arab and Muslim Feminisms, and Cultural and Islamic Studies

At its inception, queer studies focused on sexuality as an independent category of subjective identification and as a way of apprehending personal sexual conduct. It took as its subject the white homosexual male and hence re-instantiated an idealized white masculinity, despite efforts by scholars such as Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Gary W. Harpers to undermine the ideas of stable sexual subjects and compartmentalized notions of LGBTI identities. As Lisa Duggan has noted in The Twilight of Equality, this homonormativity is indicative of a queer politics “that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” After all, as Eng et al. note, gay marriage and its association with queer freedom are often addressed according to a hyper-individualist 18th century Enlightenment Protestant reformation ethics and a conservative social agenda, which results in the recoding of queer liberation “in narrow terms of privacy, domesticity, and the unfettered ability to consume in the ‘free’ market.” Addressing the domestication and compartmentalization of queer theory within the academy and its reformist promotion of queer inclusion into the nation-state, Amy Brandzel notes, “perhaps no field can be (or should be) called out more for its bandwagon-like political agendas than queer studies, a field that is as culpable for creating monosystems of thought and action as it is for critiquing them.”

However, by the 1990s, queer diasporic and people of color critiques were arguing that ‘sexuality,’ as an identitarian classification, was as Joseph Massad notes, a specific Euro-American “‘cultural’ category that is not universal or necessarily universalizable.” They further noted that most queer scholarship is written in English, which in effect reifies already “uneven exchanges [that] replicate in uncomfortable ways the rise and consolidation of U.S. empire, as well as the insistent positing of a U.S. nationalist identity and political agenda globally.” They noted that the restriction of sexuality to the individual’s sexual behaviors ultimately hinders queerness’ political potential by disregarding its conjunction with race/ethnicity, gender, ability, nation, class, religion, capitalism, the nation-state, and continuing imperialist/colonialist projects in the East. One of the stated goals of transnational queer and diasporic studies is to address the denaturalization of the silenced voices of queer diasporic people, migrant workers, and refugees, while offering imminent critiques of queer liberalism and the incessant demands of U.S./Canadian queers petitioning for rights and recognition before the law. Queer diasporic studies focus on expanding the interrogation of sexuality’s relationship to citizenship, nationalism, race, and gender politics while undermining the triumph of individualist neoliberal marketplaces that obscure conflicts between global capital, labor, and the biopolitics and necropolitics of gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies in a 9/11 era. For example, Martin F. Manalansan explores the politicization of queerness in the post-9/11 era by examining the gentrified African American, Latino, South Asian, Arab, and Muslim urban migration from Jackson Heights, Queens, during its transformation into a “new exotic gay mecca.” Whereas in Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique, Ferguson interrogates the ways in which Black scholarship and African American activism subvert their racialization through nonheteronormative practices while also reproducing heteronormative nightmares that consciously and unconsciously reproduce cisheteronormativity, American exceptionalism, and imperialism.

Other queer of color critiques, like those of David Eng, have exposed how members of the queer diaspora have invested in heteronormativity. Specifically, he describes the “racialization of intimacy” and the depoliticizing effects of queer liberalism’s depolitical construction of gayness as the new blackness, which assumes the teleological disappearance of racism, in a supposed post-racial, multicultural, colorblind age. Extending this insight, South Asian queer of color critics like Gopinath sought, using a scavenger methodology, to “dissect the ways in which discourses of sexuality are inextricable from prior and continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism, racing, and migration” and critiques the “parochialism of some strands of queer studies by making the study of sexuality central to an anti-imperialist, antiracist project.” Drawing on the critical works of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, as well as cultural literary genres, musicals, and Bollywood film representations of family, home, the nation, and diaspora, Gopinath challenges the construction of queer diasporic female/male South Asian subjectivities as either transnational, homonormative, and eroticized model minority neoliberal citizen-subjects seeking multicultural assimilation or alternatively terrorists who are perverse and homophobic. Gopinath’s formulation of the queer diaspora is critical because it demonstrates how queer migrations can recuperate “those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries.”

Similarly, and critical to this dissertation, the work of José Estaban Muñoz builds on Michel Pêcheux’s conceptualization of “disidentification,” in the context of minority queer people of color who have been rendered erased as a consequence of colonialism and white heteronormativity. Muñoz examines how the former not only subvert and resist their mainstream assimilation into dominant white queer figurations, but also engage in disidentifying political actions as a means of “managing and negotiating the historical trauma and systemic violences” to which they have been exposed. In these disidentifying instances, queer people of color, as some research participants in this dissertation’s fieldwork prove, do not necessarily seek to assimilate into Gay Internationalist narratives nor do they entirely reject them or engage in constructing a radical decolonial counter-identity to challenge the former’s hegemony. Rather, in this context, they more complexly partake in a third self-actualized survivalist strategy that entails, “tactically and simultaneously” working “on, with, and against” dominant Eastern and Western cultural formations, seeking to rework these hegemonic cultural identities in order to alter their own futurities, as part of a queer counterpublic. In other words, as Hiram Perez notes, queer diasporic theories are a call for queer theory to re-examine its collusions with Euro-American imperialism/colonialism and embrace the rich vocabularies that non-Western discourses have to offer.

Thus, this dissertation argues that although modern identity politics are tactically necessary for alliance and solidarity, in light of the differential and hierarchical racialized, sexualized, and gendered realities that Indigenous, Black, and people of color face, they are also strategically limited given how they represent what George Lipsitz refers to as “possessive investments in whiteness.” Our investment in identity politics occurs at the expense of our focus on radical decolonial ethico-political commitments and a politics of collective responsibility and accountability centered around what Richard J.F. Day refers to as a “politics of affinity,” which would usurp the nation-state as an arbiter of our rights and responsibilities.

It is critical to note the distinction in this thesis between whiteness (as a racial/ethnic category) and liberal ‘cultures of whiteness,’ which refers to ontological white values, conceptualizations of civility and progress, as well as epistemological practices and paradigms. The practice of whiteness has consistently (de)humanized, infantilized, sweetened, feminized, exaggerated, and flattened the psychic life of diverse people of color and is associated with hegemonic Eurocentric ideas and notions of a hierarchy of civilizations (or what Lisa Lowe refers to as “colonial divisions of humanity”) that continue to be internalized and exercised by whites and nonwhites alike. This struggle against (neo)colonial/ neo)imperial incursions is ongoing, and is related to histories of master/slave and colonizer/colonized relations that are not being transcended because of a lack of engagement with decolonization and reindigenization.

While existing anti-racist and transnational queer theories are useful to my project, there are two lacunae in the theoretical framework. The first concern includes the role of religious theology in understandings of Arab and Muslim genders and sexualities, particularly in the case of queer Egyptians who live in a predominantly Muslim society, and hence are compelled to theologically justify their existence as both queer and Muslim using Islamic exegetical concepts. The second concern relates to how transnational scholarship in general and queer immigrant Muslim diasporic populations in particular, due to a lack of a decolonial perspective, often silence their complicit and collusive role in upholding settler colonialism, empire, and the continued racialization of Indigenous peoples as political communities.

The transnational queer theorists most relevant to the overarching theoretical context of Arab and Muslim gender and sexualities in this age of terror are Jasbir Puar, Joseph Massad, and Paul Amar. Puar’s investigation of Western homonationalism and Israeli pinkwashing is critical to situating the interlocking yet fluid nexuses of power that maps queer Muslims and queer Egyptians across various demarcations of colonialism/imperialism, race, gender, class, nation, and religion. Puar’s seminal Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times examines the particular paranoia surrounding the War on Terror, and the appropriation of sexuality and queer bodies by U.S. patriotic discourses. As she writes,

The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies.

Puar’s work is critical to this dissertation as it describes the manipulative Euro-American socio-political-economic processes that justify prejudicial cisheterophobic, racism, and xenophobic claims against migrants, and especially against Islam, and the entrenchment of its image as homophobic and savage in contrast to the image of Western democracies as civilized and egalitarian. As a patriotic mandate, homonationalism is concerned with domesticating queer communities under settler-state authority by offering the hope of inclusion, thereby neutralizing their capacity to disrupt national unity. Puar calls this process homonationalism, which she considers a biopolitical process that conscripts LGBTQ bodies and causes for neoliberal, militarized imperialist/colonialist, racist, xenophobic, nationalistic ends, especially against Islam and Muslims. It creates queer subjects who are worthy of life, while other queered bodies are condemned to die. In particular, Puar’s scholarship examines the Zionist Israeli settler-colonial state’s particular manifestation – pinkwashing – in which the state’s LGBTQ-friendly images and rights record for a few is used to reframe and deflect attention from its occupation of a ‘backwards’ Palestine.

Puar’s scholarship is vital to understanding the Cairo 52 case study in Chapter Three, particularly as it relates to the medicalization of torture in Egypt and why the Cairo 52 defendants were charged with undermining national security, a charge usually reserved for militant Islamists. I argue that this is related to the enmeshed nature of counterterrorism, securitization, and patriotic logic post 9/11; the same logic that led the U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay to act as “docile patriots” and develop “culturally specific ‘effective’ matrix of torture techniques” to shame the monstrous queer terrorist fag prisoners into confession.

My participants’ critiques of the geostrategic effects of queer migration, neoliberal development programs, and NGOs coincides with Puar’s critiques of queer tourism, human rights discourses, and normative queer nationalism’s collusion with the empire’s racist foreign policies and their implicit acceptance of American imperialist expansion. Furthermore, for many of my queer participants, desire and queerness do not strictly pertain to sexuality, but are associated with broader nonsexual investments in and overlapping interconnections to socio-political, imperial, colonial, nationalist, racial/ethnic, ageist, religious, class, gender-based, and neoliberal entanglements. Therefore, my dissertation builds on what Puar calls assemblage theory, without the need for supplanting or replacing what Kimberle Crenshaw referred to as intersectionality.

As with intersectional analyses, assemblage theory does not assume the stability of identity across space and time. Puar notes, “assemblage is actually an awkward translation – the original term in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is not the French word assemblage, but actually Agencement, a term which means design, layout, organization, arrangement, and relations – the focus being not on content but on relations, relations of patterns.” Puar adds, “You become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space.” Intersectionality is structural, and privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning, whereas assemblage, Puar argues, underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information. Some of the problems with intersectionality’s focus on naming and representation are demonstrated by my research participants’ struggles with the politics of translating their gender/sexual experiences, both theoretically and in social movement terms, as language, irrespective of nuance, will always fail “to properly grapple with processes of differentiation, power, identity, and subjectivity.” Recently Amy Brandzel, utilizing a “ventriloquist” writing method, has responded to Puar’s critiques of intersectionality, and stated, that although Puar’s efforts to make feminist and queer studies “more accountable to critiques of racism, empire, and the logics of the normative” are necessary, this does not imply, by Puar’s own admittance, that intersectionality and assemblage are mutually exclusive. Brandzel affirms that although intersectionality can serve and abet the nation-state,

What Puar names intersectional state practices, I describe as anti-intersectional ones. The nation-state does not practice intersectionality when it requires subjects to check preselected boxes to mark identity categories on a census, nor when it marks a subject as a potential terrorist due to their racially injected affiliations or geographically marked surnames. Rather, these are anti-intersectional efforts by the nation-state, whereby categories of identity and difference are forged, segregated, and forced to exist in separate and hierarchicalized frames.

Similar critiques of intersectionality by feminist, queer, critical race, and poststructuralist scholars argue it is hegemonic. This reinforces multicultural neoliberalism and sustains normativity, indicating the need to distinguish between quasi-intersectional approaches that are complicit in upholding the nation-state and assimilatory citizenship discourses, and intersectional analyses that seek to expose how liberal-progressive positions uphold these hegemonic contradictions. Perhaps the greatest challenge to overcome is intersectionality’s misapplication in academic and mainstream discourses. Many scholars/activists claim to be engaging with intersectionality. They are instead engaging in an ornamental or ‘toothless’ intersectionality that refuses to decenter whiteness and is “used as an alibi that lets scholars and activists off the hook for actually being attentive to the embodiments” of a host of gendered colonial/imperial power differentials.

As Brandzel notes, assemblages and intersectionality can be complementary methodological tools to conceptualize and visualize complex subjectivities and intersections between struggles alongside what the Combahee River Collective refers to as an analysis of “interlocking systems of oppression” and what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as the “overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained.” All of these methodologies are necessary to build social movement coalitions grounded in anti-racist feminist paradigms, while rejecting the idealization of naturalized identities, bourgeoisie minority nationalisms, and the perpetuation of male normativity and white normativity. Engaging these methodologies, which some queer Egyptian participants employ, is necessary to conceptualize the radical social movement trajectories they have embraced since the 2011 Tahrir uprisings.

Just as Brandzel does not see a contradiction between intersectional and assemblage approaches, I do not see a conflict between these methodologies and what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s describes as “cacophony,” which she developed in Transit of Empire. As an analytical interpretative tool, cacophony can assist transnational anti-imperial and anti-colonial queer and feminist scholarship to expose questions relating to home, place, and belonging given how “U.S. colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerce struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism.” Cacophony as a methodological tool can reveal the interstices between Indigenous dispossession and U.S. imperialist orientalist politics, exposing what Black feminists such as Patricia Collins highlight as the varying “degrees of penalty and privilege” reaped from “multiple systems of oppressions.” For instance, cacophony can illuminate the way repression by military dictatorships, propped up by the West in societies such as Egypt, leads to the voluntary and forced displacement of queer Arabs and Muslims to the U.S./Canada, who then inadvertently profit from assimilation into these settler colonies and further the violence against and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

By illuminating the relationship between settler-and-franchise colonialisms, these approaches can decenter competing claims or the ‘Oppression Olympics’ that often take place between horizontalist struggles as to who is more oppressed. This is a crucial process, as these claims often transform “horizontal histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony and distract from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities for [decolonized] anticolonial actions that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean allegories that define oppression.” After all, with globalization, systems of oppression are nationally and transnationally dynamically connected, interacting with and feeding off of each other: racism strengthens gender oppression against women of color, as classism strengthens racism against poor people of color, and sexism against poor women, while Western imperialist queerness strengthens all the former (i.e., racism, sexism, and queerphobia) against those in the East.

On numerous occasions, my participants refer to Joseph Massad’s scholarship on the Gay International and his indictment of Orientalism, which is also used in this dissertation’s analysis of the case study of the Cairo 52. Massad’s work serves as critical reminder of how identity politics bear within them Eurocentric, (neo)liberal, cultural, and spiritual assumptions. The West created a bourgeoisie Eastern ars erotica discourse in relation to the Other. As Fanon states, this in turn aroused in the Othered, an Oedipal inferiority complex. In the case of Muslims, this complex is grounded in an ambiguous and amorphous symbol called ‘Islam’, whose meanings are further obscured by pathological fundamentalist/orientalist discourses on sexuality/gender that depict Islam as opposed to all that is civilized and ‘Western’. However, despite the validity of Massad’s criticism of the Western instrumentalization and universalization of liberal LGBTIQ discourses, Massad offers no decolonial alternatives to counter cisheteropatriarchal, xenophobic, colonially nationalist, and queerphobic sentiments within Arab, North African, and predominantly Muslim societies. Equally, Massad racially and sexually essentializes not only Gay Internationalists (according to specific upper and middle-class elite dynamics) and the very idea of the East and West, he also essentializes queer Arab and Muslim experiences, both within the Middle East and in immigrant diasporas, so that he has been accused of representing queer Muslims and Arabs as duped pawns with no agency of their own.

Exploring these tensions is particularly important in light of the fact that Egypt is not a homogenous society, and it has internalized anti-black politics, despite the existence of repressed Coptic, Nubian, and Sudanese-Egyptian populations, as well as Somali, Iraqi, and Palestinian refugees who are often exposed to xenophobia. Massad pays little attention to the visceral impact on queer Muslims and Arabs of discourses of securitization, surveillance, and terror, under the pretext that he is not interested in becoming a “native informant.” Most problematic is Massad’s exclusive focus on men, deemphasizing gender’s carnal relationship to sexuality. He is content with simply identifying LGBTIQ identities as a white neoliberal-commoditized importation. As a consequence, any reconciliatory ground between identitarian/non-identitarian discussions, or even the possibility of transcending debates as to whether or not Arabs and Muslims should or should not identify as LGBTIQ, is forsaken.

Therefore, while Massad’s work provides a trenchant and valuable critique on Islam, sexuality, and the imperial influence of the Gay International, his criticisms are not the end of the discussion, but rather the beginning of the conversation. Massad ignores the fact that Arabs, as well as migrant North African and South Asian diasporic Muslims who reside in Canada/U.S., are pressured to become good settler subjects who participate in settler colonialism and hence contribute to the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples. In other words, the object of one type of colonialism can be if not in fact is, the circulatory agent of another colonialism. A non-statist, decolonial, and accountable solidarity such as the one this dissertation seeks to express must address all of these interlocking systems of gendered coloniality. The multiple colonialisms are in fact historically, materially, and spiritually interrelated. Settler-colonial power targets queer Arabs and Muslims as outsiders (i.e., through global Orientalism). However, what facilitates and nourishes this Western imperial Orientalizing are the other forms of white supremacist Othering that precede or intersect it, such as the Othering of Indigenous people or anti-Black racism.

Paul Amar’s work demonstrates the nexus of securitization and surveillance, and their affects on how gendered queer spaces have morphed since the 1798 Napoleonic French occupation of Egypt, immediately followed by the British colonization of Egypt from 1801-1952. Amar’s work is critical to my discussion of the Cairo 52 case study and is also necessary to contextualizing Egyptian society and the nation-state’s response to the case. Using an ‘archipelago method’, Amar discusses how militarized humanitarianism, urban planning practices, as well as illiberal controls and security cultural campaigns have coalesced to form what he refers to as a ‘security archipelago’ that justifies itself on humanitarian grounds and is exercised upon sexualized populations, namely, sex workers and queer resisters, hence affecting sexuality politics in the Age of Terror and post-Arab Spring/Islamist Winter uprisings. Moreover, Amar’s scholarship is vital in his specific examination of how militarized humanitarian rescue discourses, neodevelopment projects concerned with reviving Islamic heritage sites, and most importantly Gulf-Arab sex tourism in the Red Light districts along the Nile Waterfront and Pyramid’s Road, transformed the very spatial-temporal geographic organization of land. This in turn affected Egyptian notions of desire and perceptions of sexuality/gender, changing them from fluid embodied pre-modern practices to cisheteropatriarchal norms of modernity. The theme of land and how it defines desire is a key theme in decolonization discourses, which seek to understand how restructuring land transforms practices and perceptions of spirituality, gender, and sexuality in postcolonial nations such as Egypt. However, Amar also argues that securitization facilitated deeply repressive forms of policing under the premise of protecting national security interests, which ushered in the end of neoliberalism, which my thesis contests.

Incredibly vital to this thesis is Amar’s analysis of the case of Muhammad Atta, the queered 9/11 hijacker, who had written his MA thesis on the urban refurbishment of an Islamic quarter in the districts of dar al-Darb al-Ahmar, al-Husayniyya, and Suq al-Silah in Egypt, two years prior to 9/11. In Chapter Three, I juxtapose fundamentalist Islamist subjectivities such as Atta’s against other orientalist subjectivities such as those of Sherrif Farahat, the main Cairo 52 defendant who was accused by the Egyptian government of being a Zionist agent. This analysis is critical to unearthing the imperialist/colonial psychoanalytic effect of hypersexualized neoliberal Western Gay Internationalist on postcolonial subjectivities, which Amar takes for granted. Using, in part, Amar’s work, I illuminate how the West solicits reactionary responses from Arabs and Muslims. As some of my participants state, these responses are often based on internalized shame and Islamophobia, which at times even implicates some queer Egyptians in settler-colonial Israeli pinkwashing and homonationalist narratives that undermine the struggle for Palestinian liberation, just as diasporic Egyptians in North America participate in the U.S./Canadian states’ settler colonization of Indigenous peoples.

I will also be building on the extensive scholarship of secular Arab feminists as well as Islamist-leaning Muslim feminists because of their immeasurable contributions to clarifying the gendering and sexualization of the postcolonial nation as well as Arab and Muslim peoples. They offer alternatives to Western whitewashing that also address the reality, including the gender and sexual violence, of their own experiences. Arab and Muslim feminisms are generally congruent with the overwhelming emphasis of my queer participants on focusing on gender egalitarianism and feminist concerns as a precursor to discussing same-sex intimacies.

Arab and Muslim feminisms are further critical to the debate, because of the majority of my Egyptian participants explicitly rejected and resented Western militarized human rights initiatives and their associated set of whitewashed interventionist development schemas of globalized queer politics. Western LGBTIQ discourses have resulted in the essentialization of women’s and queer rights and experiences as human rights, which consistently construct brown and black women elsewhere as subjects of oppression and depict them as lacking agency, regardless of their cultures, spiritualties, histories, and traditions. As an alternative, some Arab and Muslim feminists discuss non-Western forms of agency that challenge Western conceptualizations of what constitutes resistance and binary oppressed/oppressor, domination/subversion narratives.

There are two strains of Arab and Muslim feminisms: secular Arab and Islamist/Islamic. Leila Ahmed characterizes them as follows:

The dominant voice of feminism, which affiliated itself, albeit generally discreetly, with the westernizing, secularizing tendencies of society…[and] the alternative voice, wary and eventually even opposed to Western ways, searched a way to articulate female subjectivity and affirmation within a native, vernacular, Islamic discourse.

Arab and Muslim feminisms have mutually influenced each other. Although they each accused the other of being a product of the West, in fact, both feminisms operated within its liberal-statist paradigms, without a radical decolonial project that would allow them to transcend the false binaries of secular and Islamist. Secular Arab feminisms are intricately linked with the liberal-reformist nationalist struggles that emerged with postcolonialism and they tend to racialize the Islamic concept of Umma (global spiritual-political community that arguably includes Muslims and non-Muslims alike) and hence advocate for an Arab Umma, that at times is used interchangeably with Arab qawmiyyat (pan-Arab regionalism). In contrast, Muslim feminists tend to be affected by statist and non-statist Islamist discourses and aspire towards a non-reformist, non-racial, and non-statist Umma that they hope can ultimately displace the Eurocentric nation-state.

The division of feminisms has historical depth. Some of the early secular Arab feminists, such as Huda Sha’rawi, who in 1923 advocated for educational opportunities for Egyptian women and restricting the practices of polygamy, were strongly nationalist. In 1951, secular feminist Doria Shafik formed the Bint al-Nil Union, which advocated for women’s political rights while engaging in militant actions against British colonial rule. Other secular Egyptian feminist leaders like Malak Hifni Nasif, Nabawiyya Musa, and Ceza Nabarawi, were nationalists who advocated for a strong Egyptian army to counter a phantom Sudanese threat. In contrast, some of the early Muslim feminist organizations, such as the Society for the Advancement of Women founded in 1908, adopted a conservative Islamist trajectory. Another early Islamic women’s group, Jamaa'at al-Sayyidaat al-Muslimaat (Muslim Women’s Association), was formed by feminists who rejected the Western liberal feminism of the Egyptian Women’s Union. The Muslim Women’s Association primarily focused on women studying Islam within a social justice framework, with an emphasis on issues of poverty. Al-Ghazali, one of the founders, who was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, took the Islamist stance that “Egypt must be ruled by the Qur’an, not positivistic constitutions.” It is in this context that Leila Ahmed argues that while “feminism and the idea of rights and justice for women formed no part of the original Islamist agenda, activism in the cause of justice most emphatically was a foundational requirement and obligation of Islamism.” Arab and Muslim feminists are useful in critiquing how in Egypt, the state is embodied in the figure of the woman, who must by protected by cisheteropatriarchal Arab military dictators and moral Islamists.

Unfortunately, a majority of contemporary Arab and Muslim feminists continue to ignore settler colonialism and its relationship to either the nation-state or the global Umma. With few exceptions, queer and feminist, Arab and Muslim literatures tend to ignore the “gendered dispossession of Indigenous lands and sexist neoliberal and neo-racist migratory structures and processes.” In transnational feminist and queer literatures, non-statist Indigenous understandings of decolonization are often problematically perceived to be a single example of anti-racist discourse rather than the foundation of a grander anti-racist struggle. Thus, as with queer theory, Arab and Muslim feminists in the West often re-instantiate “a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the [I]ndigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects.”

The under-theorization of settler colonialism within women of color feminisms and queer people of color critiques, and the downgrading of decolonial Indigenous feminist understandings of nationhood is problematic given the geopolitical interlocking systems of oppression and empire’s investment in both sustaining postcolonial conditions in non-Western nation-states, while also creating and depending on migratory processes and diasporic populations that are pitted against Indigenous dispossession. Ignoring the mutual dispossessions that emerge from the bifurcations between settler/postcolonial societies hinders the collective solidarities needed to simultaneously confront gendered colonialisms and a global white supremacy. After all, postcolonial and anti-racist Third World feminist collective organizing “necessitates alliances and coalitions, not only across groups and issues, but also within groups, precisely because there are varying forms and degrees of power at play in the margins as well as between various relational centres and peripheries.” In a similar vein, Indigenous literatures cannot essentialize all monotheistic spiritualities, particularly Western Judeo-Christianity and Islam as one and the same, while ignoring theological and historical differences between Western and non-Western interpretations of the former.

Summary

Indigenous, queer and feminist discourses have argued that queerphobia and the origins of homophobic violence are actually rooted in cisheteropatriarchy and settler colonialism and that the responses must be centered in alliance work. They argue that Euro-American queer advocacy for gay marriage as a civil right is imperially homonormative, neoliberally social conservative, and serves to reproduce a white, cisheteropatriarchal, and colonial citizenship politics that compounds the genocide that Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial societies face. Moreover, the reformist civil rights approaches/hate-crime legislations adopted in North America erodes the political claims of Indigeneous and Black others, pacifies resistance, and upholds settler-colonialism.

Radical queer activist literature has argued that gay marriage is beside the point when one witnesses the criminalization and murder of trans people of color, as well as the normalized violent targeting of black, brown, and Indigeneous bodies at the hands of the police, prisons, mental health institutions, and Immigration and Custom Enforcement agencies (ICE). As the trans South Asian artist collaboration DarkMatter note, civil rights approaches to queerness through victories like the Supreme Court rulings of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas that decriminalized sodomy and legislatively legalized gay marriage are mere props “used to pinkwash [and homonationalize] the US government and make it seem LGBT friendly even though it’s one of the biggest arbiters of anti-queer and anti-trans violence at home and abroad.” In this new script, gay and lesbian parents now possess the rights to reproductive futurity, a temporality premised around the investment in the child, nuclear familial units, and proper, privatized routes of inheritance. Windsor, like Goodridge, marked same-sex marriage rights as a means to protect the future/child. However, Windsor was much more direct about how marriage rights are primary mechanisms for the transmittal of property and capital accumulation. In these processes, a particular type of familial, class-based gay rights inherit the right to futurity, and the futurity of rights.

Postcolonialism, Settler Colonialism, and Decolonization

My participants’ discussions of settler-hood, anti-blackness, and Arab supremacy within Muslim communities in Egypt and the U.S./Canada illuminate the value and limitations of postcolonial literatures. They also demonstrate the need to examine concepts of non-statist decolonization/reindigenization within Indigenous discourses, particularly in relation to what community means to queer Muslims through the Islamic concept of Umma. As queer Indigenous studies illuminate, decolonial movements ought collectively strive to unsettle the rigid, dogmatic, ways of conceptualizing gender/sexuality through the constant decolonization of our paradigms. It is the decolonization framework that links this dissertation’s examination of ‘queerness’ in Egypt to ‘queerness’ among the Middle-Eastern diasporic settlers in Turtle Island.

A close reading of both postcolonial and decolonial theories is critical to this dissertation’s examination of queerness because postcolonial societies such as Egypt never decolonized; they merely adopted the European capitalist nation-state model, including their security and surveillance apparatuses and their political, economic, social, medical, and judicial systems. Postcolonial nation-states even emulate the architectural and spatial-temporal construction of the colonizers, including the casting of ‘peripheral’ rural terrains as inferior and savage. Their embrace of neo-developmental frameworks that mould their urban-metropoles in the image of Western city-states, not only disconnects native-subjects from land and their responsibilities to nonhuman life, it also restructures gender/sexual practices, as well as perceptions of the private/public.

The nature of a postcolonial society is demonstrated in the Cairo 52 case discussed in Chapter Three, in which the defendants were arrested under national security and French colonial fujūr (debauchery) laws originally intended to prosecute women’s sex work, not the same-sex practices to which these laws are now extended. This dissertation argues that homophobia and queerphobic violence in Egypt are rooted in cisheteropatriarchy, which is a by-product of colonial/imperial rule. I also show that the current Egyptian nation-state denies the more fluid pre-modern perceptions of gender/sexuality in order to bolster its patriotic mandate to guard imagined and normalized ‘licit’ gender moralities, which in turn are a neoreactionary response to perceived illicit Western neoliberal hypersexualized penetrations that have prostituted the motherly Egyptian nation. Queerphobia is patriarchy dressed in drag.

This dissertation represents a call to identify the roles that Islam and queerness play within what Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini refer to as franchise or postcolonial societies that never decolonized and in settler-colonial societies. The objective of the fieldwork and case studies is to illuminate the liberatory potentials of queer black and brown Arab, North African, and Muslim migrant ways of belonging that do not neutralize our radical politics or terminate our differences by appealing to national unity pogroms, civil rights discourses, or the vocalized multicultural assimilationist paradigms of the 1980s and the post-racial ideologies of the 2000s – all which usurp and deny Indigenous peoples’ right to self-governance, and homogenize all minorities into the category of Other in the U.S./Canada.

To achieve this objective, this dissertation draws on postcolonial/subaltern studies, which are primarily concerned with analyzing the historical, anthropological, socio-political, cultural, spiritual, and economic structural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and on critical race theories, which are focused on revealing intersections between white supremacy, law and racial hierarchies, inequalities, and power. In particular, this dissertation uses the work of postcolonial feminists who have “contributed greatly to the discussion of the ‘double marginal’ and have challenged other feminists to consider the intersections of gender with other axes of difference.”

However, postcolonial theories and critical race theories without an engagement with settler colonialism, Islamic anarchism, radical Indigenous conceptualizations of non-statist self-governance, autonomy, decolonization, and reindigenization are limited. This is because postcolonial and critical race theories can reproduce colonial discourses through their adoption of nation-state frameworks. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang affirm this when they note that racism and colonialism are not just symptoms and technologies of capitalism but are also a product of the organizing principle that is the nation-state, whether capitalistic or Marxist. Sandy Grande notes, “both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited, in the first instance, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second by Marxists for the good of all.”

Jodi Byrd and Michael Rothberg argue that it is the misleading emphasis on ‘post’ in postcolonialism that has meant that postcolonial studies have largely ignored the specificities of settler-colonialism and Indigenous studies, and hence avoided a critical engagement with the material oppression and the colonization of Indigenous peoples. Similarly, Tuck and Yang note that the reliance in postcolonial scholarship on anti-colonial critique is not remotely equivalent to a decolonizing framework. An anti-colonial stance celebrates the transfer of power to postcolonial subjects, whereas a decolonizing stance seeks to subvert and remake the colonial system. In this sense, the “postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject.”

Critiques of settler colonialism are therefore vital to this dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation recognizes that Indigenous and Black subjugation are integral to white settler colonialism and both are interrelated projects. This dissertation draw on scholars such as Rita Dhamoon and Patrick Wolfe who have noted that discourses on race and religion are deployed in settler colonialism to provide access to land. Patrick Wolfe argues that the expropriation of land is the basis for physical and cultural genocide that contains and kill Indigenous peoples, which in Canada takes the form of Indian Acts, blood quantum politics, and their continued treatment as children under the paternalist wardship of the nation-state. Scholars in Indigenous studies have long argued that policies of ‘inclusive’ integration into the nation-state erases Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, and the intimate relationships that all people living on Indigenous territories must bear to land, culture, spirituality, egalitarian self-governance, and values. Moreover, they have called on those who become assimilated citizen-subjects to challenge the “constructions of land as extractable capital,” given the ways in which this denies Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous views on the integration of cosmological, ecological, spiritual, and non-statist, feminist, ethical-political commitments to land.

At the same time, as Tuck and Yang note, settler society participates in what Philip Deloria refers to as “playing Indian” or what Sherene Razack refers to as a “race to innocence.” As Tuck and Yang note, these strategies, practiced by white and brown settlers, are attempts to relieve feelings of guilt without giving up land, power, or privilege. These moves to innocence include evoking Indian blood quantum narratives, registries and policies, gendered settler-nativism, and Indian grandmother complexes that ignore the implications of sexual violence, in which “settlers [mythically] locate or invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have had ‘Indian blood’, and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples.” However, there is no such thing as purity when it comes to racial/ethnic belonging. Thus Byrd also cautions that in advocating for self-determination and sovereignty, indigenous movements should not reify binaries and thus ought not “be just a return push that demonstrates difference – that move is anticipated and already silenced.”

Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith write that settler colonialism thrives on bypassing Indigenous peoples and creating an environment in which the fate of Indigenous peoples “are inextricably linked to the conditions facing other oppressed groups.” Similarly, using an anti-imperialist approach, Byrd argues that the logic of settler colonialism is replicated throughout the U.S. Empire, transforming “those to be colonized into ‘Indians’,” who are politically erased physically and culturally. In this sense, Tuck and Yang state, “settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave” and hence the “desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people” are knotted “in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism.”

Unlike postcolonial movements, non-statist decolonization suggests there is no single framework for decolonization or for Indigenous citizenship, although there is some agreement that “decolonization requires, at a minimum, the repatriation and the rematriation of land, the reinstatement of Native governance in all of its distinct varieties, and the unsettling of white settler colonialism and its constitutive logics.” Dene critical theorist Glen Coulthard states that land is the ethico-political criterion for Indigenous peoples’ identities. He argues for Indigenous conceptions of autonomy that are anchored in “grounded normativity,” otherwise understood as the centering of land as an “ontological framework for understanding relationships” in non-individualist/non-exploitative ways, which will facilitate renewed interconnections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and their mutually shared environments. Accordingly, colonized peoples have three choices: “become good subjects, accepting the premises of the modern West without much question; become bad subjects, always revolting against the parameters of the colonizing world; or become non-subjects, acting and thinking in ways far removed from those of the modern West.”

It would be a grave mistake to think that settler colonialism’s manipulation of race/ethnicity as a site through which whiteness orients and replicates internal and external racializing, gendering, and sexualizing projects affects only settler-societies. Due to imperialist projection and transference of its effects onto franchise-colonialism, both types of colonialism uphold each other. Therefore, in light of the intertwinement of gendered and racial colonialisms, social movement scholars/activists should strive to examine the intersections between “the comparative racialization projects of U.S. orientalism and U.S. settler colonialism.” Settler colonialism, homonationalism, and cisheteropatriarchy not only systemically racialize and sexualize all people within settler-colonial states, they also forcibly queer people in postcolonial nations.

Decolonization

Decolonization in white settler colonial societies involves the relinquishing of settler communities’ sovereignties “over these very pieces of earth, air, and water is what makes possible these imperialisms.” I argue that decolonization in franchise-colonial societies entails abandoning capitalist nation-state paradigms, as well as the inferiority complexes and cultures of whiteness that we, as people of color, have internalized. It involves a complete re-understanding of our utilitarian and exploitative use of natural resources, land, and nonhuman life, and the construction of non-statist and non-capitalist, non-cisheteropatriarchal, egalitarian social justice land-based alternatives that are based on our own spiritual and cultural traditions, and are characterized by our own notions of public/private as well as our gender/sexual based intimacies, encounters, and relations. Decolonization facilitates the assertion of dignity and respect, as it offers alternative ways of interpreting taxonomies of Arab and Muslim desire in relationship to self, community, kinship, family, and territory. Decolonization in settler-colonial societies implies being guided by an ethic of inconsummerability that entails the repatriation/rematriation of Indigenous land, and hence is not a metaphor for reconciling with nation-state paradigms.

In is important to note, as Tuck and Yang do, that decolonial struggles in postcolonial and settler-colonial societies intersect but are distinct. They entail different demographics and histories. Due to Islam’s contemporary positioning as a geopolitical arc and the conjoined relationship between settler-and-franchise colonialism, settler colonialism cannot be utilized as a stand-alone analytic or be self-contained. As Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein argue, in the absence of an anti-imperialist analysis, it “potentially reproduces precisely the effects” that are entangled in more complicated histories. Thus, decolonization is not adopting civil/human rights-based approaches, nor does it mean that we simply improve our school curriculums or deploy liberal-multicultural social justice paradigms. Radical autonomous and Indigenous non-statist conceptualizations of decolonization involve comprehending that white settler states engage in and benefit from constructing, collapsing and reshuffling the taxonomic borders “between Native, enslavable Other, and Orientalized Other[s]” as a “triad of categories.” This divide and conquer strategy sets ‘model’ and quasi-assimilable minorities in competition with each other, while retaining the threat of a return to “the status of foreign contagions (as exemplified by Japanese Internment, Islamophobia, Chinese Exclusion, Red Scare, anti-Irish nativism, WWII antisemitism, and anti-Mexican-immigration).” Radical understandings of decolonization, based on the understanding of how settler colonialism fuels imperialism, can therefore illuminate the codependence and constitutive natures of colonialism and racism. It can also show how white antiracists, allied decolonialists, people of color, and Indigenous activists can explore ideas and practices that abstain from reinforcing ‘model minority’ myths. As Brandzel suggests we decolonize by focusing “our energies toward queering – as in, denaturalizing – the disaggregation of race and colonialism [and hence embracing] a politics that is against citizenship – one that refuses both futurity-as-inclusion as well as retroactive and restorative political visions of the past, in order to enact a coalitional, intersectional, and decolonial politics in and of the present.”

This conversation is critical given calls by the likes of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (née Mead), as well as others, including the Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, for settler-accountability from the margins. Urging allies of non-native people of color to stop seeking colonial administrative inclusion within the specter of American/Canadian citizenship-belonging and instead decolonize their anti-racist and feminist movements, and to make returning to the land a priority of their agendas, Lawrence and Dua have spawned discourses between Indigenous, Black, and anti-racist people of color on the varying typologies and differential placements that occur as consequence of both historically forced and willful displacements and migrations to the North American empire. There is consensus amongst scholarship that the term ‘settler’ is “intrinsically linked to the complex relations of the post-Columbian White colonialist project globally,” and, as a consequence of settler colonialism, non-native people of color can be complicit in. However, Byrd notes that “it is all too easy, in critiques of ongoing U.S. settler colonialism to accuse diasporic migrants, queers, and people of color for participating in and benefitting from indigenous loss of lands, cultures, and lives […] as if the could always consent to or refuse such positions or consequences of history.” Thus, Byrd in her efforts to destabilize the construction of “Indianness” and the notion of a ‘pure’ authentic indigeneity, whether in the context of Indigenous peoples or the general colonized Other, introduces the category “arrivants”, borrowed from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite “to signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe, but who have functioned within and have resisted the project of colonizing the ‘New World’.” Hence, arrivants include racialized non-European immigrants, migrants, and refugees as newcomers to Turtle Island. Her approach represents a call to the “settler, native, and arrivant” to “each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism and its resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure” through the violent erasure of Indigenous people’s relationship to land.

A growing body of research addressing the terrains of Indigenous and Black peoples and solidarities are illuminating how white settler-colonialism is, was, and continues to be contingent on not only Indigenous genocide, dispossession, and the denaturalization of their relationship to land, but also fundamentally continues to co-depend on anti-Blackness as illuminated in works of Tiffany Lethabo King, Tuck and Yang, as well as Shona N. Jackson, Achille Mbembe, Stephanie Smallwood, M. Jacqui Alexander, Saidiya Hartman, Kyle T. Mays, Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, George Sefa Dei, Melissa Phung, Achille Mbembe, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley. Shona N. Jackson, for example, discusses, “practices of belonging and becoming that have provided a new material, symbolic, and discursive relationship to the land for blacks, Indo-Guyanese, and Indigenous Peoples.” Settler colonialism, as these authors describe, relies on the racial and sexual economies of the Middle Passage, as well as the abduction and sustaining of transatlantic chattel and plantation colonial enslavement of Africans as indentured labors and property. It also relies on contemporary colonial/imperial ‘after-life slave’ projects that continue to dehumanize people of color whether through white-liberal humanist judicial laws, that are purportedly impartial and objective, or the usurping modus operandi of global racial capitalism across what Katherine McKittrick refers to as a vast “landscape of systemic ‘blacklessness’.” Indigenous-Black relations are creased by white settler-colonialism, whose divide and conquer strategies pit native against native and black against black. Whereas historically both entities were mutually engaged through treaty and other forms of cooperative relationships. the impact of white colonialism resulted in fraught conflicts as some Native people enslaved Black people, and some Black people participated in Indigenous extermination, expulsion, and land theft. And yet, in other instances, we see fused identities like the Black Cherokees in Oklahoma and Black Mi’kmaq peoples in Nova Scotia, who are a living embodiment of these two worlds and the intertwining of Indigenous and Black peoples’ fates and futurities.

The entanglement of Indigenous-Black histories emerges not only in the context of the U.S. that is often assigned strict blame, but Canada as well. This is despite the myth of Canada’s multicultural inclusiveness and it was as an innocent bystander and haven to runaway slaves, and during the Jim Crow and segregation era. Scholarship by Ronaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper documents the invisible history of the slave trade and argue that the reality is: “First, that Canada was a colony of France and Britain, two of the largest slave traffickers. Second, because the Atlantic slave trading activities connected diverse economies, for much of the slavery period, there was a brisk trade between the capitalists of eastern Canada and the slaveholders of the Caribbean… Third, recent scholarship discovered that at least 60 of the slave ships used in the British slave trade were built in Canada. Most important, enslavement of Africans itself was institutionalized in Canada. The enslavement of black people existed from least 1628 to 1834.”

The complicated nature of Black-Indigenous relations is explored in this research’s fieldwork through a Nubian-Egyptian black queer participant who, on account of the hypervisibility and invisibility of blackness and Arab supremacy, shuns his Arab identity in exchange for a perceived globalized black and African identity. Such an essentialization of ‘Blackness’ can both erase the ongoing effects of the Middle Passage and contribute to the promotion of narratives that Islam was spread by the sword and that Muslim slavery is akin to Euro-American slavery. In another instance in the fieldwork, a queer black participant of Nigerian-African descent acknowledges black-on-black prejudices, and the difference between her experience in the U.S. and the unique position of transatlantic descendants. She also indicates how contemporary militarized policing allocates black bodies, irrespective of their origins, to prison industrial complexes. These accounts echo the call to acknowledge how settler colonialism benefits from conflating historical experiences, and hence the need to expose the power relations, cultural logics, and subjects that have co-opted and erased radical Indigenous and Black trajectories. Blackness is further complicated when it intersects with Islam as many Middle Passage slaves were Muslims who were forcibly Christianized.

Recent diasporic migrations of people of color render the notion of settler-hood even more complicated. There can be little doubt that arrivants, and in particular brown people of color who have embraced and promote a culture of whiteness, have knowingly or unintentionally accepted a permanent invitation to appropriate Indigenous land. An ethic of healing must be embraced, but this cannot happen without acknowledging and being accountable for the ways that we, as Indigenous, Black, and people of color, and all that is in-between, collectively hurt and wound each other. White supremacy must be recognized as a “key pillar of the settler colonial state” and this knowledge can be “mobilized as common ground for solidarity among [colonized] people.” Clearly, it is neither the responsibility nor place for white settlers, even those engaged as radical allies with Indigenous peoples, to ascribe or school people of color, “even if in the former’s capacity to oppress Indigenous people.” In other words, white allies possess their own culpability and complicity, and it is their responsibility to allow and permit us space/time – as Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities – to order and rearrange our own house.

My fieldwork finds that some queer Egyptians emigrate to the West, particularly to U.S./Canada, as a consequence of their repression. It is therefore critical to examine Byrd’s category of arrivant. I agree with Sara Ahmed, that Byrd’s arrivant is not “a third position somehow located between settler and native,” but rather a productive means to “destabilize the settler/native binary.” The emphasis on arrivant can potentially disrupt the imperial/colonial categories that separate labor and bodies from land. This requires, as Byrd notes, settlers, natives, and arrivants to each first acknowledge their positions within the imperial system of relationships and then to reconceptualize them. There are two means through which this can be achieved. The first is through mobilizing Sara Ahmed’s insights in Queer Phenomenology. She discusses the process of arrival and “migrant orientation,” that operates against the logics and dynamics of invasion while also reifying one’s position as a colonial product now engaged in the colonization of others. The second is through mobilizing the concept of indigeneity, especially given how a majority of non-Indigenous Muslims from franchise-colonial nations do not identify as settlers of color and abdicate their responsibilities to Indigenous peoples on account of their own fears and self-victimizations.

With regards to migrant orientations, Ahmed reflects on the process of arrival by noting that what is transplanted or arrived “is shaped by the conditions of its arrival, by how it came to get there.” Understanding the migrant’s orientation is critical for the purpose of relating across our mutual struggles, because, as Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein note, both the “arrivant and indigenous positions alike certainly speak to ‘lost homes’, but neither seems to inhabit home in the mode of ‘not yet’.” For this reason, a too-neat settler/native binary can silence and compromise not only “the question of blackness in the world, of black liberation”, but also the futurity of settler people of color. Furthermore, non-Indigenous peoples cannot miss out on the productive opportunity to “articulate in relationship with indigenous decolonization” how to dismantle imperialist conditions in franchise-colonial societies. Taking into consideration the migrant orientation and constructing relational opportunities should not mean, as Tuck and Yang note, “that Indigenous peoples or Black and brown peoples take positions of dominance over white settlers; the goal is not for everyone to merely swap spots on the settler-colonial triad, to take another turn on the merry-go-round” but rather “the goal is to break the relentless structuring of the triad – a break and not a compromise.” Instead, non-Indigenous settlers of color must build decolonial relationalities through situating their struggles in one another’s narratives and vitally understand that “breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, the abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole.” Dismantling settler-colonial ‘here’ means eradicating franchise-colonialism ‘elsewhere’, as much as “decolonization ‘here’ is intimately connected to anti-imperialism elsewhere,” because both colonialisms are informed through liberal universalism and modernism that regenerate the social formations of empire. Any thesis on decolonization must address Indigenous sovereignty or rights and take into account the unsettling and de-occupation of land. To do otherwise constitutes an equivocation.

It is critical to note that I disagree with Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, who argue that people of color are not settlers. They also critique all nationalisms for being cisheteropatriarchal and hierarchical products of colonialism, and problematically assume that Indigenous nationalisms are antithetical to decolonization, by suggesting that they are premised on Western ontologies of the nation. By problematically essentializing Indigenous understandings of the nation, Sharma and Wright’s analysis denies and depoliticizes, as Dhamoon notes, the “differences between Indigenous peoples and other non-whites.” In fact, like the Islamic concept of the Umma, Indigenous approaches offer ontologies of nation that refuse hierarchies of power and open decolonial modes of governance. By adopting an Oppression Olympics perspective that pits claims of oppression against one another, Sharma and Wright misconstrue settler colonialism and Indigenous nationhood, and interpret the latter to imply the expulsion of non-Indigenous peoples. They argue that Indigenous nationalisms are likely to advance “neoliberal practices that have further globalized capitalist social relations and to the related neo-racist practices.” In response to Sharma and Wright’s model, Rita Dhamoon argues that the crisis of collective liberation is “not so much about whether migrants are settler colonists, but rather how migrations and the movement of non-whites are enabled and regulated by a global system of nation-states and corporations in the service of settler colonial projects and vice versa.”

Drawing on Melissa Phung, Robinder Sehdev, and Beenash Jafri, Dhamoon argues that the differing effects of racial colonial structures on their lives mean that not all non-Indigenous residents of Turtle Island can be categorized as one. Sehdev argues that non-Indigenous people’s presence on Turtle Island, “is made possible by treaty, and it is therefore incumbent on us to reconsider our strategies for social justice with treaty in mind.” The call here is for allies across the vast array of racialized arrivant-communities, who bear distinctive historical trajectories from both Indigenous peoples and white settlers, to adopt or at least engage Indigenous conceptualizations of treaty, “such as that of the Two Row Wampum and that is based on mutual peace, respect, and friendship, and contains a spiritual dimension.” Seeking to distinguish between settler privilege and settler complicity as well as arrivant-privilege and arrivant-complicity is necessary because privilege and complicity do not circulate in the same way. Racialized subjects who have been marked as white may not benefit from the former, but cannot disavow the latter. Beenash Jafri states,

When people refer to ‘settler privilege’, they are referring to the unearned benefits to live and work on Indigenous lands, and to the unequal benefits accrued through citizenship rights within the settler state. However, for people of colour the benefits of being a settler are accrued unevenly. These privileges or social advantages are contingent on things like nationality, class, gender, and migration status. When we account for systemic inequities, underemployment and the racialization of poverty, for most people of colour there are few ‘benefits’ associated with being a settler. Thus, if we follow the logic of a settler/non-settler binary, an argument about people of colour having settler privilege quite easily falls on its face. Many people of colour are settlers without (or with limited) settler privilege.

If Indigenous, Black, and people of color communities seek to transcend the triadic structures of settler-native-arrivants to offer a horizontalist unconditional hospitality that is still paradoxically conditioned on the existence of conditional shared ethical-political decolonial commitments, then I argue that beyond an honest action-based acknowledgment of our complicities and privileges relative to each other, as well as Byrd’s category of arrivant, and Ahmad’s migrant orientation, there is a need to activate what Byrd, Jeannette Armstrong, and Robert Lovelace refer to as indigeneity.

Michael Rothberg and Byrd argue that in this time of volatile borders and massive displacements of people, “‘indigeneity’ holds the promise of rearticulating and reframing questions of place, space, movement and belonging.” They see postcolonialism and indigeneity as overlapping and opposing positions that can illuminate each other, and they point to Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair as rare examples of academics exploring this area. Rothberg and Byrd also note the reluctance of some Indigenous scholars to adopt postcolonial perspectives “since confronting the ongoing colonization of native lands remains at the top of the agenda for indigenous peoples, […] indigenous intellectuals have been reluctant to sign on to a theoretical project that appears to relegate their dilemmas to the past or an achieved ‘after’ (even if, in practice, this has rarely been the project of postcolonial studies).” Moreover, although postcolonial studies have provided important tools for indigenous scholars, it is unclear whether “models developed as a response to the colonization of the Indian subcontinent and (to a lesser extent) Africa” are suitable for understanding the settler colonies in Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Palestine. In particular, “both ‘subaltern’ and ‘indigenous’ name problems of translation and relationality; or, to put it slightly differently, subaltern/indigenous dialogue is, among other things, a dialogue within and about incommensurability, but “for postcolonial work to resonate in indigenous contexts it must be careful about the way it translates its terms,” as, for example, ‘subaltern’ and ‘indigenous’ may be incommensurable. As Rothberg and Byrd write, “failed reception can certainly mean a complete lack of reception, that is, a relegation of subaltern subjects to silence, absence and non-recognition.” Gaurav Desai explores this issue in his case studies and travel narratives on the Otavalo and Cotacachi, two indigenous communities in Ecuador. She suggests that the term ‘diaspora’ is key to understanding the relation between subalternity and indigeneity. Rothberg and Byrd note, “Desai calls for a ‘located’ consideration of the significance of indigeneity and uses the category of subalternity as a lever for revealing power relations that cluster around different experiences of tradition, place and movement.” However, Rothberg and Byrd also direct our attention to how Desai rightfully argues that indigeneity can become nativist and have genocidal mutations such as “Hindutva in India and Hutu Power in Rwanda.” The objective, as Rothberg and Byrd interpret Desai, “is not to relativize the emphasis on distinctions of power that subaltern studies and indigenous studies share, but rather – in the spirit of Desai's call for a located critique – to trace the shifting meanings that indigeneity has had and continues to have in colonial and neocolonial imaginaries.”

Syilx Okanagan scholar/activist Armstrong notes that through sacred activism and spiritual paths of service, indigeneity can become a social ethic in which “[l]ife practices intent on TEK, and knowledge of the land’s local realities and regenerative capacity, become the guiding force for human occupation.” Moreover, Ardoch Algonquin elder Robert Lovelace notes that indigeneity or becoming indigenous is not synonymous with nor is it a politically charged euphemism for Aboriginal, Native, or Indian. Nor does it follow from archetypical multicultural liberal UN declarations, articles, and racial definitions of Indigenous peoples. To Lovelace, indigeneity and becoming indigenous cannot take place in the domesticated corridors of a cordoned neoliberal academy that has a transactional relationship with corporations and the state. Lovelace states, “re-indigenization and indigeneity entail a return to the expectations of the womb [and] every infant in the womb has an expectation that he or she will emerge into a thoroughly indigenous world.” Indigeneity can only manifest and unfold through anti-colonial/anti-imperial sacred and decolonial, place-based, ecologically literate, symbiotic relation to land and (non)human life. To do so demands that peoples develop trust, an ethic of hospitality and disagreements towards each other, and enhance cognitively, spiritually, politically, and metaphysically each other’s relationship to land. This allows settlers/non-settlers alike to engage in becoming indigenous. Nonetheless, this entails decolonially teaching, learning, and listening to each other as we discover what it means to become human again in a world in which we are mere migrating travelers, witnesses to each other worlds during our temporary transit(s).

Lovelace emphasizes that we are not our ancestors and hence there is no return to an authentic and pure notion of self. He writes, “re-indigenization focuses interest on a complex set of contingencies. Knowledge of Indigenous technologies is certainly part of it. Exploring the theoretical underpinnings of technological, social, political, economic, artistic, psychological and philosophical development within Indigenous societies as they may be applied to real life collective decision making connects knowledge to practice…[reindigenization is] about present decision making, forming intentional communities and engaging in actual earth based work.”

Amadahy interprets and expands on Lovelace’s views, arguing that non-Indigenous people should do away with settler-guilt syndrome in exchange for our collective embracing of healthy minds and living well. As an Algonquin-Muslim, Lovelace teaches, “anyone can become indigenous to a place” and this does not mean “everyone has to ‘become Indian’” or that we engage in white orientalized projects that entail our collective return to innocence. At the core of Lovelace’s understanding of decolonization/indigenization, Amadahy notes, “is not bloodlines, skin colour, or cultural heritage”. Rather Lovelace argues for fulfilling acts of compassion (rahma), goodness (iḥsān) and intelligence, and adhering to non-statist, innate communal bonds and ethical-political, spiritual commitments. These are all synonymous with Islam’s notion of fiṭrah (originary nature of individuals to incline towards all that is communal and good) and associated with achieving an anarchistic interpretation of a global Umma and pluriverse-spiritual world. As discourses on Islamic anarchism have discussed through the concept of Umma, “there are existing ontologies of nation that refuse hierarchies of power and still open decolonial modes of governance.” A pluriverse vision of an Umma (global Muslim and non-Muslim polity) is premised on the acceptance and not mere tolerance, in a multicultural liberal way, of the Other, and is composed of participants bound by variant spiritual belongings, faiths, and religions interwoven with shared decolonial ethico-political social justice values derived from their own paradigms. This occurs even if those composing the Umma differ from each other in their cultural and ritualistic performances and traditions.

Through Lovelace and Armstrong, and a conceptualization of ethical contracts and concepts within decolonial understandings of Islam I seek to go beyond Byrd’s understandable trepidation regarding indigeneity. This is done by offering indigeneity as a transnational category and a spiritual-ethical-political decolonial coordinate in relation to land. The condition of being indigenous or indigeneity allows us to mobilize as an international collective of multiple anti-imperial/anti-racist decolonial communities that can build solidarities with Indigenous Peoples in Turtle Island and with settler-colonial societies found in Australia, New Zealand, and Palestine, and their decolonizing work. Since decolonization is a spiritual act, arrivant Muslims must engage decolonial scriptural interpretations, as those emergent from Islamic anarchism, to locally connect and correspond with spiritual, decolonial, visions of indigeneity.

We cannot predetermine or predict what a decolonized and reindigenized world will look like. Decolonization entails a biodiverse strategy of resistance, which I discuss in Chapter Five. Decolonization is filled with anxieties because it relies on the understanding that land, its soil, and nonhuman life have much to teach us spiritually and materially regarding our species’ purpose and existence. In other words, we must understand that all “the answers are not fully in view and will not emerge from friendly understanding either” as what is required is a “dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics – [and hence involves] moves that may feel very unfriendly.”

Summary

To conclude this subsection, settler colonialism as a form of racial and sexual occupation sustains both homonationalism and cisheteropatriarchy. This dissertation uses settler-colonial theories to identify and critique the ways in which the politics of settler colonialism in Western societies creates and diffuses queer Muslims and non-white settlers of the diaspora. I also examine how their positionality and identity politics differ from queer Egyptians and Arabs in predominantly Muslim societies. Crucially, this decolonial critique of settler-coloniality recognizes that some diasporic queer Muslims inadvertently participate in the promotion of a settler-colonial mentality, whereas some queer Egyptians seek migration to the West on account of repressive conditions in Egypt and hence strive to escape to a new world of freedom. Settler colonialism critiques and decolonization theories attempt to transcend these transnational gender/queer colonial constraints by positing radical different ways of speaking of desire. It is through particular concepts like ‘blackness’, ‘migrant’, ‘arrivant’, and ‘indigeneity’, that we need to understand how racial/ethnic hierarchies of citizenship in the East and West privilege and oppress people of color, Indigeneous, and Black people differently, and to do so beyond a politics of inclusion. The aim is our collective liberation, given the urgent demand that we begin to look to each other – and not to the state – for our self-determination.

Chapter 3

Psychoanalysis/Schizoanalysis & Post-anarchist Social Movement Theories

My dissertation is informed by psychoanalytic theories, particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal schizo-analytic critique of psychoanalysis. The Sally Abd Allah case study in Chapter 3 reveals how the controlling logics of Egyptian psychiatry viewed through particular Islamic legal interpretations condone torture in the name of medicine. Although the logics underlying this are based on a modern Egyptian and Islamic theory of gender diversity that is effectively non-Western, they simultaneously produce presuppositions about gender/sexuality derived from Western psychiatry.

Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of psychoanalysis point out that desire is not only related to sexual investments in the social field, but also relates to nonsexual dimensions such as race, gender, nation, class, and social justice. Similarly, some of my research participants understand queerness as not exclusively relating to sexual practices. Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between desire and pleasure. A similar distinction exists in Islam, between desire (raġba) and pleasure (shahwa), in which the latter is a tempora