Shakar, Hijra, and Mama Nour: On Queer NGOs, Western Dominance, and Disregarding the Local

عربي

Words by Mohammad Abu Hajar and Ahmed Osili
Translation by Hiba Moustafa
Artworks by Omar
This article is part of the “Sana wara Sana” issue

This text is a preliminary attempt to re-read the sequence of events of the last decade with a critical lens.
We hope there will be more space to build on it.

Research on issues of “gender” and “feminism” in the Arabic-speaking region has shifted dramatically since the 1920s, which would pave the way for increased usage of these two terms, in addition to many others such as “queer,” “trans” and “pride” among others. This shift has also generated new spaces for theoretical and epistemological discussions, even around “coming out of the closet”¹ or going public on an individual level, which wasn’t possible before that moment. But such a shift, despite all the potentials and opportunities it has to offer, also brings a number of issues to the surface.

The colonial perspective on gender and sexuality intersects clearly with the prohibitory one in our heteronormative patriarchal societies. Society and authorities in the Arabic-speaking world deny that communities with different sexual orientations can draw their roots to the history, culture, and deep-rooted rituals of the region, viewing them as lost or influenced by Western cultural invasion. The colonial perspective denies local queer communities their existence, except in cases that serve its imperialist interests and align with the set of definitions and standards established by colonialism itself. This includes ideas of coming out of the closet, the rainbow flag, organizational work and gender stereotypes that are acceptable in the West, and a host of things that are produced primarily in North America and then exported to the rest of the world, like wars, capitalism, and  the “international” (though this is often produced in the West, with its “civilizing mission).”²

This in no way means that sexual liberation isn’t locally possible in the Arabic-speaking world. Nor does it mean that sexual liberation necessarily refers to an absolute colonial act. It also doesn’t mean that queer communities must remain trapped by two narratives. The first is of a patriarchal society and local authority that operate their full machinery – including the specificity of the Arabic-speaking society they wield as an instrument of oppression – to delegitimize, dehumanize and even call for the killing of queer people and communities. The second is of an “international community” that adapts and uses its vocabulary and ways of life to enable racist and supremacist perceptions of the entire local community. Rather, we must ask: can NGOs, which are entirely dependent on Western funding, be the social torch-bearers of this liberation? And, what do these NGOs have to do with the production of a discourse that aligns with and upholds Western dominance?

Though the two narratives seem to be at the ends of the spectrum, they are actually very similar. In fact, neither can exist without the other. Both deny the existence of queer communities in the region, with their own lifestyles and vocabularies. For example, a European queer activist once told us that anyone who didn’t watch Eurovision wasn’t queer enough. We were shocked, for at the time, many of us in the queer community in Syria had never heard of it before. This takes us to a Western queer community that is trying to impose its own norms, modes of existence, celebrations, and rituals as globalized lifestyles, where international organizations and their local subsidiaries become a “Trojan horse” for Western dominance, to quote William Glen Wright. This colonial perspective overlooks all the queer histories and experiences of non-Western countries. Many of those concerned with issues of sexual liberation in the Arabic-speaking world today know about Christopher Street Day; pride parades in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin; and the pronouns that are used to address people accurately. And yet, they know practically nothing about the history and depth of queer life on the backstreets of Damascus, Cairo, and Riyadh, despite the richness of these experiences.

Entering Al-Jaow³

“Coming out” stands out among the terms that have become used either in their English or localized forms as a result of the shift I’ve referred to at the beginning of this article. It is borrowed from debutante society, where elite young women “came out” into high society. But its Arabic translation, الخروج من الخزانة (al-khrooj min al-khazaneh), is both literal and has no Arabic cultural connotations whatsoever, unlike “الخروج من القوقعة أو الشرنقة” [tr. coming out of the shell or cocoon]. The difference between “closet” and “shell” or “cocoon” goes beyond metaphor to discourse itself, beyond “the spoken” to identification. The difference is within the folds of “the unspoken,” wherein an imported culture that generally looks down upon spoken culture, displaying internalized classicism and taking a deeper plunge into importing Western dominance and its vocabulary. 

Additionally, this shift toward using such phrases indicates an increasing role played by international government and non-government organizations in funding the emerging queer movement in the region and impacting its language and vocabulary. Many studies and research describe how these organizations act as a “Trojan horse” for Western dominance and serve as a means to control different movements and their effects in the “third world” countries.⁴ In his footnoted article, Musa Shadeedi argues that Western colonial perspective promotes a new normative, which it sees as the only capable of evaluating the “validity” and performance of queer communities all over the world.

Artworks by Omar: A Hijra, A 49$ T-shirt
In the process of colonial mutation and the rejection of one uniform for another,
clothing becomes a mass-produced piece of capitalistic self expression.

Featured image: Postcard from A Queer Crusade
An alternative postcard suggests that there is more than camels and deserts and mosques. In the pursuit of a new world,
the same mosque visited by curious Tourists is targeted, for the dollar that lies beneath it.

It was in Damascus, around 2007, when I first came out of the shell. I was in a café, which a friend told me was for the “community” or “society” – both terms were used to describe the gay community. There, Mama Nour nicknamed me Hind, and through a quasi-sacred ritual, I was “baptized” as her new “daughter” and I met my “sisters” in al-jaow. It’s funny that I never met her again after that night, but she will always remain my mama. It’s a family that I belonged to not by blood but through a ritual, that was a mix of sacredness and promiscuity. New doors opened for me to a world of pleasure and debauchery, unity and solidarity, the “society” and its orgies, hammams (public baths), Karnak Café, the secluded corner at al-Hejaz Café, al-Qishleh Garden, the Four Seasons Garden and seducing straight men⁵. It was a world where everyone got to live as they pleased.

This is a narrative that goes far beyond the parties and hustle and bustle of a jolly, licentious community to the very existence of this world. It enables the creation of a life and vocabulary – which the colonial perspective knows nothing about and which NGOs receiving funding ruled by this perspective have abandoned – instead of monopolizing its representation and imposing totally exhibitionist Western notions on its individuals and modes of communication. This exhibitionism becomes more flagrant when the embassies of the countries that have the blood of people in Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others on their hands raise the rainbow flag every year. This annual exhibitionism, taking into account everything that these embassies stand for in the Arab collective consciousness, does nothing more than reinforce accusations of treason and being agents of the West.  The consequences of this are suffered by queer people, who neither care about the flag to begin with, nor feel that they belong to “civil” life or these corrupt NGOs that shamelessly seek to monopolize queer representation and rush to obtain annual funding from these embassies.

Funding and Disregarding the Local

As important as it is to work for queer liberation in the Arabic-speaking region, we will face many problems if we hand over the reins to NGOs and funding mechanisms. As David Korten argues, “The surest way to kill a movement is to smother it with money.”⁶ This, alongside the corruption associated with these NGOs, allows them to monopolize and direct discourse wherever they want. Ralph Kramer’s observation, “If you have your hand in another man’s pocket, you must move when he moves,”⁷ can also be applied to the state of the queer movement in the Arabic-speaking region, today. In its current state, this “movement” doesn’t seem capable of going beyond participation in international conferences and writing “intelligence-like” reports for international funding centers, and then presenting all this as revolutionary activism. 

In their research paper titled “Activism and the Economy of Victimhood,”⁸ Nour Abu-Assab and Roula Seghaier argue that one of the most problematic aspects of the NGO-ization of queer activism in the Arabic-speaking region is its complete reliance on Western funding and the creation of an activism entirely dependent on identity politics, wherein individualistic contexts are promoted as victories. A queer NGO activist reported that – at the onset of Syrian people’s displacement and asylum seeking –  he devoted his life to the liberation of the “LGBTQ+ community.” He boasted that, in the last two years, he has not spent a whole month in a single country, moving from one country to another and participating in many international conferences and training workshops to support the queer community, much like the rest of flying activists. He never mentioned the mechanisms through which he was supporting a community that he barely knew about its lifestyles, staying in the luxurious rooms of five-star hotels. 

In fact, NGOs have created many conflicts among activists over funding issues and played a role in dismantling the social fabric and solidarity that brought queer people together. Hatred replaced affection. They outed each other and even sought the support of state authorities, reporting on some private gathering places, as a friend told us. We omitted the details upon his request.

One of the most significant impacts of NGOs on queer activism, and indeed any kind of activism, is their borderline tendency to depoliticize their field of work by adopting “empowerment methods” that reinforce individual success stories or isolate issues of queer liberation from the general social framework. A friend, a teacher in a remote Syrian village, told us about one  queer activist who was conducting a study on the realities of queer students in Arab schools for a Western-funded organization. He asked this friend about the efforts made by the school psychologist to help queer students. Can you imagine how out of touch with reality he must be to ask a teacher in Ba’athist Syria such a question? 

The story of Suzie al-Beirutiyya is one of many examples that show how NGOs adopt working mechanisms that seek to provide individual and isolated success stories. Many inside and outside the queer community remember her. Suzie, who identified herself as a shakar⁹ (Arabic شگر) in her first media interview, roamed the streets of Beirut every day in search of a living. She died homeless and very poor. Every activist in Beirut has traded endlessly on her name while presenting individual “success” stories. And yet, though she was a symbol and icon who embodied the suffering of the queer community in the region, none of the queer NGOs in Lebanon with millions available in their coffers, did nothing to provide Suzie with a decent life or peaceful death. They did not even respect her self-identified identity, changing it from “shakar” to “transgender,” adopting Western labels of gender identities that have no local connotations. The difference between the two terms isn’t just rhetorical. Through funding and the training workshops their employees attend, these NGOs have intrinsically turned into parrots that repeat the Western funders’ dogmatic notions without the slightest interest in the local context. Instead of researching the shakar identity, the organizational discourse has wiped it from lived experience, replacing it with something that would appease funders and donors and make it easier for them to understand. 

Artwork by Omar: Goodbye Suzy, Reporting Live from the Airport 
At the Airport, time and geography collapse when individual salvation is not an event
but a never-ending thread of betrayal and deception.

The Local as a Starting Point, Not an End

Alma¹⁰ was a well-known woman in our city. I was six when I saw her for the first time. She was sitting like a pasha or me’allema ( مِعلّمة, tr. female boss) in a café she owned and ran. She had such a strong presence that I couldn’t take my eyes off her for a few moments. When I asked my grandmother who and what she was, she said she was a shakar – neither a male nor a female. She told me not to stare at her, for if she got angry with me, Allah might too. I didn’t know, nor did my grandmother, whether her words matched the doctrines of any religion or sect, but she believed that a shakar is blessed by Allah. Later on, I learned that Alma didn’t see herself as male or female, or insist that people addressed her as either. My grandmother’s words brought me to the conclusion that shakars have carved a place for themselves in popular imagination from people’s belief that they are a divine blessing.

Years later, when I was having a conversation with a friend who was interested in gender studies and worked in the circles of Western-funded NGOs, I asked her if she knew what shakar meant. She thought it was a vulgar word used to describe transgender people. Her answer prompted me to break with an entire history of class and Western supremacy, among other things. Alma wasn’t a trans person, and because she died before NGOs were a thing, unlike Suzie, she may have never heard of the word “trans.” Since gender is a social construct, her gender identity was the product of an intense contact with the region’s experience, her society, and her heritage in a pre-globalization time. She was a shakar and not a transgender.

Imported from Western contexts and used by a local social niche that has strong connections with those contexts, these labels may be nothing more than a speck of dust to the Arab queer community that is too complex and diverse to be contained within imported stereotypes. Neither “trans” nor “drag queen” may mean anything to the Alexandrian belly dancer Hatem, who sits on the throne of belly dancing in Sharm El Sheikh, nor to the dozens whose social and sexual identities cannot be contained or comprehended within Western classifications. That they dance and are invited to dance in traditional weddings and parties suggests some kind of coexistence that generations have carved out over decades, only to be scorned and erased by the elite of funded NGOs within a few years.

Western Epistemology As A Standard: NGOs’ New God

What this article discusses isn’t exclusive or limited to the Arab queer community. In cultural geography all over the world, there are communities that have lived their atypical sexuality and developed their own culture and vocabulary of coexistence within their environments. A friend from the Indian subcontinent talked to us about the hijra¹¹ community and the position of coexistence they’ve created within the social fabric. The presence of hijra people in any place brings about divine blessing. Our friend told us, “Weddings, new businesses, and houses aren’t considered blessed unless the hijra community chant their hymns in the place.” 

During my visit to India, when the tuk-tuk I was in stopped at a traffic light in a busy New Delhi street, a hijra with a lovely face approached me, asking for money. I gave her some, and she then chanted a mantra. The driver told me that this was a kind of blessing that only hijra offered. When she tried to flirt with him, though, touching his hand, he gently pushed her hand away with a light-hearted laugh. Noticing my look of surprise, he said, “It’s an offer I either accept or reject; to each their own pleasure.” What I witnessed in India doesn’t match our globalized definitions of harassment. If the hijra had touched the hand of a taxi driver anywhere in the West, it’d have been seen as harassment, and maybe it is. What are the defining factors? And do they transcend races, ethnicities, identities, and individuals? What the hijra did doesn’t count as harassment in New Delhi, the tuk-tuk driver told me. Each society has its own social and sexual vocabulary, while Western perspectives, which Arab queer organizations reproduce on a daily basis, provide a single answer that propagates a “one-size-fits-all solution.” This is nothing more than a blatant colonial generalization.

A French friend once asked me about Abu Nuwas’ sexuality. She must have felt like she was the new Lawrence of Arabia, or as if she had made an epistemological breakthrough that all Arabs have failed to achieve, when she told me that she believed Abu Nuwas was bisexual. She expressed her surprise that there were not enough studies to confirm what she had concluded from reading his poetry, though such studies do exist. What our friend said might have been nothing more than a personal opinion, were it isolated from the institutional and organizational contexts that exercise the same oppressive projection of all the identities developed in the West onto people and constructions that existed in distant places and different times. 

Like NGOs, she dismissed the local and the individual, as if Abu Nuwas and millions of others had no right to describe themselves in the time of Western centralization and export them locally through “absolute facts” coming from the West with bags full of dollars. Abu Nuwas never called himself bisexual – such a term meant nothing to him, just as it meant nothing to his readers. These Western projections on our identities, present and past, have meant nothing to anyone outside the circles of funded organizations, flying activists, and the local “elite” who are usually the quickest to rush towards everything Western, favoring it over the local.

Though a bit long, this article is only a preliminary attempt to offer a further critique of the shift mentioned at the beginning of the article. We see it as a step forward in extricating the debate on issues related to sexual liberation from the weight of Western dominance that tries to subjugate our society with its economic, social, cultural, political, and even sexual components to one-size-fits-all determinants and frameworks. Antonio Gramsci argued that for the rule of a class to continue, its discourse must dominate. Therefore, pushing back against Western epistemological dominance is essential in the light of its ferocious attempts to universalize itself. We see research into the self and its development throughout history as part of the struggle against what is presented as the end of history, Western dominance of the world and its destiny. As indicated above, international organizations are a Trojan horse not only to introduce Western dominance, but also to undermine our unity and solidarity, the only two things we can rely on in the light of a vicious colonial attack.