LGBTQIA+ history — a queer past, including the Arab world

8 min read

A common claim — used by religious authorities and conservative politicians across the Middle East — is that homosexuality and gender variance are Western imports. The historical record disagrees. Same-sex love and gender variance have been documented in every major civilization, including the Arab and Islamic ones. The modern political movement is recent; the human reality is ancient.

Pre-modern world

Ancient civilizations record same-sex relationships matter-of-factly. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese texts all describe same-sex love, gender-variant people, and their place in society. The Greek and Roman traditions of pederastic mentorship are well-documented; in classical Athens, sexual relationships between adult men and adolescent boys were a recognized social institution (with consent norms very different from modern ones, and we can treat the practice critically while acknowledging it existed).

Pre-Islamic Arabia had a recognized social category of mukhannathūn — people assigned male at birth who lived in feminine social roles, dressed in feminine attire, and were considered neither men nor women in the conventional sense. The early Islamic community continued to recognize this category.

Early Islam

Several authentic hadith document the prophet Muhammad encountering mukhannathūn in Medina. In one well-known tradition, mukhannathūn were permitted entry into women’s spaces because they were considered “without desire for women” — i.e., they were socially aligned with women rather than men. The category was recognized as something between or outside the male/female binary.

Classical Islamic legal scholarship engaged extensively with same-sex desire and gender variance. Medieval Arab poetry — by figures including Abu Nuwas (8th–9th century, Baghdad) — celebrated love between men with explicit, lyrical, sometimes sacred language. Abu Nuwas wrote extensively about boys he loved, using imagery that placed same-sex desire within the canon of high Arabic literature. He was not censored or marginalized in his lifetime; he was a court poet of the Abbasid caliphate.

The medieval Arab world also produced extensive women-loving-women literature, including a tradition of sahq poetry that frankly described sexual relationships between women.

This is not romanticization. Medieval Arab societies were not utopias for queer people. There were also strict legal prohibitions and brutal enforcement at times. But the dominant historical reality was a culture that recognized same-sex desire as part of the human range — sometimes punished, sometimes celebrated, sometimes ignored, but always known.

The colonial flattening

Modern anti-queer law in much of the Middle East and former colonies is a colonial inheritance. The British Empire spread anti-sodomy statutes (descended from English laws like the Buggery Act 1533 and the Offences Against the Person Act 1861) across India, Burma, much of Africa, and parts of the Arab world during colonial rule. France similarly exported its own legal codes.

Local Islamic legal frameworks had been more variable, often theoretically harsh on paper but inconsistently enforced in practice. The colonial period imposed European-style criminalization with European-style enforcement, replacing or overlaying older systems.

When Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and other Arab states gained independence, they inherited these colonial legal codes — and have largely kept them. The 2024 Iraqi anti-LGBT law (Law No. 14) is in this tradition: a modern statute drawing on a colonial legal framework, justified with religious rhetoric.

The modern movement (West)

The modern LGBT rights movement traces several origin points:

The modern movement (Arab world)

Modern Arab queer organizing is real, growing, and often clandestine.

Online Arabic-language queer media — magazines like My.Kali (Jordan, originally), Twitter/X accounts, blogs, podcasts — have grown despite repeated platform crackdowns and state harassment.

Iraq specifically

Iraqi queer history is intertwined with the country’s broader political history.

The history shows: queer Iraqis have always been here. The legal and political pressure changes. The people don’t disappear.

Why history matters

Knowing this history does several things:

  1. It refutes the Western-import argument. When someone tells you that queer identity is a foreign idea, you can name Abu Nuwas. You can name the mukhannathūn in the hadith. You can point to the medieval Baghdad of which Abu Nuwas was a celebrated figure. This is not borrowed identity. It is yours.
  2. It places you in a long line. You are not the first queer person in your family, your city, or your country — even if you feel like the first. There were queer people in Baghdad in 800 CE. There were queer people in your grandparents’ generation. There will be queer people after you.
  3. It frames the current moment. The 2024 law is severe. It is also one event in a much longer story. Movements that started smaller than ours have outlasted regimes that seemed permanent.

Further reading

If you have the means and the safety to read more:

In Arabic, queer literary and historical writing exists but is harder to access publicly. The community can sometimes provide reading lists — reach out.

See also