Gay clubs facing Mecca: Welcome to Mamdani's NYC

the queer/Muslim horseshoe

Well, here we are. Welcome to Mamdani’s NYC, where all food is required to be halal, the adhan plays on the subway loudspeaker, and gay clubs are built to face Mecca.

In all honesty, this doesn’t sound so bad, actually. If all food were halal, I wouldn’t have to kindly refuse pork when a guest at people’s house, or pick the pancetta out of my pasta.

This post was prompted by Zohran’s appearance at a gay club this past weekend.

not that anyone would enjoy it much, seeing as he’s a butterbody

Conservatives whine about how he’s too progressive on social issues. And then they have the nerve to whine about he’s too Muslim and that he’s gonna enforce Shar’ia law. I mean, come on, do you really think Shar’ia is worse than drag queen story hour?

Besides, Zohran is not a super practicing Muslim—he’s what friend of the pod Jacob Williams might call a “bad Muslim” (roughly the equivalent of a bad Catholic)—and as we all know, this is something I think that is not very good. No, I don’t want Shar’ia imposed on NYC…but I wouldn’t mind a Ben Abbes-esque, subsidiarity-pilled Muslim running the city.

In all seriousness, I’m only posting this so I have an excuse to remind you about my content on the queer/Muslim horseshoe. Contrary to what many reactionary conservatives believe, the keffiyeh-clad rainbow-flag toting gays are not suffering from cognitive dissonance: queer theory and Islamic cosmology complement each other [in some ways].

There is a common thread uniting our instinctive, irrational, absolutist, and dualist tendencies […] quick to skip past the level of mundane reality and jump straight into the realm of idealism…and even plunge to the depths of nihilism.

This reality-denying, idealist impulse manifests itself in numerous schools of thought: Manichaeism, gnosticism, epicureanism, Platonism, Augustinianism, apophatic theology, predominant modes of Islamic theology, both puritanical and what Cornel West calls prophetic Christianity, voluntarism and nominalism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and totalitarianism (both in its left- and right-leaning forms). It is prone to chaos and violence, disorder and destruction.⁵ […]

Thus, is it any wonder that younger people of a progressive persuasion tend to be more sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians—a people they perceive to be oppressed and colonized by an entity with greater power than them, and whose Islamic metaphysical orientation aligns more with the Dionysian, fluid, gnostic stream of thought—which, though bringing this stream to very different conclusions, also fuels queer theory and the LGBT platform?

I’ve hinted previously at the capacity Islamic theology and culture have for fostering a decadent aesthetic sensibility, which is due in part to its Dionysian and Platonist tendencies. […] Islamic art and aesthetics carry a charge that in some ways overlaps with the sensibility found in some works of art born of a queer sensibility. […]

Besides, think of the aesthetic appeal that many pro-Palestine protests have…with the numerous non-Arabs dressing up in keffiyehs out of a sense of solidarity but also as performance art, and its ethos of revelry and the carnivalesque. Not exactly the same as the kind of costumes one will find at a Pride parade, but I rarely see such an aesthetic draw to pro-Israel protests (correct me if I’m missing something, of course).

And is it any wonder that older generations of a more conservative persuasion tend to be more sympathetic with the cause of the Israel—a State which they perceive to uphold law and order (even if by any means necessary), and whose metaphysical worldview aligns more with the rigid Apollonian stream of thought?

Read the rest here.

More on this topic in our post on the specter of an Islamic Dimes Square (and even more to come in our post on Dionysian Islam). Also, I wrote about the anti-colonialist queers for Palestine in Compact.

Lastly,

Amir Naaman

wrote a riveting essay in Inversion about queers for Palestine—which digs into the deeper metaphysical implications of queer culture, which is yet another reason you should pre-order your copy NOW!