Reflections on Haqq as Rights, by Amina Wadud
In which the brilliant and outspoken scholar of Islam touches upon feminism, personal rights, classism, white privilege, and her experiences visiting Makkah for Umrah (among other things) while discussing it all under the context of Qur’an and hadith.
from Nick Cave’s Handwritten Dictionary of Words, 1984
Love isn’t about
fucking each other
at any opportunity.
It also isn’t about
how many months
or years
that you’ve been together.
To me,
love is about
being able to see light
inside of the person
who knows nothing
but darkness.
I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.
These questions came after a brief exploration of gay men’s relationship to American fashion and women’s bodies. That dialogue included recognizing that gay men in the United States are often hailed as the experts of women’s fashion and by proxy women’s bodies. In addition to this there is a dominant logic that suggests that because gay men have no conscious desire to be sexually intimate with women, our uninvited touching and groping (physical assault) is benign.
