Gaysia

by Benjamin Law

  He prayed for his fellow man, for his work and his research, and he prayed for the people he was helping to find a path out of homosexuality. Because that’s how Hasbullah regarded homosexuality: a maze through which to navigate, a spiritual conundrum, a puzzle that could be solved.

  ‘Homosexuality is hard to grasp,’ he’d tell me later. ‘It’s a challenge.’

  Hasbullah felt he was just the person to unravel it.

  Eighteen months earlier, Hasbullah had founded an organisation called the Malaysian Islamic Association of Homosexuality Research and Therapy. The organisation already had hundreds of clients. Most of them weren’t homosexual, but siblings, friends or parents who were seeking guidance to help their spiritually corrupted family members. As far as Hasbullah knew, it was the first formal Islamic organisation in Malaysia – and possibly South-East Asia – devoted solely to researching a cure for homosexuality from an Islamic perspective.

  Hasbullah hadn’t known much about homosexuality himself, but when he was studying counselling at university in Kedah, he regularly encountered clients who spoke of their crippling attraction to the same sex. One of Hasbullah’s first clients was a man who wept openly in Hasbullah’s office, overcome with grief at his sexual desires for men. Hasbullah had never heard anything like it. The man had cried out to him – weeping and moaning, intensely anxious – ‘Mister, help me! Help me, I want to stop this! I tried this and that, but nothing works!’

  ‘They want to stop,’ Hasbullah explained, ‘but how can they stop?’

  In that session, Hasbullah didn’t know what to do. What the man was saying shocked him, but, as more and more people came to Hasbullah with the same problem, he began to find it fascinating.

  ‘Did this stuff ever make you feel uncomfortable?’ I asked.

  ‘It didn’t matter what their problem is,’ he said. ‘I’m ready to listen.’

  Eventually, Hasbullah would ask them what they wanted to do about it. Invariably, the answer was the same: they didn’t want to be attracted to the same sex.

  Hasbullah had read some books and literature about homosexuality in the context of Islam, but had trouble finding any field research with homosexual people. There was no Islamic organisation dedicated to helping people with same-sex attractions. Hasbullah read online about an American Christian ex-gay organisation called NARTH and contacted them immediately with his plans to start something similar for Muslims. They gave very supportive advice.

  Hasbullah and I met at Terengganu State Public Library, an unlikely architectural hybrid of arches, domes, cement and glass slopes. It looked as if a mosque had grown out of a government building. At the entrance was a giant water feature that looked as though a tree had exploded, with liquid gushing out of its mangled remains.

  ‘Homosexuality is not a disease,’ Hasbullah explained helpfully as we walked inside the library. ‘Homosexuality is a deviant behaviour. Everybody is supposed to be on the normal curve, but the homosexuals are outliers. From an Islamic perspective, the Qur’an and the prophet said that homosexuality is wrong, so then it must be wrong. Even if the statistics were that all people are homosexual, it will always be wrong from an Islamic perspective.’

  His association’s members – fellow Muslim academics from psychology, counselling and other disciplines – were starting groundbreaking field work, he said. They needed raw data and anecdotal case studies of how prevalent this problem was among young Muslims. They needed to know what caused it and how to fix it. Fortunately, data was easy to come by. Because most of the association’s members worked at universities, they had easy access to students for surveys. And Hasbullah’s day job as a counsellor and chaplain at a private Islamic high school gave him regular access to children and teenagers.

  When Hasbullah told me this, I must have looked surprised.

  ‘I know,’ Hasbullah said, smiling slightly. ‘It’s a bit evil, right?’

  ‘You’re collecting data off the kids?’

  Hasbullah nodded, adding he had consent from all parties for his research. ‘It’s a good way for me to start venturing into how I can help people with this behaviour. Because I need proof.’

  ‘Proof of what?’

  Students at Hasbullah’s school would come to him with their problems, about home, friends or study. Only some of them would have problems with their sexuality. Hasbullah would ask all students – regardless of their problems – to undertake a questionnaire called the Bem Sexual Role Inventory, a checklist invented by the psychologist Dr Sandra Lipsitz Bem in the early 1970s, fifty questions that would apparently demonstrate whether the person was more male or female. If the child deviated from the normal range, homosexuality was a strong possibility.

  ‘Do the results necessarily mean they’re homosexual, though?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But depending on the results, I might ask a student to come do another session with me. From that session, he might actually say, “Every night I think of how my friend used to do this to me.”’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Touching, something like that.’ Hasbullah put his hands together and looked solemnly at the floor, as if he was mentally running through evidence to solve a crime. ‘If I can stabilise their emotions towards homosexuality, it can help them. It’s so that they understand themselves, and understand why homosexuality is wrong.’

  ‘So what sort of questions do you ask?’

  ‘Do you consider yourself as man or woman?’

  ‘Man,’ I said.

  Hasbullah smiled, embarrassed for me.

  ‘For example, I mean,’ he said. ‘Or: “Do you like flowers more or sports more?”’

  Who doesn’t like flowers? I thought.

  ‘If you say “flowers”, you’re more feminine.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  Hasbullah took me to meet one of his mentors, Dr Abdul Manam bin Mohamed, an academic at one of the leading Islamic universities in the state. He was both a theologist and counsellor, a senior faculty member whose knowledge of the Islamic faith informed all his work. With a stout cylindrical kopiah on his head, Dr bin Mohamed was a friendly gorilla-sized man. His hands were gigantic; his fingernails the size of coins. Hasbullah translated for us as we spoke in his office.

  ‘Some students have come to me,’ he said, ‘and told me they have tendencies in homosexuality. But it’s not in a severe level. It’s just mild.’

  He smiled and pinched his fingers together as if to demonstrate. Only this much.

  Mild homosexuality, I wrote in my notebook, nodding.

  ‘I believe the source of homosexuality is outside and inside,’ the doctor said. ‘Outside, because it’s out there in the environment. The urge exists inside, of course, but if it’s triggered by outside factors, it becomes “emerged”. But there are particular cases where the source of homosexuality came from inside – not from outside – and in those cases, it’s what in Islamic terms we would call …’

  He looked at Hasbullah questioningly and slipped into hesitant English.

  ‘… satanic?’

  ‘Satanic!’ I said, excited.

  ‘Anyway, it’s involved with Satan. There are different spiritual causes. One is satanic, the other is, like … jin?’

  ‘Like a genie,’ Hasbullah clarified.

  ‘A genie,’ I said, imagining a fabulous gay genie.

  ‘Sort of like ghosts!’ Dr bin Mohamed said happily. ‘There is a spiritual element. There are ways in which spiritual entities enter a person.’

  He explained that many young Muslim men and women had asked for his help, wanting to be freed from their homosexuality. The first and most important step, he said, was to identify people with these tendencies and separate them from ‘the source’ – each other. Young homosexuals and lesbians usually came to him in couples asking for help. Dr bin Mohamed explained it was important that all contact between them ceased immediately. They needed to dry out, so to speak. The second step was the ‘purification of the heart’ –
inabah, a return to purity, a recovery – using a method Dr bin Mohamed had successfully trialled on people with drug addictions. It was through repetitive prayer and readings of the Qur’an that the spirit could be healed of vices.

  When we walked out of Dr bin Mohamed’s office, Hasbullah explained the methods in more detail. Hasbullah was really keen to use something called psychoacoustic therapy, where patients listened and recited the Qur’an continuously for marathon sessions, a technique that had yielded many success stories with drug addicts.

  ‘What Dr Manam said was interesting,’ I said. ‘The idea that homosexuality comes from being overtaken –’

  ‘Possessed.’

  ‘– yeah, by a spirit. So he means, like a demon or something?’

  Hasbullah nodded.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ I said.

  ‘I believe what he said. Because in Islam, we believe in spiritual entities. There are bad ones and there are good ones. These bad entities cause bad things. They’ll make you lose your memories, for example. But some people fight, and then they win. It’s like the last prophet says: “Every problem in this world has a solution.” This is one of them.’

  The next morning, Hasbullah picked me up at 5.30 am to take me to morning prayers. As a treat, he took me to the floating mosque that I’d been admiring on our car trips together. It was a voluptuous dome-shaped building, surrounded by sea-water that washed over a reef to form a natural lake. During high tide the mosque appeared to float on water. In the lazy dawn light, it looked both blue and orange, as if pulled from science fiction.

  Crossing a tiled bridge, I joined the morning worshippers as they took off their shoes and walked inside, the men splitting off from the women. I took a seat on the floor towards the back, watching Hasbullah pray with his fellow men in a line, folding themselves like origami as they bowed, adopting prayer positions in unison. It felt peaceful watching them. I’d decided a while back that while I couldn’t commit myself to a religion, I could never be a hardline atheist either. For all the horrors done in the name of religion, something about worship seemed almost fundamental and necessary.

  After prayers, we got back into Hasbullah’s car and drove for a while. Hasbullah asked me questions about Australia – the city where I lived, what the people were like, how many Malaysians lived there, people’s religions – and naturally, homosexuality came up again. What were the Australian attitudes when it came to stuff like this?

  ‘Well, in some parts of Australia,’ I said, thinking of my home state Queensland, ‘homosexuality was still against the law twenty years ago. Now they’re talking about legalising marriage between men and men, and women and women. So I guess the changes have been pretty fast.’

  Hasbullah looked ahead, concentrating on the road but listening intently.

  ‘Do you ever think Malaysia might change too?’ I asked.

  He thought about it for a while. ‘You don’t know for certain what’s going to happen in the future,’ Hasbullah said. ‘In Malaysia, there is political turmoil. They may change it and make it legal. It depends on the Islamic foundation of this country. Society in Malaysia is changing. Maybe ten years before, we never heard of these types of cases being brought up. But nowadays, it is one of the things discussed openly in forums like television.’

  ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ I asked.

  ‘Worst-case scenario?’ he said. ‘There are countries, for example, where you can marry homosexually. In one house, you might have a son, Christian; a daughter, Muslim; a sister in Buddhism who is gay and unmarried.’

  ‘You see that as too messy.’

  Hasbullah nodded. He knew there was a long way to go before the Malaysian Islamic Association of Homosexuality Research and Therapy met his ambitions. But Hasbullah fore-saw, in ten years from now, the association becoming the biggest religious organisation dedicated to addressing homosexuality in the Asia-Pacific region, and perhaps the premier Islamic authority on the topic in the world. Within the next few years, he wanted the association to run its own conference where inter national delegates could share information and develop their own methods for addressing homosexuality. They would create information packs for Malaysian schools and students and provide formal, specialised training for counsellors and psychologists. They would start up camps and retreats to help people of all ages battle their sexual demons. Considering that he’d already built up a national network of hundreds of members in under eighteen months, I didn’t doubt his drive.

  Even on his days off, Hasbullah kept recruiting new members, including young people from all intellectual disciplines. The broader the skills base, he reasoned, the more professional and robust the organisation would be. The people he approached often didn’t know how to respond. They would stare at him silently and would, as Hasbullah put it, ponder.

  ‘And what do you think they’re pondering about?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe they are thinking, “Is it okay to research on this topic?” People don’t do this, right?’

  ‘You are.’

  Hasbullah allowed himself to grin.

  ‘It’s not common,’ he said. ‘Yet.’

  ‘But it will be?’

  Hasbullah nodded, determined and serene. ‘It will be.’

  Hasbullah understood there could be controversy – he had read about protests against Christian ex-gay groups like NARTH – but he also felt controversy could only be a good thing.

  ‘If there are people supporting me, who think like I do, there also has to be people who hate what I do,’ he said. ‘It makes the world complete.’

  Setting up the association was only the first step. Right now, Hasbullah was applying to study psychology at a leading university in Chicago. He had been accepted once before, but hadn’t raised sufficient funds. He felt his work with the association would look good on his latest application. It was pioneering work after all.

  We pulled up to a red light. Out of nowhere, Hasbullah said, ‘Homosexuality, if not controlled, can destroy the harmony of a family.’

  He said it firmly, almost angrily. Confused, I looked up and saw what had triggered that outburst. Above us was a billboard for a whitegoods company, showing a smiling Caucasian family – two parents, a son and a daughter – laughing in the breeze of their portable air-conditioning unit.

  ‘That’s why the issue cannot be left out of the mainstream,’ Hasbullah said. ‘I don’t know how it feels – I’ve never been a homosexual – but being able to understand them a little now, I know it’s important. If it’s not contained, it will be broken families, leading to more deviant behaviour.’

  We sat in silence, waiting for the light to turn green. It seemed to take forever. Finally, we drove past more mosques and lakes, past thatches of forest and a gigantic sign built into a hill that featured the Arabic script for Allah over the words ‘Peliharakanlah Terengganu’: ‘May Allah bless Terengganu.’

  ‘It’s scary,’ he said firmly.

  I nodded, now watching him a little warily from the corner of my eye. ‘It’s scary,’ I said, echoing him.

  Gay Muslims were easy to find in Malaysia, but that didn’t mean they felt comfortable speaking on the public record. To criticise Islam openly was a crime under sharia law, a code that bound Muslims in Malaysia and worked as a parallel system to the country’s secular laws. It was easy enough to find out whether someone was Muslim: everyone’s religious status was stated on their government-issued identity card. If you wanted the word ‘Islam’ removed from your ID, you had to go to the National Registration Department and the sharia court and declare officially that you were murtad – ‘out of Islam’ – meaning you had either left the faith or conspired against it. Some interpreted that declaring yourself murtad was, paradoxically, a serious crime under sharia – worse, one gay Muslim man told me, than admitting you were gay. It was easier to leave Islam on your ID card and simply shut up about your sexuality.

  One gay man I spoke to had studied Islam so thoroughly that he
was a qualified imam, but he didn’t feel religiously Muslim anymore. His problem, he told me, wasn’t with Islam itself, but the brand of Islam practised in Malaysia, one that didn’t have room for critical thinking when it came to issues like homosexuality. All over the world, there were many Islams, but he felt the type practised in Malaysia proposed one unquestionable version. If he’d been born in the US or UK, things might have been different and he might still identify as a Muslim and gay. Over there, he knew there were liberal mosques, but when you lived in a country where the teachings couldn’t be contested, there was no room to move. You had to make a choice between your faith and your sexuality.

  And if you didn’t make a choice, people would make it for you, and that could be dangerous. Azwar Ismail was one gay Muslim man happy for me to use his name, mainly because it had been used so much in the media, especially during that period when people sent him death threats.

  An engineer by day and published poet by night, Azwar was a short man with tiny delicate hands, well groomed and urbane in Tom Ford spectacles. The oldest of five children, Azwar was raised in a family devoted to Islam. They prayed five times a day, his sisters wore hijabs, no one wore shorts (they would scandalously rebel against this after high school) and they were banned from going to the cinema.

  But when Azwar hit his late twenties, he started coming out as gay to close friends. To his surprise, he didn’t get too many hostile reactions. It felt as though his world was decompressing and loosening up. What the hell, he thought. He had already come out; he might as well do everything else blacklisted by Islam. For the first time, Azwar went clubbing and drank alcohol, but he still prayed. He also started hanging out with Kuala Lumpur’s tight-knit gay community of artists and activists. When Malaysia’s most prominent gay organiser, Pang Khee Teik, started a YouTube project inspired by America’s ‘It Gets Better’ campaign, Azwar volunteered to be the one Muslim guy who would talk publicly about what it was like to be gay within Islam.

  Azwar’s video was always going to attract the most attention, but no one suspected that it would score over 140,000 views on YouTube in a week. Comments poured in, most of them negative and hateful. People told Azwar he was going to hell and others offered to take him there themselves. Many posted verses from the Qur’an condemning sodomy, followed by graphic death threats. After Azwar’s video made the news, even Malaysia’s cabinet minister for Islamic affairs chimed in, stating he was concerned gay activists were now promoting homosexuality in Malaysia, and hinted at the government taking ‘appropriate action’ to stop things like Azwar’s video polluting the image of Islam. A prominent Islamic cleric said Azwar had ‘derided his own dignity and Islam in general’.