The Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia and Britain (Book review)

Abstract

Retaining most of the structure of his thesis, Shanon Shah divides the book into eight chapters
Shanon Shah has strategically juxtaposed the two different cases – Malaysia and Britain – throughout the book to demonstrate the contingency of the Islamic institution, its attitude towards homosexuality, and the religious and sexual identities of gay Muslims and former Muslims
The book argues that the perceived and contingent incommensurability of Islam and homosexuality and gay Muslims’ identities are interpretive categories, whose meanings are subject to the trajectories of various discursive dialogues over time and at various levels: the intercultural dialogues among Islam, Christianity and gay culture in a globalising world (Chapter 3); the colonial and postcolonial dialogues between the coloniser/governor and the colonised/governed (Chapter 4); the political dialogues between the state, the media and civil society (Chapter 4 to 7); the debates within the Muslim, gay and gay Muslim communities (Chapter 3 to 7); the negotiations between gay Muslim individuals and their surrounding social agents (Chapter 5 to 7); and individual’s reflections, including Shanon Shah’s own reflections (Chapter 5 to 7)