4 - Gamal al-Ghitani’s Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa: The Fitna of Sexual Deviance

Summary

He went on to say, ‘There are secret reports telling of the spread of sexual deviance (al-shudhūdh al-jinsī) among our country's leadership class, at all levels, such that they now constitute ten percent. This is connected to a foreign plot to gain complete control of the country's decision-making and destiny.

Muḥammad ʿAbbās, an extremist Islamist author and television pundit, provided this frightful portrait of an Egypt overrun by homosexuals in an article published in May 2002. (His source – an anonymous ‘promiment member of Parliament’ – had considered this a ‘very grave matter’ that warranted immediate exposure.) Simply titled ‘Liwāṭ’ (‘Sodomy’), the article appeared in the wake of the infamous Queen Boat case of the previous year, when police arrested fifty-five men on charges of ‘practicing debauchery’. Incensed that the men had not been punished severely enough – apparently, he either did not know, or did not care, that the detained had been brutally tortured – the author accused the Egyptian regime of ‘championing sodomites’ and playing into the hands of a gay international plot.

There is reason to believe that ʿAbbās's source was real, even if his story was not. Upon their arrest, the defendants in the Queen Boat case found themselves accused by security officers, as well as by the media, not merely of committing private moral offences, but of conspiring to form ‘a cult eroding moral values, a subversive network threatening state security’. In particular, the interrogators alleged, the men belonged to a group called the Agency of God on Earth, which, apart from Satan worship, embraced the prophethood of Lot (Lūṭ) and the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās (756–814). Subsequent investigations revealed, however, that these accusations of conspiracy – and perhaps even the alleged ‘sexual deviance’ – were likely the product of the security services’ own interpretive excesses and narrative elaborations. The case had begun with the interrogation of one man who, under torture, happened to recant a ‘dream’ involving the Prophet Muhammad and a prophecy concerning a ‘Kurdish boy’. Their oneiromantic fantasies aroused, security officers – according to one hypothesis – deemed their prisoner a homosexual, based on nothing other than the casual mention of a boy in a dream.