The Koran and the Flesh by Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed review – the trials of a gay Muslim
This courageous, melancholy memoir, about the author’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality, argues that homophobia is a cultural phenomenon, not a religious edict
A few years ago I wanted to write about gay life in Algiers, where homosexuality is illegal and, if you’re not careful, can get you killed. There is, however, a busy, if well-hidden, gay underground in the city, as there is in most Arab countries. I found it relatively easy to make a few contacts, who all insisted that we meet in a “neutral” restaurant in the embassy district of Hydra, which is well guarded by government and foreign soldiers and a difficult place for hardline Islamists to penetrate. The watchwords for being gay in Algiers, I learned, were secrecy and discretion. There were no clubs or bars to go to, but rather invite-only private “parties”, along with the riskier, potentially lethal business of cruising the port area and main boulevards. Significantly, everyone I spoke to was upper-middle class, which ensured a certain immunity from suspicion and accusation, and they were diffident about their Islamic faith. To be working class and gay in Algiers, as well as a devout Muslim, is quite another matter.
Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed grew up in a working-class family in Algiers; from the earliest age he knew he was gay and had no idea what to do about it. It did not help that his father was a sometimes violent man – the very incarnation of “rajul”, the Algerian dialect word for a man and his machismo – who hated his son’s effeminacy. Zahed was also a pious Muslim, experiencing real spiritual feeling, which persists in him to this day. The first part of this book is a gripping description of living two realities at once: the life of a religious young man who is ever aware that his sexuality, as it develops, is anathema to his religion, his family, his friends and society at large. Zahed’s fears are deepened against the background of the civil war that took place in Algeria in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousand of people were killed and Islamist guerrillas massacred as many “miscreants” as they could, including homosexuals.
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