Toward a Decolonial Muslim Queerness: Feminine Queer Men,Hegemonic Masculinity,and Islamic Tradition(s)

Bodies, Modesty, and Piety

Across urban middle-class Lebanese society, a male body characterised by height, width, and (muscle) mass is idealized, Ibrahim explained. This body is further expected to radiate confidence and assertiveness and to perform firmness and strength, he elaborated. A Hawza student in his late 20s, he then described himself as ‘slender’, ‘effeminate’, ‘relatively short’ and with little muscle mass. He had, he said, ‘none’ of the things an ideal masculine male body is to have. As a teenager, he was ‘even skinnier’, ‘extremely shy’, and timid. Consequently, he often faced disapproving comments and abusive incidents that demanded he ‘eat [s] more, exercise [s]…man [s] up’.

As a child and teenager, Ibrahim was uncomfortable removing his clothes in front of others or with revealing attires. Within his nuclear family, minutiae such as wearing a shirt before answering the front door were met with comments of ‘are you a girl?’ from parents and siblings. This ‘non-masculine’ preference – as it is women who are expected to ‘cover’ – similarly led to multiple experiences of ridicule and abuse from extended family members and friends, including at school. These wounding experiences accompanied him throughout his life, he shared, especially as he tried and failed to ‘bulk’ and change either his physical appearance or his embodied behaviour.

Ibrahim entered the Hawza in his early 20s given his interest in Islam and spirituality and his desire to further his knowledge of the religion and dedicate ‘energy’ to it. Once he joined the Hawza, the wounding experiences shifted. Within this Islamic space, modesty [tasattor] was idealized and it was expected of him to keep his shirt on at all times, wear long pants, and cover more of his body than would be usually expected of a man in public life.

We went to a day trip once, to a river, and some guys decided to swim. They swam with shirts on. I was so happy. I swam too and didn’t have to worry.

This expectation was not limited to public spaces or the presence of non-kin women, he stated, but extended to private settings including home, dormitory, and garden. Crucially, this covering, as well as being ‘frail’ and ‘timid’, were not merely acceptable, but valorised, he insisted. As we discussed this, we gradually connected it to valorized modesty as an expression of piety [taqwa] and reserve as key Islamic values:

Ibrahim: There are all these stories [in Islamic tradition], about scholars who are super skinny, very weak, frail. And they’re seen as super pious, like [this] becomes a sign of their piety…their value and standing [makam].

Physical weakness and modesty both became an indicator of a rejection of worldly desire and a focus on spiritual development. While such traits are typically stigmatized as subordinate and feminine, they were elevated in the Islamic milieu and could serve as a source of social capital. While in earlier conversations Ibrahim presented this as a personal trait incidentally addressed in the Hawza, our conversations gradually moved this to a constitutive aspirational Islamic script, at least to certain extents, rooted in the Quran, hadith, and Islamic belief. In other words, this was, we gradually came to realize, an enablement and protection to be situated within an Islamic epistemic alternative to hegemonic masculinities in Beirut that the Hawza offered allowing him to relate safely and differently to his slim non-muscular body and inhabit reserve and shyness.

Extended fasting and a disregard for physical strength, as part of the larger weakness and frailty upheld as ideals, was an important dimension of this script. Fadi, a second Hawza student a few years older, similarly discussed:

There is a saying [in Arabic] ‘men eat as much as men do’. They used to always say it to me so I eat more and gain weight and muscle, become stronger. Not in Islam. In Islam, it’s ‘go hungry and go weak’ [laughs].

Once sources of discrimination and abuse, Fadi’s physical ‘weakness’, timidity, calmness, softness, and ‘physical ineptitude’ (his words) are now entwined with respect, authority, and reverence. His family members, he explained, now seek his guidance on both theological and jurisprudential issues and consult him to resolve various social and spiritual problems – as is common with religious scholars in the community – specifically due to his perceived piety and spirituality.

Sometimes people say that I fast too much, and that is why I am skinny. That’s very respected of course. But in reality I don’t fast too much [laughs], but I don’t always correct them and even when I do they think I am just being humble! It’s quite funny. [Ibrahim] ²

Ibrahim contrasted this to ‘wider society’, including many of his family members and friends who are not part of the Hawza or the broader ‘religious community’ and who have failed and continue to fail to recognize or validate his ‘frailty,’ even when he mobilizes scripts of piety to ‘defend himself’, he said. These were individuals ‘too deeply’ shaped by ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005; Kimmel et al. 2005) that I would here conceptualize as a ‘culturally exalted’ form of masculinity that sustains and reinforces systemic injustices by subordinating alternative gender expressions (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). To be situated within a larger contemporary modern global gender order, this is both shaped by and perpetuates heteronormative structures that exclude queer identities – especially those considered overtly identifiable – at the intersection of local histories and global structures and legacies (Connell 2005; see; Elias and Beasley 2009). For Ibrahim, the ideals and models of esteemed Islamic scholars helped him remain “unaffected by their judgments, inside, I now know this is legitimate,” as he responded when I asked him how he felt about this heteronormative assault. It allowed him to dwell beyond this hegemonic masculinity and its demands as an enabling alternative that became possible. In practice, this extended into a wide range of behaviours:

Author: There was a football match organized by the year 3 class last week. Do you ever join these kind of games?

Through a conversation that broke and resumed across different occasions and meetings, we gradually developed a typography of behaviors deemed suitable and aspirational for Hawza students and scholars and those considered inappropriate. Loudness, aggression, and an excessively competitive attitude were inappropriate. This applied to athleticism and interest in sports like football, basketball, or wrestling. Participation in violent or combat sports was especially criticized, often labeled as ‘dirty’ or ‘unworthy’ of someone in a scholarly or religious role and their intellectual persona. Such behaviors were seen as incompatible with – as too crude and unbecoming of – the makam (status) of a pious Muslim scholar. This is in clear distinction from hegemonic masculinities in Lebanon (and in much of globalized modernity) where, for instance, athleticism, strength, and competitiveness are celebrated, albeit differentially across variables such as cultural formations, class, or geography. For Fadi and Ibrahim, this was a relief: they felt much less pressure to ‘size up’ or to participate in activities they had long been uncomfortable with and inferiroized for.

The Hawza milieu was not a space where athletics were rejected or sports necessarily frowned upon, but rather a place where feminine gay men who prefer not to partake in or focus on activities of physical strength could do so legitimately and could even be conceived as valuable and worthy for doing so – rather than despite it.

I was always a more clam…kid…And that was sometimes OK in my family, but not always, but because I was into books, many people used that to explain that I would not be into sports or into more manly things like outdoors activities or whatever. But when I entered the Hawza, it was on a whole other level. The way people, like my grandfather, who is a super masculine man, it changed…so when I said no to sports or to competition stuff, people understand…I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s very strange…The judgment stopped, that’s it, the [negative] judgment stopped. [Fadi]

I here asked Fadi why he thinks the judgment is relatively absent in the Hawza. He said he is ‘not sure’ and, after some thinking and discussion, he said that it ‘must be’ aligned with a larger rejection of scripts of dominance and assertiveness in the Hawza in line with a specific construction of aspirational piety as submission to God. In this sense, it was a specific set of onto-normative constituents of Islam that were emerging as enabling and protecting of behaviours deemed feminine.

Another example in this respect that emerged during conversations was the habitual handshake expected when men greet one another across class, geographic, and sectarian divides. This handshake is often riddled with a performance of hegemonic masculinity in which grip and strength are key. Often, it is the beginning of asserting dominance and control. As a child, Ibrahim’s father often objected to how he shook hands, and taught him how to do so with ‘like a man’. This, Ibrahim said, had always been uncomfortable and ‘unnatural’ for him. In the Hawza, however, men hug and kiss as a form of greeting – a hugging that is laden with slowness, intimacy, and care. Sometimes, they do shake hands. Yet, their hand shaking, both Ibrahim and Fadi stressed, was void of aggressiveness, assertiveness, or an attempt to thrust power and control unto the other. Fadi described it as ‘timid and kind, ideally loving’. At times, Ibrahim said, they ‘hold hands, not shake hands’. This, they both explained, was ‘comfortable’ and alleviated a pressure and expectation they had both struggled with – and largely failed at – since their childhood. In explaining this, Fadi turned to the Islamic epistemic underpinnings:

There is no hadith that says ‘be physically strong, have muscles’… And that’s not what our scholars are like. It’s very different here [in the Hawza]…[for us] it is love and kindness that are the highest values.

When I asked why this is so, a discussion involving hadith, Qur’anic verses, prophetic history, and a wide range of behaviours of (Shia) scholars developed to elaborate on a belief system that centres obedience, submission, compassion, and tight-knit intimacy among believers (see Moosa 2024). Values of care and affection towards others were here centred in a moral universe where human relationality and connection is based on mutual relational surrender and an entwined pursuit of ethical formation (see Landry 2023; Mahmood 2003). Assertiveness and strength, within and beyond athletics, was accordingly relatively voided of its valorisation as possibilities for honoured timidity emerged. Accordingly, modern hegemonic masculinities shaped by power and subordination (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), and their elaborate varied presence in Lebanon, are significantly challenged as alternative queer-enabling relations became imaginable.

The Hawza’s normatively accepted dis-interest in physical strength and muscular physique did not mean a normative disinterest in caring for one’s body. Rather, a different caring was expected: cleanliness, grooming, and elegant dress. Practices deemed as excessive self-care frowned upon during participants’ upbringing as incompatible with masculinity were ‘perfectly normal for a Hawza student’. From styled hair and body oils to perfume and an especially high level of cleanliness and ‘elegance’, Mahdi explained:

There’s a lot of hadiths about this. Some we don’t do, they’re not really OK anymore. But many we do. We take extra care of our bodies, because we represent Islam ultimately, so we have to look really good all the time. I always liked spending time caring for my looks. Now it’s something I get [Islamically] rewarded for…

The things that are no longer practiced include eye shadow for men [kohl], scented body balms, henna, facial makeup and long hair reaching the shoulders or longer with or without hair ties. Things that are practiced include dying of greying hair to maintain a youthful look, regular trimming of body hair and significant color coordination of dress, including brighter colours, as well as wearing rings and other accessories. Mahdi repeatedly referred to the prophet braiding his hair as an example of self-care and pursuit of beauty that has become unacceptable for men. In explaining this, he referred to the Islamic hadith saying ‘God is beautiful and God loves beauty’ as an epistemic basis of this pursuit that does not differentiate between genders as ‘the soul has no gender’, he said. During the writing of this analysis, I returned to this point with Mahdi and said ‘so basically there is no expectation you build muscle and strength but there is an expectation you spend time to look aesthetic?’ to which he half-jokingly responded ‘You make the Hawza sound so gay. I love it! Yes it’s absolutely that! [laughs]’ – even though that was not my intention.

Surely, this is an intersectional phenomenon and variables such as class and geography play an important role in its unfolding. Ibrahim, for example, when I asked about class, shared that he thinks this is harder for those from more working-class backgrounds where such self-care would be further culturally removed and, potentially, financially demanding. He nevertheless insisted that it was ‘still hard’ for his middle-class non-Hawza family to accept ‘some things more than others, of course’ insisting that while this enablement was variable, it applied to ‘significant degrees’ across the Shia community and its divides.

Ultimately, while ‘de-beautification’ is a key constituent of modern hegemonic masculinity (see Zhao 2024), participants comfortably sought beautification as a religious/spiritual practice through an Islamic ontotheology that enabled their feminine queer selves to inhabit and express a specific embodied performance. As scholars in training within Islamic tradition, they could (and did) ‘do gender’ in ways that included extensive body care and that would be considered feminine and suspect – queer – in many other spheres of contemporary Lebanese society.

Emotionality, Piety, and Queer Enablement

As Basma and Rubie-Davis argue (2025, 8), masculinities in Lebanon, albeit to varying extents, are largely shaped around ‘antifemininity norms, which suggest that traits associated with vulnerability or softness are treated as inappropriate for males’. This was all three participants’ upbringing where masculinity demanded a stoic demeanour in line with global scripts of the valorised strong modern man. Within the Hawza, on the other hand, emotional expressiveness and ‘sensitivity’ were celebrated as markers of spirituality and closeness to God across different contexts and situations including mourning, prayer, and even studying or reading.

Fadi recounted a story about Imam Ali (the prophet’s first successor according to Shia belief) encountering a child being bullied by other children on the street. When the Imam asked the child who his father is, the child replied that he was an orphan, prompting the overwhelmed Imam to sit by the roadside and weep before reprimanding the other children. This example among many of public display of vulnerability and emotional openness, Fadi argued, was a defining characteristic of the Prophet’s and the Imams’ lives. It deeply shaped his connection to them and helped him embrace his own ‘sensitivity’. Fadi, Ibrahim, and Mahdi, all expressed that they were ‘extremely comfortable’ crying and expressing emotions, including of weakness, in front of their fellow students and teachers in the Hawza.

Ibrahim explained that, to him, this extended to an expression of ‘sensitivity’ through poetry that he was confident in sharing with Hawza students but would ‘not show to people [outside the Hawza]’. When I first asked Ibrahim when he started writing poetry, he said ‘A long time, since I was a kid.’ Yet, some weeks later, he returned to this question and shared that he had been writing more over the past 3 years saying: ‘It’s the Hawza. I had never thought of this before but it [Hawza] really helped me become so much more confident here and have been enjoying poetry so much more…’ This, he specified, focused on a specific type of poetry centred around emotions, lament, and intimacy that included same-sex relations. The Hawza was, in multiple ways, emerging as an enabling space for an emotionality that is often framed as feminine.

Fadi felt empowered to embody some levels of the Hawza’s aspirational ideal of emotionality and physical expressions of vulnerability even outside of the religious context, both in public and private settings. He explained:

This one time, it was a family gathering, and they were talking about something, I don’t remember what, but it was really sad and horrible, one of the wars maybe, and I got really moved and teared up. My cousin was like ‘man up!’ and then I said ‘you should say that to Imam Ali’ and told him the story. And Imam Ali is seen as like the strongest man ever [laughs], so he went quiet and left me alone, and I think he felt embarrassed too.

By referencing religious tradition and leveraging his expert status, Fadi was able to counter reproach of his emotional expressiveness and assert the legitimacy of his emotions and their expression outside the Hawza space despite the default hegemonic requirement in Lebanon that men’s ‘behavior should be manly and no emotions should be shown’ (Ziade 2023, 3).

This behaviour is enabled by Fadi’s middle-class, highly educated, and ubran family setting where masculinity has already been shifting toward a relative embrace of emotionality as that of the cosmopolitan modern man (Aghacy, 2009). When I raised this class-dimension with Fadi, he strongly affirmed it but cautioned that an anti-feminine stoic hegemonic masculinity applies ‘to some extent’ regardless of class. Further, he insisted that ‘yes, but it was very different…what I was doing, it was Islamic’. This ‘Islamicness’, he emphasized, granted it a particular legitimacy but also situated it in a different frame – a religious rather than the modern cosmopolitan middle-class liberal one.

We cry a lot, during religious rituals of course, but not just that…[when I] watched Inside Out [movie], I cried a lot. I told everyone [in the Hawza], and recommended it to them. I never thought anyone would judge or reproach [yi’ib]. When you lose someone, when someone travels, you cry, it’s proof of religiosity and a praised kind heartedness. It’s not at all like that outside [the Hawza and religious community]. [Mahdi]

In multiple instances, Mahdi connected this to a wider sensibility and care including for nature and animals that he situated as a reconstitution of different Islamic, spiritual mode of being that centres generative affective connections as an epistemic principle. I asked Ibrahim what he thought of this. His response immediately remembered a popular story of a pious mystic who, after travelling for days following a spiritual retreat, collapsed crying when he realized an ant from his place of retreat was trapped on his robes and immediately went on a return journey to allow them to rejoin their family. Ibrahim followed up saying ‘actually there is a lot about this heightened feeling [ihses] in our tradition’ as this emerged as a valorized aspirational trait to be fostered through techniques of worship and ritual piety.

Here, boys do cry, and indeed, the most pious are those who cry the most – the most vulnerable, delicate, spiritual. For my three interlocuters, timidity, reserve, shyness, quietness, emotional sensitivity, and vulnerability became a foundation for respect and recognition as pious, spiritual, and pure. This repertoire, in other words, allows a stepping outside modern hegemonic scripts of (toxic) masculinities, to safely explore alternative ways of being, and to even, at times, negotiate and reshape hegemonic scripts.

Connell (1992) conceptualized a ‘straight gay’ and the need for gay men to perform a traditional masculinity for safety – including a repression of emotions and a performance of assertiveness. Queer Muslims in the hawza, safely, did not perform many of these dimensions of straightness but rather challenged extant hegemony specifically through a construction of Islamic tradition they found embracing of their feminine selves. While many queer men in broader Lebanese society standardly enact masculinity in ways that pursue inclusion into hegemonic male privilege (Moussawi, 2020), this was alleviated through the Hawza student status opening up possibilities for the students, but also for broader queer life in the country.

In some ways, the boundaries between what are in Eurocentric modernity feminine queer and straight cultures and individuals are already blurred in certain formations of Islamic milieu/tradition. Indeed, while De sondy (2013, 113) argues that ‘there is no ‘single’ ideal masculinity in Islam,’ my participants grated against this by arguing that there is, in some way, an ideal ‘masculinity’ – one that embraces their femininity and moves away from modern hegemonic masculinities not as a liberal self-mastering modern ego agentively recreating their world but rather an enmeshed self working through Islamic ‘tradition’ to create other possibilities of life and being (see Landry 2023; Mahmood 2003).

Sexualities, Tensions, and Limits of Queernes

Heterosexuality – and its public display and expression – are a key constitutive of hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Lebanon as well as in global Eurocentric modernity/coloniality (see Fidolini 2022). Throughout, in various forms, ‘men’ are expected to inhabit and express sexual vigour as they are ‘compelled’ to abide by specific scripts, including by peer groups (see Richardson 2010). In Lebanon, this unfolds within ‘homosocial competition among men in the realm of virility and fertility, which are typically conflated’ (Inhor 2022, 270). For Fadi, this was a key feature of his high school experience. There, he was expected to know the names of national and international female sex symbols – from Playboy to pornography and from pop culture to the fashion industry, he said – as part of asserting his ‘manhood’. Often, he did not know these or did not know much about them. This led to multiple instances of embarrassment for him and surprise for his peers and, at times, a questioning of his ‘manliness’ as a questioning of his ‘sexual power’. Mahdi, who had similar experiences, shared:

‘They would say things, in the school courtyard I remember, like ‘don’t you have a penis? Doesn’t it work?’ and they would laugh and make hand gestures like masturbation. It was really horrible.’

With time he both began to pretend he knows the figures and the references, as well as put effort into learning about them. He performed heterosexual vigour as a requirement of asserting an inevitable tyrannizing masculinity that centres ‘sexual contests’ among Lebanese men (Ziade 2023, 3).

In the Hawza, such instances do not happen and such embarrassment does not ensue. This is either because fellow students also do not know these symbol – motivated by their understanding of Islamic piety and rejection of dominant sexual culture – or that they do not speak of these or share them with their peers – as this would be seen as a serious breach of their piety. Indeed, our discussions elaborated that Hawza students are supposed to be exemplars of Islamic ethics with an expectation not to register, not to gaze upon and not to approach women. Ibrahim similarly explained:

‘Growing up, at school, I was surrounded by talk about girls, how pretty they are, sleeping with them, interest in them. I could never engage those conversations… But of course, sometimes I did say things… But in the Hawza, I never have to do that… It’s easy. No one talks about girls actually, except when they are talking about their interest to marry and it’s all coded and general and non-sexual. So it’s quite a relief.’

Starkly different from their experiences outside of it, the Hawza offered a safer space where vocalized heterosexuality is neither foregrounded nor overtly performed. There, relationships with women are discussed not in terms of desire, attraction, or sex, but rather in a depersonalized, functional, religiously sanctioned context (i.e., marriage as a spiritual and social institution).

[non-Hawza] People say things, sometimes really improper things, sometimes more…when a girl in short dresses passes, or when a woman with a real nice body passes, they make comments, mostly to each other, sometimes even to her. I was never interested, obviously [laughs]. But there was that pressure, always, even as a teenager in school, that you pitch in. In the Hawza, there is none of that, you are expected not to notice the beauty or the attractiveness or the body. I love it!

As Ibrahim later nuanced this by saying ‘well not everybody [outside the Hawza] of course’, our discussion identified socio-economic class, formal education, urbanization, age and ‘maybe even sect or politics’ (his words) as variables that shape such behaviour. Either way, this was behaviour he ‘encountered, regardless of these differences …it can happen in different ways, but it’s always there’ he said as he transitioned from a love of the Hawza to a love of Islam as a protection and a safeguard from such wounding experiences.

Further, Ibrahim explained in a separate conversation, when a Hawza student is sitting with friends, including when these are non-Hawza friends, they refrain from sexual discussion specifically because they are joined by a student seen to represent the religion. Had he not been a hawza student, he would have needed to endorse – to ‘lie’ and ‘pretend’ as he said. During one discussion, I shared that I also do not make such comments and that my grandmother calls me ‘Muhtaram’ for it, translated as respectful or decent. Ibrahim then emphatically affirmed that his grandmother uses the same word to describe him in opposition to two of his cousins who casually date, party, and regularly comment on the physiques of women. As he labelled this as ‘valorizing’, I shared that I did not think my cousins agree with her or respect me for it to which he responded: ‘doesn’t matter. But you know they have to respect that and stop it when I am there.’ He was not only muhtaram, he was insisting, but was strategically working and succeeding in authoring the spaces in which he existed as muhtaram spaces – devoid of sexualization, a performance of virile masculine thrust, and often misogynistic comments.

This, Ibrahim explained, was linked – albeit not reducible to and deeply shaped by Islamic norms of sexuality – to the rejection of broader boisterous assertiveness and exuberant power that the Hawza culture enabled as discussed above. For him, the ‘arrogance’ and entitlement that characterised hegemonic masculinities in Lebanon was muted through the Islamic ontotheology and ethical system. Our discussions accordingly articulated the sexual as, in many ways, a question of power that was silenced or even dismantled for a pious, spiritual, and soft Muslim self.

During these discussions, all three participants used terms such as ‘fit’ and ‘match’ to speak of their feminine queerness and these elements of the Islamic milieu, expressing ‘relief’. In their retellings, the ‘default hawza status’ (already) fit who they already were as feminine gay men specifically – it allowed them to be ‘more honest’. Further, this was, Mahdi argued, a reprieve that allows them to not be reduced to their sexuality, to ‘shelf it’, dwell beyond it in his ‘humanity’, and receive forms of recognition irrespective of it.

While sex is central and constitutive of modern masculinities (Pearson 2019), it was here stripped of its valence by drawing on Islamic ‘tradition’. The result is, in many ways, ‘a kind of masculinity that simultaneously challenges Orientalist stereotypes of Arab men as terrorists and “Middle Eastern” norms that associate masculinity with virility and the patriarchal domination of women’ that emerges through (European) modernity and its technologies (Jason 2015, 190, see Inhorn 2012). In multiple ways, this was not a challenging through Eurocentric modernity and its scripts but rather an emergence against it.

It is important here to stress these limits of the Hawza as a queer-affirming space. While a (contextually, relatively) safer space for queer feminine men was created, the Hawza demanded and upheld a dominant heterosexual reproductive norm along with a significant rejection of same-sex sexual behaviours. ³ In terms of sexuality, the Hawza could be understood as safer refuge – yet not clearly a space of undoing and challenging normative heterosexuality but rather as a conditional space of acceptance and enablement.

In discussions around these limits, Mahdi implied that the extant prohibitions are to publicized same-sex sexual behaviour only (which applies to heterosexual sex as well). When I probed further, he refused to either reject or endorse private same-sex sexual acts. Ibrahim and Fadi, meanwhile, both explicitly claimed that they support and accept all prohibition to same-sex sex as they desire de-sexualized lives as queer Muslim. Lifting the pressure of heterosexual reproductive performance does not call for creating space for male-male sexual acts, they suggested. When I contested and critiqued this position, Ibrahim once proposed that it might, perhaps, involve creating space for male-male love that remains non-bodily or that is bodily but refrains from penetrative acts. As these conversations developed and positions oscillated between some acceptance and some rejection, they would not agree or endorse a pro-sex formation.

While this Islamic tradition enables certain dimensions of participants’ queer Muslim selves, it also foreclosed other dimensions. Ultimately, this call for a fuller exploration of queer Muslim men’s complex and heterogenous relationship to the sexual visible through the discomfort that haunted many of these conversations. ⁴ This remains, nevertheless, an important ceiling to this alternative – one that I would argue (albeit not clearly in line with my participants) must be undone to remake liberatory possibilities alongside as well as contra ‘traditions’.