THE SULTAN VS THE GAYS
The real story behind Brunei’s Sharia laws isn’t the one gay activists are telling you, writes Scott Long.
Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei, is a cross between a Bond villain and Pastor Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church. In his oilrich lair, Bolkiah has devised an evil plot to kill all the gays. At least, that’s what the Western press and US LGBT groups are saying. Nine months ago, the Sultan promised to phase in a criminal code based on Syariah – Malay for Sharia, Islamic law. This week, Western gay activists decided that that means “outrageous anti-gay legislation.”
Through a satellite firm, the Dorchester Collection, Brunei invests in a tier of top-starred hotels. Social media whipped up boycotts against them and protested outside the Beverly Hills Hotel. Leading the boycotts is the Human Rights Campaign, the richest US LGBT group. A “same-sex wedding package in Brunei,” it warned, is “death by stoning.”
Few of the people now protesting could have told you a week ago where Brunei was on a map. For most Americans, it’s more a Jeopardy question than a real jurisdiction. But ignorance is a bad starting point for an international campaign. For one thing, LGBT activists show a strange indifference to how Brunei’s action transcends gay identities – and will especially target women. In fact, global women’s movements have vastly richer histories of working consultatively and building coalitions across borders. Insular LGBT groups need to learn from that. In that spirit, let’s clarify some things.
First, what is Sharia? It’s painted as a set of barbaric punishments with gays as a special target. In fact, Sharia is a diverse, sophisticated legal system. “Classical” Sharia was never turned into a legal code. It’s a set of interpretations by Islamic scholars who drew principles for conduct from the Quran and the sayings of Muhammad. Criminal law makes up only a small part of Sharia; it mostly deals with property, inheritance and marriage. In these, it discriminates against women, but plenty of European legal systems remained more biased into the 20th Century.
All Sharia schools punish a variety of sexual offenses. They do not punish “homosexuality” – Sharia doesn’t even recognise the concept. They do, however, penalise sexual acts between men as extramarital sex. Most Sharia provisions on so-called sex crimes set a forbidding evidentiary bar. Depending on the school of interpretation, a guilty verdict usually requires eyewitness testimony from two or four adult males. The obvious intent was to make convictions difficult; in an honor-based society, accusations of sexual misconduct led to disruptive family feuds. The laws thus had limited reach. A man seeking to have sex with men would fare far more safely under “classical” Sharia than under the current laws of Uganda.
Yet a woman seeking justice after a sexual assault would find Sharia impossibly weighted against her. The honor-based essence of the laws reaffirmed women’s bodies as patriarchal property. To say that Sharia isn’t an “anti-gay” barbarism shouldn’t obscure another fact: women are vastly more likely than gay men to suffer from its imposition.
How does Sharia work today? Most countries recognising a version of Sharia embody it in legal codes. Codified law, alien to the interpretive spirit of “classical” Sharia, eliminates f lexibility in applying its principles.
Political change across continents takes patience and persistence and hard work, not hashtags.
Moreover, Sharia criminal provisions have been wedded to the modern state’s police powers. Requiring eyewitnesses means something different when cop cars roam streets and a surveillance industry wiretaps homes and trawls the internet.
And Sharia has become a political tool. Previously, the law was in the hands of scholars and courts often working outside state control. Populations saw it as independent, often oppositional. Now governments compete to embrace – and manipulate – versions of Islamic law, using it to show their moral credentials while forcing it under their supervision.
Enter the Sultan of Brunei. The Syariah criminal code is a blatant political move to reclaim his regime’s religious credibility. Its impact on LGBT rights is likely to be small. The new code will co-exist with the current penal code inherited from the British. Brunei already punishes homosexual acts with 10 years’ imprisonment under its colonial-era law. Probably (as in Pakistan, which also formally embraced Sharia years ago) most gay cases will be tried under that provision. Syariah will be a looming threat, but not an imminent danger.
It will be different for women. The law controls their appearance and movements. Women who violate Syariah dress-code will face six months in prison and a $1,600 fine.
Here, then, is the question. Why are gay bloggers, Tweeters and groups like the Human Rights Campaign hyping this as an “anti-gay” law? Obviously, because they haven’t talked to anybody in Brunei or elsewhere in the region. They especially haven’t consulted feminist groups in South and Southeast Asia who could clue them in on the impact of these laws. And they show no interest in building long-term coalitions with such movements – realistically, the only way to affect Brunei’s politics and policy. They’re interested in publicity and the satisfaction of speaking their minds. That’s not change. That’s catharsis.
Boycotting the Beverly Hills Hotel won’t damage Brunei’s budget. When US politicians demand that Bolkiah sell the hotel, who does that benefit? The sale wouldn’t hurt the Sultan – he’d make a bundle; nor would it help Brunei’s gays. It’s clear that the Human Rights Campaign and other gay activists still haven’t learned the importance of alliances, a blindness doubly alarming when projected on an international scale. The current fetish for “clicktivism” feeds into this. A quick boycott threat might bring down a Firefox CEO in a few days, but political change across continents takes patience, persistence and hard work, not hashtags.
Indifference to the broader issues at stake, to the fate of women in Brunei and to the work of feminists in the region, is disgraceful. It endangers LGBT Bruneians by turning the dispute over the Syariah code into a battle solely of “the Sultan vs the gays.” It damages women’s movements by relegating their campaigns to silence. This isn’t international solidarity: it’s international solipsism.