Coming up in October: Pink Muslim conference in Paris

By joan on Monday, September 20, 2010 - 22:39

On October 9th and 10th CALEM, a conference for LGBTQI Muslims, will be held in Paris. The motto: 'Leaving our sexuality in Peace, as Queer Muslims... Defending our civil rights & human dignity!'

Religious LGBT people often don't have it easy. While in most countries with a Christian majority homosexuality is at least legal, countries in the Muslim world mostly have severe laws against it.

One of the 99 names of 'Allah' (by Jugni)

CALEM - Confederation of associations of LGBTQI European and Muslim is an association of various European Muslim LGBT groups. All these groups have in common that they seek to reconcile Islamic belief and LGBTQI identity. In their point of view homophobic laws can't reasonably be based on the Quran.

At the French National Assembly on the 17th of May 2010, HM2F and imam Tarek Oubrou - a French Theologian very well known for his Islamic progressive values concerning women and now LGBT individuals - confirmed that nowhere in the Quran nor in the Sunnah homosexuality is condemned by nature, that homophobia is against the Islamic ethic!
CALEM

Invited to this conference, which seems to be organised by the French Muslim LGBT group HM2F, are similar groups from the UK, Belgium, Norway and Spain, but also from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and South Africa.

The idea for this conference first arose in April 2010 at the Annual International Retreat (AIR) in South Africa, where many participants voiced their conviction that Muslim LGBT organisations from different continents should work closer together "to correlate Islamic Rights with Human Rights and to breach the gap between the two."