What Georgetown University Professor Jonathan Brown in 2017 wrote is “so out of date” and a “pointless article to read now,” he declared in a July 6 podcast concerning possible Muslim-LGBT alliances in Western countries. Brown, the Islamist former director of Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), has belatedly realized how opposing totalitarianisms frustrate Leftist-Islamist alliances.
Brown’s 2017 article for the Yaqeen Institute (YI), where he is director of research, had proposed an ironical tactical alliance between Muslims and, among progressives in particular, LGBT communities. “LGBTQ groups are some of the only activists in the U.S. who have consistently stood by Muslims” against “Islamophobia,” he wrote. Yet “core elements of various LGBTQ identities and lifestyles are prohibited in Islam” as “individually and socially harmful,” although historically Islamic “policy was basically ‘Don’t ask; Don’t tell’” towards private behavior. “The prohibition on homosexual acts in Islam,” he noted in the podcast, “is absolutely certain.”
Disturbingly, Brown’s article revived fears that America’s same-sex redefinition of marriage would also aid Muslims in redefining marriage to include polygamy as well. “Muslims and LGBTQ groups have the same goal, namely” marriage laws “not influenced by Western-European/Christian cultural mores,” he wrote. “Muslims and their marriages are just as repugnant to many conservative Christians in this country as LGBTQ folk are” given polygamy.
Summarizing in the podcast Brown’s 2017 writing, he envisioned a “soft liberal, pluralistic society.” Thus “different groups” would “pursue their own moral, religious vision or lifestyles under a shared protection of rights.” This would be “almost like a millet system” in Ottoman history.
Nonetheless, Brown strenuously rejected that Muslims should embrace progressive sexual and gender mores such that “Islam would just become an identity.” Elaborating upon his past writing, he marveled that some self-defined “progressive” Muslims “have jumped in the Kool-Aid completely” of LGBT agendas such as same-sex marriage. “What universe are people in that they think it is halal?” he asked and proclaimed that “Muslims shouldn’t dance in gay pride parades.” Particularly his “Muslim sister,” the pro-LGBT (and anti-Semitic) Representative Ilhan Omar, “has made it effectively impossible for me as a Muslim to support her program.”
Brown cautioned whether modern LGBT innovations including same-sex marriage would ultimately prove better than centuries of contrary experience. People such as his parents “were the hippy, the 60s and 70s generation. We don’t even have one full generation of people who have lived through the sexual revolution, let alone seen what that does to their kids,” he stated. Saying “if you don’t view the world this way…you are some kind of monster—that is the pinnacle of arrogance.”
To preserve dissent from LGBT ideology, Brown advocated individual conscience rights. Therefore a baker has a right “not to be forced to make a cake that forces the baker to engage in expression he doesn’t agree with.” Likewise, citing the experience of Birmingham, England, Muslim parents who successfully protested LGBT curriculum mandates, Brown opposed school LGBT indoctrination.
Sheikh Shadee Elmasry, Brown’s Islamist podcast interlocutor who had written a response in the original 2017 article, noted how “fascist liberals” had dashed Brown’s previous hopes of any tolerance from LGBT advocates. “Hegemonic progressivism and liberalism,” Brown agreed, are making his previous “position almost impossible.” Especially Supreme Court LGBT jurisprudence is endangering institutional “bubbles of existence” for Muslims and others in places such as religious schools.
Such disappointments validated Elmasry’s 2017 warning that “Liberals, including those who identify as LGBTQ, are using Muslims as part of their diversity hammer to crush the white conservative establishment.” Meanwhile he had correctly rejected Brown’s “Islamophobia” panic, for “[i]n general, Muslim men and women are going about their daily business.” Although Elmasry would “proudly stand fully by the Sacred Law and against attacks on polygamy,” he noted that Islamic doctrine concerning polygamy was not absolute and wondered how “is polygamy on the Muslim community’s to-do list.” Moreover, LGBT advocates had often taken pains to reject any claim that same-sex marriage justified polygamy.
By contrast, LGBT advocates and others might very well become alarmed by Brown’s podcast statement that “in a Muslim society or a Muslim country I actually think it should be illegal to insult the prophet” of Islam, Muhammad. Brown also felt this prohibition should exist as well under various hate speech and related laws around the world, as he has previously argued online. Accordingly, in France “Charlie Hebdo should not been allowed to have those cartoons” mocking Muhammad in the years before the 2015 jihadist massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices.
“Religious freedom is incredibly important, but it can be restricted” in places including modern Malaysia, Brown wrote for YI in 2018 with ominous implications for any liberty-minded individual, LGBT or otherwise. “In the Shari’ah, the aim of punishing apostasy from Islam is to protect the communal faith and social order of a Muslim state,” he added, while in the podcast he noted that such a “Muslim state” should punish liwat (sodomy). Such historically Muslim state coercive powers give a disturbing context to Elmasry’s 2017 writings. The Ottomans had “used the power of the state to actively promote Islam and the Sacred Law, and many peoples under the Ottomans entered into Islam as a result.”
In yet another hypocritical twist, Brown during the podcast opposed American hate speech laws. “Hate speech laws are never used to protect vulnerable minorities like Muslims,” but rather “protect the powerful when minorities get out of line.” He worried that issues such as Muslim criticism of non-Muslims meant that the “Quran itself becomes an article of hate speech.”
Among many others, Brown’s self-serving, convoluted ideas have failed to convince devout American Islamists such as Daniel Haqiqatjou. His Muslim Skeptic website has undertaken a massive, withering rebuttal to YI’s “Modernist Revisionism” and “blasphemous” publications on many matters, including LGBT agendas. While the Muslim Sceptic has recognized the politically tempting advantages of YI members “not wanting to offend all of their left wing activist ‘allies,’” devout Muslims cannot ignore or approve that the “Rainbow Gestapo Cometh.”
Along with Elmasry and many others, the Muslim Sceptic’s criticism of “confused people like Brown” (and Linda Sarsour) and their doctrinal disorientation of Muslim faithful has undoubtedly helped precipitate his reassessment. He had previously wanted to advance his agendas with the largest possible enemy-of-my-enemy coalition of the willing against traditional Western societies. Simultaneous Muslim outcry and LGBT rigidity have chastened him.
Brown is belatedly realizing that his too-clever-by-half, big tent political strategies involve perilous tactical alliances between submissive, yet fanatical, believers in Islamic politics as divine will and LGBT radical individualists. Accordingly, like many other Western Islamists, he will continue to twist in the wind for tactical advantage on LGBT issues. As both Islamists and LGBT advocates often show little concern for freedom of conscience, in the end they can only see which revolutions will eat their own.