Islamic Homosexualities

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature is a collection of essays edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe and published in 1997 by New York University Press.

The editors argued that students of the Middle East who originated from all countries have avoided giving attention to homosexual acts, so therefore they had the book made to give attention to the practices. The book's stated purposes were to state "the conceptions and organizations of homosexual desire and conduct in Islamic societies" and "to counter the pronounced Eurocentrism of recent research on homosexuality". The book's central argument is "treating the patterns of homosexuality we find in Islamic societies as categorically distinct from all aspects of modern homosexual identity and lifestyles reinforces the conceits of Eurocentrism". Both editors were not Middle Eastern specialists but were North American and Latin American specialists. Bruce Dunne of the Lambda Book Report wrote that the book argued that premodern LGBT groups in the Middle East are "progressive" and "modern" as much as the modern LGBT identities are.

Didi Khayatt of York University stated her belief that "the authors' need to find Islamic homosexualities either similar to or different from Western notions of corresponding sexual practices is in line with the very critique they want to avoid." Steven C. Caton of the New School for Social Research argued that "Eurocentrism" was not properly used, since the word should refer to a view that Europe is central to the world, and that it may be Eurocentric to look for LGBT sexualities of the European style in the Islamic world.

Dunne stated that this book was aimed at both academic and general audiences.

The editors co-wrote the introduction and conclusion. The book contains over 22 essays, which all discuss same sex desire in the Islamic world. Time periods discussed in the essays range from pre-Islamic period to present. The cultures in the works include Arab, Iranian, and Turkish cultures; and the countries include areas of South Asia; areas of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia; Egypt; Iran; Iraq; Spain under Islamic rule, Oman, and Turkey, including Ottoman Turkey. Murray wrote and/or co-wrote thirteen of the essays. Roscoe wrote one of the essays. In addition to Murray and Roscoe there are other contributors. The contributors include academics with different subject fields, journalists, a businessperson, and a publisher. Some of the contributors originate from Islamic countries, and the authors included three Pakistanis. Most essays are original to the book while some are revised or non-revised versions of essays previously printed in other publications. The essays other than those by the Pakistanis are based on cultural information from literary studies, research in archives and documentaries, and research reports written by other people; these essays do not include fieldwork.

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