Preface and Acknowledgements

Abstract

ON 12 June 2016, a man called Omar Mateen, an American Muslim of Afghan heritage, committed the deadliest crime against LGBT citizens in the whole of American history: he walked with his gun into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, popular with queer citizens of many different ethnicities, and killed 49 people, leaving another 53 injured, before being shot dead by the police. The Orlando massacre took place while I was in the midst of writing this book, and, on reflection, it tragically encapsulates the complications assailing queer Muslims in the diaspora. The initial responses to Mateen’s murderous rampage illustrate the acts of disavowal that ensue when no single community is ready to claim ideological influence over an individual’s actions. On the one hand, Mateen was quickly identified as a Muslim extremist – the classical terrorist scenario following 9/ 11 – in the light of his call to the American police to disclaim his allegiance to Islamic State (Kirby, 2016). As it was later discovered, Mateen’s radicalisation was politically inconsistent, intermittently showing support for antithetical groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Hezbollah (Perez et al., 2016). So, while clearly harbouring resentment against the West and being sympathetic to Islamist groups in the Middle East, Mateen was not a ‘straightforward’ Islamic terrorist with clear links to any organisation. It is possible that his subscription to the Islamic State may have constituted an attempt at justifying, in his own eyes, the crime he was perpetrating against Florida’s LGBT community. On the other hand, while the Islamic State was more than willing to enlist Mateen as one of its own, Muslim commentators were quick to disqualify Mateen as a Muslim, since his behaviour was clearly inadmissible, especially during the sacred month of Ramadan. As it percolated, it would seem Mateen was himself an occasional customer at the Pulse nightclub, marking him as a closeted homosexual. By that point, however, he had already been disowned by queers and