Can Islam Accommodate Homosexual Acts? Qur’anic Revisionism and the Case of Scott Kugle

Abstract

Reformist authors in the West, most notably Scott Kugle, have called Islam’s prohibition of liwāṭ (sodomy) and other same-sex behavior into question. Kugle’s “Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims” (Progressive Muslims: 2003) and Homosexuality in Islam(2010) serve as the scholarly center for those who advocate sanctioning same-sex acts. Kugle traces the heritage of the Lot narrative’s exegesis to al-Tabari (d. 310/923), which, he contends, later exegetes came to regard as theologically axiomatic and thus beyond question. This study argues that Kugle’s critical methodological inconsistencies, misreading and misrepresentation of al-Tabari’s and other traditional works, as well as the anachronistic transposition of modern categories onto the classical sources, completely undermine his argument.