Islam and LGBT: Gender, Sex, and Morality in the Modern Age

• The topics of gender and sexuality have become extremely important in our current circumstances and have come to pose a great challenge for many of our youth, leaders, parents and others. This course offers an in-depth, comprehensive look at this topic that is meant to encourage Muslims and to give them the tools to speak confidently on this issue and to feel confident in their faith.

     This course, which comprises 44 lectures divided over seven units, aims to achieve the following goals:

• To build a comprehensive framework for understanding, conceptualising, and dealing with the phenomena of homosexuality, transgenderism, and related LGBT issues from within an authentically grounded Islamic worldview perspective
• To situate current discourses surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality within the larger paradigms of modernity and post-modernity—which depart from radically different premisses than those of Islam—and, in doing so,
• To develop—using the question of LGBT as a case study—a more general framework and set of analytical tools that can be applied to other questions that have arisen, and will continue to arise, under the modern and postmodern paradigms

     Upon completing this course, insha’Allah, students will have

• gained a comprehensive understanding of LGBT-related phenomena from an authentic and informed Islamic perspective
• come to appreciate the wisdom, balance, justice, beauty, and truth of Islamic teachings on gender, sex, and sexual morality
• acquired the conceptual tools and the vocabulary necessary to articulate Islamic teachings on gender, sex, and sexuality with confidence, clarity, and conviction
• developed a larger framework and a set of critical and analytical skills that they can apply to current questions beyond LGBT.