The Heretics and Holy Faggots: Hermeneutics of Queer Belonging in ‘Progressive Islam’

This project reads progressive Islam as an alternative spirituality that seeks legitimacy through exclusionary liberal notions of inclusion while reproducing liberalism’s sorting of the good and bad Muslim. In Euro-American liberal contexts, progressive Islam often functions as a translation project, reconciling Islamic devotion with secular modernity at the cost of spiritual violence and what I call doctrinal suicide. Drawing on autoethnography as a queer Muslim in academic, activist, and devotional spaces, I examine how belonging is conditioned on performing the good Muslim: privatizing faith, thinning doctrine, and narrating sexuality through liberal authenticity. Within this moral economy, the invitation to belong arrives as an invitation to dilute belief and become what I call the 'holy faggot,' whose queerness redeems Islam for Western liberal spectators. Engaging Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Jasbir Puar, I argue that progressive Islam internalizes liberal governance. Against this, I turn to ghurbah as a form of impure piety, proposing unbelonging as devotional refusal.