Türkiye'deki İslam ve eşcinsellik tartışmaları: Müslümanlar arasında LGBTQ hakları üzerine söylemsel çatışmalar

For the last few years, the relationship between Islam and homosexuality has come to the fore of the political debate more than ever before in the recent history of Turkey. Certain Islamist actors including Islamic NGOs, Islamic-oriented political parties and many influential Islamic writers began to take oppositional positions against homosexuality and LGBTQ rights. This thesis engages with firstly the basic premises of the Islamic political opposition to LGBTQ rights in Turkey and secondly the challenges it receives from other Muslims who are able to develop Muslim defense of LGBTQ rights at the individual level. In this study, it is argued that the Islamic opposition to LGBTQ rights that depicts Islam and homosexuality as irreconcilable to each other utilizing critique of Western universalism, cultural essentialism, and communitarianism. On the other hand, it is asserted that this opposition to LGBTQ rights is disputed by a minority group of LGBTQ friendly Muslims. These people strive to defend LGBTQ rights by rearticulating religious norms in ways that reconcile them with LGBTQ rights. Even if for some of these Muslims the tension between homosexuality and Islam remains unsolved, these processes of rearticulation and reexamination enable them to open spaces of freedom for LGBTQ people within Islam. This study concludes that Muslim defense of LGBTQ rights achieves to move beyond neo-orientalist discourses of homonationalism, on the one hand, and culturalist communitarianism, on the other and to avoid getting caught between these two equally essentialist paradigms. It is able to build a third way depolarizing the binary opposition between universalism and cultural particularism.Keywords: LGBTQ rights, universalism, Islam, Queer Islam, homosexuality, homonationalism, Orientalism, communitarianism, cultural difference, cultural essentialism