During my career in education, I was engrossed in this evil habit. I got second class grades and was going to end this career when my parents encouraged me to not leave my studies. My parents do not know about this evil in me. I had a sexually transmitted disease, and I am frightened that I will get it again for this will offend my wife.
I tried to commit suicide, but the fear of death stopped me. I went to the railway track, but I could not die. I don't feel like praying. My father took me to see a psychiatrist before marriage. He said I was normal, but I cannot change my ways. I know all the places where this evil habit takes place. I am ashamed of myself; I have lost the peace. Can I hand over myself to the Saudi government for committing this crime? I did it in my country. I want to mend myself. I want to come out of this darkness.
Answer
In this counseling answer:
• Spend on your own is proactive. Use that time to look at how your homosexuality began in order to help you find your way forward in life instead of sitting alone recycling negative thoughts that make you more depressed.
• Make a list of all the places of temptation that you will avoid from now on.
• Dhikr (remembrance of Allah) is a powerful tool.
As-Salamu ‘Aleikom,
I am sorry to hear of this dilemma that you have lived with for so long. Kindly read what former gay men (no-Muslims) said who have learned to understand and overcome their dilemma:
“For most of us, the longing that we came to identify as homosexual desire actually began long before we ever experienced it as an erotic attraction. It was the natural and necessary yearning that every little boy feels to be loved and wanted by his father, to feel like he belongs as “one of the guys,” and to feel confident in his masculine identity.
If a boy’s longing for masculine connection remains unmet, it can grow into an open wound as he enters adolescence. Sometimes, with the hormonal surge of puberty, it can become inadvertently sexualized. So it was with us. Having felt insufficient love and masculine affirmation from father, father figures, or male peers throughout our developmental years, we began to see men as the opposite from us – masculine, mysterious, and different — while we too easily identified with women as our sisters.
But sexualizing men — relating to them as lovers — would only further the sense of estrangement we felt from men and from our own masculine identities. It could never fill the true need we felt to bond with men as our brothers and to experience brotherly love, as a man among men. In our own journeys, we found that connecting deeply with our masculinity was a terribly significant area of healing that had to take place in two important realms, internally and interpersonally.
Internally, we needed to connect with our own masculinity and masculine power, coming to see ourselves as masculine and capable-like the men we had admired, envied, and sexualized. We needed to separate ourselves internally from the female perspective so we could experience the world as men. We needed to yield to the genuine masculinity inside us, giving up all “gayness” and homosexual identity or homosexual ways of relating.
Interpersonally, we needed to connect with the world of heterosexual men, overcoming our old sense of not being “man enough” and not fitting in. We needed to overcome our prejudices against men, especially heterosexual men, and learn to accept men as our brothers — with all their weaknesses. We needed to become comfortable being around men in a variety of situations. “
“This is because Allah has never changed a favor which he has conferred upon a people until they change their own condition: and because Allah is Hearing, Knowing.” ( Al-Anfal 8:53)
In Islam, as boys become older, they spend more and more time with their father and male relatives and less time with their mother and aunts. In this way, a boy learns about the world as a young man and his place in the world. Men need to connect with other men, and women need to connect with other women, not in the nasty competitive mode that we find ourselves in today, but in the environment of sharing.
As a woman (I’m sorry, I’m not a brother) who has experienced living in various communities other than the one that I grew up in, I was able to identify a common thread of womanhood in a real context.
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Men had their time and space, and women had their time and space. When men and women came together, they were comfortable with each as themselves. Men were comfortable with men, and women were comfortable with women. This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it is the way of the city that one is stripped of one’s identity and the means to reclaim that identity. People become objects in the process of desperately trying to fit in with one another under some unnatural, common agreement where everyone suffers eventually.
“O you who believe! Be careful of (your duty to) Allah and be with the true ones.” (Al-Baraat 9:119)
I cannot comment on your upbringing, but it is extremely important that the time you spend on your own is proactive. Use that time to look at how your homosexuality began in order to help you find your way forward in life instead of sitting alone recycling negative thoughts that make you more depressed. This includes making a list of all the places of temptation that you will avoid from now on.
All your determination is needed to get through this and that includes prayer times. If you choose to do this, you will be fighting against your lower self until your higher self is strong enough to have a role in your progress. After every prayer time, make du`aa’ (supplication). Allah is always with you, waiting for you to seriously seek resolve and in that resolve, He will help you. Dhikr (remembrance of Allah) is a powerful tool.
Due to your fear of death, you might feel tempted to lead the rest of your life without hope and care, and, in your case, risk contracting a more serious sexually transmitted disease. This in itself is a form of dying or suicide. Wouldn’t it be great to look back on this period of life and think what a fool you were, and to leave this world having taken your place in it and your child remembering how you lived and not how you died?
Continuing from the above extract from former homosexuals, Alan Medinger stated the following:
“First, identity is more amenable to direct attack than behavior or attractions. It can be changed significantly through a program of conscious choices and specific actions.
Second, a man’s incomplete male identity is what drives and directs homosexual behavior and attractions. In other words, by placing more emphasis on identity than on behavior or attractions, a man addresses root causes, rather than resulting symptoms.
Identity may be defined as the way a man sees himself, especially the beliefs and judgments he holds about himself in relation to others, as well as the groups and types of individuals he identifies himself as belonging to or sharing common characteristics with. So if identity is based on adopted beliefs and chosen associations, consider, then, how malleable identity can be, and how susceptible it can be too deliberate manipulation. “
I pray you find the above useful in some way.
When you are less weighed down with the worries of the problem you face, in sha’ Allah, you will be more clear-headed and able to think about your relationship with your wife. Whether one is homosexual or heterosexual, it is not always the case that a husband feels attraction. His attraction depends on the basis on which he married her. At the same time, because you are so convinced that there is no resolution to your situation, this will, of course, affect your perception of the possibility of being attracted and hence intimate with her.
Much can be eased in the meantime if you begin to view your wife as a friend because friendship in marriage is not only the mainstay of a marriage; it also brings two people closer together through thick and thin. There is less fear and more understanding between both of you and a long-distance marriage is beneficial to you both.
For you, coming out of the darkness is like coming out of a coma and not knowing how to walk; you just have to take one step at a time because you cannot continue living your life in such torment. It is the remembrance of Allah that provides tranquility to the hearts (Ar-Ra`d 13:28), and by continually feeling unworthy, you misjudge Him, and you make it impossible to submit before Him and to be guided by Him. Did you not know that His Mercy is greater than His Wrath?
“And whoever does evil or acts unjustly to his soul, then asks forgiveness of Allah, he shall find Allah forgiving, Merciful.” (An-Nisa 4:110)
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