cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/إسلام/p/1262928/saudi-arabia-reassures-lgbtq-visitors-ahead-of-2034-world-cup
Saudi Arabia is attempting to reassure LGBTQ+ visitors ahead of hosting the 2034 World Cup, even though homosexuality remains criminalised.
It’s wild to me that you’d call countries in the Middle East “young”, given that the Middle East has, throughout human history, been one of the primary hotspots of human development, all the way back to the time of early human migration from Africa. The Middle East is the very opposite of young. See: Persia and Egypt
Like, many of the things that you can be executed for in Saudi Arabia are such because of a literalist interpretation of the Quran combined with significant latitude afforded to judges because of a lack of prescribed punishment in doctrine (Tazir). Consequentially, Saudi Arabia sits in third place worldwide after China and Iran for number of executions at 356 people executed in 2025. A staggering number when you remember the fact that it has a population of only ~35,000,000 people.
Indeed, there are differing beliefs within Islam about how literally to interpret the Quran in the first place, as well as how harshly (if at all) one should punish such transgressions, because the document is fucking old. The cultural development you speak of did happen; the culture isn’t young. Saudi Arabia just so happens to be an absolute monarchy with a particularly strict interpretation of religious and legal doctrine.
Just so we’re clear: the point I’m making isn’t that Saudia Arabia or the Middle East more broadly are somehow culturally inferior or less developed relative to any other nation or region. I am well aware, for example, that the US has the exact same problem with religious fundamentalism (something which I also loudly decry) but in both cases it represents a resurgence of fundamentalism within already developed cultures, not a linear progression from “barbaric” to “civilized” or whatever that nonsense about tribes and caves was.
Stop giving the absolute monarchy that regularly executes dissidents, journalists, and queer people the benefit of the doubt via whataboutism and false equivalencies between Saudi Arabia and the Middle East as a whole. You’re either being played a fool, or you’re actively excusing something monstrous in exactly the same way that anyone who ignores the United States’ (many) atrocities is.
It’s also fucking opaque. Much of the Qur’an is written in a highly allusive, poetic way, referencing events and controversies that there’s little to no extra-Quranic historic record of. Often it’s not possible to connect a particular sura to anything at all. There’s a considerable body of personal accounts of the life of the Prophet and the time after him (hadith) with varying degrees of credibility, and a huge amount commentary on the Qur’an and the hadith accumulated over many centuries (tafsir, kind of like the Talmud). Much of the actual practice of Islam is a combination of ancient local practices (e.g., women being fully veiled, which was a pre-Islamic Persian custom not practiced in Arabia), accretions of interpretations of religious texts, and traditions.
Yeah, Saudi Arabia is a corner case. It’s sort of the Arabian equivalent of a US bunch of hillbilly glossolalist snake-juggling bigots, who found themselves sitting on a lake of oil. But in other parts of the MENA, you can find highly sophisticated urban people who make most Americans look like hicks, and ancient communities sustaining millennia of cultural continuity. The diversity of the region is extreme.