CALEM    Shelter

Our team, in connection with the Queers Alternative constellation (now incorporated as a 1901 association), obtained a 17K fund from ILGA, in order to organize an alternative, inclusive and intersectional festival in summer 2022:

"At ILGA-Europe, we believe that now is a crucial time to stay united, re-claim agency and pro-actively address growing anti-LGBTI and anti-gender rhetoric and state-led anti-LGBTI attacks. That’s why we have launched a scheme under which we will support efforts that enable work on communication, alliance building, and the movement’s cohesion and resilience.

For years now, we have witnessed mounting anti-gender and anti-LGBTI rhetoric, and targeted attacks against LGBTI rights and the LGBTI movement. Populists, religious actors, the far-right, ultra-conservative organisations, but also increasingly government actors and civil society actors are working to curtail LGBTI rights, gender equality, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Their tactics are diverse and include (but are not limited to) strategic litigation, lobbying discriminatory legislation and policy, campaigning on-line, publicly presenting signatures against progressive laws, antagonising and pitting pro-rights communities against each other, producing and spreading harmful misinformation.

Some of the concrete examples of ways in which actions by these forces have impacted LGBTI communities over the recent years include - but are not limited to: the ban on legal gender recognition in Hungary; LGBTI-free zones and Family Charters in Poland; the ban on gender studies and LGBTI phobic violence during local election campaigns in  Romania; violence during Plovdiv Pride and control over NGO funding in Bulgaria; the rise of anti-trans rhetoric in the UK; the increase in anti-LGBTI rhetoric in the media in Denmark; trials of Middle East Technical University’s Prides and scapegoating the LGBTI community for the withdrawal of Turkey from the Istanbul convention; blaming the spread of COVID-19 on same-sex marriages by religious leaders in Ukraine; and the harmful family legislation and laws targeting civil society organisations and freedom of expression in Russia.

Anti-LGBTI actors often use anti-equality, anti-democratic, anti-gender and anti-LGBTI rhetoric and tap into different fears and anxieties of specific national contexts. They aim to disrupt alliances, create divides, attack funding of LGBTI organisations and groups, and reduce or halt progressive laws.

They also sow discontent and misinformation among the general public, scapegoat LGBTI communities to divert attention from the anti-democratic slide and socio-economic and political failures, deliberately instilling fear around topics of LGBTI rights, marriage equality, gender equality, adoption, inclusive sexual education, abortion rights, trans rights and gender studies..."

In January 2021, Moussa Fone Fofana as president, Alieu as vice-president, Souleymane Traoré as treasurer and Henry Ansaldi as secretary, founded the association RML (Refuge Migration LGBT+), after two years of continuous field activities.

Network support

Once again this year, our AOZIZ network participated in Pride Marseille in July 2021. It was an opportunity to celebrate the arrival of this new association, RML, within the Marseille community, which gave them a warm welcome!

Provide intersectional services

Our COVID debts are now repaid and our AGM of December 12th will take note of this.

Thus, within our network, and by coordinating these activities dedicated to LGBT + migrants, we are able to continue to offer in 2022:

- administrative advice

- legal advice

- emergency accommodation

- health care (precarious, migration)

- weekly support group

- good addresses (food, clothes etc.)

- cultural and sport activities (partnerships)

etc. 

CALEM    Institute

Self fundraising campaign, 

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD".

Film by Jamal Ouazzani, women imamat

 

This year again
(September 2020 to May 2021)
The CALEM Institute provides its training, on the basis of renowned scientific research, in particular for progressive imam-es from France, 
Europe and beyond:

All our publications online here

The status of apostasy seems unclear in Islamic jurisprudence of the classical age; it is an act considered traditionally to be a legal vacuum, calling for no corporal punishment (mubah). When a sentence was applied in this case, it would seem that it was due to partisan political reasons, rather than on the basis of real spiritual proper needs. Yet today some conservative ulemas apply this status of excommunication, patterned on the modern Catholic model, to practices considered to be “abnormal,” such as homosexuality. What about the Islamic jurisprudence development, as it is conceived and applied today? What is the position of the so-called majority Islamic authorities in regard to apostasy or the perversion of some Muslim minorities? Moreover, what is the position of these ulemas vis-à-vis the so-called alternative progressive movement, which reject the majority Islamic dogma, in France, Morocco, Egypt and elsewhere in the so-called Arab-Muslim world?

The status of apostasy seems unclear in Islamic jurisprudence of the classical age; it is an act considered traditionally to be a legal vacuum, calling for no corporal punishment (mubah). When a sentence was applied in this case, it would seem that it was due to partisan political reasons, rather than on the basis of real spiritual proper needs. Yet today some conservative ulemas apply this status of excommunication, patterned on the modern Catholic model, to practices considered to be “abnormal,” such as homosexuality. What about the Islamic jurisprudence development, as it is conceived and applied today? What is the position of the so-called majority Islamic authorities in regard to apostasy or the perversion of some Muslim minorities? Beyond proper spiritual contingencies, today some conservative ‘ulama’ apply the status of excommunication, patterned on the modern Catholic model, to practices considered to be ‘abnormal’, such as disbelief or even homosexuality. What about the Islamic jurisprudence development, as it is conceived and applied today in the so-called Arab-Muslim world but also in France, USA, Morocco and elsewhere? What is the position of the so-called majority Islamic authorities in regard to apostasy or the perversion of some Muslim minorities? Is apostasy an authentic Islamic tradition, or is it a post-modern identity uniformization?¹

First, let us have a closer look to what some scholars consider as universal values implemented within this tradition per se, in the early years of the emerging Islamic axiology. Then, we shall clarify how apostasy, the exclusion from the universal of non-believers, started to become the new Islamic norm, nonetheless creating schisms and disputes within Muslim communities. We shall put forward the fact that apostasy was, then, defined primarily as the act of treason according to those tribal social and political dynamics. Secondly, we will illustrate how apostasy, in the early 20th century, was categorized as a post-modern ‘perversion’, the consequences of which were that epistemological shift in Arab-Muslim civil societies, especially in the Maghreb. Finally, we will describe how progressive movements, in the early 21st century, started their disidentification towards those uniformized identity dynamics, from within Islam.

Full article here

CALEM    Cabinet

MLiving in the streets because of their gender #LeRefuge
(27 July 2021)

We have been honored again this year, most often online, to facilitate the blessing of couples, in France and elsewhere. Learn more here

Like every year, on the last weekend of August, we organized three days of inclusive workshops, exchanges and meetings around the question of the body and spirituality (around 30 participants). We also participated in some of the cultural activities of the Marseille Festival, our partner, performing at the same moment.

This year our network is mobilizing to be part, once again at
the beginning of July, of the Pride (LGBT + pride march) in Marseille.