The Sky and Not the Earth: In Honor of Sarah Hegazi (1989-2020)

In these last days of COVID-19 confinement, I heard the news of the death of Sarah Hegazi, an LGBTQ+ activist who died by suicide on June 13, barely a year after her arrival in Canada. Sarah endured imprisonment and solitary confinement in an Egyptian jail for waving a rainbow flag during a concert by the Lebanese Group Mashrou’ Leila.

In jail, Sarah was tortured and sexually abused by brutes who forbade love between two humans of the same sex, yet permit themselves the criminality of rape and execution. Sarah was driven to suicide by an Egyptian regime that claims a monopoly on morality and affords itself every right to oppress those who do not adhere to their notions of social norms and their religious beliefs. Sarah was arrested for her sexual preferences and for being courageous enough to express them. She was formally charged with being a risk to national security, a laughable accusation that misconceives what comprises the national and what security is. Needless to say, the liberty that a free Sarah would have taken with her soul and body would not have caused any harm to the Egyptian national identity or anyone’s security. 

Ultimately every authoritarian state seeks complete control of the body. The body, with its agency, liberty, mobility, sensuality, and organic constituency, can manifest a dangerous freedom of intention and expression.  The freedoms of physical thought and expression are perceived as grave risks to the national security of any oppressive regime or ideology. However, one must question if this notion of sexuality as power has always applied historically. What was the historical progression that led men and women of antiquity to consider love and desire for the same sex as something undesirable and, eventually, criminal? 

Egypt, Sarah Hegazi’s birthplace, had no quarrel with homosexuality in antiquity. The archeological evidence on tombs and other artifacts reveals the joint burial of humans of the same sex. The Greeks were famous for love between men, and even Alexander the Great took one of his colonels as a lover. Lesbos was a meeting-place for women in love, and in some cultures in antiquity hermaphrodites were even seen as a sacred fulfilment of the two sexes.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the religious morality of our time — arguably another form of confinement — that no one wants to discuss. Yet the genesis of hostility towards bodily freedom has roots in the three main Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The condemnation of homosexuality laid the moral ground for such persecution. In Egypt, as in many, if not all, countries in the Arab world, morality and the prevailing laws of the state are a slight variations on, or literary adaptations of, religious laws. The legal compromises of all of these nation states, even those that claim certain secular tendencies, are perfectly compatible with religious dogma. 

This complicity and collaboration between the state and the religious apparatus against the body should be placed in the context of universal values and international law, not old, tribal, archaic tenets. All sentiments that incite hatred and violence and yet are still today applied as a guideline or creed should be condemned as crimes against humanity. It is time for the religious and for religions to acknowledge their involvement in the mechanisms of hate and intolerance, to take responsibility for their actions and the outcomes of their actions. 

Sarah Hegazi had an intimate experience of religion. Her journey in search of a good religion and for acceptance of her natural and legitimate desire to love and care for another were met with profound disappointment. Before giving up religious affiliations, she embarked on a quest. She approached the various sects of Islam and other religions and was met with the same refusal, the same dogma, the same intolerance. However, her act of suicide was an act of compassion and forgiveness. In her words: “To the world, you were cruel to a great extent, but I forgive.”

Her search for a better humanity, a more humane conscience,  never stopped, not even in the last minutes of her life. What her ancestral earthly gods prohibited she created in her aspiration for a better afterworld.  Her final Instagram post read: “The sky is sweeter than the earth; I want the sky and not the earth.”

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