The Word That Was Never Translated

For over two decades, Western liberal NGOs have funded projects across Arabic-speaking countries, in what they call the MENA region, or SWANA (naming our region as a homogeneous people is itself an argument for another day). The premise of these projects is mainstreaming a set of imported labels. The most obvious example: mujtama3 al-meem, the Arabic abbreviation modeled directly on “LGBT.” As if Arabic is a language that naturally speaks in acronyms. It is not, English uses capital letters to mark an acronym as an acronym; there’s no equivalent in ميم or م.م.م.م. The whole concept of building identity around an abbreviation was introduced by NGOs. It didn’t emerge organically from our community.

And then there’s “queer” itself. When it came time to bring the word into Arabic, activists and organizations chose to transliterate it, to just say “queer” in Arabic letters rather than translate it. Even though Arabic already has a word for this: shaath (شاذ), a word with real linguistic and poetic weight, a word that describes the irregular, the exception to analogy, the thing whose eloquence is attested even as it breaks the rule. I wrote about this at length in “Call Me Shaath!”

When I posted about this, some queer activists pushed back on my social media, arguing that shaath is “still used as a slur in Arabic” in a way that “queer” has since been normalized out of in English. That response is exactly the problem I want to name here.

When the Community Doesn’t Know What the Word Means

A feminist activist I genuinely admire and follow once described “queer” to me as “a politically correct way to say lesbian.” I love her work. But that description tells you everything about what happens when a word is transliterated instead of translated: the political and etymological weight it carries in English, its history as a reclaimed slur, its anti-normative charge never actually crosses over. What crosses over is just the sound of the word, dressed up as progress.

How do you challenge your Arabic-speaking community to think anti-normatively when the community itself believes “queer” just means “gay, but nicer”?

This is the issue with NGO-driven language awareness campaigns. And I say this as someone implicated in it: mainstreaming this exact language, in the name of “respectful dialogue,” was part of my own paid job more than a decade ago. I’m not writing this from outside the thing I’m criticizing.

It Was Never Just the Language

But the deeper issue isn’t the vocabulary. It’s the epistemology that came attached to it. We didn’t just import Western liberal language, we imported a Western liberal way of thinking, a way of looking at ourselves.

Queer activism in our region, as it’s currently funded and shaped, is often deeply colonial and orientalist in its assumptions. It treats Islam as the background problem. It treats Arabs as inherently, exceptionally homophobic and transphobic, as though queerphobia is a regional pathology rather than something that exists everywhere, manifesting differently in different places.

This framing conveniently ignores that Judaism and Christianity are, arguably, just as hostile to queerness across our region and beyond. In parts of Africa, American evangelical churches have directly funded anti-queer campaigns. In Israel, Jewish religious voices who currently control the government attack gay rights daily. And yet the dominant narrative remains: Islam is the problem. Our own activists blame Palestinians for being queerphobic, ignoring that they have been occupied and controlled by Israel for more than 78 years, in a system that intentionally forecloses any space for a Palestinian human rights movement to evolve. Even the most secular, avowedly non-religious states in the world remain homophobic, because, as I’ve argued before, it isn’t religion at the root of it. It’s authoritarianism, which constrains every form of freedom, sexual or otherwise.

Homonationalism, or: Whose Liberation Is This Serving?

Jasbir Puar and others have written about homonationalism in academia, the way sexual identity gets absorbed into nationalist and political projects, deployed by governments across the spectrum, Democrat or Republican, right or left, as a marker of civilizational superiority. Extend that concept outward, into foreign policy and global politics, and you can see exactly how “queerness” gets used as a tool to assert social and moral dominance over the countries it’s supposedly being brought to.

I don’t say this to let authoritarian governments in our own countries off the hook. They are just as responsible, arguably more so for foreclosing any space for knowledge production in our own language. That vacuum is precisely why so many queer people from our region, especially those of us who are privileged and English-speaking, end up reaching for Western concepts and frameworks by default. It’s often the only material available.

But needing a new language doesn’t mean we need to strip ourselves of our own Arabness in the process. You do not have to transliterate a concept, or adopt a foreign way of thinking wholesale, to talk about your own liberation.

Imagine Without Them

I am not disclaiming queer liberation. I am for it, unconditionally. But liberation does not arrive through a foreign-funded project. It arrives when we write and think in our own language, on our own terms.

So instead, try this with me: imagine Arab queerness if the Western liberal queer movement had never existed. Not as a thought experiment about erasing history, it happened, it’s here, we can’t undo it, but as a test. Strip away the acronyms, the transliterations, the funded workshops, the language that arrived pre-packaged. What’s left?

What’s left is a world we already had, older than any NGO, older than any grant cycle. What’s left is a region full of people who have always been at odds with the norms placed on them, not because a foreign movement taught them to be, but because normativity itself has always needed policing to survive.

Liberation, if it’s coming, isn’t going to be handed to us translated. It’s going to be written by us, in a language we don’t have to explain or apologize for. So write it. Write your own manifesto. SHAMELESSLY.

فلماذا نختار تسميات لا تشبهنا؟

متى أسمي نفسي كوير، ومتى أسمي نفسي مثلي؟ وهل تعبيري الجندري يجب أن يتماشى مع المعايير الجندرية؟ لماذا نفصل، في الغالب، بين الميل الجنسي والهوية الجندرية؟ وما هي النظرية التي بُني عليها هذا الفصل؟

معظم الرجال المثليين الذين أعرفهم من منطقتنا، حين يكونون بمفردهم أو بعيدين عن الأعين، يكونون على تماس مع جانبهم الأنثوي. فهم لا يكتفون باتباع معيار الميل الجنسي، بل غالباً ما يعبّرون عن جندرهم بطريقة غير مطابقة للمعايير. وكثيراً ما يُشذَّذون من قبل المجتمع بسبب تعبيرهم الأنثوي، بينما يتنقلون في الوقت نفسه ضمن أداء أكثر ذكورية وأكثر قبولاً، ذلك الأداء الذي يُتوقَّع من الرجال المثليين في الغرب أن يقوموا به. فمن قرر ما هو الوجه المقبول للهوية المثلية، وما تكلفة ذلك القبول؟

أجد نفسي حالياً أطرح أسئلة أكثر مما أجد إجابات. لا بأس بذلك. هذه هي غاية هذا المقال.

أردت أن أعود إلى الأساسيات، إلى سؤال الشاذ والمعيار. فكلمة “كوير” استُخدمت بطرق عديدة لدرجة أنني وصلت إلى نقطة أصبح فيها إما أن الناس لم يعودوا يعرفون كيف يستخدمونها، أو أنها أُسيء استخدامها، أحياناً عمداً، حتى فقدت الكثير من معناها.

كنت في مؤتمر لحقوق الإنسان يتناول حقوق مجتمع الميم. وانحصر النقاش في القاعة بأكملها حول اللغة والتسميات، بدل الحديث عن حياة الأشخاص الكوير. قال أحدهم: “علينا أن نُطبّع الكويرية في مجتمعنا.”

أُصبت بصدمة لغوية. فكّرت أنني ربما أسأت الفهم، فالإنجليزية ليست لغتي الأم. لكنني بدأت ألاحظ شيئاً في الكتابة العربية: حين يريد الناس أن يقولوا “كوير”، لا يترجمونها. بل ينقلونها حرفياً، فيكتبون الكلمة الإنجليزية بحروف عربية. إنهم يستوردون السردية الغربية لـ”الكوير المُطبَّع” كما هي بدلاً من ترجمتها إلى الكلمة الموجودة باللغة العربية.

تلك الكلمة هي شاذ.

نعم، واخيراً قلتها.

ما الذي تعنيه كلمة “شاذ” فعلياً؟ بحث سريع عن الكلمة العربية “شاذ” يُظهر ترجمات مثل: aberrant، abnormal، uncanny، strange، queer، أو incomprehensible. وكعربي تعلّم اللغات في المدرسة، تعلّمت أيضاً، في الإنجليزية، عن الأفعال “الشاذة” وصيغ الجمع الشاذة: كلمات لا تتبع القاعدة العامة المُقرَّرة. وفي العربية، لهذه الفكرة نفسها اسم: القواعد الشاذة.

لكن في العربية، يصبح الأمر أكثر إثارة للاهتمام. فهناك مفهوم كامل حول الشاذ وتصنيفاته. فالشاذ هو ما يخالف القياس العام، لكن فصاحته ثابتة وموثوقة. وفي الدراسة اللغوية، يُقسَّم إلى نوعين: شاذ عن القياس، مسموع بالنقل، أي أنه يُحفَظ كما ورد، ولا يُبنى عليه قياس جديد في الكلام؛ وايضاً لضرورة الشعرية، وهي الصيغة التي يُضطر الشاعر/ه لاستخدامها للحفاظ على الوزن والقافية، ولا يجوز استخدامها في النثر.

هذا مثال على كيف أن الشذوذ، نحوياً، يُثري اللغة العربية ويكمّلها، بدلاً من أن يكسر قواعدها.

فلماذا يجوز لنا، كعرب، أن نستعيد كلمة “كوير”، لكن لا يجوز لنا أن نستعيد كوننا شاذين؟ فكون المرء شاذاً، لغوياً، يُثري النحو، وشعرياً هو ضرورة لجماليته.

لا يمكنني أن أنكر أن الكلمة استُخدمت أيضاً كإهانة، أو أنها على الأقل تركت مجتمع الميم او الكوير يشعر بالغربة أو الاقصاء عن المجتمع. لكن أليس هذا أيضاً تاريخ كلمة “queer” في الإنجليزية؟

على منصات التواصل الاجتماعي العربية، إن كتبتُ كلمة “شاذ”، يُحذف محتواي. أتذكر أنني كنت في قاعة تدريب حين كانت شركة “ميتا” كانت لا تزال تعرف بأسم “فيسبوك”، وشاهدت ناشطين وناشطات عرب وهم/ن بأنفسهم يُبلّغون عن كلمات عربية كهذه ويحذفونها من محتوى مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي. وهذا جزء من تاريخ أطول: منذ أن انضممت إلى التنظيم المجتمعي الكويري، كانت سياسات الرقابة على اللغة الكويرية العربية محور تركيز متكرر لناشطي منطقتنا.

إن استعادة كويريتنا بلغتنا الخاصة هي فعل مقاومة قوي. وهي لا تنتقص من ذلك، بل على العكس، إن كان لها أثر، فهو أنها تدحض الحجة القائلة إن حركتنا مبنية على مفاهيم غربية وغريبة عن ثقافتنا. إنها تذكير بأن “الشذوذ” ضروري لثقافتنا بقدر ما هو ضروري للغتنا العربية نفسها. فحين ينزعج الناس ويقولون “هذه تسميات غربية”، أفهم هذا الدافع. لكنني أطلب منهم أن يتأملوا هذا بدلاً من ذلك: لماذا “كوير” مرحّب بها، و”شاذ” ليست كذلك؟ من اتخذ هذا القرار، وما تكلفته؟

نادوني مثلياً، كوير، شاذ، مثلي، خنيث. إنها كلمتكم، وهي تحمل تاريخكم حين تقولونها. أما أنا، فقد اخترت كلمتي. أنا شاذ، ولستُ مصنف ضمن معاييركم وقواعدكم.

وأخيراً أقول، لنبدأ بكتابة تاريخنا الخاص، تاريخ مكتوباً بلغتنا، بكلماتنا، شاذّاً بلا اعتذار وبلا خجل. غير مُترجَم، غير مُلطَّف، غير مُستعار و يشبهنا نحن.

So why do we choose labels that do not sound like us?

When do I call myself queer, and when do I call myself gay? Does my gender expression need to align with gender norms? And why do we often separate sexual orientation from gender identity? What was the theory behind that split?

Most gay men I know from my region, when they’re off guard, are in touch with their feminine self. They are not just following the sexual orientation norm, they are often expressing their gender in a non-conforming way. Often they are queered by society because of their feminine expressiveness, all while navigating a more accepted, more masculine performance, the one gay men in the West are expected to perform. Who decided what was the acceptable face of gay identity, and what did that cost us?

I’m finding myself asking more questions than finding answers. That’s fine. That’s the point of this column.

I wanted to go back to basics, to the question of the queer and the norm. The word “queer” has been used in so many ways that I’ve reached a point where either people no longer know how to use it, or it’s been misused, sometimes deliberately, until it stopped meaning much at all.

I was at a human rights conference on LGBTQ rights. The whole room got trapped in a conversation about language and labels instead of talking about the lives of queer people. Someone said, “we need to normalize queerness in our society.”

I got a linguistic shock. I thought, I must have misunderstood, English is my second language. But then I started noticing something in Arabic-language writing: when people want to say “queer,” they don’t translate it. They transliterate it, writing the English word out in Arabic letters. They import the Western narrative of “normalized queer” wholesale, rather than translate it into the Arabic word that already exists for it.

That word is shaath.

Yes, I’ve said it.

What does shaath technically mean? A quick search for the Arabic word “شاذ” turns up translations like aberrant, abnormal, uncanny, strange, queer, or incomprehensible. As an Arab learning languages in school, I also learned, in English, about “irregular” verbs and irregular plurals: words that don’t follow the general established rule. In Arabic, this same idea has a name: القواعد الشاذة.

In Arabic, though, it gets more interesting. There is a whole concept of the Irregular (shaath) and its categories. The irregular (shaath) is that which contradicts the general analogy (qiyās), but whose eloquence is reliably attested. In linguistic study, it is divided into two kinds: irregular by analogy but preserved through transmission, kept exactly as it was passed down, with no new analogy built on it in speech; and poetic necessity, the form a poet is compelled to use to preserve meter and rhyme, which may not be used in prose.

This is an example of how shaath, grammatically, enriches the Arabic language and complements it, rather than breaking its rules.

Why is it okay for us as Arabs to reclaim “queer,” but not okay to reclaim being shaath? Being shaath, linguistically, enriches the grammar, and poetically, it is necessary to its beauty.

I can’t deny that the word has also been used as an insult, or has at least left the queer community feeling estranged or alienated from society. But isn’t that also the history of the word “queer” in English?

On Arabic social media, if I write the word shaath, my content gets taken down. I remember being in the room, back when Meta was still Facebook, watching Arab activists themselves flag and censor Arabic words like this one. It’s part of a longer history: since I joined queer community organizing, the politics of censoring Arabic queer language has been a recurring focus of activists in our region

Reclaiming our queerness in our own language is a powerful act of resistance. It does not take away from it, in fact, if anything, it counters the argument that our movement is based on Western concepts and foreign to our culture. It is a reminder that shaath is as necessary to our culture as it is to our own Arabic language. So when people get upset and say “these are Western labels,” I understand the instinct. But I’d ask them to sit with this instead: why is queer welcome, and shaath is not? Who made that decision, and what does it cost us?

So instead of running from the word shaath, or from being anti-normative, I’ve started to think differently. When the norm is an oppressive binary, one where the woman is meant to be weaker and lesser, and the man is meant to be stronger, protector and provider, I am happily shaath. I don’t want to be folded into that hierarchy just because it’s been made slightly more comfortable for me. I don’t want to be normalized into the family institution, the religious institution, the Islamic school. I don’t need a fatwa invented to explain me. I just want to be respected for what I am, as I am, needed to complement society, and I’d argue, to beautify it too.

Call me gay, queer, shaath, mithli, khanith. It’s your word, and it carries your history when you say it. I’ve chosen mine. I am shaath, and I’m not asking to be normal.

Let’s start writing our own manifesto, one written in our own language, in our own words, unapologetically and shamelessly shaath. Not translated, not softened, not borrowed. Ours.

I’m Hasan Kilani, a Palestinian-Jordanian queer activist based in London. My work sits at the intersection of queer studies, decolonial thought, human rights, and social justice. Over the years, I’ve studied and worked across these fields, always returning to one central question: How does context shape the way we understand ourselves, others, and the concepts we use to make sense of the world?

Each week, we’ll unpack a single concept, whether it’s politics of being, belonging, performativity, disidentification, homonationalism, or pinkwashing. I will explore how it shapes our lives, especially as Arabs navigating questions of identity, culture, faith, collectivity and liberation.

Queerfication is an invitation to queer ourselves: to question what we’ve inherited, imagine what could be different, and discover new ways of seeing ourselves and each other. Above all, I hope this column helps build bridges of solidarity through curiosity, dialogue, and a deeper understanding of our shared humanity.

A new essay will be published every Monday. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.