http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/21

When the US supreme court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage last year, the White House welcomed it with rainbow-coloured lights and many people celebrated by adding a rainbow tint to their Facebook profile.

For the authorities in Saudi Arabia, though, this was cause for alarm rather than celebration, alerting them to a previously unnoticed peril in their midst. The first casualty was the privately run Talaee Al-Noor school in Riyadh which happenedto have a rooftop parapet painted with rainbow stripes. According to the kingdom’s religious police, the school was fined 100,000 riyals ($26,650) for displaying “the emblem of the homosexuals” on its building, one of its administrators was jailed and the offending parapet was swiftly repainted to match a blue rainbow-free sky.

The case of the gaily painted school shows how progress in one part of the world can have adverse effects elsewhere and serves as a reminder that there are places where the connection between rainbows and LGBT rights is either new or yet to be discovered.

In Afghanistan, only a few years ago, there was a craze for decorating cars with rainbow stickers – which Chinese factories were only too happy to supply. It wasn’t until the Afghan Pajhwok news agency explained how they might be misinterpreted that the craze came to a sudden halt.

Look on the internet and you will also find copies of the “Rainbow Qur’an” for sale – an unconsciously gay edition of the holy book with tinted pages of every hue and recommended on one website as “an ideal gift for Muslims”.

But there are two sides to this cross-cultural misunderstanding. Western visitors to Egypt are often struck by the sight of men – even soldiers in uniform – holding hands in the street. In Lebanon, you’ll find straight men who spend hours preening themselves and, in Afghanistan, warriors who wear eye makeup.

It doesn’t mean what you might think it means, but it’s also less surprising than it might seem. Gender segregation, which goes to extreme lengths in the more conservative Muslim countries, encourages homosocial behaviour, creating a situation where men are often more comfortable in the presence of other men and where placing a hand on another man’s knee is a sign of friendship, not an invitation to sex. They hug and kiss a lot too – and according to a former head of Al-Azhar’s fatwa committee in Egypt, there’s nothing wrong with same-sex kissing so long as there is “no chance for any temptation”.

Muslim society is still, by and large, strongly patriarchal. Patriarchy, by its nature, extols masculinity. There’s no sin in appreciating male beauty, either. In the Qur’anic vision of Paradise, there are not only 72 female virgins in attendance but handsome young men who serve an endless supply of non-alcoholic drinks.

Of course, same-sex relationships don’t always stop at the platonic level. Historically, Muslim societies have often acknowledged this – tolerating it to some extent even if they disapproved.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, men who had been persecuted for their sexuality in Europe often sought refuge in Morocco and, long before same-sex marriage was dreamed of in the west, male-on-male partnerships were recognised – and marked with a ceremony – in the remote Egyptian oasis of Siwa.

In some Muslim countries, whole towns have become the butt of jokes about the supposed homosexuality of their inhabitants. Idlib in Syria is one of them; Qazvin in Iran is another. An old joke in Afghanistan is that birds fly over Kandahar with one wing held under their tail – as a precaution.

At another level, though, it’s no joking matter. In Iran today, lavat (sodomy) is a capital offence and people are frequently executed for it. In Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Mauritania, sodomy is also punishable by death – though no executions have been reported for at least a decade.

Among other Arab countries, the penalty in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia and Syria is imprisonment – up to 10 years in the case of Bahrain. In those that have no specific law against homosexuality, gay people may still be prosecuted under other laws. In Egypt, for example, an old law against “debauchery” is often used.

These laws have a catastrophic effect on the lives of people who are unlucky enough to get caught but, despite occasional crackdowns, the authorities don’t, on the whole, actively seek out gay people to arrest them. Statistics are scarce but the number of arrests is undoubtedly lower than it was during the British wave of homophobia in the 1950s. In England in 1952, there were 670 prosecutions for sodomy, 3,087 for attempted sodomy or indecent assault, and 1,686 for gross indecency.

The problem with such laws, even if not vigorously enforced, is that they signal official disapproval of homosexuality and, coupled with the fulminations of religious scholars, legitimise discrimination by individuals at an everyday level and may also provide an excuse for action by vigilantes. Years before Isis began throwing allegedly gay men off the top of buildings, other groups in Iraq wereattacking “un-manly” men – sometimes killing them slowly by injecting glue into the anus.

One reason for the comparatively small number of prosecutions is the official fiction that gay people don’t exist to any great extent in Muslim countries; homosexuality is regarded primarily as a western phenomenon and large numbers of arrests would call that into question. Some of the most brutal Arab regimes (Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Syria under the Assads, for example) also showed little interest in attacking gay people – probably because they had other things to worry about.

There are, however, periods of moral panic and times when it suits a government to blame the country’s ills on those least able to defend themselves. This is what the Sisi regime has been doing in Egypt recently – and its targeting of sexual minorities is documented in detail by rights activist Scott Long on his blog. Gay people are not the only ones, though. The regime is also working on plans to “eradicate” atheism.

Arrests in the Arab countries often involve groups of men at parties (sometimes described as gay “weddings”) and occasionally at hammams (bathhouses). Individuals or couples accused of having unlawful sex may be arrested for a variety of reasons, including some which initially are unrelated to homosexuality. There are also reported cases where people suspected of being gay have been arrested by police seeking to elicit bribes or turn the suspects into informers. For those caught, the effect on their lives is catastrophic but the law is not much of a deterrent and for those who are discreet about their sexuality the risk of arrest is small.

For the vast majority who identify as gay, lesbian or transgender the attitudes of family and society are a much bigger problem.