Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings.
In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on the basis of sexual orientation, and gender identity. After coming out as gay in 1996, the imam began endorsing the rethinking of his religion as one that wasn’t antagonistic to women and the LGBT community, underlining the need to ‘unplug patriarchy from Islam’. This advocacy for a tolerant Islam created mortal enemies for Hendricks, as gay and female-led mosques receive threats around the world, from South Africa to western Europe. The menace is further underscored by Islamic organisations’ reaction to Hendricks’s murder, punctuated with a reminder that Islam unequivocally prohibits same-sex relationships’.
Today, Islam is the only religion that still codifies death for homosexuality, with 11 Muslim-majority countries upholding the death penalty for same-sex relationships. The Sharia codification of violence against the LGBT community comes from the Quran’s derision of ‘the people of Lut’, and verses which criminalise ‘illicit sex’. As a result, gay Muslims can suffer incarceration in Qatar and Bangladesh, flogging in Malaysia and Indonesia, and execution in Iran and Saudi Arabia. While the sharia enforcement means that the LGBT community within the Muslim countries remains overwhelmingly within the closet, Imam Hendricks’s killing is a reminder over the threat of Islamist homophobia even in countries that have legalised same-sex marriages.
The gory Islamist hostility to homosexuality was brought to the global limelight by the Islamic State hurling gay individuals off buildings a decade ago. Since then, multiple jihadist attacks have taken place against members of the LGBT community in the West, from the Orlando nightclub massacre to the Dresden stabbing. The US FBI continues to issue warnings of a potential jihadist attack on Pride rallies, amid intelligence reports of Isis urging attacks on LGBT events in Europe, with the group increasingly calling its followers to take out ‘soft targets’. But where the radical Islamic targeting of the LGBT community has increased, so has the appeasement of Muslim homophobia in the West.
Global brands that have commercialised human rights are quick to surrender to Islamic homophobia, whether its Disney, Warner Bros or Marvel Studio censoring their productions, or companies such as Pfizer or BMW sidelining rainbow logos. In sports, not only are Qatar and Saudi Arabia hosting world events, headlined by the Fifa World Cup, even the English Premier League is allowing Muslim exceptionalism on LGBT rights as witnessed by Manchester United backing out of the rainbow laces campaign in December owing to the religious beliefs of Noussair Mazraoui.
Even policymaking in many western states has betrayed quasi-enactments of Islamic Sharia. Hamtramck, the first US city with a Muslim-majority council, dubbed a liberal success story not too long ago, has banned LGBT flags, with imams across North America signing a statement underlining Islam’s disapproval of homosexuality. In the UK, educational institutes have stopped LGBT lessons over Muslim parents’ protest and withdrawal of their children from school. Today, gay Muslims in Britain are receiving death threats over everything from delivering reformist lectures in school to performing in clubs, while the UK practically allows a parallel justice system in the shape of Sharia courts that not only refuse to acknowledge the existence of LGBT Muslims but also enforce anti-women rulings.
Far too many western states are abandoning hard-earned fundamental human rights in order to appease radical Islamists. Global organisations are selling out to Middle Eastern states that still have violence against entire communities codified in law. Even LGBT rights groups limit their activism in the Muslim world to little beyond tokenism, instead of prioritising the single biggest enemy of gay rights today. Muslim representatives, progressives and conservatives alike, would spend much of their energy shielding Islamic scriptures, instead of delegitimising the violent commandments. All of this puts a bulls-eye on the head of anyone looking to challenge Islamists, with Imam Mushin Hendricks the latest casualty of a life-endangering quest to reform Islam.
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