Ashlyn Davis
When the world was celebrating “Pride month,” the global Muslim hate-preacher, a fugitive from India in Malaysia, Zakir Naik used his verified Facebook account to remind his 22 million followers how homosexuality is condemned in Islam. Writes Ashlyn Davis.
Quoting Qur’an 11:82, he posted, “When our decree issued, we turned (the cities whose inhabitants indulged in homosexuality/sodomy) upside down, and rained down on them brimstones hard as baked clay, spread, layer on layer.” He also reminded his followers across the world that in Musnad Ahmed, Volume 3, Hadith 2913, Muhammad is depicted as saying: “May Allah curse the one who does the act of the people of Lut (Homosexuality/Sodomy).” His followers reciprocated the same beliefs in hundreds of comments and shared Naik’s statements widely.
If this abject bigotry supported by religious texts were not disturbing enough, Mark Zuckerberg allows these calls for killing to stay on Facebook and be spread through his platform. That is mind-boggling. How did Naik’s words not go against Facebook’s community standards and get taken down? Was it because the hatred was being spewed by a Muslim preacher, citing Islamic texts for his Muslim followers, who were spreading his word in their world of believers?
“It’s amusing to see the LGBT community partner with Muslims in Western democracies such as the U.S., or South Asian democracies such as India, to stage demonstrations against elected governments and ethnic or religious majorities. It’s amusing because it’s a fool’s paradise they live in. They are completely oblivious to the fact that those they consider “friends” hold to a faith that considers the existence of LGBT and the concept of homosexuality “haram” proscribed by Islamic law, and punishable by death. ”
Homosexuality has been a crime deserving of capital punishment in Iran since 1979. During a visit to Columbia University in 2007, Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted that “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.” In as recently as January 2019, an Iranian man was hanged after being caught having sex with another man.
In the African Muslim country of Mauritania, homosexuality has always been illegal, and offenders were sentenced to three years in prison. But since 1983, with Sharia law becoming the basis of the country’s penal code, homosexuality has been made a crime punishable by death, with stoning as the new prescribed mode of execution.
Nigeria, with its 90 million Muslims, a few years ago banned gay marriage, public display of affection by same-sex couples, and registration of gay pubs or clubs. Homosexuality can be punished by 14 years in prison.
“Interestingly, the African country has 12 states that have instituted Sharia and impose the death penalty on those who engage in homosexuality. ”
Pakistan’s Penal Code holds homosexual activity to be “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” Though the mode of punishment is not explicitly mentioned, one can be jailed or fined for engaging in homosexuality.
In Yemen, homosexual women are sent to prison for three years. Unmarried gay men may receive one year in prison or one hundred lashes. However, if a married man practices homosexuality, he is sentenced to death by stoning. Yemen is a Muslim country with about 1000 Christians and a handful of Jews.
Homosexuality continues to be a taboo and can be a capital crime in other Islamic counties such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. First-time offenders may be let off with lashes or thrown behind bars for several years. Honor killings of gays by their own families are not unheard of, either.
Omar Mateen, the perpetrator of the mass shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, Florida, was born in New York in 1986 into a modern Muslim family that had emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Though they became naturalized citizens of the US, we wonder if there was a part of Afghanistan, they had inadvertently carried with them and nurtured, and which prompted the young man to go kill a group of homosexuals.
To assume that devout and knowledgeable Muslims will go against their religious dogma and embrace the LGBT community is idiocy. For Muslims, Islamic law is paramount, and nothing surpasses it. The amity extended by some Muslims in modern societies is at least in some cases only eyewash to induce the LGBT community to join forces with them in bringing down governments that stand against the Islamization of their land and destroy social structures in non-Muslim countries.
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