"Quran Is Not Against Homosexuality"

First openly gay imam in the world, Muhsin Hendricks is also the founder of Inner Circle, a group for Muslim LGBTs in South Africa. We talked about spirituality and sexuality with him during 2012 ILGA World Conference in Stockholm.

Before i came out I was teaching in one mosque, and in another one in the afternoon, teaching Arabic and Islamic studies and I was an assistant imam in another mosque, so I was working in three different mosques. When I came out, they asked me to resign.

 

At that time I didn’t want to go through that route because I was prepared for that and I knew that that was gonna happen. So I decided to go to johannesburg and lived there for a few years. I wasn’t working, I was doing my research on Islam and sexual diversity for six years, that was the time when I put my work together and started our organization.

 

After I did my study I realized that Quran is not against homosexuality and also the story of Sodom and Gomorra were about rape, molestation and exploitation than it is about homosexuality. After i came out I kind of put that research together in a workshop on Islam and sexual diversity.

 

It was actually when Jihad for Love came out. I formed Inner Circle when I came out because I started little support groups in Cape Town, it was a volunteer organization. No financial support, I was working out of my pocket. In 2006 Atlantic Philanthropy heard about my work and they approached me to ask if I want to set up the organization. And I said yeah I‘d love to do that. So they gave me some co-funding to start the organization and some money to start my first annual international retreat. That was about bringing people together from different parts of the world to talk about the issue. That was in 2006.

 

I always say if somebody wants to leave Islam and made an informed choice to leave it, then it is their choice to leave Islam. But I discovered in my 17 years of experience of queer Muslims that most of them leave Islam because they are angry about it. They can’t see that they can marry or reconcile faith and sexuality. So they leave it. So they leave all the good things that come with Islam as well. I believe that it is because of lack of education, lack of understanding of the story, lack of personal inquiry of what Quran says. Because we have an oral tradition in Islam, you know, we learn from our imams. So there is no personal desire to study Islam. Because of that, most people don’t understand Islam, I think.  They choose to rather leave it.

 

When I do my workshop, people recognize that it is factual. I give them all the references. But because I’m gay, it seems to most people that I’m justifing my position. I think when we come to the time straight people share this kind of information, I think more people will start believing.

 

There are many. There are also female imams that are supporting us in the USA or in Indonesia. I think, women understand the issue, the discrimination because they themselves are also discriminated sometimes within Islam. So they are our supporters. There are many straight imams that are supporting our work but because of the association with the muslim community, they are not ready to speak about it publicly.