No comment. “Documentary explores gay Muslims’ lives in ‘Love,'” by David Wiegand, for the San Francisco Chronicle, August 23:
The men and women who tell their stories, sometimes tearfully, in Parvez Sharma’s documentary “A Jihad for Love” have one thing in common: They all continue to believe in the tenets of Islam, regardless of having to hide their personal lives or, worse, escape their homelands because their religion considers their way of life a sin sometimes punishable by death.
Where does one start? “Jihad for Love”? So, from meaning holy war to “inner struggle” to advocating homosexuality — has any word been so tampered with in the last couple of decades? Of course, Muslims know what jihad is; so do we. As for “believing in the tenets of Islam” and being homosexual at the same time: shouldn’t such people stone themselves? Seems the logical conclusion when putting those two aspects together.
The only mention of homosexuality in the Quran has to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. Other writings known as the Hadith, a kind of Apocrypha of pronouncements said to have come from Muhammad, are cited to enforce the idea that homosexuality is a sin.
That said, the official and popular attitudes toward homosexuality vary from country to country in the Islamic world. Turkey, for example, is a largely Islamic country but has no laws outlawing sexual relations between people of the same sex. In Iran and Egypt, homosexuality is specifically outlawed and the punishment can be extreme.
Why bother explaining the policies of various countries? The question is simply, What does Islam have to say about homosexuality? Basically, that those who engage in that sort of thing are to be stoned. For “specifics,” Minhaj al-Muslim (“the way of the Muslim”) recommends that “Gay people should be thrown head first off high buildings and if not killed on hitting the ground, they should be then stoned to death.”
Sharma’s film begins with a look at Muhsin Hendricks, an Islamic scholar who fought his homosexual feelings as a young man, married in the hope of sublimating his true nature, and eventually concluded that he had to find a way to live with being both a believer in Islam and a gay man. He believes that since Allah created him as he is, and because scriptural references condemn homosexual rape and not homosexuality per se, he is living a religious life as a gay Muslim.
Better get Al Azhar’s opinion on all this before proceeding any further.