Brett on Harry’s Place has noticed yet another scandal from Osama Saeed – on his blog back in 2006 he recommended the unpleasant anti-gay site Eye on ‘Gay Muslims’ as a blog “[w]ell worth checking out”.
Eye on ‘Gay Muslims’ (I am repelled as I type those scare quotes) is a site written by a chap called Rashid Eldin who tells gay Muslims that there is no place for them in Islam, calls the estimable organisation Imaan’s ‘Europride‘ event a “parade of perversion” and also recomends lectures by Yasir Qadhi.
Here is Qadhi talking about homosexuality.
It’s a long video and mainly it is concerned with Qadhi’s backwards views on women, but scroll through to 32 minutes where Qadhi starts to reminisce about the good old 80s when it was OK to abuse gays – and how society has “regressed” since then as you can’t attack homosexuality without being thought a homophobe. Funny that.
The Scottish Islamic Foundation, a hard-line Islamist outfit run by two former Muslim Association of Britain spokesmen, was today taken to task by the Scottish Herald newspaper over its half-baked plans to hold a conference in the Gulf to promote Scotland.
The article quoted Omar Shaikh, a board member of the Islamic Finance Council UK, who warned that the SIF’s planned event threatened to be “shallow, incoherent and patchy” and Frank McAverty, a Labour MSP, who said that “the SIF has to demonstrate its independence from key figures associated with the SNP.” He added “I hope this expo will not be used for partisan politicking to promote the SNP, its leadership and candidates.”
The Scottish Islamic Foundation responded by attacking McAverty for being partisan, accusing him of trying to manufacture a “party political knockabout” and adding that “the SIF has no view, and can have no view, on the various parties”.
One of the bizarre hypocrisies of modern Britain is that criticising people who claim religious sanction for homophobia can be labeled bigotry but, at all other times, homophobia is the unacceptable bigotry.
I have always attempted to square this circle by drawing a line between those who say we are all sinners and homosexuality is a sin like any other judged by their god on judgment day (generally speaking, the Anglican answer) and those who say that it is a sin worse than all others (Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps, for example) and homosexuals deserve punishment in this world.
There is another way – and it is significantly more intellectually satisfying: to argue that religions can accept homosexuality. Dr Amanullah De Sondy does so today in the Sunday Times.
One of Scotland’s leading Muslim academics is challenging his religion’s orthodox opinion on homosexuality by suggesting Islam is compatible with a gay lifestyle.