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Venerated 16th century Sufi saint "fell in love with a Hindu boy"
Islam IS compatible with homosexuality
Leading Muslim academic 'accepts' homosexuality
In the Sunday Times, a leading Muslim academic, Dr Amanullah De Sondy, who teaches at the School of Divinity in Glasgow University, has said that homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. He claims that his belief is supported by Islamic history but "deeply homophobic" conservative Muslims refuse to accept the evidence.
"Homosexuality is not incompatible with Islam. The two can and have coexisted. The important thing is to link it with a good life and creating a good society," said De Sondy. "If you ask them privately, the vast majority of my generation of Muslims are deeply homophobic. I think it's particularly entrenched because so many Muslim societies are rooted in traditional ideas of the family and patriarchy. It's time to challenge all of that."
De Sondy says that the story which appears in both the Bible and the Koran, of God destroying Sodom, is not, as usually claimed, evidence of God's disapproval of homosexuality: "But on closer inspection it is about his disapproval of the rape of young boys. There is a big difference."
"In the 16th-century Punjab, there lived a Sufi saint and poet called Shah Hussain who is greatly venerated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. But some people want to rewrite history, saying the boy was in fact a girl."
De Sondy argues that intolerance is not necessarily part of Muslim tradition, blaming the propagation by conservative political Islam, namely the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabi sect, of the contemporary puritanism which restricts sexual freedom and subjugates women.
