The World Cup in Qatar has once again put the focus on one of the most controversial issues surrounding this and other Islamic countries: the repression against people from the LGBT+ community.
In Qatar, for example, manhaving sexual relations with people of the same sex can carry a penalty of up to 7 years in prison. And it is not the toughest country.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Yemen -among other Islamic countries- contemplate the death penalty as punishment for these acts.
It can be affirmed that repression against gays and lesbians is greater today in the Islamic world than in societies of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian or Jewish tradition.
Their spiritual leaders, from the Iranian ayatollahs to the Saudi Grand Mufti, consider homosexuality a crime that contravenes the rules of Islam and should be harshly punished.
But is this what the Qur’an and other texts that support the Muslim religion affirm?
The Qur’an
First we must clarify that “the Koran is not an exhaustive book of laws, but a set of texts that lend themselves to interpretation”, the Spanish Susana Mangana, director of the chair of Islam and Arab world from the Catholic University of Uruguay.
In fact, in the holy book of Muslims we only find clear references to same-sex relationships in a specific episode .
It deals with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a story similar to the one told in the Old Testament of the Bible.
When the prophet Lot receives two messengers sent by Allah, the sodomites ask him to have sex with them. He replies:
“Do you commit an atrocity that no creature has committed before? Certainly, by concupiscence, you reach out to men instead of reaching out to women. Yes, you are an immoderate people!”.
From this chapter starring Lot the term was born luti, with which homosexuals are called in Arabic.
Despite this and other allusions in the same episode, the Koran “is ambiguous, it does not speak directly about homosexuality or the punishment that homosexuals must suffer”, according to Mangana.
“If the issue of homosexuality it had been clearly addressed by the Qur’an, there would be no debate, because if it is in the Qur’an it cannot be denied . A Muslim cannot go against his own sacred book”, says the Spanish academic.
In any case, the Koran, which for believers contains the divine message of Allah, is the main source of Islam , but not the only one.
There is also the sunna, which is a set of texts or hadiths, as the sayings or deeds of Muhammad of traditional transmission are called, as well as the iymá (community consensus) and the qiyas (analog interpretation of the sacred teachings).
From all of them is derived the fiqh, which is the jurisprudence created from the first two sources by applying Islamic or sharia law.
The sunna
“In the sunna, the second source of Islamic law, the homosexual ality is compared to adultery . It is a crime called hadd and is usually attributed a death sentence, in the most serious of cases, or whipping”, the Italian writer and historian Gerardo Ferrara, one of the leading European experts on the Middle East and Islam, told BBC Mundo.
In some hadiths of the sunna, in fact, it does refer more directly to sexual relations between two men.
“If a man who is not married is caught committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death”, collects one of these writings in the Sunan Abu Dawud, one of the six books of the Kutub al-Sittah, the six main collections of hadiths of Sunni Islam.
However, in the world Islamic there is a permanent debate about the veracity of sacred texts, and some experts say that the hadiths that prescribe severe punishments against homosexuality are not authentic .
For example, Mohamed el Moctar el Shinqiti, director of the Islamic Center of South Plains, in Texas, maintains that ” there are no authentic hadiths of the Prophet that indicate a punishment for homosexuals” nor information that Muhammad punished someone for having relations with another person of the same sex.
In any case, it is not possible to speak of a position unity of Islam, which, like other religions, encompasses many different branches and creeds, with ultra-conservative visions such as those of Wahhabism or the Salafites , and other more liberal ones such as those prevailing in some European Muslim countries and East Asia.
“When we get entangled in the sacred texts there will always be a jurist who will interpret it in one way: whoever wants to prohibit homosexuality will seek the most severe interpretation, and whoever wants to defend LGBT+ rights in the Muslim world will try to refute that”, says Susana Mangana.
Other Islamic sacred texts, curiously, allude to sexual desire between two men.
“There are poets, scientists and theologians of Islam who say that a man who has no sexual desire towards adolescents is not a man”, says Ferrara.
And he indicates that, in another of the hadiths of the sunna, “Muhammad himself recommends a man not to let him be carried away by the desires towards another man, which are possible especially if the other man is young, and that he focuses on a woman”.
Sharia
From the Qur’an and the hadiths, together with the contributions of Islamic scholars and the consensus of the community, the sharia is derived, which literally means “trodden path” or “path that leads to the source”.
“By extension it is understood as the path that leads to peace, because in Arabic ‘peace’, which is salam, and ‘submission ‘, which is islam, have the same root, that is, you can live in peace if you are willing to submit to this law”, explains the academic.
Sharia is the code that governs all aspects of life of a Muslim: how he should live and behave, as well as the sins he should not commit, their seriousness and how they should be punished.
Most Muslim countries incorporate some aspects of Sharia law into their laws (for example, almost all of them punish apostasy with imprisonment or the death penalty) and others, fewer, apply it almost to the letter in their courts, such as Saudi Arabiaita and Iran.
And how to legislate homosexuality, according to the sharia?
“Not even in the sharia it is said that homosexuality is adultery; but by extension it has been interpreted that having a homosexual relationship outside of marriage is a crime and, therefore, any homosexual act is a crime”, affirms Ferrara.
And it is not a petty crime: adultery or zina, considered a hadd, is punishable by penalties ranging from lashes or lashes to death by stoning, depending on the seriousness of the act.
This plays against LGBT+ people: if adultery consists of a homosexual relationship, judges in the most radical Islamic countries will tend to consider it more serious and apply the most severe sanctions, including death
.
To pronounce the death sentence on a person who has had illegal sexual relations, the sharia requires the arguments of four male or eight female witnesses.
“It is frequent in Iran or Saudi Arabia that groups of police infiltrate houses where it is believed that a homosexual act is being committed to testify and thus send those involved to death”, explains the Italian academic.
“ If the man is married, he is more guilty and must be killed. If he is not married, he can be flogged or put in jail.”
But in countries where sharia is applied more severely, like Iran or Saudi Arabia, ” most of the people who are sent to death are not married and, in many cases, they are young boys “, he says.
The Italian expert also points out that, in the past, homosexuality was something relatively tolerated in Muslim societies.
“There has always been a very high percentage of homosexual relations, as well as with minors, in Islam. Anthropologically, it can be attributed to the fact that since there is a very strict separation between men and women , it is easier to vent your desires with another man”.
The Spanish academic, for her part, points out that the hostility of a large part of the Islamic world towards people with diverse sexual orientations is something relatively recent.
“Islam tolerated homosexuality until the 20th century when, as a rejection of what they considered the corrupted morality of Western society began to speak out much more against it.”
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