Islam and same-sex love: what is really written in the Koran, and what does the terrorist attack in Berlin have to do with it

On July 25 in Berlin, a man Moved in on a van into a crowd of LGBT pride participants, and then began to cut people with a machete. A woman was killed, 29 people were injured. The attacker, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese origin, was shot dead during his arrest. A year earlier, he tried to join ISIS in Syria, was convicted of preparing a terrorist attack, but received a suspended sentence. After the attack, Germany's largest Muslim organizations condemned the attack and called it un-Islamic.

Doberman media tried to find out and understand what is really written in the Koran and Islamic law about same-sex relationships, how it is used in different countries today, and why the terrorist attack in Berlin is explained not by this, but by the specific terrorist ideology of ISIS.

What is written in the Qur'an

The Koran does not have a separate law like "such and such a punishment for same-sex relations." There is the story of the prophet Lut (Lot in the Bible), which is repeated in several surahs: 7:80-84, 11:77-83, 26:160-175, 29:28-35. The plot is as follows: the inhabitants of the city where Lut was sent were engaged, as it is said in the Koran, in "an abomination" that no other nation had ever had before: men "lusted after men instead of women." For this, the city was destroyed. Muslim theologians almost unanimously read this story as a condemnation of sodomy.

The second argument is not about the ban directly, but about the "idea". The Qur'an repeats several times that God created humans in pairs (78:8, 4:1). From this it is concluded that the only permissible form of sexuality is the marriage of a man and a woman.

That is all that the Qur'an itself says about this.

What did the lawyers decide?

There is no direct punishment in the Quran, so it was invented by jurists – through hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) and subsequent centuries of legal disputes. And here the divergence within Islam is immediately visible, and not a united front:

• Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali madhhabs equate a proven homosexual act with adultery. But in order to convict a person, four witnesses are needed who have personally witnessed the sexual act, which in practice is an almost impossible condition.
• By the 10th century, most jurists had ceased to consider this punishment to be rigidly fixed by the Qur'an (hadd) and attributed it to the category of "tazir" – that is, at the discretion of the judge, with a wide range of possible measures.
• In the Shafi'i madhhab, punishment depends on marital status: a married person is sentenced to death by stoning, an unmarried person is punished with corporal punishment and exile.
• Hanafi Madhhab – the most common today, dominates in Turkey, Central and South Asia – traditionally milder than others. The founder of the school, Abu Hanifah, believed that such relationships do not create illegitimate children and do not destroy the genealogy, so they deserve only censure and administrative punishment, and not death. Although some of his followers later still allowed execution "in case of political necessity".

That is, even within classical Sunni law, there is no one answer – from a suspended death penalty to an administrative penalty, depending on the school and era.

The law on paper and the law in life are different things

In Iran, same-sex relationships are a criminal offense. Under Article 129 of the Iranian Penal Code, lesbian relations are punishable by one hundred lashes, and the fourth violation is punishable by death under Article 131. Similar norms are formally in force in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and some states of Nigeria.

But this is far from a general rule for the Muslim world. Most Muslim-majority countries now have much more lenient laws, usually prison sentences for "obscenity" inherited from colonial codes rather than directly from Sharia. And in a number of countries – parts of Central Asia, Albania, Bosnia, Indonesia outside certain provinces, partly in Turkey – same-sex relations between consenting adults are not considered a crime at all.

Severe criminal criminalization in its current form is largely a legacy of the 19th and 20th centuries and European colonial laws, rather than a direct consequence of classical Muslim law.

There is another Islam

Within modern Islam, there is an openly LGBT-inclusive direction – small, but real.

Imam Daayee Abdullah, one of the first openly gay imams in the U.S., argues that what is considered the "Islamic view" of homosexuality is actually based on centuries of tradition of interpretation, not the Koran itself. In the UK, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative has been operating since 2012, and in 2001, Muslim women from the LGBT community founded the Safra project. There is an international organization, Muslims for Progressive Values, which describes itself as a human rights movement that defends the Quranic ideas of justice and equality in the 21st century. Scholar Scott Coogle suggests reading Lut's story differently — as a condemnation of the violence and inhospitability of the city's inhabitants, rather than same-sex love per se.

At the same time, even conservative, quite mainstream religious leaders make a distinction that is often lost in disputes. The Mufti of the Muslims of Ukraine, Sheikh Said Ismagilov, directly calls Islam a conservative religion with clear prescriptions on this issue, but insists that many of the oppressive practices attributed to Islam actually come not from the doctrine of the faith, but from the local traditions of specific countries.

Why the terrorist attack in Berlin is not about this

Classical Islamic law, for all its strictness towards same-sex relationships, is a formal judicial procedure: witnesses, evidence, and a court are needed. Nowhere does it suggest that a private person goes out into the street and kills random people with a machete.

ISIS acted differently – it publicly executed gay people, including throwing them off rooftops, as part of propaganda and terror, without any trial and in defiance of the demands of most Muslim legal schools for evidence. It is an ideology of political violence that uses religious terms as a shell rather than a theological position shared by the Muslim majority.

Attacker in Berlin was a person with just such a biography – an attempt to join ISIS, a sentence for preparing a terrorist attack. This is a specific story of one person's radicalization, not an illustration of "how Islam treats LGBT people." That is why the largest Islamic organizations in Germany were among the first to condemn the attack and directly warned: it should not be blamed on all Muslims or migrants.

P.S.

Islam as a religion is indeed mostly conservative towards same-sex relationships – this is a fact that should not be hushed up. But there is no unity within this conservatism: legal schools diverge from each other, historical practice has known periods of tolerance, and today there is an openly LGBT-inclusive movement. At the same time, none of these theological positions, even the harshest ones, justify a street attack. The Berlin attack was not carried out by "Islam", but by a specific person with a history of allegiance to ISIS.

Sources
LGBT, Gender and Sexuality Education from the Perspective of Islam – Interview with the Mufti of Muslims of Ukraine / NV. https://nv.ua/ukraine/events/lgbt-gender-i-seksualnoe-obrazovanie-s-pozicii-islama-intervyu-s-muftiem-musulman-ukrainy-50123726.html
What does Islam say about homosexuality? – Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan. https://www.muftyat.kz/ru/qa/kunlar/2021-05-18/36274-chto-govorit-islam-o-gomoseksualizme/
Islam and Homosexuality — Why Islam. https://www.whyislam.to/islam/ahlyak/islam-i-gomoseksualnost.htm
Islam and homosexuality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ислам_и_гомосексуальность
Non-traditional sexual orientation of a Muslim is Umma.ru. https://umma.ru/netraditsionnaya-seksualnaya-orientatsiya-musulmanina
LGBT rights in Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Права_ЛГБТ_в_Иране
Islam and homosexuality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (section on inclusive initiatives). https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ислам_и_гомосексуальность
Religion and homosexuality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Религия_и_гомосексуальность