Author: Yaqeen Institute
The following article is based on a video presentation by Dr. Carl Sharif
El-Tobgui on Blogging Theology with Paul Williams (July 17, 2022) and has been slightly modified and annotated for readability in collaboration with the presenter. The link to the original presentation is referenced below.
Introduction
This year on May 17, Canada’s International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, a poster, promoted under the auspices of a Canadian university, depicted two Muslim women in headscarves on the verge of kissing.
A number of other Canadian universities and high schools allowed the poster to circulate as a way of promoting “diversity in love.” The poster also featured a biracial homosexual couple, a black heterosexual couple, and a couple consisting of a fully-abled and a disabled person, alongside the two Muslim women, with each couple engaging in a romantic act. Many Canadian Muslims were enraged after the release of this poster, and rightfully so considering the appropriation of a patent Muslim symbol (i.e., the hijab) for a cause that is explicitly prohibited in Islam. The Muslim community organized collectively and submitted a petition signed by thousands of individuals, from young students in high school to leaders of Muslim organizations, demanding that the university take down the poster. One Muslim wrote to the university, “Shame on you for such an insulting mockery post to my religion.”
Soon after, LGBTQ Nation published an article titled “University pulls image of women in hijabs kissing after Muslim community protests.”
The university initially pushed back against the petition, conceding that the topic was “complex and intersectional” but insisting that the poster would remain. The LGBTQ Nation article ended with the following statement: “Muslim culture isn’t inherently anti-gay: the Qur’an says nothing about homosexuality (unlike the Bible); Islamic history is filled with texts openly depicting homosexuality as a beautiful, matter-of-fact thing; and more American Muslims support same-sex marriage than do Christian Evangelicals, Protestants, and Mormons, according to a Pew Research Study.”
The framing of the article as a whole, from its title to its final paragraph, portrays Muslims who objected to the poster as unnecessarily “homophobic”: they were protesting a beautiful thing that their own religious scripture supposedly does not condemn and that their own history has allegedly celebrated for centuries.
In the end, however, the university acquiesced to the demands of the Muslim community and pulled the poster down. There is an uplifting lesson here. The Muslim community—starting with the young students who had the intelligence and awareness to decipher the subversion of Islamic teachings and the courage to raise their voices against it and the Muslim organizations who came to their aid—is to be congratulated. Even against the aggressive agenda of the cultural, political, and capitalist elites, the Muslim community scored a small but significant victory for their faith and in favor of truth and reason.
As elaborated below, Islam’s prohibition of homosexual acts is categorical, and its teachings on gender relations and sexual norms are foundational and inseparable from belief in Allah and His revelation. There is no room in Islam for the new direction in which the liberal culture appears to be dragging the West and, through its coercive ideological apparatus, the world as a whole. It is a culture that denies the natural and divinely ordained norms of union between men and women, erasing sexual differences in favor of a utopian, ideological, anti-religious, and anti-scientific androgyny. One would have to reject Islamic guidance root and branch in order to incorporate this radical gender egalitarianism. This agenda requires, and has already mobilized, rigorous social engineering domestically, as well as neocolonial wars and anti-religious propaganda in the Muslim world in particular and the Global South generally. Muslims must, therefore, establish and advocate for the Islamic paradigm of gender and sexuality over and against modern and postmodern perversions, while also supporting those Muslims who acknowledge orthodox Islamic teachings, but who struggle with same-sex attractions and/or gender dysphoria, in their struggle to live lives of virtue in conformity with the will of Allah and the teachings of Islam.
We cannot explore the Islamic paradigm of sexual morality without first understanding where morality itself comes from. A theocentric worldview, such as that of Islam, takes God as the ultimate source of morality. Our very purpose for existence is to uphold God’s command to the best of our ability: “I have not created jinn and humankind but to worship Me.”
We maintain that God and His Messenger alone are the legislators of what is right and wrong, permitted and prohibited. Allah states in the Qur’an, “It is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their affair. And whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger has indeed strayed into a plain error.”
Islamic morality is not arbitrary; although the divine command is at the heart of our rich tradition, Muslims have long engaged in rational reflection on the wisdom of divine creation and the divine word for centuries, producing a comprehensive discourse on the consequences of acts for the individual and the community, and incorporating it into the fiqh tradition.
The “diversity in love” poster, discussed above, reminds us that over the last couple of decades, the perspectives and claims of the LGBT movement have become not merely tolerated but championed. They are now pervasive, ubiquitous, and irresistible. Within one generation, LGBT ideas and behaviors have gone from being taboo to mainstream. The questions we need to ask are:
How did we get here and why should we care?
How can we build a conceptual framework on gender, sex, and morality based on Islamic sources?
Given the prodigious changing of the cultural winds, it is no longer sufficient for Muslims—and others who disapprove of same-sex relationships—simply to say that they do not approve of homosexual behavior in the same way that they do not approve of drinking or premarital sex between men and women. The discourse on homosexuality has shifted so quickly and radically that the old Muslim defenses and attitudes (“It is not our problem,” “How is this different for us Muslims from fornication or wine-drinking?,” or “Live and let live”) have become ineffective and we are confronted with grave challenges. Most well-meaning and sincere Muslims are either complacent, helpless, or both. They fail to realize that unlike the haram acts of drinking alcohol and illicit (heterosexual) sex, the affirmation of same-sex relationships and transgenderism is presented as a positive moral cause, undergirded by contentious metaphysical assumptions regarding, among other things, the human self, the place of sex and sexuality in human identity, and the proper balance between the individual and society. It is a discourse that appeals to universal notions of human dignity, justice, respect, and autonomy. Only by engaging with these issues holistically can we properly understand and respond to this challenge.
Throughout the past century, so much has changed deep within our conscious understanding that we must expend considerable effort to understand that we, as Muslims in the contemporary West, are dealing with two very different conceptual paradigms. Consider the common occurrence of a young Western Muslim saying to an Islamic religious authority, “I think I’m gay. What does Islam have to say about that?” The shaykh may simply respond, “It’s haram (prohibited)!” The youth in this scenario, however, is asking about an individual and political identity situated within a paradigm without truth or metaphysics—a paradigm that views sexual feeling as being as close to unassailable truth as one can get. To our young, college-going American Muslim, who generally champions liberal causes in the name of justice and love, to say that “being gay” is haram might be like saying that being Arab or South Asian is haram. There is miscommunication between the two because each is operating from a different paradigm. On the one hand, we have the Islamic worldview as it pertains to morality—and to gender and sexuality in particular—and, on the other hand, we have the modern/post-modern secular worldview. The two start from diametrically opposed assumptions.
This article sets out to distinguish these worldviews before exploring more specifically the Islamic paradigm on gender, sex, and sexual morality. It then discusses homosexuality and transgenderism from two angles: from the Islamic moral and legal (sharʿī) considerations, followed by a discussion of how to support Muslims who struggle with same-sex attractions. By doing so, we hope to illustrate the urgency of challenging the contemporary discourse around sex, gender, and sexuality and equipping ourselves with the proper conceptual framework to better help Muslims struggling with this issue. We conclude with additional resources on the subject that may be of help in providing further direction.
Source: yaqeeninstitute.ca
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
