Homosexuality in Islam: 5 facts

The Quran tells of Lot’s people, who “approach men with desire instead of women” and were destroyed.^[1] It calls the act an indecency (fāḥisha) and says that the people were transgressors. The tradition has understood sexual relations as lawful only within marriage between a man and a woman, and has read the story of Lot as a statement about the act itself.

A recent school of writers disputes that reading. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle and others argue that the sin of Lot’s people was sexual violence and the abuse of guests, among other wrongs, and that the Quran has no teaching on loving relations between consenting adults.^[2] The verses do mention robbery and a public wrong (29:29), which gives the argument its footing.

The classical commentators and jurists read the same verses differently, and the wording favours them. The people are rebuked for coming to men “instead of women” (7:81) and for leaving the wives their Lord created (26:166), which names the act and its object, and there is no classical school that takes the revisionist view. The teaching of the tradition is therefore that same-sex acts are forbidden.

There is no punishment in the Quran for the act. One verse, which prescribes a mild penalty for two persons who commit an indecency and removes it on repentance, was applied to male same-sex acts by some early commentators.^[3] The jurists differed on the rest. Abu Hanifa held that no fixed penalty applies, and left it to the judge’s discretion. Others compared it to adultery, and some prescribed death on the strength of a hadith whose grading is disputed, since al-Albani rates it sound and many other scholars consider it weak.^[4]

That hadith says that those found doing the act of Lot’s people are to be killed. It is recorded in the collections of Abu Dawud and al-Tirmidhi and its chain is disputed: some scholars of hadith accept it and many reject it. Reports of severe punishments under the early caliphs also exist, and they too vary in strength and in the penalty they describe.

What follows is that a scholar who says the law prescribes death is relying on disputed reports and on analogy, and a scholar who says there is no fixed penalty relies on the silence of the Quran. Both positions are in the classical books, and the second is that of the founder of one of the four main schools.

If it were treated as adultery, the proof is four eyewitnesses to the act itself.^[5] The Quran forbids spying on people: “Do not spy.”^[6] The Prophet told people not to expose what God had concealed, and said that whoever conceals a Muslim, God will conceal him in this world and the next.^[7] In practice, the standard of proof made a conviction almost impossible without a confession.

The Prophet’s practice with those who confessed was to turn them away. In the best-known cases of confession to a sexual offence, he looked away and asked the person to reconsider before accepting the confession, and many scholars drew from this the lesson that a person should repent privately and not publicise a sin.

Khaled El-Rouayheb, who studied the early modern Arab world, argues that the evidentiary rules kept prosecutions rare, so that the law condemned the act while leaving a person’s private life largely alone.^[8]

Scholars distinguish between what a person feels and what he does. The Quran says “God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity.”^[9] The Prophet said that God has pardoned his community for what passes in their hearts, so long as they do not act on it or speak of it.^[10] A person who is tested with an inclination and who refrains is, in the tradition’s terms, like anyone who restrains a desire for the sake of God. This is a teaching about conduct, and not a claim about the origin of the inclination.

The strongest objection is that this asks lifelong abstention of a person who did not choose the inclination. The tradition does not hide the difficulty. It asks the same of every unmarried person, whatever their desire, and the Prophet’s counsel to those who cannot marry was fasting.^[11] The sources give no licence for contempt toward such a person, as the last entry shows.

Vigilante violence, torture or killing of people by individuals has no basis in Islamic law, which reserves punishment to courts. The Prophet forbade insulting and abusing believers.^[12] The Quran also tells the believers not to mock one another or to call one another by offensive names (49:11).

Muslim societies today differ: some criminalise, some tolerate quietly, and a minority of Muslim thinkers argue for a different reading. A few states hold the death penalty in law, others punish with prison, and others have no statute. In several countries the present criminal law descends from colonial penal codes such as section 377, a source outside the classical jurists.

The tradition therefore leaves a person who feels the inclination protected against assault and mockery, and protected by the standard of proof against exposure. These protections are as much a part of the teaching as the prohibition.