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The Kingdom in the Closet

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Being Gay and Muslim - MECCA Institute

Keep me logged in. Try Independent Minds free for 1 month See the options. Voices Don't be so surprised by this week's gay Muslim marriage — I married my Muslim husband in a same-sex ceremony in We wanted our day to be normal, like us, like our love for one another, like our families and friends Dennis Harper Thursday 13 July You can form your own view. Subscribe now. Shape Created with Sketch. UK news in pictures Show all Supporters march during the YouthStrike4Climate demonstration in central London.

Sexual Diversity

The Milky Way and millions of stars over Dinstanburgh Castle in the early hours of the morning. Dunstanburgh Castle is a 14th-century fortification on the coast of Northumberland in northern England, between the villages of Craster and Embleton. The castle was built by Earl Thomas of Lancaster between and The Lionesses went on to win Former Olympic and World Champion Cracknell, 46, became the oldest entrant in Boat Race history, qualifying after taking up a Master of Philosophy degree in human evolution.

He became the first horse since Red Rum to win back-to-back renewals. Activists in hazmat suits and masks stop traffic in west London in a protest accusing authorities of lying after cancer-causing chemicals were found in soil close to Grenfell Tower. Newborn lambs in a snow covered field near Allendale, Northumberland, after temperatures dipped below freezing overnight. Hill snow, sleet, showers and gales are expected for parts of the UK as the chilly snap keeps hold. Armathwaite Hall hotel in Keswick, Cumbria holds Lemoga classes with the lemurs from Lake District Wild Life Park, who were mingling with the class to create a personal yoga experience which aims to heighten the sense of wellbeing for both lemur and human.

With their friendly, outgoing personalities and love for human contact, lemurs make the perfect yoga buddies, helping people to laugh, unwind and stretch away their troubles. Fire fighters attend to two police cars that were destroyed after being set on fire outside Goldthorpe police station in South Yorkshire in a suspected arson attack.

Forensics teams work at the scene of a stabbing in Edmonton in London.

Four people have been stabbed in a spate of knife attacks in the north of the capital over the weekend. Workers from the Honda plant in Swindon during a protest march through the town as the car giant will be urged to reverse its decision to close its UK plant. British Prime Minister Theresa May will today chair a potentially volatile meeting of her cabinet amid reports of an attempted coup by colleagues over her handling of Brexit.

Workers peeling off stickers left on the Cabinet Office door on Whitehall, London, left by anti-Brexit campaigners after they took part in the People's Vote March. Thousands of protesters gathered for the march from Park Lane to Parliament Square calling for a public vote on the Governments final Brexit deal.

The mosque and community centre on Albert Road in Birmingham where a police forensic team are at work after it had its windows smashed with a sledgehammer. An investigation involving counter-terrorism officers has been launched after four mosques in the Birmingham area were attacked overnight. The 'tall ship' William II passes a wind turbine as it sails along the north east coast near Whitley Bay in Tyne and Wear after it set off from Blyth in Northumberland on a voyage round the coastline of Great Britain calling at 10 ports en route and changing crews at each stage.

The Blyth Tall Ship project is a charity working alongside Blyth community volunteers to recapture the spirit of adventure that was employed in the town to discover the Antarctic years ago and the turbine is part of a pilot field operated by EDF off Blyth which uses concrete float-and-submerge foundations. Messenger, the largest bronze cast sculpture in the UK, arrives in Plymouth Sound by barge as it makes its way to be installed outside Theater Royal Plymouth, Devon.

Flooding in Silsdend, Yorkshire.

'It is possible to be Muslim and a lesbian'

Heavy rain has caused widespread flooding across the country. Flood warnings remain in place across the UK.

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Police at the scene in Fulham, west London where a year-old man was stabbed to death this morning. So again—sodomy, or zina? For many centuries, Rowson says, these verses were widely thought to pertain to zina , but since the early 20th century, they have been largely assumed to proscribe homosexual behavior. He and most other scholars in the field believe that at about that time, Middle Eastern attitudes toward homosexuality fundamentally shifted.

Though same-sex practices were considered taboo, and shameful for the bottom, same-sex desire had long been understood as a natural inclination. For example, Abu Nuwas—a famous eighth-century poet from Baghdad—and his literary successors devoted much ink to the charms of attractive boys.

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At the turn of the century, Islamic society began to express revulsion at the concept of homosexuality, even if it was confined only to lustful thoughts, and this distaste became more pronounced with the influx of Western media. Even Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab—the 18th- century religious scholar who founded Wahhabism—seems to draw a distinction between homosexual desires and homosexual acts, according to Natana DeLong-Bas, the author of Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad The closest Abd al-Wahhab came to touching upon the topic of homosexuality was in a description of an effeminate man who is interested in other men at a wedding banquet.

His tone here is tolerant rather than condemnatory; as long as the man controls his urges, no one in the community has the right to police him.

In the remaining four, the most important citation reads: It may have provided the authority for the execution this February. Judges will go out of their way to avoid finding that an act of sodomy has occurred, however. The gay men I interviewed in Jeddah and Riyadh laughed when I asked them if they worried about being executed. For one thing, such an effort might expose members of the royal family to awkward scrutiny.

In addition, the power of the mutawwa'in is limited by the Koran, which frowns upon those who intrude on the privacy of others in order to catch them in sinful acts. The mandate of the Committee on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is specifically to regulate behavior in the public realm. What occurs behind closed doors is between a believer and God.

This seems to be the way of the kingdom: Cinemas are forbidden, but people watch pirated DVDs. Drinking is illegal, but alcohol flows at parties. Women wrap their bodies and faces in layers of black, but pornography flourishes. Gay men thrive in this atmosphere. I can be flamboyant in my house, but not outside. This strikes many Saudis as a reasonable accommodation. Court records in Saudi Arabia are generally closed, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the mutawwa'in are most likely to punish men who are overtly effeminate— those whose public behavior advertises a gayness that others keep private.

Filipinos, who have little influence and less familiarity with the demands of a double life, seem to be especially vulnerable.