Repeal Islam’s scarlet-letter sex laws – The Washington Post

Asra Q. Nomani on the challenges and need for reform of sex laws and attitudes:

We are never going to see a real cultural shift in the Muslim mind-set about sex and homosexuality until we call out and repeal these scarlet-letter sex laws, and instead choose an interpretation of Islam that values compassion, privacy, acceptance and love over judgment and bigotry.

Just one day after the Orlando massacre, a Dutch woman in Qatar was convicted of the crime of “illicit sex” — for coming forward with the complaint that she had been raped. Several years ago, a Norwegian woman faced similar charges in the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, the Islamic State is throwing men accused of homosexuality off rooftops, and the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabiahave executed gay men.

Of the 57 states that belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a quasi-United Nations for countries with large Muslim populations, at least 23 have zina laws and 38 criminalize consensual adult same-sex, according to data from human rights groups and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. These governments are promoting an interpretation of political Islam, or Islamism, that feeds this culture of punishment for even consensual sex.

Puritanical Islamic sex laws feature a hierarchy of punishment, based on the Koran and the sunnah, or sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, of stoning to death for those who are married and have sex outside of their marriages and “100 stripes,” or lashes, for premarital sex.

The punishments are even worse for gays. Influential Saudi cleric Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, following the rigid interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism or Salafism, condemns zina as a crime and calls homosexuality “the most abhorrent of deeds,” calling for “execution of homosexuals,” from having them “burned with fire,” “stoned to death” and “thrown down from a high place then have stones thrown at them.”

As in the West, cultural attitudes are closely intertwined with legislation. Babies born out of wedlock, gay sex, transgender relationships and other forms of allegedly illegal sex are shamed, stigmatized or punished — whether by court of law or by vigilante justice, as we saw in Orlando last weekend.

Source: Repeal Islam’s scarlet-letter sex laws – The Washington Post