The director of the Islamophobia monitoring organisation Tell MAMA has said that Muslims must unite with gays to combat haters.
Writing in the Gay Star News Fiyaz Mughal said he had been subject to a “malicious smear campaign” after he appointed gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell as a patron.
Writing about his childhood in East Africa he said he saw “what happened to people who were assumed or reported to be gay. I saw the vicious beatings and inhumane degradation of such people just because someone accused them of being gay.
“Those street incidents shaped me – someone could be beaten to within an inch of their life just because they loved or wanted to have sex with another person of the same gender. When you see that, it lives with you for the rest of your life.
“This is why I have always had a problem with the fragmentation of communities in the UK. The pigeonholing of people into communities as though we do not have intersectionality and multiple identities is in part, why there is some level of bigotry within Muslim and LGBTI communities.
“I think now is the time to discuss some of the difficult issues of anti-Muslim bigotry within some sections of the LGBTI communities and homophobic bigotry within some sections of Muslim communities.”
Critics have accused Fiyaz Mughal of going against the normative teachings of Islam which considers homosexuality a sin and bans promotion of it. Others have said that he is undermining the good work his organisation has done in monitoring Islamophobia by conflating it with other agendas.
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