A South African imam who devoted his life to selling homosexual rights and tolerance for L.G.B.T.Q. Muslims was shot and killed within the coastal metropolis of Gqeberha on Saturday, the police mentioned.
Muhsin Hendricks was credited by some as being the world’s first overtly homosexual imam. In 2018, he based the Al-Ghurbaah Basis, a nonprofit that provided support services for Muslims discriminated in opposition to for his or her sexual orientation.
The group labored to assist Muslims around the globe reconcile their religion with their sexual orientation and gender identification.
An announcement from the South Africa Human Rights Fee condemned the killing. It cited footage circulated on social media during which a hooded man emerged from a pickup truck and fired photographs via the home windows of a automotive in a residential space earlier than rushing away. The video has not been verified by The New York Occasions.
South Africa’s deputy justice minister, Andries Nel, mentioned it was too early to say whether or not the capturing was a hate crime, however he mentioned that the police had been “scorching on the heels of the suspects.”
Mr. Hendricks confronted fierce criticism within the nation, not least on social media.
In an interview on Monday with Newzroom Afrika, a South African digital channel, Mr. Nel mentioned that, although there are debates amongst Muslims in South Africa about homosexual rights, these debates acknowledge the primacy of the nation’s constitutional protections.
“They’ve been unambiguous in reaffirming the values of our Structure, the values of tolerance of plurality and of human respect,” he mentioned.
Mr. Hendricks was a outstanding supporter of homosexual folks in South Africa, which in 1998 turned the primary nation in Africa to decriminalize homosexuality, when the Johannesburg Excessive Courtroom dominated that current sodomy laws violated the post-apartheid Structure.
Other than its constitutional provisions, a survey in 2021 by the analysis community Afrobarometer rated South Africa because the second-most tolerant nation on the continent when it got here to same-sex relationships, after the island nation of Cabo Verde.
The Worldwide Lesbian, Homosexual, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Affiliation mentioned that it was “deeply shocked” by the killing. Mr. Hendricks had mentored people in South Africa and around the globe as they tried to reconcile their religion and lives and was a “testomony to the therapeutic that solidarity throughout communities can carry,” Julia Ehrt, the group’s government director, mentioned in an announcement.
South Africa is seen as an outlier on the continent for its method to homosexual rights. Greater than 30 of Africa’s 54 nations criminalize same-sex couples, and lately at the least six nations, together with Ghana and Uganda, have taken steps towards harsher anti-gay legal guidelines.
