....
Not OP, but if I recall correctly, the UAE has a de facto moratorium on using the death penalty to deal with these cases. I mean, you can do to the craigslist for the country and you'll see a lot of gay people openly seeking homosexual relations, with their contact details and everything. Do you think they would do that if there was a real threat to their life of doing that? Dubai has a bit of a reputation for having a very... active gay scene.
I think muslims aren't allowed to hate gay men. They can hate the act of having homosexual relations, but if someone says that they have homosexual desires but there is no proof that they acted on them, then they cannot be blamed since they having a desire is not a crime. While some scholars have said that homosexual convicted of having same-sex intercourse should be punished as adulterers, but that is not a general rule that can be applied in every circumstance, in every place, in every time. The Shari'ah is not a rigid set of laws, stagnant, not changing. They must be adapted.
But IINAL, so yeah.
That's certainly interesting input. There may be several directions in this thread, but mine is not at all about rights of gays, which I really don't care much about. I do though care about ridiculous killing or jailing of anybody.
This was the point concerning Turing-
I believe it is a certainty that "he could not have done his work in an Islamic country" and that of course has tremendous consequences.
However, perhaps our friends could prove the opposite. Can they point to an openly gay scientist doing work of such proportions in the Muslim world?Let's extend that. Openly gay sports starts? TV stars? Whatever. But none of these would have had the nearly unthinkable effect of the computer being invented or not being invented......
So my direction of concern was more the detriment to society, the way it would be held back, by it's not allowing gays to contribute, by it's not allowing education to women ---- rather than whether some guys were permitted to go off in some corner and have "fun" without getting in trouble with the law....
I apologise if I misunderstood what you were saying.
I think you have a small misconception on the Muslim world - it is not only Arab. Although many people, especially in the United States and other Western countries, may associate Islam with countries in the Middle East or North Africa, nearly two-thirds (62%) of Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the Pew Research analysis. In fact, more Muslims live in India and Pakistan (344 million combined) than in the entire Middle East-North Africa region (317 million). While I agree that there is a strong social stigma against homosexuality in Arab culture (not just Muslims, but Arabs of other religions, too), I can point to Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim country (on a side note, no Muslim army ever step foot in INdonesia, so there's some evidence for those people who think that Islam was spread by the sword. But anyways, Indonesia has never had any legal prohibitions against homosexuality, since its founding as a nation. The country even has the longest running LGBT organizations in Asia. Even today, gay and transsexuals can be found performing in Indonesian television and entertainment industry. In Indonesian view, it is quite acceptable to have transsexual or cross dresser entertainers or public figures. Since you're looking for some gay TV stars, I'd suggest Indonesia as a good place to start. It is in their culture that sexuality of any kind is a taboo subject, so they prefer not to talk about it, but Indonesia is generally a very tolerant country.
Another interesting thing to note here is that Indonesia's neighbors, Singapore (non-Muslim) and Malaysia (Muslim), both have laws that make it illegal to be gay. Another thing they have in common is that both these countries had been colonized by the British Empire.
You can also look at another Muslim country, Turkey. While Turkey was under Ottoman rule, the Ottoman Caliph decriminalized homosexuality in 1858 (Britain only decriminalised homosexuality in The Sexual Offences Act of 1967, more than 100 years after the Ottoman Caliphs). When Turkey became an independent nation in 1920, it didn’t see a need to change this law. I remember reading about a representative of KAOS LG, one of the largest LGBT organizations in Turkey, saying that their organization was never censored. Jack Scott, a British writer who moved to Turkey with his gay partner, said that he never got any bad publicity from any Turk because of it.
Furthermore, another country that used to be under Ottoman rule is Jordan, an Arab country. When the Ottoman empire collapsed and Jordan became mandated by the League of Nations between 1922 and 1945 is the time when homosexuality wasn't okay. But when the country became fully independent in 1951, it nation made homosexuality legal. “Jordan is considered an open minded country, and when coming to cities, the tolerance is even higher,” said the editor of My.Kali, a gay magazine that is based in the capital. “And considering the fact that it’s an Islamic country, the morality of the culture could be a huge pressure to many people to remain discreet, but it never stopped many of my friends and other LGBTQ people to come out and show who they are,” he added.
Other countries with a large Muslim population and where homosexuality is legal include Abkhazia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Niger, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, and Tajikistan.
Now tell me, if Islam really was the root of the problem in the harsh treatment of gays, then why would all these countries still be Muslim majority and not prosecute homosexuals? How come the Islamic Ottoman empire decriminalised homosexuality more than a hundred years before the British? In my humble judgement, I would argue that this is an issue pertaining to certain cultures of the world and not to a religion which has almost 2,000,000,000 followers worldwide.
And as for your comment on education of women, I won't even get into that because we could be here for hours, but I'd just like to say that the person who founded the first ever university in the world was a Muslim woman named Fatima al-Fihri, and the university, incidentally, is still thriving today. I believe that one of Islam's main teachings is that the pursuit of knowledge is obligatory in every man and woman. When reading up on the topic, I found an explanation by an Islamic speaker that I'd recommend you take 5 minutes of your day to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bnWf6CuLjUThanks, and have a great day.