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Instead, scholars say, the Quran implies that retribution is in the hands of God. However, there is no prescribed execution for homosexuality in the Quran or in Islamic law. Experts believe that IS’s gruesome executions are meant to symbolize God’s punishment of the cities, recreating the effect of being thrown into the air when the cities were flipped upside down. “And we turned (the cities) upside down and rained upon them brimstone hard as clay,” says the Quran in verse 74 of the surah, or chapter, Al Hijr. In such filmed executions, IS makes multiple references to Quranic passages on Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, referring to the people of Lot as “criminals.” “Who is better than God in judgment – setting a limit on the people of Lot,” says one such video, before depicting the group shoving two suspected gay men off a rooftop in Homs, Syria. That number has certainly risen, given the subsequent IS videos and reports of LGBT executions in Iraq and Syria this year. The UN estimated at that time that at least 30 executions of alleged homosexuals have taken place in IS-controlled territories. In August 2015, members of the LGBT community from ISIS-held Syria and Iraq told the United Nations that the group goes through the phones of suspected homosexuals and targets their contacts. “The hisbah ask us about our neighbors and relatives – why some are not married, have no children, or dress a certain way,” says Mohammed, a 24-year-old refugee from Deir Ezzour who now lives in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan. “If they find someone who has refused to marry and has many friendships, they believe he may be gay and therefore must be killed.” Syrians who have fled IS-held strongholds of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour told The Christian Science Monitor late last year that IS has built a network of religious police and “informers” to oust those suspected of “sexual deviancy.” IS takes a far less nuanced view, attempting to take justice into their own hands. "Those that say homosexuals are deviants of Islam, they are the true deviants and their actions are a graver sin than the homosexuals themselves,” he added, in a statement on his website. Salman al-Odah, a leading Saudi cleric with 9 million Twitter followers, said in an interview with a Swedish newspaper April 30 that even though homosexuality is considered a sin in the Torah, Bible, and Quran, according to Islam the punishment comes in the next world, not this one. Why American veterans are dropping everything to train Ukrainians While IS cites the Quran as its authority, Muslim clerics are far from agreement on how homosexuals should be treated. IS has killed homosexuals with particularly brutal zeal, and in some Middle East countries homosexual relations are considered crimes punishable by death. In April, the group’s branch in the Indian subcontinent assassinated an LGBT magazine editor in Bangladesh in a bid to prevent the “promoting of homosexuality.”Ĭelebration of the Orlando attack across jihadist social media and in certain Islamist circles highlights the acrimonious relationship Islamist groups have long had with the LGBT community. Mateen, who pledged alliance to IS, also reportedly followed the propaganda of Al Qaeda, which has called for the killing of “deviants” such as gays. “Rejoice, for they are gays such as Lot in Sodom, where God unleashed upon them his torment,” one sympathizer tweeted.
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Thousands of sympathizers with the self-declared Islamic State (IS) either praised the attack, which killed at least 49 and injured dozens more, or dismissed the dead as “merely gays.” Mateen may have been influenced by jihadi views – either as justification for the mass shooting, or as a source of inner conflict that shaped his decision to attack. As reports emerge that Omar Mateen used a gay dating app and patronized the gay nightclub Pulse, so has speculation that he may have been deeply conflicted about his identity.