Muhsin Hendricks, world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, shot dead in South Africa
Hendricks, involved in various LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, came out as gay in 1996. Two years later he started hosting meetings in his home city for LGBTQ+ Muslims, who treated him like their community imam. “I opened my garage, put a carpet down and invited people to have tea and talk,” he told the Guardian in 2022.
In 2011 Hendricks bolstered his role as an imam figure by setting up a mosque space after a friend endured a local sermon condemning homosexuality. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we started our own space, so people can pray without being judged’.”
He ran the Al-Ghurbaah mosque at Wynberg near his birthplace, Cape Town. The mosque provides “a safe space in which queer Muslims and marginalised women can practise Islam”, its website states.
Hendricks, the subject of a 2022 documentary called The Radical, had previously alluded to threats against him.
He told the Guardian he had been advised to hire bodyguards but said he never feared attacks and insisted that “the need to be authentic” was “greater than the fear to die”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...uth-africa
Hendricks, involved in various LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, came out as gay in 1996. Two years later he started hosting meetings in his home city for LGBTQ+ Muslims, who treated him like their community imam. “I opened my garage, put a carpet down and invited people to have tea and talk,” he told the Guardian in 2022.
In 2011 Hendricks bolstered his role as an imam figure by setting up a mosque space after a friend endured a local sermon condemning homosexuality. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s time we started our own space, so people can pray without being judged’.”
He ran the Al-Ghurbaah mosque at Wynberg near his birthplace, Cape Town. The mosque provides “a safe space in which queer Muslims and marginalised women can practise Islam”, its website states.
Hendricks, the subject of a 2022 documentary called The Radical, had previously alluded to threats against him.
He told the Guardian he had been advised to hire bodyguards but said he never feared attacks and insisted that “the need to be authentic” was “greater than the fear to die”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...uth-africa
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
