A “practical guide” on how to navigate pride month for Muslims living in the West has sparked outrage among liberals all the way up to the British parliament, leading some to question whether Islam is the progressive ally they somehow thought it was.
The guide, published by UK-based Islamic affairs news site 5Pillars, describes navigating “LGBTQ-related issues while remaining grounded in Islamic teachings” as one of the most pressing challenges facing Muslim families living in the Western world today.
It cites the central Islamic religious text, the Quran, as well as the corpus of traditions, sayings and practices ascribed to Mohammed – known as the Sunnah – to provide a basic overview of Islamic sexual ethics.
Drawing on these, it says that same-sex relationships are haram, which means they are prohibited. It adds, however, that Islam teaches that all people should be treated with respect and compassion and calls for spiritual support for those experiencing same-sex attraction.
Muslim parents are advised to discuss Islamic teachings on sexuality with their children from an early age. The publication advocates morality drawn from divine revelation, warning that public opinion and social trends can lead to subjective moral standards.
Liberal Opposition to the Pride Guide
The publication aroused intense opposition among liberals, many of whom were shocked that a demographic that they have come to view as an ally on such contentious issues as immigration and Palestine would not only defect from the progressive trench in the ongoing culture war, but fight for the regressive forces arrayed against them.
Among the guide’s most prominent critics was Labour MP and former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who said that he would save social media users the time of clicking on the link by offering his own alternative.
“Treat everyone with respect. Love who you want to love. Worship who you want to worship. Love, A Gay Christian whose right [to] marry was secured with the vote of the Muslim Mayor of the best city in the world”, Streeting wrote on X.
The post also drew criticism from many less prominent users. That was hardly surprising: by the time of writing, it had been viewed 4.6 million times.
“People on the left have gotta learn to stop giving hate groups like this a free pass just because they’re aligned on Palestine”, one social media user wrote, expressing the sentiments of at least the 4.6 thousand people who liked their comment.
“It really is this simple: if the Green Party ever collaborate with 5Pillars again, I am out, and so are thousands of others”, another wrote, adding: “No more interviews, no more endorsements, nothing. Progressive movements cannot exist with homophobic religious fundamentalism.”
Many of the responses centered on the notion that if Muslims are not fond of Pride Month and all that it signifies, they are free to leave the UK and the West more broadly.
A perceptive observer might note at this point that many people in Western countries are also morally opposed to same-sex relationships and gender ideology and, being native Westerners, have nowhere else to go.
For example, despite the Islamic justifications and assumptions offered for viewing same-sex marriage as illegitimate and homosexual activity as a sin, there is little in the guide itself that a devout Catholic or Christian would disagree with from a natural law standpoint.
But typically, devout Catholics and Christians in Western countries are Western in origin and therefore fair game to attack, silence and marginalize. The modern liberal worldview, grounded in Critical Theory, divides the world into a hierarchy of victimhood and privilege and has no hesitation in doing so. It does, however, encounter an obstacle when immigrants, particularly non-white immigrants, express views that are not sufficiently progressive.
The Natural Time Limit on Liberal-Islamic Alliances
Conservatives of various stripes have long offered liberals some free advice: that their alliance with Muslims has an expiration date. That advice generally carried a second warning: that in the long term, the arrangement would prove far more beneficial to Muslims, and to Islam itself, than to their liberal hosts.
The British Green Party, in particular, has become popular with England’s Muslim population in recent years, a fact starkly illustrated by the Gorton and Denton by-election in February. The vote saw Gorton’s South Asian, mostly Muslim, voting bloc opt for the Greens rather than their old political home, Labour.
That shift was down to two things: Labour’s perceived complicity in Israel’s Gaza campaign – foreign policy failings, in other words – and the Green Party’s tailored outreach to South Asian voters, involving Urdu messaging and slapping the Islamophobic label on the party’s primary opponent in the by-election, Reform UK.
The Green Party went on to win that election with approximately 40% of the vote, a deciding factor in which was, it seems, ethnic voting. Between its growing Muslim support and its growing Muslim composition, with deputy leader Mothin Ali an outspoken Muslim, along with a number of prominent councillors, the Islamification of the Green Party in the UK is well underway.
Which is, ultimately, what many critics of the 5Pillars guide were identifying when they lashed out at the left-wing liberal tendency to make common cause with Muslims. We have already safely rejected the same positions on sexuality from Catholics and Christians, the thinking went, so why is it acceptable from Islam?
The answer to that lies in their own worldview, which typically views diversity for diversity’s sake as a greater good. So good, in fact, that it has unthinkingly become one of the core tenets of secular liberal democracies over decades.
The latest incoherence has woken some liberals up to the fact that it is not, something their soft targets have been saying for some time now. However, a few more cracks in the modern creeds of diversity, equity and inclusion and who knows where the cultural conversation might move along to?
