One of this weeks bravest people are Norwegian Omar Akhtar (18), he came out as gay in a response to Orlando massacre.
Omar Akhtar (18) writes in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten’s Si ;D (I’m saying), that he is gay and Muslim. Gay and Muslim are a word combination you almost never hear. That is understandable – acceptance of LGBT people among Muslims are almost non-existing.
There are a few courageous people who tirelessly fighting for our rights, but which meets the extreme adversity of fellow believers, he writes.
This we can’t accept, Omar states.
He continues about last weekend, we learned about the worst mass shooting in U.S history. 49 people died in Orlando. Completely normal people, like you and me, Omar writes.
It didn’t take long before we again heard the same old argument: “It has nothing to do with religion.”
Omar Akhtar writes :
As a socially committed person who constantly reads about how LGBT people systematically are suppressed and discriminated against by Muslims, I have the opposite opinion – massacre in Orlando had everything to do with Islam.
I myself have experience from a Koranic school in Oslo, Norway where our teachers constantly told us about how gays should be punished by God. Many teachers and imams holding forth that non-Muslims, liberals and especially LGBT people, can not be regarded as real people.
Read more at Aftenposten.no
Only Muslims like Omar Akhtar can tell us on the outside what is really preached on the inside by imams and Koranic teachers – what imams and Koranic teachers tell the public doesn’t need to be the same as was is said in the classroom were no one is listening in.
We hails Omar Akhtar coming out and telling his story as gay Muslim – it’s brave especially when we know how Muslim LGBT people are treated by other Muslims.
Photo By Own work [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons
