The Assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks and the Tyranny of Hateful Muslims

Fascists always fall.

History tells us this, whispers it through the crumbling bones of empires, shouts it from the dust of statues torn down, sings it through the open mouths of those once silenced. And yet, here you all stand, grotesque in your smallness, giddy in the presence of death. You dance on the grave of a man who prayed with love in his heart, thinking yourselves righteous, your laughter rising like smoke from a burning book. Your joy is an elegy to your own irrelevance.

The Misguided

They call themselves warriors of justice, brandishing slogans like weapons, mouths foaming with outrage at oppression – except when it does not fit neatly into their brittle, pre-approved worldviews. Their protest banners unfurl only in one direction. Their self-righteousness is selective. They will cry for Palestine while sneering at the queer journalist who dies reporting from the rubble, dismiss the gay imam who prays for the oppressed as an aberration, erase the history of queer resistance woven into every struggle for freedom.

And yet, what are they, if not the very thing they claim to resist? Their morality is an old, rusted machine, built from the same spare parts as the oppressor’s – dehumanization, supremacy, fear wrapped up in holy verses misread and misused. Zionism justifies apartheid with scripture. White evangelicals anoint Trump’s bloated mouth as divine prophecy. And here they are, twisting Lot’s story from the Quran into a hammer to wield against the very people who have fought for their right to exist.

The Lazy Thinker

But of course, they cling to their favorite passage – the story of Lot (Lut), parading it as if it were the only scripture in the vast ocean of the Quran. They distort it, flatten it, strip it of all nuance, all context, until it serves as nothing more than a crude weapon for their own bigotry.

The story of Lut is not about love. It is not about two people choosing tenderness, choosing devotion, choosing to build something holy between them. It is about power, about humiliation, about cruelty wielded as violence. It is about men who reject all moral boundaries, who use sex as an instrument of control, who transgress every principle of justice. It is a warning against oppression – not an instruction manual for it.

But they do not read for meaning. They do not seek truth. They pluck verses like fruit from a tree, leaving the ones that do not serve them to rot on the ground. Because if they truly read the Quran, if they truly held the weight of its words, they would have to contend with the uncomfortable fact that it speaks more often of mercy than punishment. That it breathes freedom into every page, commands justice in every decree.

The Assertively Ignorant

“There is no compulsion in religion.” (2:256)

“And We have created you in pairs.” (78:8)

“And among His signs is that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that you may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your hearts.” (30:21)

Love. Mercy. Tranquility. Not fear, not shame, not the gnashing of teeth at the sight of two people choosing each other in defiance of a world that has tried to keep them apart.

And what of justice? What of freedom? What of standing against tyranny in all its forms?

“Indeed, Allah commands justice and kindness and giving to relatives and forbids immorality and bad conduct and oppression.” (16:90)

But they do not hear this verse, because it would demand of them something they are unwilling to give. It would force them to recognize their own cruelty. It would strip them of their borrowed moral authority.

The Hypocrisy Of The Laudium Sun

And then, there is the paper. The smugly self-satisfied institution of hypocrisy that deems itself the arbiter of what is moral, what is permissible, what is worthy of condemnation. They publish stories of gay Muslims with sneering contempt, brand them as unworthy, as outsiders, as defilers of faith. And yet, turn the page, and there it is – a gossip column, dripping with scandal, slander dressed up as entertainment, a weekly festival of backbiting and malice.

They speak of sin as though they do not swim in it.

“O you who have believed, avoid much [negative] assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin. And do not spy or backbite each other.” (49:12)

“Woe to every scorner and mocker.” (104:1)

But they do not weep for their own transgressions. They do not fall to their knees in repentance for the cruelty they print. Their ink stains only the hands of others, never their own. They are merchants of moral decay, wrapped in the thin veil of respectability.

A Tyrannical Hatred Of Women

And what of their war against women? These men, self-appointed gatekeepers of morality, who gnash their teeth at the existence of a gay imam, who spit fire at queerness – but have no quarrel with their own unholy hatred of women?

Their contempt is older than their faith. They hate women’s voices, their bodies, their laughter, their autonomy. They cloak their misogyny in scripture, but the Quran does not wear their hatred. It is not theirs to wield.

“O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” (49:13)

Not the men among you. Not the straight among you. Not the powerful among you. The most righteous among you.

“And do not crave that which Allah has given some of you over others. For men is a share of what they have earned, and for women is a share of what they have earned. And ask Allah for His bounty. Indeed, Allah is ever, of all things, Knowing.” (4:32)

And yet, their inheritance is resentment. They rage at women who dare to lead, who dare to speak, who dare to exist outside their control. They twist the Quran into a noose to hang women from, but it is their own moral corruption that will leave them dangling.

“Indeed, those who falsely accuse chaste women, who never even think of anything bad, are cursed in this life and the Hereafter. And they will suffer a tremendous punishment.” (24:23)

A warning. A prophecy. A reminder that the weight of their own cruelty will crush them before any divine retribution does.

A Note For The Hollow Ones

But all tyrants fall. The oppressors, the zealots, the flag-wavers of fake revolutions. The ones who mistake their prejudices for principles, their borrowed outrage for action.

There are queer journalists who have died for Palestine, who have risked everything, who have given more in a single breath than these men in their expensive cars ever will. There are people whose love is an act of resistance, whose existence alone is a battle against every force that seeks to erase them.

And what are these men? These laughing, leering men who have built their fragile world on the suffering of others? They are nothing. They are echoes of a machine that will outlive them. They are the inheritors of the same cruelty they claim to fight.

But history is unkind to tyrants. The world turns against them. The people they sneer at today will bury them tomorrow.

And when the last of them falls silent, the only thing left will be the truth.