The Killing of the Gay Imam

This paper investigates the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks (d. 2025), the first “openly-queer” imam in the world. It argues that while dominant clerical groups (ʿulamāʾ) in Cape Town condemned the extra-judicial killing of the imam, they spread a toxic theology of violent exclusion. For the last ten years, members of the ʿulamāʾ advocated a position of virulent exclusion or takfīr based on a theological reconciliation between Islam and queerness. This form of excommunication presents a religio-cultural system of marginalization, legitimating the murder of the imam, and even proposing it as a form of cleansing the “moral corruption” in the broader Muslim community. This paper investigates how religious forms are deployed in service of hegemonic sexual scripts legitimating exclusion. Therwsfater, it will analyze the constructive theological work of Imam Muhsin as a form of reimagining Islam.