His mother could not end the sentence. “I heard you were divorced,” she had begun, “because you’re—” A long pause. “Gay,” he finished for her.
He had dreaded saying it for years. Not to his wife, because she had known it before they married. Not to colleagues, or even to the conservative imams he often mixed with. Telling his mother was always going to be the hardest part. For 80 days he had fasted and prayed about it. In the end, at peace and assured that Allah embraced him as he was, he was ready to talk to her. But at the very word, she collapsed in front of him.
She had known him for 29 years; but not who he was. He had disguised it well, obediently following the rules of the household where his imam grandfather had preached fiercely and often, and had tied his small left arm behind his back to make him eat with his correct, right, hand. He had gone to Karachi in Pakistan to study Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence, a holy training, and had become an Arabic teacher in Cape Town, where they lived. He seemed on a straight road to imamhood, especially when he married (as imams had to) and produced three children. Given all that, he should have been the joy of any mother.
But from the age of five Muhsin knew he was different. He was teased for being girlish, and by puberty he was clearly attracted to boys. This terrified him. Under sharia law he would be stoned; according to the scholars he would go to hell. Silently, because it was impossible to tell a soul, he fasted on Tuesdays and Thursdays and agonised over how Allah, the all-compassionate, the all-merciful, could send him to the fire. The real reason he went to Karachi to study was to see what the Koran truly said about homosexuality. He also discovered there that, though it was illegal, men strolled hand in hand with their boyfriends, as he soon strolled with his.
Those were the foundations of Muhsin Hendricks’s 30-year ministry, which over time provided meeting places, a mosque, constant reassurance and two human-rights foundations to defend Muslims torn between their faith and their sexuality. It became famous well beyond Cape Town. Two documentaries helped; so did his lively TikTok presence, dancing and lip-synching to Bollywood love songs. But he was also famous because he was the world’s first openly gay imam, and very few followed.
Coming out to his mother allowed him to start work. In 1998 he put down a carpet in his garage and invited like-minded people to this “Inner Circle” for tea and chat. Not only LGBT Muslims were welcomed, but anyone who felt ostracised within Islam. Later he founded “The People’s Mosque” in Wynberg, near Cape Town, a small, calm space with blue prayer-mats and no gender separation. On Fridays women sometimes led the prayers and preached the sermons, as they could not do elsewhere. Afterwards their Imam Muhsin, strikingly robed (he had worked for a while as a fashion designer, and once hand-sewed a dress for his daughter to wear to a gala), served up a storm of his signature biryani.
He had not wanted to be an imam, and he gave himself no holy airs. The word just meant a chosen leader, and his community had picked him to protect them and advance their cause. Therefore he had to teach the sacred texts, but in his own way. He already had mystical, Sufi tendencies. Now both he and his congregation set out to read his beloved Koran afresh, with queer eyes.
His fundamental premise was that Islam was a religion of love and peace. Allah was not an angry ruler but a loving energy, a compassionate light: the fount of the whole diversity of creation. Homosexuality was thus divinely intended. The Koran said that Allah had created partners for human beings, not specifying their sex, in order to foster tranquillity, as much as to procreate. It was not God who condemned non-heterosexual sex, but the patriarchy that underpinned Islam. The Koran itself was a tolerant voice. His favourite quotation was Surah 17:84: “Everyone acts according to his own disposition.” As he to his.
Critics thought they could trip him with the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah. But God blasted those cities because their people were rapists, robbers and inhospitable to strangers. Homosexuality was not specifically mentioned in the Koran and only hinted at in the hadith, or acts of the Prophet Muhammad (which were unreliable anyway). Elsewhere in the hadith the Prophet appeared to easily accept effeminate men in the household of his wives. And when he was asked to condemn to death a man who had hennaed his feet and hands, like a woman, he refused, saying “I have been forbidden to kill those who pray.”
All his exegesis was partly aimed at the local Muslim Judicial Council, the keepers of hardline tradition. That patriarchy was not swayed. As soon as he came out he was fired from one of his teaching jobs in Cape Town, and quickly resigned from two more before he was pushed. Other local imams pointedly called him “Mr Hendricks”. In 2007 the council declared him “out of the fold of Islam” for appearing in a documentary called “A Jihad for Love”. In 2011 he scandalised them again by marrying his Hindu boyfriend at a ceremony conducted by a woman. He mocked when, just last year, the council issued a “short fatwa” against gay lifestyles. Short because so little thought had gone into it.
Even secular South Africa, the first country in Africa to legalise gay marriage, was not a safe place to be so defiantly different. He did not care. Friends told him to get bodyguards, but he said he would rather be killed than be untrue to himself. To be shot to death on the road was therefore always a possibility.
And he did not fear it. Nothing could be more fearful or difficult than coming out to his mother. It took her ten years to accept it. In the end, though, they had “a beautiful connection”. It would be even more beautiful, he felt, to meet God fearlessly, entirely as the person he was. ■