THE contradictions of contemporary South Africa are exemplified by its having produced the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, and his having been murdered this month in a professional hit — almost certainly a homophobic assassination. This was the subject of a feature on Radio 4’s Sunday. Hendricks had faced repeated death threats since coming out in 1996. It is a pity that we heard only a brief clip of his own voice, which revealed a charming humour.
What we did have was an interview with his old friend Imam Paul Salahuddin Armstrong, a convert to Islam from a white English background, and the Birmingham-based gay Muslim activist Khakan Qureshi. Having had some experience over the years of debating the “clobber texts” in the Bible, I was fascinated to hear Armstrong make the case that their Qur’anic equivalents condemn rape and lack of hospitality rather than loving and committed same-sex relationships.
In many ways, we do indeed have “more in common”, although, even in my darkest encounters with fundamentalist Ulster homophobia, I have never had to fear for my physical safety.
At a time when identity has become a predominant theme in politics, an edition of Illuminated, Radio 4’s one-off documentary programme, reminds us that community is far more about common experience than immutable characteristics.
Thirty Eulogies (Sunday) told the story of Suresh Vaghela, a heterosexual Indian immigrant who, in 1990s Manchester, gave the oration at the funerals of several dozen gay men who had been disowned by their families. Vaghela was a haemophiliac who acquired HIV as a result of infected blood. Diagnosed in 1988, he was given two months to live. His brother, also a haemophiliac, was informed that he had been infected on the same day, and died in 1994, just before effective treatments became available.
The Vaghela brothers had been advised not to discuss their condition, and Suresh and his wife, Rekha, had felt extraordinarily isolated, until a chance encounter at an HIV clinic introduced him to the world of gay AIDS activism.
Although the Vaghelas, who struck me from some of their comments as being quite devout Hindus, “didn’t understand the ‘gay’ word at all”, they finally found themselves with a community — one that took Rekha out clubbing on Manchester’s Canal Street, nights out never having appealed to the self-confessedly staid Suresh.
The Vaghelas talked about this overwhelmingly gay and white activist community as “us”: people who “gave us a voice” and “taught us to fight”. Having become a voice for men who had been abandoned by those supposed to love them most, unconditionally, Suresh survived into the years when AIDS was no longer a death sentence.
As you did it to the least of them . . .
