Homosexuality, Once Again, Highlights the Contrast Between the Traditional Version of Islam and the Quranic View

بِسْمِ اللَّـهِ الرَّحْمَـٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

أَتَأْتُونَ الذُّكْرَانَ مِنَ الْعَالَمِينَ

" Do you approach males among the worlds" 26:165

وَتَذَرُونَ مَا خَلَقَ لَكُمْ رَبُّكُم مِّنْ أَزْوَاجِكُم ۚ بَلْ أَنتُمْ قَوْمٌ عَاد

"And leave what your Lord has created for you as mates?
 But you are a people transgressing." 26-166

وَأَمْطَرْنَا عَلَيْهِم مَّطَرًا ۖ فَسَاءَ مَطَرُ الْمُنذَرِينَ

"And We rained upon them a rain [of stones], and evil was the rain of those who were warned."173

أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَأْتُونَ الرِّجَالَ شَهْوَةً مِّن دُونِ النِّسَاءِ ۚ بَلْ أَنتُمْ قَوْمٌ تَجْهَلُونَ

"Do you indeed approach men with desire instead 

of women? Rather, you are a people behaving ignorantly."27-55

إِنَّكُمْ لَتَأْتُونَ الرِّجَالَ شَهْوَةً مِّن دُونِ النِّسَاءِ ۚ بَلْ أَنتُمْ قَوْمٌ مُّسْرِفُونَ

Indeed, you approach men with desire,"  
7-81 "instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.

صدق الله العلي العظيم

from Quran.com with Sahiheh Int. translation

In the above verses God directly addresses the topic of homosexuality. There might be more verses that I have not found besides 29:28-34 in which God referrers to the Lot and his people. 

From these wordings it is clear that God explicitly forbids men from using other men instead of women as the people of "Lot" did. Consequently, they were punished and wiped out of the earth by divine retribution. 

The important lesson to learn for our time, is the fact that according to these verses God does not order his prophet of the time (Lot or Abraham) to go and fight them or to stop them by any means they could.  It is left to God to deal with them in anyway necessary.  This is the lesson we should learn from Quran. That is, in many cases such as homosexuality despite being strictly forbidden, we are not to harm the doer's of such actions or prevent them doing so by force.   

This is one of the many occasions when the Quranic view is not supporting the traditional Islamic punishment system which are mostly derived from "Hadith"(The bonafide wordings of the prophet) or "Sunna"(The way prophet acted upon different situations).   The contrast between the Quran's position, which is leaving such sinful actions to God, with sever punishments imposed in Islamic tradition seems to be of immense significance since there are examples for which "Sharia" laws do not make sense in our age, to say the least. 

That is not to say we should totally abandon "Hadith" and deprive ourselves from the precious teachings of our dear "Prophet Mohammad", but rather we should not hold them as sacredly as Quran which instructs us to hear all the ideas and choose the best (39-18).

"Who listen to speech and follow the best of it. Those are the ones Allah has guided, and those are people of understanding."

In this manner we can open-mindedly look at Prophet's tradition and learn from what he did or said bearing in mind that all prophet's wordings and actions (except for Quran) have meant for the time of the prophet and the specific circumferences of the time. Obviously, our time requires different measures and different lifestyle compared to 1400 years ego.  

I however, strongly believe that content of Quran is universally applicable and true while the "Hadith" and tradition of Islam are certainly limited in their scope of time and context. If the tradition of Islam, as unfolded at time of prophet, was supposed to be held true for all times then Quran should have included all those laws in details.  Whereas in reality, Quran has contained eternally true principals and universally comprehensible concepts leaving the details to humans to work out as deemed most suitable for the specific conditions they are living in.  This could potentially be one of the main reasons God has clearly stated that he will protect Quran himself (15-9), which is needless to prove that is very much the case.

It might seem an unsupported statement at this stage, but it appears to me (once again here) that Quranic version of Islam is very much viable all over the world while the traditional Islam may not.   I understand that even in Quran there are some punishments that seem inappropriate for our time, yet, the fact of the matter is they are set so meticulously that if we consider their subtle conditions seriously these punishments make perfect sense.  I will discuss them one by one over the future posts.

One of the unnoticed delicacies is the fact that Quran never instructs the believers to interfere in other people's life in order to implement God's commands unless someone is being hurt physically, emotionally and/or financially.  Otherwise, no mater how sever one's wrong doing is, it is only left to God to deal with him. That is, the prophet or the righteous have nothing to do in such cases except for reminding the wrong doers of what they are doing and invite them to the right path.

Finally, I believe it is time for Muslims to believe that: it is possible to truly love God and his greatest messenger, to have a Quranic life in modern time and at the same time use their logic and reason to handle their worldly affairs in line with God's satisfaction (to the best of their collective understanding) looking to the future instead of past in order to live happily and peacefully with the rest of the world.