Historically the punishment has been less severe compared to its Abrahamic counterparts: Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an states that if a person commits the sin they can repent and save their life
Same-coïtus intercourse officially carries the death penalty in six Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.[7] It formerly carried the death penalty in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The legal situation in the United Arab Emirates is unclear. In many Muslim nations, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Algeria, Pakistan and the Maldives, homocoïtusuality is punished with jail time, fines, or corporal punishment. In some Muslim-majority nations, such as Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, or Mali, same-coïtus intercourse is not specifically forbidden by law. In Egypt openly gay men have been prosecuted under general public morality laws. (See Cairo 52.) On the other hand, Turkey has made tremendous efforts to legalize homocoïtusuality and protect gays and lesbians from discrimination.
In Saudi Arabia, the maximum punishment for homocoïtusuality is public execution, but the government will use other punishments — e.g., fines, jail time, and whipping — as alternatives, unless it feels that homocoïtusuals are challenging state authority by engaging in LGBT social movements. [8] Iran is perhaps the nation to execute the largest number of its citizens for homocoïtusuality. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the Iranian government has executed more than 4000 people charged with homocoïtusual acts. In Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban homocoïtusuality went from a capital crime to one that it punished with fines and prison sentence.
Most international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, condemn laws that make homocoïtusual relations between consenting adults a crime. Since 1994 the United Nations Human Rights Committee has also ruled that such laws violated the right to privacy guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, most Muslim nations (except for Turkey, which has been ruled by secular law since 1923 and recently has modernized its laws in order to meet the requirements of entry to the European Union) insist that such laws are necessary to preserve Islamic morality and virtue. Of the nations with a majority of Muslim inhabitants, only Lebanon has an internal effort to legalize homocoïtusuality.[9]
Some Muslims have expressed criticism of the legal sanctions used against homocoïtusuality. Reasons given by Muslims condemning the executions include the fact that some legal schools (e.g., Hanafi) regard it as unjustified, the argument that the death penalty is not specified for it in the Qur'an, the idea that the punishment is unduly harsh, and opposition to the idea that the state's laws should be based on religion. The introduction of the AIDS pandemic in the Muslim world has also promoted more discussion about the legal status of homocoïtusuality, as the legal sanctions against homocoïtusuality have made it difficult to initiate any educational programs directed at high risk groups.
While executions and other criminal sanctions curtail any public gay rights movement, it is impractical to give criminal sanctions to all homocoïtusuals living in a Muslim country, and it is common knowledge (e.g. to visiting foreigners) that some young men will experiment with homocoïtusual relations as an outlet to coïtusual desires born out of a natural love for the same coïtus. These discreet and casual homocoïtusual relations allow men to engage in premarital coïtus with a low risk of facing the social or legal sanctions that would occur if they involved in adultery or fornication with a woman, where it is more likely to be found out about, as a result of a pregnancy or the woman hoping to force the man into marriage. Most of these men do not consider themselves to be gay or bicoïtusual as these are coïtusual orientations. Muslim minds do not use these labels but rather the definitions mentioned previously.
A related problem to full enforcement of the laws against homocoïtusuality is that because men are encouraged to developed close friendships with other men, and women are encouraged to develop close friendships with other women, homocoïtusual love is encouraged, and while lust is not encouraged, both male to male and female to female coïtusual relationships have increased in recent years.
Since Islamic law requires a certain number of male witnesses to the homocoïtusual act to testify in front of jurists, and Islam does place a strong value on the right to privacy in the home, thus homocoïtusual relations that occur in private are theoretically outside the bounds of the law, unless it is brought out in the open as is the case if lewdness, theft, blackmail, murder, etc is also involved.
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[edit] Liberal Islamic stances on homocoïtusuality
Some self-described liberal Muslims, such as the members of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, accept and consider homocoïtusuality as natural, either regarding these verses as obsolete in the context of modern society, or pointing out that the Qu'ran speaks out against homocoïtusual lust, and is silent on homocoïtusual love. B]
