A South African imam who devoted his life to promoting gay rights and tolerance for L.G.B.T.Q. Muslims was shot and killed in the coastal city of Gqeberha on Saturday, the police said.
Muhsin Hendricks was credited by some as being the world’s first openly gay imam. In 2018, he founded the Al-Ghurbaah Foundation, a nonprofit that provided support services for Muslims discriminated against for their sexual orientation.
The organization worked to help Muslims around the world reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation and gender identity.
A statement from the South Africa Human Rights Commission condemned the killing. It cited footage circulated on social media in which a hooded man emerged from a pickup truck and fired shots through the windows of a car in a residential area before speeding away. The video has not been verified by The New York Times.
South Africa’s deputy justice minister, Andries Nel, said it was too early to say whether the shooting was a hate crime, but he said that the police were “hot on the heels of the suspects.”
Mr. Hendricks faced fierce criticism in the country, not least on social media.
In an interview on Monday with Newzroom Afrika, a South African digital channel, Mr. Nel said that though there are debates among Muslims in South Africa about gay rights, those debates acknowledge the primacy of the country’s constitutional protections.
“They have been unambiguous in reaffirming the values of our Constitution, the values of tolerance of plurality and of human respect,” he said.
Mr. Hendricks was a prominent supporter of gay people in South Africa, which in 1998 became the first country in Africa to decriminalize homosexuality, when the Johannesburg High Court ruled that existing sodomy laws violated the post-apartheid Constitution.
A survey in 2021 by the research network Afrobarometer rated South Africa as the second-most tolerant country on the continent when it came to same-sex relationships, after the island nation of Cabo Verde.
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association said that it was “deeply shocked” by the killing. Mr. Hendricks had mentored people in South Africa and around the world as they attempted to reconcile their faith and lives and was a “testament to the healing that solidarity across communities can bring,” Julia Ehrt, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.
South Africa is seen as an outlier on the continent for its approach to gay rights. More than 30 of Africa’s 54 countries criminalize same-sex couples, and in recent years at least six countries, including Ghana and Uganda, have taken steps toward harsher anti-gay laws.
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