“This is an abomination,” tweeted on December 17, 2020, from a since deleted Twitter account, Ismail Royer in response to a “heartwarming gay rom-com” movie, Breaking Fast, for the Muslim Ramadan fast period. This condemnation from a Muslim intellectual formerly convicted on federal terrorism charges demonstrates how a previously discussed conflict between Islamic doctrines and LGBT agendas is roiling American Muslim leaders.
Speaking of his incarceration in maximum security prison, Royer tweeted from his deleted account on October 18, 2020, that “I went away in 2003 and came back in 2017 to find that Muslims in America had changed a lot.” He had discussed on Twitter with former Department of Homeland Security adviser Mohamed Elibiary, a subject of controversy for his pro-Muslim Brotherhood views. “Do you really think it’s a good idea that government deems the Islamic view of morality to be the same as racism?” Royer had asked Elibiary.
Considerable backlash in Twitter replies greeted Elibiary’s response, in which he bizarrely claimed
a consensus/ijmaa amongst most of us American Muslims to protect LGBT folks from discrimination, period. The prophet said his ummah would never unite on falsehood. You’re out of sync with the majority of the community.
Breaking Fast received promotion on Twitter from the Muslim legal society, Muslim Advocates, boosterism that dismayed Royer. “Right on cue, here’s @MuslimAdvocates advocating to distort Islam,” he tweeted on December 20, 2020. In a follow-up tweet, he expressed bafflement that
@MuslimAdvocates is advocating for the gay Muslim rom com that mocks Ramadan, yet claims that it’s “zakat [Muslim alms] eligible.” Will people of knowledge speak out about this? Can an organization be zakat eligible that’s trying to undermine Islam?
Other Muslims joined Royer in condemning Breaking Fast, including the Lamppost Education Initiative (LPI), where he has been a board member. In a December 16, 2020, tweet, LPI declared that the movie demonstrated that “Islamic values are under direct attack. What more proof of this do we need? #disgusting.”
The Breaking Fast endorsement is not the first time Muslim Advocates has disappointed Royer. He retweeted on December 18, 2020, a 2019 Muslim Advocates tweet celebrating the “First Muslim drag queen on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’” “Let’s revel in the cringe of this evergreen tweet,” he responded.
Muslim Advocates has continued its LGBT advocacy into 2022. On June 25, Muslim Advocates tweeted being “so happy Tan France can finally be his full self” when this British-Pakistani Netflix star, who is raising with his gay partner a son birthed through surrogacy, related his coming out story. The same day Muslim Advocates tweeted a Forward article about how a Muslim and a Jewish doctor run Alabama’s only clinic “providing gender-affirmative medicine for trans youth.”
Forward’s profiled Muslim doctor, Hussein Abdul-Latif, asserted a positive view of such body mutilations in Islam, contrary to established Islamic canons. “Issues of transgender treatment and management are generally accepted by Muslim scholars. Culturally, it’s still very difficult and taboo, but generally, religious scholars find a way to accept it,” he said.
Gender-bending reached new heights in 2021 with a proposal by a Congressional Democratic majority led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to make language “gender-inclusive” in Congressional proceedings. Thus, “‘Mother’— among the most important concepts in human life — would be erased from the lexicon of the US House of Representatives. It’s important to recognize how radical this is,” wrote “transgenderism” critic Abigail Shrier.
Royer on January 6, 2021, tweeted that he was
sad that American Muslim activists are totally silent about this evil. But they must be, because they’ve signed onto the progressive pact that requires them to support such evil in exchange for the inclusion of Muslims in the left’s pantheon of marginalized identity groups.
The same day, British Muslim international security analyst Tallha Abdulrazaq tweeted from a since deleted account a Guardian article. The British newspaper examined a Danish public broadcaster’s children’s program, which prompted Royer to tweet, “‘Danish values’ are garbage.” As Abdulrazaq critically explained,
Denmark, a country that demonises its Muslim population for being against “Danish values”, has launched a kids’ show about a man with an uncontrollable giant penis. But Muslims are the problem in Denmark. Nothing to do with Danish “values” at all.
Royer from his new Twitter account conversed on July 4 with another Muslim, whose Twitter account has since been deleted. Royer explained his emphasis on social issues such as abortion and LGBT agendas as opposed to international relations issues involving Muslims such as the United Arab Emirates’ establishment of relations with Israel:
It’s fashionable to mock focusing on LGBT and abortion but these are issues over which Muslims are literally apostatizing. In America and even globally these issues are ground zero in the war on religion generally and certainly on Islam…LGBT and abortion are the tip of the spear in destroying iman [faith] in US culture.
As Royer has explained, powerful political and cultural trends in Western countries such as the United States have enticed Muslims to go wobbly on LGBT matters where received Islamic doctrine is firmly opposed. As the next article in this series will examine, such lukewarm tendencies have not left untouched Muslim academics.
