Sorry to comment on a long-dead article, but:
This is the key part. You see the same thing in certain regions of the US with conservative-religious Christians. I just don’t think one should be allowed to practice clinical psychology with views that homosexuality is a morally wrong “lifestyle choice.” You need to be willing to accept the sexual identity of your patient in order to care for them properly, and failure to do so is tremendously dangerous.
As you said, a lot of young gay Muslims are living in home environments where they’re feeling oppressed and threatened. When you’re living in a conservative community with a conservative family who demonise your feelings, it can seem like you can have nowhere to turn for relief, which is the core cause of self-image issues and depression in young non-heterosexual individuals. I have experienced this in a different context, so I know how psychologically destructive those environments can be.
Dover recently authored this article which indirectly revises some of her views, but it looks like a half-measure to me because it doesn’t address the heart of the issue: do you, as a Muslim, find homosexuality morally acceptable? I’d love to see more Muslims coming out and saying “yeah, there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. It’s completely morally acceptable even within the bounds of my religion” as has happened for Christianity, Buddhism, and most other faiths which have previously rejected homosexual acts as immoral or unwise.
And yet, there’s a sidestepping of homophobia by Muslims across the political spectrum. On the Drum a couple of months ago, not even Silma Ihram, who is extremely liberal in her social views, could accept homosexuality within a Muslim framework. For her (and most liberal Muslim co-thinkers), it seems like the fact of homosexuality is okay, but homosexual acts are completely off the table. That leads to the question: how do you reconcile the obvious rejection of homosexual acts (in both the Qur’an and various Hadithat) with a liberal and accepting approach to the fact of non-heterosexuality?
