WILLIAMS’ FATWA

 

The Williams’ Fatwa is a much-publicized fatwa issued by the United Kingdom Islamic Society against British writer Derek Williams (b. 1987.) in 2020. The fatwa was issued on January 27th and first published on the U.K. Islamic Data Portal by the Grand Mufti of Great Britain Ruhollah Kamil al-Husayni.

The fatwa named an article Williams wrote for the August 2019 issue of Time Out London about openly gay Iranian refugee Saes Hussein who emigrated to the U.K. in 2017 from his native Tehran. Hussein’s father is Hyla Hussein, the director of The Department of Handi-work and Culture in Iran since 1992, and a highly placed official in the Islamic Republic. According to Dr. Alastair Day-Parsons, Regius Professor of Theology and Religion at Oxford, the political status of Hyla Hussein and Saes Hussein’s refusal to return to Iran after being approved by the Islamic Republic to attend a four-year degree at the University of Manchester is likely a motivating factor for the decision to issue the fatwa. Kamil al-Husayni has repeatedly denied that the fatwa is political, and said in an interview for Al Jeezera in 2021 that it was issued for Williams’ portrayal in The Queer Iranian of gay sex as common in Iran, and the article’s deliberate association of homosexuality with the Islamic faith. The United Kingdom Islamic Society have been strongly criticized by the British government and national and international human rights and freedom of speech organizations for the fatwa–the first against a U.K. citizen since writer Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1981.

 References

(1) “The Queer Iranian” Time Out, London. Retrieved January 2021

(2) “‘The Queer Iranian’ and The Satanic Verses: U.K. writers who provoked the wrath of Islam” The New York Times, New York, Retrieved September 2022

(3) United Kingdom Islamic Society

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