LGBTQ Criminalisation in Muslim-Majority States: Colonial Law, Sharia Claims, and Modern Repression

The Ottoman Penal Code of 1858, modelled on the Napoleonic Code, omitted sodomy as a statutory offence. The omission is often described as decriminalisation, but recent scholarship cautions that this imports a modern Western legal category into a legal system where same-sex intimacy had not been criminalised in the same statutory form. The narrower and better-supported claim is that the 1858 code did not create a modern anti-sodomy offence, leaving later criminalisation in many successor states to arise from colonial and postcolonial statutes rather than direct Ottoman penal continuity.

Two years after the Ottoman decriminalisation, the British Raj enacts Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, criminalising "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" with imprisonment up to life. Over subsequent decades, Britain exports equivalent provisions to its colonies across Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Academic research published by the University of Reading documents how today's anti-sodomy laws in numerous Muslim-majority countries — including Pakistan, Malaysia, and Sudan — derive directly from British colonial penal codes rather than from Islamic jurisprudence. This colonial origin is the single largest structural source of current criminalisation globally.

Egypt enacts Law No. 10/1961 on combating prostitution and debauchery. Egypt has no standalone law explicitly targeting homosexuality, but prosecutors and courts subsequently interpret Article 9(b)'s prohibition on "debauchery" (fujur) to cover consensual same-sex conduct. Public morality provisions in the Penal Code are used alongside this law in prosecutions. Human Rights Watch extensively documents how Egyptian authorities deploy both provisions in campaigns of mass arrest, which intensify sharply after 2013.

Within weeks of Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Tehran and the proclamation of the Islamic Republic, executions for sexual offences begin. The Washington Post documented three men executed in May 1979 on sexual offence charges. In a September 1979 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Khomeini defended the executions using the analogy of cutting off a gangrenous finger, stating: "Corruption, corruption. We have to eliminate corruption." The theocracy frames sexual non-conformity as gharbzadegi — Westoxification — and identifies its elimination as a founding ideological mission of the Islamic Republic. The Human Dignity Trust documents that this framing, rather than any classical Sharia precedent, drove immediate codification of the death penalty.

General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq enacts five Hudood Ordinances as the centrepiece of his Islamisation programme. The Zina Ordinance criminalises all sexual conduct outside marriage, with death penalty provisions for acts meeting Hudud evidentiary requirements — the same four-witness standard that functioned as de facto non-enforcement under classical Sharia. Pakistan already retains Section 377 of the colonial Indian Penal Code, carrying a maximum life sentence for "carnal intercourse against the order of nature." The Hudood Ordinances add a second, explicitly Sharia-framed criminalisation layer. The Human Dignity Trust notes that whether the Zina provisions apply to same-sex conduct is legally contested; no Hudud execution for same-sex conduct has been confirmed under Pakistani courts. Prosecutions proceed overwhelmingly under the colonial Section 377 instead.

Iran's post-revolutionary Islamic Penal Code codifies the death penalty for lavat (penetrative same-sex acts between men) and discretionary sentences including flogging for non-penetrative acts and acts between women. Conviction can rest on prescribed evidentiary rules or confession; human rights organisations have repeatedly documented coercive interrogation conditions in Iranian criminal cases. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and Human Dignity Trust both stress that exact totals for executions specifically for same-sex conduct are difficult to determine because court records are opaque and multiple charges are often combined.

Three independent institutional sources document the same pattern: Section 377 prosecutions in Pakistan rarely proceed through formal judicial channels. Instead, the law provides police with a legal pretext for systematic extortion — gay men and transgender women are detained, threatened with prosecution, and released in exchange for cash or sexual favours. The US State Department's 2023 Human Rights Report states the provision is "sometimes used by police as a means to extract bribes or sexual favours under threat of prosecution." The UK Home Office's 2025 country assessment documents police "abusing the law as a tool to blackmail, harass, and extort LGBT+ people." This enforcement gap does not reflect tolerance; it reflects Section 377's function as an economic instrument rather than a judicial one.

Human Rights Watch documents multiple executions in Iran for homosexual conduct in 2005, including a November report on two men executed in Gorgan. HRW notes that because Iran's courts investigate "moral issues" in closed proceedings and do not publish charge-specific records, it is structurally impossible to determine with precision how many people have been executed specifically for same-sex conduct versus other charges. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center's report "Denied Identity" establishes through case-by-case analysis that the pattern of execution is systematic, not aberrational.

Saudi Arabia has no single codified law explicitly against homosexuality but enforces prohibitions through the Sharia court system and, historically, the religious police (Mutawa — whose powers of arrest were stripped by royal decree in 2016 but who retain a reporting and patrol role). The Human Dignity Trust documents that Saudi authorities arrest people on gender expression grounds, subject detainees to forced anal examinations (condemned by the UN as torture), and impose prison sentences and corporal punishment. The UAE similarly enforces anti-homosexuality provisions under both federal law and emirate- level Sharia codes, with both nationals and foreigners prosecuted. Human Rights Watch's 2025 World Report confirms Saudi authorities continue these enforcement practices.

In June 2015, Istanbul's governorate bans the annual Pride march, which had drawn large crowds in previous years. Police disperse attendees with tear gas, water cannon, and rubber bullets; Amnesty International later states that Istanbul Pride has been unlawfully banned since 2015. On 20 March 2021, President Erdoğan signs Presidential Decree No. 9 withdrawing Turkey from the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention on violence against women. Turkey's Directorate of Communications states that the convention had been "manipulated" by people trying to "normalise homosexuality," making LGBTQ people an explicit rationale for leaving the treaty.

On 22 September 2017, several young people wave rainbow flags at a Cairo concert by Lebanese band Mashrou' Leila. Egyptian security forces launch a systematic crackdown, making at least 43 documented arrests within days under debauchery and public morality laws. Prosecutors subject multiple detainees to forced anal examinations. Human Rights Watch documents that police use fake social media profiles and dating apps to entrap suspects, plant digital evidence, and fabricate chat logs when no incriminating material is found. The US State Department, citing a local rights group, reports over 250 documented LGBT arrests in Egypt between 2013 and 2017 — a figure that predates the concert crackdown.

Human Rights Watch releases a 135-page report, "All This Terror Because of a Photo: Digital Targeting and Its Offline Consequences for LGBT People in the Middle East and North Africa," documenting systematic state-run entrapment across Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. The report documents 20 cases of online entrapment on Grindr and Facebook by security forces who created fake profiles posing as LGBT people, plus 17 cases of online extortion by private individuals. When no incriminating digital evidence is found, officers download same-sex dating applications onto suspects' phones, upload photos, and fabricate conversations. Documented offline consequences include arbitrary arrest, torture, forced exile, and severe mental health harm.

In May 2023, Pakistan's Federal Shariat Court declares key sections of the landmark 2018 Transgender Persons Act incompatible with Islamic principles, including provisions linked to self-identification. Human Dignity Trust and Outright International describe the ruling as a major rollback of formal transgender rights protections. The judgment does not create a new criminal offence for same-sex conduct, but it narrows a rights framework that had provided legal recognition and documentation pathways for transgender people.

On 23 January 2024, a Houthi criminal court in Dhamar, northern Yemen, sentences nine men to death — seven by stoning and two by crucifixion — on charges including homosexuality, spreading immorality, and immoral acts. Twenty-three others receive prison sentences between six months and ten years. Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab analyses three videos from 24–25 January showing at least two individuals being publicly flogged by a person in security uniform. Amnesty calls the sentences a grave violation of human rights and demands the immediate and unconditional release of all people held solely for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

On 1 February 2024, the court of first instance in Ibb, southern Yemen, hands death sentences to 13 students and sentences three others to flogging on charges of "spreading homosexuality." Human Rights Watch documents the sentences alongside the January cases and describes the pattern as a stark escalation. In under six weeks, Houthi courts have issued 22 death sentences for homosexuality-related charges — the most concentrated documented use of capital punishment against LGBTQ people in the recent record.

On 18 February 2025, Turkish authorities detain KaosGL.org editor-in-chief Yıldız Tar within the scope of an investigation into the Peoples' Democratic Congress (HDK). On 21 February, Tar and others are arrested on charges of illegal organisation membership. Kaos GL reports that the appeal petition argued the accusations were based on journalistic activity, old phone records, and rights work rather than concrete evidence of armed activity. Tar is later released after approximately four months, but the case remains pending into 2026.

ILGA World's 2025 legal data release reports that 64 UN member states criminalise consensual same-sex sexual acts, and that the death penalty is the legally prescribed penalty in seven UN member states. ILGA's database and broader Laws on Us legal mapping show that criminalisation remains legally diverse: some statutes directly punish same-sex acts, while others operate through morality, debauchery, Sharia, colonial-era, or hybrid provisions.

In September 2025, ILGA Asia documents targeted harassment and expulsion campaigns against transgender people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A committee of elders in Swabi district orders transgender people to leave the area "to protect the youth," with police mobilised to enforce compliance. ILGA Asia also reports that 226 people, including five transgender individuals, are arrested in a late-night raid. The episode shows how the formal rollback of rights protections can be followed by localised coercion without the need for a new national criminal statute.

In October 2025, leaked proposals for Turkey's 11th Judicial Package threaten prison sentences for conduct deemed "contrary to biological sex," the public encouragement or promotion of such conduct, and same-sex ceremonies. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe the package as a major threat to LGBTQ people, freedom of expression, civil society, and press freedom. The draft would mark a shift from administrative repression and protest bans toward explicit criminal penalties for LGBTQ expression and advocacy.