Here’s the truth about the history of Islam’s relationship with homosexuality, and why we need to stop perceiving Muslims as a global threat

The media has been trying to understand the Pulse nightclub murders and Omar Mateen’s motives through an anorexic knowledge of Islam and Muslims. For some, this media coverage is rubbing salt in an already gaping wound.

Mateen is said to have dedicated the attacks to ISIS in a call he placed with 911. The killer’s connection to ISIS, whether simply wishful or well-established, is precisely where we should start when we ponder the question of whether this violence is produced by Islam or not.

To argue in the affirmative is to suggest that ISIS can be reduced to Islam, and Islam to ISIS.

Even with everything that has been written about ISIS in the last five years, few people have noticed the group’s peculiar flag. Since the dawn of Islam, Muslims have always and invariably said “Mohammed Rasul Allah.” This means that Mohammed is God’s Prophet.

But on the ISIS flag, the words are written in the reverse. The flag reads: “Allah Rasul Mohammed.” Read as a sentence, the words mean: “God (is the) Prophet (of) Mohammed.”

I’m sure that ISIS’ chief graphic designer did not actually intend for God to become Mohammed’s prophet in syntax. Rather, the intention was probably to re-brand Islam for the 21st century with something unique. But the final product has inadvertently produced blasphemy. It betrays the grammatical and theological illiteracy at the heart of their endeavor.

Recently, Salman al-Ouda, a prominent Saudi scholar, made headlines by pointing out that legislative punishment for homosexuality is not supported by scripture.

Al-Ouda is not the first to point this out. Al-Hassan al-Basri, a highly regarded scholar of Islam from the 7th century, is said to have found same-sex relations between women permissible. Ibn Hazm, a 12th century scholar of great repute, also details why punishment of homosexuality is not supported by scripture.

In ninth century Baghdad, during the reign of al-Caliph al-Ma’mun, gender and sexual diversity was commonplace, and it is alleged that al-Ma’mun’s chief judge, Yahya Bin Aktham, was a sodomite.

Meanwhile, homoerotic Arabic poetry fills the classical literary canon of the Arab-Muslim world. There are many more examples.

Like Christianity and Buddhism, Islamic scripture was not written down at the time of its revelation. It was transmitted orally before it was collected and canonized.

That process came to produce so many different schools of thought. Although the Koran is said to have remained virtually unchanged since the days of its oral transmission, the same cannot be said of the concentrated effort to try to make sense of it.

There are more books explaining the Koran than any one scholar can collect, read and study in a lifetime. Across Islamic history there have been more schools of thought, ways of interpretation and of living out Islam, more racially diverse Muslim groups, than we are able to account for.

Some have survived; others have become obsolete. Islam made it to China and to America, to India and to Bosnia and to Tanzania and to Vietnam. And yet all we see on the TV screen, which these days might be large in size but is small in every other way, is ISIS.

We must not deny the tremendous diversity of Muslim religious practice in nations all over the globe.

We shouldn’t lie to ourselves either. Homophobia and transphobia are huge problems throughout the Muslim world, both in the Muslim-majority contexts and in the diaspora. Contemporary modalities of religious thought are a big culprit.

Some of this intolerance fuels actual violence against gays and lesbians. I grew up in a secular household and went to a Catholic school. My first girlfriend was a devout Christian, and we barely made it out of high school alive.

The homophobia that permeated our lives did not come from Muslims, nor was it simply confined to the Arab community we come from. It came from a racially diverse group of students and teachers in the heart of Sydney, Australia. This early experience of coming out had a huge impact on my future work as a scholar. I did not want anyone to have to go through what I went through.

It now appears to be that Matten himself may have been gay. If so, the hatred he must have experienced for himself would have come from the social intolerance that surrounded him.

Religious belief does play a big role in creating and sustaining homophobia, but this is not limited to Islam. It is religious belief that helps produce homophobia and transphobia in North Carolina and in Kansas. Religious belief helped fuel intolerance during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when the Reagan administration refused to act while thousands of homosexual men fell ill and died.

Homophobia can emerge organically from religious beliefs and practice; it can also emerge without them. A tendency towards violence can emerge through religious institutions or ideologies; it can equally emerge without them.

Sensible gun control and a public mental health-care system that works will curtail some of this maniacal violence.

What will not help is the continued perception of Islam and Muslims as a global threat. That myopic confusion is the real danger. It is what radicalizes both some Muslims and those who fear or hate them.

We need to think better, think harder. We can’t afford to understand less. It’s time we started to understand more.

Samar Habib is a writer, researcher and scholar. She is the author of “Female Homosexuality in the Middle East” and the editor of “Islam and Homosexuality.” She lives in California.