The Ideals of Imam Muhsin Hendricks Live on in South Africa’s Human Rights Activism

"It's convenient to say that Imam Muhsin was killed because he was gay," South African visual artist, coach, and activist Wisaal Abrahams tells OkayAfrica. "He wasn't only about queer freedom; he was a humanitarian activist doing the work that nobody wants to do."

Abrahams used to work with Muhsin Hendricks, the South African maverick known as the world's first publicly gay Imam, who was murdered on Feb. 15, 2025. The crime sent shock waves through queer and progressive communities across the continent and the world.

"Many people have been saved from committing suicide because they were living with something that the formal religious structures were against in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity," says Teboho G. Klaas, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. "[Imam Hendricks] helped so many people to appreciate who they are, to love themselves and live life fully."

Klaas is the religion program officer atThe Other Foundation, a community trust that gives grants to LGBTQ activists and their allies in 13 African countries; Hendricks' foundations,The Inner Circle, and the Al-Ghurbaah Foundation have been grantees. "Cutting his life did not cut his ideals," says Klaas. "We know that he has not been defeated."

The police stated that the motive of the murder was unknown, but writer and activist Kelly-Eve Koopman says that this was a politically motivated murder as Imam Hendricks had been receiving death threats for many years. "The assassination of the imam also needs to be looked at through the lens of gender-based violence and the idea that certain people deserve to be violated because of the way they express their gender, whether that be a woman, a queer person, or the imam," she says.

Online, tributes and condolences coexist with hateful comments. A group of queer Muslim activists, some of whom are helping Hendricks' family pursue a criminal case, are facing a doxxing campaign and receiving death threats after a list with their names spread on the internet.

While South Africa's Constitution guarantees safety and freedom from discrimination for all people, this legal framework does not translate into actual safety for many marginalized communities who continue to face violence and persecution with little to no state support. As one South African, who works at theGALA Queer Archive, tells OkayAfrica: "The constitution is predominantly only effective for the wealthy."

"The social realm is a hard area of work because it's about changing the perspectives and understanding of people," says Klaas. In this social realm, religious institutions play a key role in stigmatizing members of LGBTQ communities, but they also have the power to promote tolerance.

"It's at once about religion, and it's not," says Koopman. "In our last couple of elections, we've seen very conservative movements that claim to have religious values, but those values are being weaponized to create the threat of the other and hurt people."

"There are extremists who are jumping on this global bandwagon around superiority: who is allowed into heaven and who is not?" explains Abrahams. "But really, they're not scared of queerness. Their fear is becoming irrelevant; that is what I'm picking up being on the ground with this whole matter."

Koopman and Abrahams attribute the murder to a global shift towards right-wing extremism. "These violent communities are very small, but they're organized, proud, patriarchal, and male-dominated, which is not different to any other tribe in Africa," says Abrahams. People who disagree with the gender expression or sexuality of others are becoming more emboldened to take action on their own terms because they are feeling threatened by other people's freedom in a fast-changing world.

Hendricks' murder and its aftermath of continued digital incitement expose a challenge that the South African government is yet unable to tackle. "Imam Muhsin's case has highlighted a major flaw in the digital justice system or the lack of digitization in the justice system," says Abrahams. "His death gave us a massive indication that we're not prepared to deal with things like this."

On the ground, human rights activists continue organizing through various avenues of engaging religious and tribal leaders and politicians and building alternate, safer spaces. "There's been quite a shift," says Koopman. "Suddenly, we know that we have to be a lot more safe and conscious. That's been quite sobering, but it has also strengthened spaces where queer politics are centered."

"I remember [Imam Hendricks] saying: It will be God who judges him, not anybody else. That encouraged every other person not to take judgments made by people who make them feel [like a] lesser human as important," says Klaas. "There are more Muhsin Hendricks who are living and breathing and believe in themselves and the God that Muhsin believed in. It is sad that we will not physically have him around, but we celebrate that he has multiplied."