MAKKAH — Sheikh Faisal Ghazzawi, imam and preacher of the Grand Mosque in Makkah, cautioned the faithful to be wary of the growing immoral tendencies in the society, especially sexual perversion, saying that homosexuality is a heinous crime. In his Friday sermon at the Grand Mosque in Makkah, he underlined the need to uphold moral values and maintain the sanctity of marital relations. "God Almighty has made marriage between a man and a woman a universal law, but Satan misleads the servants of God to transgress the limits set by God and commit what is repulsive to good natures. This situation reached a level where the devilish forces poised to obliterate the innate nature and mislead people to introduce laws legitimizing marriage of a man with a man (gay marriage) and a woman with a woman (lesbian marriage), intermarriage with animals, incitement to sexual perversion and all kinds of pornography as they call it civilization while they take a hostile stance against those who disprove this and label them backward people and extremists," he said while cautioning that such people fight purity and virtue, as they succumbed to immorality and vice, and subjected to moral degradation, value collapse, and descent into bestial behaviors. Sheikh Ghazzawi affirmed that God Almighty created His servants on the right instinct and made them prefer virtues and hate evil and ward it off. The imam stressed that Satan distracted people from the true religion, making them violate God's laws and rulings, and deviate from what is required by sound minds and generous instincts. God created humans and made them into two types, male and female and differentiated between them. He made each one of them their own characteristics and attributes. The imam noted that Satan's intervention to instigate men and women to violate their innate nature. "Then comes someone who contradicts his nature and tries to change natural gender of human beings so that a man turns into a woman, and a woman turns into a man," he said while quoting the Tradition of the Prophet (peace be upon him) in this regard. "The Prophet cursed the effeminate men and the immodest women." Sheikh Ghazzawi denounced Islamophobia and malicious campaign being unleashed against Islam and Muslims, while citing the incidents of burning of the copy of the Holy Qur'an as the latest example for this. "Those slanderers who break the innate nature and change the creation of God have become spiritually bankrupt and have negated all human and civilized values, as they are suffering from moral crises and social problems. They provoke the feelings of Muslims everywhere by waging offensive campaigns and hostile acts against the Islamic world under the pretext of freedom of opinion." "These acts include burning the copy of the Holy Qur'an, humiliating and desecrating it, and discrediting the Prophet (peace be upon him) through mocking and defaming him and questioning his Sunnah. Thus, they showed their hidden hatred against Muslims and fueled the fire of hatred and violence," the imam said while noting that all these acts, by the grace of God, are desperate attempts to block the path of God and distort the image of Islam.
