A Europe-wide Gallup survey carried out last year found that none of the 500 British Muslims interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. What was perhaps more alarming was a Policy Exchange report from 2007, Living Apart Together, which found that 71 per cent of Muslims aged 16 to 24 thought that homosexuality was not only wrong but should be illegal. This staggeringly high number also gave the lie to the notion, so often trotted out, that with time, younger generations of immigrant families would become more liberal, more integrated into Western ways: the figure of 71 per cent was the highest for any of the age groups questioned (the same survey found that a large minority — 37 per cent — of 16- to 24-year-old Muslims would prefer to live under sharia in Britain).     

A few months ago, I attended a meeting in London arranged by an upmarket gay networking group, at which openly gay representatives of the main political parties were speaking to a packed audience, there to voice their various concerns about gay issues. From the floor, I asked if the panel shared my concern, as a gay man, on growing Islamist influence and the hostility to homosexuality embedded in Islam as evidenced in figures such as those above. 

Needless to say, nobody answered. I was informed instead by the Tory spokesman, Nick Herbert, that one should be careful not to tar all Muslims with the same brush. This has become the stock response to all questions raised about Muslim opinion, and serves no purpose except to evade. Of course, I imagine the panel, which also included the Labour MP Chris Bryant, would have had no such qualms about tarring Catholicism with the same brush, or using the words of Evangelicals to besmirch the whole of Christianity. 

Gays are pretty sensitive when it comes to detecting possible future persecution, which makes the relative silence about Islam — whether from denial or simple ignorance — all the more worrying. I've certainly found, when bringing up the subject on my travels around gay London, that one is usually met with the response: "Ah, well: it's those Christian fundamentalists that worry me."  

"The gay activist establishment has taught gay men that Christian fundamentalists are their enemies, while members of fellow ‘oppressed' groups, including Muslims, are their allies in victimhood," says Bruce Bawer, an Oslo-based gay American writer and author of While Europe Slept (Broadway, 2007). "Solidarity proscribes criticism. Never mind that these ‘allies' preach that gays should be executed. Under the reigning PC mentality, the only way in which most gays can bring themselves to criticise Islam is to do so as part of a blanket rejection of all religion."

Bawer, a liberal who moved from the US to Amsterdam in 1998, relocating to Oslo the following year, agrees that the Left is crippled by a multicultural mentality that views America, the West and capitalism as evil, and views non-Western groups as virtuous victims of imperialism and colonialism whose cultures we have no right to criticise. "Sharia calls for the execution of gay people," he says. "And for ‘good' Muslims, sharia is non-negotiable. Islam has had no Enlightenment."