Saudi Arabia awards preacher who says Muslims can have sex with slaves

Indian cleric Zakir Naik, who has also said 9/11 was an inside job, was handed the King Faisal International Prize for Services to Islam at a glittering ceremony in Riyadh.

A physician by training, the Mumbai-based 49-year-old has carved out a career as a charismatic television preacher, but his controversial views have led to him being banned from entering the UK.

Dr Naik was one of five winners presented a gold medal, a certificate hand written in Arabic calligraphy and an endowment of more than £130,000 by Saudi King Salman during a ceremony at a luxury hotel yesterday.

The president of the Islamic Research Foundation in India, Dr Naik was honoured for being one of the most renowned non-Arabic speaking promoters of Islam.

He founded the Peace TV channel, billed as the world's only channel specialising in comparative religion, which now reaches an estimated English-language audience exceeding 100million, according to his award citation.

'Islam is the only religion that can bring peace to the whole of humanity,' he said in a video biography aired at the ceremony. It was on a broadcast on Peace TV that Dr Naik suggested that Muslims men may rape their slaves.

'There are many verses in the Koran which say you can have sex with your wife and with whatever your right hand possesses,' he told a mass audience at one event.

'Right hand possesses,' he went on. 'Which means your slaves.'

He goes on to qualify his statement by saying the world at the time of the Prophet Mohammed was beset by war, making slavery more common, and that a pious Muslim would marry the slave he wanted to have sex with first. But the remark seems to be a disturbing echo of the doctrines of the Middle East's Islamic State insurgency.

Last October, the terror group published an article on its propaganda page stating that the sexual enslavement of captured Yazidis was justified because they are a 'pagan minority'.

'Enslaving the families of the kuffar (non-believers) and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia,' the article pronounced.

(dailymail.co.uk)