Facebook preacher Nauman Ali Khan was one of two very public personalities dogged with accusations of immorality and indecency back in September.
The accusations against both were – surprise, surprise! – related to their interactions with the opposite gender.
And while starlet Mahira Khan might just have taken the cake for more media attention, the real kicker were the accusations of inappropriate conduct against Nauman and all the subsequent consequences.
The darling of young, educated and impressionable Muslims in the US, Europe, and Pakistan, NAK in his high pitched, double-accented English was always eager to warn his audiences against sin, telling them in grim tones, “Allah SWT says don’t even go near it!”
Yet he seemed to have gone pretty close to it himself, if not jumped in head first. Referring to women as his “hot fantasies” and sending them half-naked pictures of himself flexing was probably stretching the sharia lines, to say the least.
And while denying the initial allegations of sexual misconduct as a malicious attempt to ruin his image was easy enough a cop out for NAK, the vicious denials got just a little more muted after the infamous hot fantasy screenshots were leaked online.
To Nauman’s dismay and audiences’ delight, the leaks got more and more salacious. With a host of former colleagues turning on him, the incident sent his large fan-following reeling, and the religious-Muslim community in the US stood divided.
Perhaps for the first time, the fiasco also called attention towards the vast array of English-speaking Muslim preachers using the internet and social media to spread their hardline message packaged in feel-good boxes.
Since then, however, Nauman has been back at it, as usual, even releasing a brand-new series of lectures. But in his latest sermons, there has been a surprising lack of social system related preaching and a lot of focus on forgiveness and sin. At least he’s self-aware enough about that.
