In the early hours of Sunday morning, as news came through about the massacre in Orlando, I was at a bar with some friends. We were a group of Muslims, Hindus, and Jews, atheists and agnostics, straights and gays, doing more or less what the innocent young men and women at Pulse night club were doing before they were mowed down by bullets. The moment it became known that the Orlando killer was a Muslim, and that this was both a hate crime and an act of terrorism, I immediately went rigid. He would have killed all of us if he were here, I thought, and he could have started with me.

The facts are still being pieced together from Orlando, but some things are now clear: Omar Mateen was a disturbed Muslim with mental health issues; he had bought his assault rifle legally; he was twice interviewed by the FBI; he was a drinker and an abusive husband; he had called the police department before the carnage and pledged allegiance to ISIS. Most surprisingly for a radicalized fanatic, he had once stated a buffoonish affinity for both al Qaeda and Hezbollah, thus putting himself on both sides of the war between Sunni and Shiite extremists. In most respects, the Orlando killer fits the same profile as other lone-wolf attackers: a distressed loud-mouth seeking religiously sanctified revenge for alleged crimes he knows nothing about and on behalf of people he has never met. What is different this time is that the killer’s target was a venue where gay people congregated. A dose of homophobia was added to the usual mix of religious fanaticism and self-loathing—a particularly potent dose, it appears, because it turns out the killer may have been gay himself and had visited Pulse at least a dozen times before.

As expected, the loudest screams on social media following the attack were from people either condemning Islam or condemning Islamophobia, but both the anti-Islam crowd and the anti-Islamophobia crowd generally treated the homophobic element of the crime as an afterthought. The Christian right and the New Atheists tend to focus on Islam to the exclusion of other issues—ask them about the white gunman who was arrested with explosives en route to the Los Angeles Pride Parade the same day, and you might get a shrug. Meanwhile, those on the anti-racist left usually refrain from criticizing non-white culture, because they see themselves as the embattled defenders of pluralistic liberalism. Yet after the gay community was specifically and brutally targeted, far too many Muslim activists and leaders were silent on the homophobia within the Islamic community. The prominent scholar Yasir Qadhi claimed that “the guy was mental, plain and simple” and that “Islam’s stance on homosexuality is IRRELEVANT to this massacre, period.” This would be like saying racism was irrelevant in the shooting of a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last summer.

The LGBTQ community has been attacked by a man whose civil rights and whose faith would have been fiercely protected by liberals. Pressing questions need to be asked. The most important of these is whether Islamic culture, or Middle Eastern and Central-South Asian social mores—the major assumptions upon which Mateen based his life—were themselves discriminatory and hateful towards gays. It is time to ask whether such attitudes were the mental fingers on the trigger long before the dreadful morning of June 12, 2016.

Growing up, I attended Koran classes in Toronto every day between the age of 6 and 16. I have traveled around the world and discussed Islam in Geneva, Jordan, Jerusalem, Iraq, and Turkey. I harbor no resentments towards Islam, and despite my current agnosticism, I still call myself a Muslim because the world of Islam has been an integral part of my identity for my entire life. I confess that when discussing Islam with white people, the writer in me tussles with the spokesman who seems to overtake the wheel of my mind, responsibly steering the conversation away from moral gray areas. The offer to become an informant on one’s culture will be familiar to any minority writer, as well as the guilt that comes with confirming a white person’s presumptions that a non-white culture may be inferior. The native informant trap is all too real for any non-white writer and must be avoided; it is doubly real for Muslims who can easily cash in by criticizing their own kind.