An Islamic preacher who likens being gay to a disease has been banned from speaking at a London university.

24-year-old Imran ibn Mansur, known as the ‘Dawah Man’, had been due to speak to the Islamic society at the University of East London.

Groups had planned to protest the event, due to the speaker’s record of homophobia.

In a video last year he advised a man struggling with homosexuality to marry a woman to “protect” himself from “filthy Western culture”.

He told the man: “It’s not something you were born with, the same way a person who’s sick, we’re all born healthy but then you get an illness so you take the treatment to get rid of not only the symptoms, but the disease.

“Homosexuality, sodomy, is an act that in the Sharia… comes under the category of ‘obscene, filthy, shameless’ acts.”

The University has previously banned the Islamic society from holding an event that segregated men from women.

A spokesperson for the university told the Standard: “We cannot allow enforced segregation at lectures, nor can we offer a public platform to speakers known to publicise and disseminate homophobic views.

“These go against our equality policies and more importantly UEL’s core values.”

Mr Mansur told the newspaper: “I was just merely voicing a belief that millions of people across the world, from the majority of the major religions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism – uphold.

“Muslims don’t in any way shape or form have a problem with homosexuals, there’s nothing within our religion that specifically tells us that we should be mean to homosexuals, that we shouldn’t allow them to enter into our cities, or come and pray with us, in fact a man who has homosexual inclinations can lead Muslims in prayer and be an imam in a mosque.”