CORRIE SHOCK Fury as Coronation Street favourite Qasim Akhtar backs vile pro-rape hate preacher who is BANNED from UK
EX-CORRIE star Qasim Akhtar has backed an outlawed pro-rape preacher.
The actor, who played Zeedan Nazir, stunned fans by teaming up with Islamic cleric Uthman ibn Farooq.
The US hate cleric claimed it is lawful to have sex with female slaves in shocking comments that could be seen to encourage grooming gangs.
His extremist views got him banned from the UK in May.
But Akhtar met him in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
They posed for snaps, and Akhtar praised Farooq’s “beautiful reminders”.
Manchester-born Akhtar played Chesney Khan in Channel 4’s Shameless before joining Coronation Street in 2014.
He left in 2018 but returned for a stint from September 2021 to February 2023.
He then moved to Pakistan, called out his “degenerate” past, and trained with guns.
San Diego-based Farooq was due to begin a speaking tour of London, Manchester and Birmingham entitled “Waking the Dead — Returning from the Darkness”.
But then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper removed his permission to travel.
A Home Office spokesman said: “We will ensure that all available measures are used to refuse entry to those intending to sow hatred and division in our communities.”
In a YouTube video, Farooq was asked why it was lawful and not adultery to have “intimacy” with a slave, but was adulterous to have intimacy with a non-slave.
Mr Farooq, a speaker with the One Message Foundation, replied: “Allah made it that those people taken under a war as captives, who you’re now going to support and keep in your house and spend money on and treat well, that they are like a wife. This is somebody who you can have those relationships with.”
Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Faith Matters and Tell Mama which supports victims of anti-Muslim hate, called the comments “abhorrent”.
