Sex and the single-minded Muslim
- From: "GWhyte" <gwhyte3003@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 06:28:43 -0400
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1739644,00.html
Sex and the single-minded Muslim
Cherry Potter
Young, unmarried men . . . extreme aggression . . . sexual repression. Is
there a link?
IF WE REALLY want to understand the mindset of the Muslim fundamentalists,
it's time that the issue of sexual politics was addressed head on. Just how
does the total domination of women in fundamentalist societies affect the
men? After all, when it comes to sex, both genders are involved. And when it
comes to extreme forms of aggression and violence, sublimated sexual fear
and repression are all too often at the root of the problem.
Take the heartbreaking story of a young Muslim woman, Fatima (I have changed
her name), who was referred for psychotherapy. When I first saw her in the
waiting area, she looked hunched and lifeless in her scruffy jeans and
T-shirt. She had become so severely depressed she rarely left her refugee
hostel. Her English was excellent. She was from a progressive Middle Eastern
country where she had been a university lecturer before fleeing to the West.
As a teenager she had been raped by her brother-in-law. Her mother swore her
to secrecy - imperative to save the family honour. Years later, despite her
successful career, her mother, against Fatima's wishes, arranged for her to
be married to a much older man. To conceal her lost virginity, her mother
hired a doctor to sew up Fatima's vagina. In an act of desperation Fatima
took rat poison in a mosque. Her mother publicly denounced her daughter to
protect the family from scandal. Should Fatima ever return home her brothers
would murder her for bringing dishonour to their family. "Honour" killings,
Fatima told me, were common - the authorities either turn a blind eye or
issue six-month prison sentences.
It's too easy to pigeonhole Fatima's distress as a "woman's issue". Men are
also victims of a cultural mindset that obliges them to display their
masculine dominance by murdering their sisters if they are suspected of
losing their virginity before marriage, or killing their wives if suspected
of adultery.
Fundamentalists demand that women be veiled and segregated at every level of
society, starting at puberty. Public displays of affection between husbands
and wives are forbidden. Wife-beating is so prevalent, many see it as a
normal part of marriage. In bed any sexual position where the woman is on
top is haram or sinful. It's difficult to imagine how either gender can
enjoy intimacy in such a climate.
So what is the effect on young unmarried men who, like youths the world
over, are subject to a whole host of fears about their burgeoning sexuality?
What do they do with their unacceptable sexual fantasies fuelled by the
strict regime and the temptations of the mysterious, hidden feminine world?
Too often they project their self-disgust on to their object of desire, whom
they blame for causing them to have "impure" thoughts. Twenty-five years ago
when Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran, women who let a single lock of hair
fall beneath their headscarves were beaten for abusing their sexual power.
Women who had worn make-up and Western dress under the Shah were denigrated
as "Westoxicated". And the supposedly sexually licentious West became, and
remains, "the Great Satan", purveyor of all evil that must be destroyed.
The connections between sexual repression, extreme violence and a male
obsession with war and death are recognisable in the West. In America
Christian Reconstructionists, a fundamentalist sect, also advocate the death
penalty for adultery, homosexuality and "unchastity before marriage" (but
for women only). Studies of the psychology of Fascism show how the Nazi cult
of obeying, adoring and fearing the Führer is rooted in the patriarchal
family obeying, adoring and fearing the father. The Nazis, like modern
Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, were also obsessed with virgins and
women as submissive housewives and perfect mothers. Their extreme
masculinity values, above all else, male bonding and sacrificing their lives
for the fatherland's high ideals of racial or religious purity, with the
promise of glorious martyrdom.
Fascist mindsets promote the abuse and denigration of "impure" women. In
modern Islamist Tehran there is a thriving sex trade - an estimated 84,000
women are in prostitution and thousands of girls are sold as sex slaves
across the Arab world.
Arguably such societies are in the grip of mass psychosis. Like a paranoid
psychotic they split the world between those they hopelessly idealise as
pure and good, and those they denigrate as evil and out to destroy them. It
is not unusual for a paranoid psychotic to nurture delusions of grandeur and
an imaginary hotline to God.
Western and Islamic feminists have for too long agonised about what right we
have to assume that the sexual freedoms enjoyed by Western women should be a
global gold standard of how to live in the modern world. The debate always
becomes ensnared in multiculturalism - that we must respect the diversity of
beliefs and traditions even if these include human rights abuses of women in
Muslim countries. But we only have to look around us to see how, in the most
sophisticated levels of society where women are seen as equal, men also
benefit - they are more tolerant, more able to enjoy intimacy and less
aggressive towards women and each other. So attitudes towards gender and
sexuality are not just a feminist issue for women to discuss while the men
set about combating terrorism.
To understand the violence of the fundamentalist fascist mentality, skewed
gender relations and repressed sexuality, far from being peripheral, have to
be confronted head on.
The author is a freelance writer and psychotherapist.
.
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