SwiftVets.com

[Craig]

Female desire and Islamic trauma
By DANIEL PIPES

Muslim civilization not only portrays women as sexually desirous, but it sees them as more passionate than men

The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq touched such a nerve in the Muslim world that one analyst said that the rape pictures "would equal a nuclear explosion" if seen in Muslim countries. Such extreme reactions raise the delicate topic of sex in Muslim-Western relations.

The West and the Muslim world entertain vastly different assumptions about female sexuality. (I draw here on the ideas of Fatima Mernissi in her 1975 book Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society.)

In the West, it was until recently assumed that males and females experience eros differently, with men actively undertaking the hunt, seduction, and penetration, and women passively enduring the experience. Only lately did the idea gain currency that women too have sexual desires.

Considering the Muslim reputation for archaic customs, it is ironic to note that Islamic civilization not only portrays women as sexually desirous, but it sees them as more passionate than men.

Indeed, this understanding has determined the place of women in traditional Muslim life.

In the Islamic view, men and women both seek intercourse, during which their bodies undergo similar processes, bringing similar pleasures. If Westerners traditionally saw the sexual act as a battleground where the male exerts his supremacy over the female, Muslims saw it as a tender and shared pleasure.

Indeed, Muslims generally believe female desire to be so much greater than the male equivalent that the woman is viewed as the hunter and the man as her passive victim. If believers feel little distress about sex acts as such, they are obsessed with the dangers posed by women. So strong are her needs thought to be, she ends up representing the forces of unreason and disorder.

Women's rampant desires and irresistible attractiveness give them a power over men that even rivals God's. She must be contained, for her unbridled sexuality poses a direct danger to the social order. (Symbolic of this, the Arabic word fitna means both "civil disorder" and "beautiful woman.")

The entire Muslim social structure can be understood as containing female sexuality. It goes to great lengths to separate the sexes and reduce contact between them. This explains such customs as the covering of women's faces and the separation of women's residential quarters (the harem). Many other institutions serve to reduce female power over men, such as her need for a male's permission to travel, work, marry, or divorce. (Revealingly, a traditional Muslim wedding took place between two men - the groom and the bride's guardian.)

EVEN MARRIED couples should not get too attached. To ensure that a man does not become so consumed with passion for his wife that he neglects his duties to God, Muslim family life restricts contact between the spouses by dividing their interests and duties, imbalancing their power relationship (she is more his servant than his companion) and encouraging the mother-son bond over the marital connection.

On the whole, Muslims lived up to these Islamic ideals for male-female relations in pre-modern times. Yet the anxiety persisted that women would break loose of their restrictions and bring perdition to the community.

Those anxieties multiplied in recent centuries as Western influence spread through the Muslim world, for Western ways nearly always collide with Islamic ones. The two are divided by the enhanced power and freedoms women have gained through legal equality, monogamy, romantic love, open sexuality, and a myriad of other customs. As a result, each civilization looks upon the other as deeply flawed, if not barbaric.

For many Muslims, the West poses not just an external threat as the infidel invader, it also erodes traditional mechanisms to cope with the internal threat - woman. This leads to widespread worries about adopting Western ways and a preference instead to cling to older customs. Differences in sexuality, in other words, contribute to an overall Muslim reluctance to accept modernity. Fear of Western erotic ways ends up constraining Muslim peoples in the political, economic, and cultural arenas. Sexual apprehensions constitute a key reason for Islam's trauma in the modern era.

And this, in turn, explains the extreme sensitivity to such varied matters as girls wearing the head scarf in French classrooms, honor killings in Jordan, women drivers in Saudi Arabia, and those pictures from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The writer (www.DanielPipes.org) is author of In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power, from which this derives. His regular column appears in the Wednesday paper

[colmurph]

Maybe this explains why most Muslem countries perform clitorectomies on the women to deprive them of any pleasure in the sex act and why homosexual sex is very common among Arab men to even include relatives. All those women who were raped by Iraqui's in Kuwait must have been the agressor, no?
_________________
CO ODA-14, B Co. 3d SFG (Abn) 66-68
CO A Co. 4/3 INF, 11th LIB, Americal Div. 68-69

[Armorer]

Your ability to cut and paste without any input or analysis of your own is stunning. We are all in awe of your intellect and academic prowess. Indeed, it makes my degree in Middle Eastern Studies pale in comparison. I could tell you about how over generalized, ethnocentric and racist that article is but instead I'll ask you to read Edward Said, Unni Wikan and Anthony Shadid. I'd add Bernard Lewis to the list but terrorist appologists hate him, so what's the point? You quote Lewis and nobody takes you seriously any more. Buying into the crap in that article would be akin to accepting an article about the Amish as accurately depicting all of American culture. It's dangerous and I recomend you don't do it. But what do I know... I compose my own posts.
_________________
"Clean your weapons!"

[Craig]

Okay. Like I presented that the topic was off topic.
But I thought it did have some relation to any forum that might even be slightly related to what seems/is/perceived the enemy of today.

I did expect responses such as the first two so I won't get snotty right back - since my post is OT.

"Why do they hate us" has been a question and the questioner has given us some nonsensical answer.

I would wonder if just hating the enemy is enough or if it would not be better to understand and that understanding might be difficult enough without denying what is actual.

"They" in that culture do seem to perceive a number of things quite different than "we" do - though maybe we were closer in some past centuries. - Well, when did American woman get the right to vote?
Don't bother me with examples - I know well enough that they are more extreme than Western culture has been - but only in some ways.

Bush has answered his own question about "Why do they hate us" and I am convinced that he has every reason to know that he lied rather than to be just mistaken.

I'd like to corner that {expletive} Kerry to make statement about "Why do they hate us." - If nothing else the answer might give some indication if he has given it any study.

Have you studied the "Anti-Jap" attitude of WW II? Maybe it was best that those folks went to *protective* custody. I suppose no one ever cared squat to try to educate that there was a cultural thing about loyalty/fealty to ones government.

Actually it has occurred to me that there is aspect of the same thing in western culture that would likely resist to understand at all what makes women such a threat to men.

[Armorer]

[Craig]

[fortdixlover]

[Armorer]

Yes Craig... I know OT = off topic. Perhaps you aren't familiar with the use of CAPS to express extremes in the capitalized word. I know it's subtle and your grasp of grammar seems a little weak... is English your first language? I only ask because you make many grammatical errors common to ESL students.
ex.