Posted on 05/27/2004 1:17:45 PM PDT by missyme
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.
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. A woman's rampant desires and irresistible attractiveness gives her 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, or 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 insure 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 premodern 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 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 explains the extreme sensitivity to such varied matters as girls wearing the headscarf in French classrooms, "honor" killings in Jordan, women drivers in Saudi Arabia, and those pictures from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
What they need is a femenist movement over there. THERE it would actually be useful. Here it stopped being useful shortly after we won women's sufferage. We should send our hairiest, manliest femenists over there where they are actually needed.
I am afraid they would just commit mass killings of the women. it seems to me they cannot contain themselves by seeing a woman so women have to cover themselves from the Volturistic beasts.
Wait till Muslim 'men' get delt with Social Services, Domestic Abuse Courtrooms, Child Support,
Visitation, Female Activist Femanazi Judges.....Bwahahahahaha
Civilzation 'HO'......
It is a twisted circle.
They hate women because they lust after women
which makes them hate them.
And it is all the woman's fault.
If they believe women are so sexually aggressive and deviant willing to corupt them in a moments notice , why are they so hep to Blow themselves up to reap the Virgin Harem? Maybe Muslim men are a bunch of baby raping out of control pedophiles
Camels don't talk, but sheep lie.
My thoughts were kind of along the same line. They keep the women in bags because if they didn't the men would be interested in one thing and one thing only. And it would not be jihad!
An ALICE IN WONDERLAND world :right is wrong,evil is good. Women are desirable/women are evil.
Pathological socially disfunctional society .
Where is NOW and the so called Women's movement when such brutal abuse of women is evident?
Out shilling for "pro-choice" candidates and judges. Protecting a woman's right to kill future women. They have a lot in common; same result, different methods.
best joke ive ever heard!! my best friend told me that one and now all he has to do is say sheep lie and we all break out laughing.
Sensitivity? They harshly beat women for even being seen with a man not their husband. Sensitivity? They punish the women for being raped by a man not their husband. Sensitivity? They conduct "honor" killings" and treat women as property. This article explains nothing except how strange their culture is.
It sounds like muslim men have perfected the "It's not my fault, I'm just a victim" mentality. Who knew how passionate and seductive all those seldom-showered/covered/cowering/servant/wives really were!
Exactly why the dog collar torture idea was so perfect; death is nothing to these guys, but having to submit to women- that's really torture to them. We ought to be sending Brittney Spears over there to really freak them out. Or Madonna.
You're right...It would be "Jihard"....
That is just it,
you would be amazed how passionate/joyful/loving the they are.
I am not talking about sexually, but in their interactions with each other and their children. Don't be fooled, there is tremendous strength and beauty under the burkas.
And the fact that they still have 'it' in spite of being beaten down just pisses the men off more.
I think they have watched to many Cleopatra movies...
At least they'd be wishing it were so!
What rape pictures is Pipes talking about? To my knowledge, and somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, all the photos of a sexual nature either depict US troopers Lynddie England and Charles Graner engaging in consensual sex or they depict the sexual humiliation of male prisoners engaging in various degrading solitary sex acts. Neither type of activity can be categorized as rape, which requires forcible penetration.
If you want to extend the metaphor even further, ask yourself why the 9/11 murderers struck at the Trade Center. You know, the world's tallest penis symbols?
This confirms it, we liberate their women, and the Islamofacists will walk around like their balls were cut off. MacArthur had it right after WWII when he made sure Japanese women had the vote.
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