ISLAM: IS THIS A RELIGION?

How the Islamist Mindset Rationalizes - and Promotes - 'Sex Sins'
by Raymond Ibrahim
Pajamas Media
March 1, 2010

http://www.meforum.org/2597/islamist-sex-sins

Is it inconsistent for Muslim "holy warriors" to engage in voyeuristic acts of lasciviousness? Because would-be jihadists and martyrs have been known to frequent strip bars — such as the 9/11 hijackers and Major Nidal Hasan, whose "late-night jiggle-joint carousing stands at odds with the picture of a devout Muslim" — many Americans have concluded that such men cannot be "true" Muslims, leading to the ubiquitous conviction that they are "hijacking Islam."

In fact, Islamists rely on several rationalizations — doctrines, even — that make "jiggle-joint carousing" consistent with Muslim piety. Considering that Islamic law permits sex slaves (Koran 4:3), permits their masters to keep them topless, and makes sex one of the highest paradisiacal rewards, this should come as no great surprise. However, to elaborate:

First, the doctrine of taqiyya allows Muslims residing among infidels to deceive the latter by, among other things, behaving like infidels, e.g., frequenting strip bars: "Taqiyya [deception], even if committed without duress, does not lead to a state of infidelity — even if it leads to sin deserving of hellfire."

In conjunction, the overarching Muslim principle that necessity makes that which is forbidden permissible goes a long way in helping Islamists validate their libidinous desires: "It is 'necessary' for me to be at this strip club so infidels come to believe that I'm just a regular bloke and not a soldier of Allah." Indeed, sometimes the mere gratification of sexual urges is deemed a "necessity" that makes the forbidden permissible in Islam, as in this historical anecdote:

After conquering the Banu Mustaliq tribe in 628, Muhammad's men deemed it "necessary" to rape their captive women (citing their wives' absence and untended desires). However, they also wanted to sell these women for a profit, which posed complications, as copulating with them risked impregnating them. So they rationalized that 'azl (coitus interruptus) would solve the problem and asked Muhammad. The prophet went one step further and offered a cosmic rationalization, dismissing coitus interruptus as unnecessary, "for every soul that is to be born up to the Day of Resurrection will be born" — that is, pullout or not, you cannot thwart Allah's will, so don't bother. (See here for more 'azl quotes.)

Muhammad also maintained that death in the jihad not only blots out all sins — including sexual ones, a la voyeurism — but it actually gratifies them:

The martyr is special to Allah. He is forgiven [of all sins] from the first drop of blood [that he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise, where he will be adorned in ornaments of faith. He will wed the 'Aynhour [a.k.a. "voluptuous women"] and will not know the torments of the grave, and safeguards against the greater terror [hell]. … And he will copulate with 72 'Aynhour (see The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 143).

In light of this, how "un-Islamic" can it be for Islamists to gawk at nude, gyrating, infidel women — especially prior to "martyring" themselves in the jihad, which, as Muhammad said, blots out all their sins? This rationalization has precedents going back to the Middle Ages: Muslim groups like the Isma'ilis created hidden "gardens of delight" swarming with voluptuous women, and, prior to sending their assassins on missions, would immerse them in these gardens, thereby giving these prototypical "suicide attackers" a foretaste of the sexual delights awaiting them in the afterlife. After this experience, the assassins would eagerly undertake any assignment simply to be "martyred" and return to the gardens of delight, which were based on "the description Muhammad gave of his paradise" (see Marco Polo's 13th-century account).

Nor has this intersection between sex and violence subsided in the modern era. The Arabic satellite program Daring Question recently aired various clips of young jihadists giddily singing about their forthcoming deaths and subsequent sexual escapades in heaven. After documenting various anecdotes indicative of Islamist obsession with sex, human rights activist Magdi Khalil concluded that "absolutely everything [jihad, suicide operations, etc.] revolves around sex in heaven," adding, "if you look at the whole of Islamic history, you come up with two words: sex and violence."

Deceit, rationalizations, and a paradise that forgives the would-be martyr's every sin — indeed, that satiates his hedonistic urges with 72 voluptuous women (which may only be raisins) — all help demonstrate how Muslims can be observant and simultaneously frequent strip clubs.

Yet there is one final explanation that requires an epistemic shift to appreciate fully: in Islam, legalism trumps morality, resulting in what Westerners may deem irreconcilable behavior among Muslims, that is, "hypocrisy." As Daniel Pipes observed some three decades ago in his In the Path of God:

[There is] a basic contrast between the Christian and Islamic religions: the stress on ethics versus the stress on laws. Controls on sexual activity directly reflect this difference. The West restricts sex primarily by imbuing men and women with standards of morality. … Muslims, in contrast, depend on "external precautionary safeguards" [e.g., segregation, veiling] to restrain the sexes. … Rather than instill internalized ethical principles, Islam establishes physical boundaries to keep the sexes apart.

In this context, the problem is not Muslims frequenting strip clubs, but misplaced Western projections that assume religious piety is always synonymous with personal morality — a notion especially alien to legalistic Islamists whose entire epistemology begins and ends with the literal words of seventh-century Muhammad and his Koran.

And it is this slavishness that best explains Islamist behavior. For the same blind devotion to the literal mandates of Islam which encourages Islamists to lead lives of deceit, also explains why they are callous to human suffering, why they are desensitized to notions of human dignity and the cries of their raped victims, and, yes, why they cheerily forfeit their lives in exchange for a fleshy paradise. In all cases, Muhammad and his Allah said so — and that's all that matters.

Originally published at: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how-the-islamist-mindset-rationalizes-and-promotes-sex-sins/

Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum, author of The Al Qaeda Reader, and visiting lecturer at the National Defense Intelligence College.

Related Topics: Radical Islam, Sex and gender relations | Raymond Ibrahim

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////////////////////////////BY SULTAN////////
Muslim Rights and Wrongs

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 08:14 PM PST

Over the last decade the treatment of Muslims has dominated discussions about human rights in Europe, the United States and Israel. Whether it's Jihadis seized on the battlefields of Afghanistan, domestic terrorists plotting death and destruction in London, Ramallah or Jersey City, asylum seekers from the coasts of Australia to England, or your regular old Abdul or Hamid who may be a law abiding citizen or a fanatical mass murderer in waiting-- the Western human rights debate over the last 10 years comes down to the treatment of Muslims.

But is that all there is to the story? While left wing "human rights organizations" such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (which even went the trendy route of appointing a Muslim Secretary General) have dived in to the business of protecting the rights of Muslims in the West with both feet, very little attention is paid to the rights of Hindus, Jews, Christians, Buddhists and others living in Muslim countries.

While the media plays up a real estate dispute between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem as a major human rights story, the last Jews of Yemen are being evacuated after one of the community's few remaining leaders was murdered by a Yemeni Air Force Pilot who ordered him to convert to Islam or die. Yemen in turn fined the pilot and offered to build the remaining Jews their own ghetto for "their own protection". Naturally they chose to leave instead. And this is the life they described behind the "Sand Curtain" of Islam;

A spokesman for the Jewish Federations, who met the Yemeni Jews shortly after they arrived in America, said they described a climate of fear in Yemen. Jewish men had to wear Arab headdresses and wrap their peyot behind their ears to hide their identity. Women wore burkas. “They didn’t have any visible institutions like synagogues,” he said. “They had to meet in people’s apartments.” For the first time, the new immigrants have been hanging mezuzot on the outside of their doors instead of the inside, and openly celebrating festivals like Succot.

Yemeni Jews had been fleeing the country since the 19th century, a flow that only intensified when the Yemeni government began seizing orphaned Jewish children and converting them to Islam in the 20's (one such child is the current President of Yemen). After the creation of the State of Israel, the majority of Yemen's Jews fled the tide of Muslim violence. And now that last handful of what had been a community of tens of thousands is departing.

But what makes the story of Yemen so damning is that it actually is fairly tolerant by Muslim standards. And that the Jews of Yemen are only a small part of the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Muslim lands in the Middle East whose plight is ignored, while the media insists on photographing toothless Palestinian Muslim Arabs posing with housekeys.

The 800,000 Jewish refugees are themselves only part of the story. The Armenian genocide and the Assyrian Holocaust both offer eloquent testimony to how Muslims treat non-Muslim minorities. As do the modern day persecutions of the Zoroastrians in Iran and the Christian Copts in Egypt, who are denied basic rights and whose daughters are routinely kidnapped for forced Islamic conversion.

While Muslims incessantly shout about their "rights" in Europe, America and Israel-- it might be a good idea to take a look at how non-Muslim guest workers are treated in Muslim countries.

As much as 90 percent of Dubai is run by foreign guest workers who slave away for the Emirs. Thousands of them die annually in construction work to erect the magnificent skyscrapers designed by foreign architects and rented to foreigners that decorate Dubai's skyline.

As much as 40 percent of Saudi Arabia consists of foreign guest workers who do everything for the fat bearded sons of Mahomet, but wipe their behinds. And in some cases even that as well. Saudi Arabia is built on the foreign oil companies they seized, built by American and British oil workers, serviced by Asian maids and African laborers. The latter have their passports seized by their employers, which transforms them into slaves of their employers without the right to even leave the country. The Saudis have built such a nightmarish slave state that it is one of the few rich countries in the world where guest workers actually try to get themselves deported. Without success.

The Saudi and Dubai slave states are all the more relevant because so many of the organizations clamoring for the rights of Muslims in the West are either Saudi fronts, such as CAIR, or Saudi funded, such as Human Rights Watch. And just as the USSR lectured America on civil rights while running the Gulags, Saudi Arabia oversees a nightmarish Islamic oligarchy in which non-Muslims have no rights, while demanding through its front groups that America throw open the doors to Guantanamo Bay, stop detaining Muslims for suspicious behavior, that Europe open wide for Islamic immigration and ban any criticism of Islam, and that Israel turn over land to terrorist organizations again funded by the Saudis.

But until the Muslim world gives the same rights to non-Muslims as to Muslims, the same rights to women as to men... Muslims have no right to make such demands of anyone else. When religious minorities can live in peace and security in the Muslim world, only then can Muslims issue demands to non-Muslim countries.

If Muslims abroad were treated as they treat others at home, they would enjoy few rights, their passports would be seized compelling them to work indefinitely, they would be murdered at random and their attackers let off with a fine, their children would be seized to be converted to another religion and their women would be jailed for not complying with local mores. Instead Muslims enjoy legal equality in their host countries, even as they spread the poison of an Islamist ideology that calls for the murder of non-Muslim. And sometimes act on it.

Not only are Muslims treated far better than they treat others by America, Europe, Israel and the other non-Muslim countries that they routinely malign for "oppressing" them-- but they are treated far better than they themselves act while abroad.

Despite all the talk about hate crimes against mosques, Muslims abroad have committed far more violent attacks on other people's houses of worship, than have been committed against theirs. Muslim rapes far outweigh any rapes of Muslims. Muslim terrorist attacks on non-Muslims far outweigh any terrorist attacks carried out against Muslims.

That is the real portrait of Muslim ingratitude and atrocities, thinly veiled by the endless barrage of "Religion of Peace" propaganda, and the squealing by Saudi front groups bewailing the fate of Muslims living high on the hog in Sydney, Paris or Haifa, while spinning their favorite anthem of Death to Everyone Who Isn't Us.

Muslim countries invite in non-Muslim tourists only to jail (Dubai) and murder (Egypt) them, despising non-Muslims and yet greedy for their gold. They rely on slave labor and yet fund lawfare and propaganda campaigns denouncing the US detention of the same Taliban throatslitters that they funded as well. Egypt, where a third of the children are malnourished, Saudi Arabia, where even half the Muslim population has less legal rights than a dog (correction: dogs are actually forbidden in Saudi Arabia) or Pakistan, where it is easier for rapists to convict their victim of adultery, than for the victim to convict them of rape-- all somehow manage to find the time to denounce the human rights of non-Muslim countries whose level of jurisprudence they couldn't reach with all the skyscrapers in Dubai.

Perhaps before Muslim bleat about their rights, they should first begin honoring the rights of non-Muslims.