Poor impulse control and Muslim men
All the debate about Muslims and the veil has centred around women. What should they wear and how should they wear it? Perhaps it’s time we looked at what the veil tells us about Muslim men.There is more. Amir Taheri has described the ayatollahs' "sex ray" theory when it comes to women's hair. Women out of control must be really awesome and frightening to some of these men. When I have written about this subject in the past some have discounted my knowledge of Islam, of which I have little to claim, however, this is a subject that is more about rationale than theology.The Koran is little help. The verse cited in support of women wearing headscarves or veils is hardly specific: “And say to the believing women to cast down their eyes, and guard their private parts, and reveal not their adornment save such as is outward.” Islamic scholars have argued ever since about what precisely that means.
The presumption, though, is that immodest dress, however defined, will inflame men’s lust. But more extreme Muslim clerics suggest also that if it does, it is the woman who is to blame. Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali, the Mufti of Australia, recently preached: “If you take uncovered meat and place it outside . . . and the cats come to eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”
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Of course only a minuscule fraction of Muslim men are rapists; the rest are upright, law-abiding citizens. But the premise of the dress code is still that men’s impulses cannot be controlled unless women hide themselves. Why should not Muslim men start to take more responsibility for their sexual desires, rather than expecting women to dress absurdly modestly, lest the sight of a bare arm or even a lock of hair should lead them to uncontrollable sexual urges?
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No, Muslim men seem to want to have it both ways. They want complete leadership of their community, with women’s voices seldom heard, but then they are happy to reduce themselves to the status of animals — feral cats in the Mufti’s sermon — when it comes to sex, unable to resist the charms of a woman with an uncovered head.
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"this is a subject that is more about rationale than theology."
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm of the belief that rationale and religion are frequently at odds to begin with (see: the Evolution debate). I don't know that strict rationale through a Western concept of morality is necessarily the best way to analyze something (Islam) that is so prevalent in (but not responsible for) so many of our current international 'situations'.
Listen, I'm no Islamic scholar either. But for anyone interested in the 'clash of civilizations' I think the responsible thing to do is to educate oneself on the religions and cultures which are so foreign to our own.
Muslims are not inherently fools. They're not dumber or more impulsively violent than we are. They are not more likely to be brainwashed by religious leaders, nor do they value life less than we do. Muslim society is made up of humans, with the same human nature we have. 'Terrorism' and 'extremist Islam' are labels that are little more than tools to simplify what is unfortunately an very complex situation.
The complexity of something that on the surface seems like a simple battle of good vs. evil partially explains, for example, how something so obviously noble and straightforward to us (deposing a genocidal dictator), could unleash something so complex and difficult (the current Iraqi chaos).
I strongly urge you to read about Islam and I highly recommend a book I recently read, by a moderate Iranian-American scholar: "No God But God", by Reza Aslan. I am perfectly willing to mail you my copy. In fact I'll lend it in return for the book on civilizations you recently recommended to me.
I learned so much reading Aslan's book. For example, there's almost nothing in the Koran about veiling. Today veiling has come to represent different things to different people and in some Muslim cultures (the Bedouins of Egypt for example), it is actually an important tool of power for women. Are there bad effects of veiling? Definitely, especially in a modern, Western society. However when you're living as a nomad in the Egyptian desert where your food and survival for the next 24 hours are far from guaranteed, perhaps veiling represents something unknown to us. "No God But God" really opened my eyes to the fact that you cannot draw a simple and direct line from Islam's origins to the many the forms it takes today.
Islam is the religion of billions of people in hundreds of countries and a multitude of conflicts and international 'situations'. I think America needs to have a stronger understanding of the nuances of the vast and diverse Muslim world before we go around writing articles criticizing foreign cultural practices or worse, attempting to change a people's history for them.
Am I defending beheadings or suicide(homicide) bombings or the Taliban? Absolutely not. I do however find tragic the collective ignorance that we as a nation have when it comes to foreign cultures, especially when it concerns ones that are dominant in places in which we're attempting to institute dramatic cultural and political reorganization for our own gains, such as Iraq or Afghanistan.