Kamel Daoud and Sexual Misery in Islam

I do not know enough about Islam to know whether the problems we read about in various cultures where Islam prevails is a feature of Islam, the faith, or the particular culture, whether it is Egyptian, Somalian or Indonesian.  

But the New Year's Eve events in Cologne have been connected, at least in the Western imagination,  to the rapes in Tahir Square in Cairo, where both Muslim and Western women were publicly raped for the crime of being a woman in public. 

In today's New York Times Kamel Dauod writes about the obsessional nature of sexuality in at least some Islamic societies, where women are seen as a source of destabilization, "short skirts trigger earthquakes."  Sexual feelings are so taboo that even married couples may not have sex while naked and women are forbidden to touch bananas.  Now, that has got to mean something:  Bananas! Sex is so repressed it's all anyone can think about.

Think about what that means:  If women are so irresistible, then they have enormous power over men, who are reduced to whimpering,   who must be protected from the  presence of women and their Siren call, their sight, their power to seduce men into sin, shame and damnation. This may go back to the Odyssey, which was not a Muslim tale, but Greek, but it's the same idea: Odysseus had to plug the ears of his men so they could not hear the Sirens' song, while he had to be lashed to the mast, begging them to steer the ship into the rocks, because he was so lost to the charms of these women. 

Women wear a hijab moutabaraj, "the veil that reveals" which is a head scarf with slim fit jeans, and this is, presumably a problem for the sex police, because, after all, the women are wearing the scarf. Benches in public parks are sawed in half to prevent lovers or potential lovers from sitting too close together.

We had suspected, of course, men from some Islamic cultures had a problem with women:  The 9/11 hijackers reportedly covered the motel wall art because the pictures showed women immodestly. Motel art! 

Jim Lehrer famously asked some Islamic "expert" just after 9/11, "Why do they hate us so?" The expert gave a rambling answer which, when boiled down, said, "I have no idea."

Well, Mr. Daoud may provide part of the answer. It's not that radical Islamists, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iranian ayatollahs hate us so much--it's self loathing they suffer from.  Could it be they feel humiliated and helpless before our culture in which nearly naked women are pictured routinely, women in every day life dress in ways which reveal their bodies in attractive ways and these repressed males feel they cannot control themselves?  They see Western men in complete control, interacting with these objects of desire and they ask themselves: How can these men continue to work, to think in the face of this provocation, while we are rendered helpless?

It's a long way back to the 13th century, and I cannot pretend to know what is going on in the mind of a 20 year old who hops a plane from Minneapolis to Istanbul so he can go fight with ISIS or blow himself up with a suicide vest. 

But maybe, if you have never spent a night with a naked woman and you are promised a dozen vestigial virgins, it seems like a good deal.

What all this means when men from this background arrive in Cologne or Paris and find themselves ignored by attractive women is anyone's guess.  

Maybe it's not about religion. Maybe, as Mr. Daoud suggests, it's all about sex.

Now that is something Westerners can understand.