Jamie Glazov

[Editorial Note:  It would be exceedingly difficult to in any way improve on the following article regarding male sexuality of the Islamic World.  Its author, Mr. Jamie Glazov, the Managing Editor of frontpagemag.com , and an internationally recognized authority regarding Islam, holds a  PhD. in History, with a specialty in Soviet Studies.  The following is an article published on October 4, 2001.]


THE SEXUAL RAGE BEHIND ISLAMIC TERROR
     
     “SERIAL KILLERS, almost without exception, are severely sexually abused as children.  The kind of people who hijack a plane with innocent people and drive it into a building with thousands of other innocent people are related to this phenomenon.  When sociopath rape and kill, they do not see their victims as human beings, but only as objects.  This is because the sociopath were themselves, at one time, used as objects…as their bodily integrity was repeatedly violated.  The rage that results from sexual abuse is one thing, but when combined with living in a dysfunctional culture of repression and misogyny, where love is reduced to violent domination, it is quite another.
  
     Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehe-mently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety.  Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them.  Sex before marriage is not just a sin…but a criminal offense!  It is punishable by a severe beating at best, or an execution at worst. 

     The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted (only) to men.  Women's sexuality and social independence represent major threats to male supremacy and are tightly controlled.  Thus, as a Moroccan feminist Fitna Sabbah reveals in her book "Women in the Muslim Unconscious", there is a deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main disturbing conflict in the Middle East between sexual libido and repression.  A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny. 
  
     Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior.  But, interestingly enough, there is no word for "homosexual" in their culture in the modern Western sense.  That is because having sex with boys, or effeminate men, is seen as a sexual norm.  Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women.  The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife.  The male who is penetrated is emasculated.  The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.  In this culture males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity.  It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality.  An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do.  As the scholar Bruce Dunn has demonstrated, sex in Islamic  societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.
    
     There is silence around this issue.  It is the silence that legitimizes sexual violence against women, such as honor crimes and female circumcision.  It is also the silence that forces Arab boys into invisibility.  Even though the Society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humilia-tion is a given.  Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back.  

     The problem is that trying to recover from sexual abuse, and to recapture one's own shattered masculinity, is quite an ordeal in a culture where women are hated and love is interpreted as hegemonic control.  

     With women out of touch…and out of sight…until marriage, males experience premarital sex only in the confines of being with other males.  Their sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males---just the way they were victimized.  

     In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men's understanding of sexuality.  Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence.  A gigantic rupture develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist.  In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture.  They threaten the hyper-masculine order.  

     It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture.  But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy", whose masculinity must be violated at all costs…as theirs once was.  

     Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him.  In the recent terrorist attacks, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists’ bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate pathological testament of the remasculinization of their emasculated selves.  
                                                              . . . . . . . .   


Mr. Glazov’s article regarding the rage of Muslims, due to the shortcomings of their society when dealing with human sexuality well illustrates the dysfunctional, misogynistic and hypocritical legacy handed down by Islam’s founder, Muhammad.

Before Muhammad destroyed his own society, that of the Arabian Peninsula of the 7th Century, women were seen as equals, not chattels or objects!  The women of Arabia, before Islam, such as his first wife, Khadija, were allowed to conduct business in their own name, a practice not allowed in present day Saudi Arabia.  Allah’s (Muhammad’s) revelations destroyed that equality.  Several revelations of the Koran do compliment women but their value is erased, by others that denigrate women.  

Another example of Muhammad’s hypocrisy is the stern language of the Koran regarding homosexual acts, and in his personal sayings, of the Hadith.  Muhammad must have known that, whenever access to the opposite sex is denied for an extended period, such as long caravan journeys, some homosexual behavior will occur.  Remember, he spent thirteen years with his uncle’s caravans.  Why then, were his words so uncompromising regarding homosexuality?  Examples: “When a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes.”, and, “Kill the one that is doing it, and kill the one that it is being done to.” It is quite possible that Allah’s (Muhammad’s) revelations regarding homosexual acts were a result of his own sexual mistreatment when a boy. 

At present, seven Islamic countries specifically proscribe death for homosexuals, including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran.  In Iran, since the Fundamentalist revolution of 1979, the number of homosexuals executed there has been estimated between several hundred and 4,000, perhaps equaling, or even surpassing those political prisoners executed by the Shah in several previous years.  The broad range of estimates is because many sentences were not reported.  The Iranian Islamic Penal Law, made effective in November of 1991, contains these following articles.  Article 110:  “Punishment for sodomy is killing; the Shari’a judge decides on how to carry out the killing.”  Article 129:  “Punishment for lesbianism is 100 lashes for each party.”, and Article 131: “If the act of lesbianism is repeated three times and punishment is enforced each time, the death sentence will be issued the fourth time.”     

As well outlined by Mr. Glazov’s article, in practice, a distinction is made between the sexual act, itself, and any possible emotional attachment, which would be unpardonable.  A man who engages in homosexual acts himself is not necessarily considered to be a homosexual; he might just be using boys or men as a substitute for women.  He would be proving his dominance, as he might prove with a woman.  What is intolerable would be the presence of love, affection, or equality between sexual partners, be they male or female.  When the sexually mistreated boys become men, an extreme distinction within Muslim societies is made concerning what are considered homosexual acts in Western societies.  The man who still permits him self to be mounted finds himself a pariah of his society, but little or no stigma is placed on the dominant partner.  

In the dysfunctional Islamic societies around the world, where women are jealously guarded against any type of relationship with a man before marriage, the incidence of lesbian relationships can only be imagined.     
                                                                                 
Perhaps a tragic incident of Saudi Arabia can illustrate the twisted mindset of Muslims regarding sexuality.  As reported by the BBC on March, 2002, a girls’ school caught fire.  Since there were no men present in the school, the girls had taken off their Islamic outer garments.  The Saudi religious police, the “Muttawa”, arriving on the scene, would not let them out of the building, since they were not properly clothed, and fifteen girls burned to death!  The reasoning, if it could such be called, was that it was preferable for the girls to die than for the men at the scene to be subjected to “impure thoughts”.