Stephen
Baskerville serves as President of the Inter-American Institute
for Philosophy, Politics and Social Thought, and is as Research
Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society.
He the author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution,
Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power (Angelico,
2017); Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage,
and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007) and Not Peace
But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution
(Wipf & Stock, 2018). A fully annotated versioni of "Sexual
Jihad" is available at www.researchgate.net
Since
the collapse of European Communism in 1989-91, two claimants
have emerged to inherit the leadership of transnational ideology.
Both have roots in the broad socialist-communist ideology
that dominated the twentieth century. But since the effective
discrediting of that system, these new claimants have, between
them, dramatically altered the ideological polarity of global
politics on a scale comparable to what socialism achieved
in its day. Yet where socialism based its grievances on social
and economic relations, its successor ideologies derive their
complaints from relations of sexuality.
Over
the last four decades, the global political agenda has increasingly
come to be dominated by the politics of sex. The most obvious
driver is feminism along with a recently assertive homosexual
politics. Its less obvious rival is no less determined to
ground its claims to power on control of sexuality: radical
Islamism. These two ideological systems are usually seen as
antagonists, with programs and agendas whose theoretical incompatibility
needs no description. Yet they might more instructively be
seen as rivals. For all their obvious differences, they share
an aspiration to political power based on their claims to
control and change the terms of sexual relations, along with
connected issues such as the family and children.
Moreover, both have a common opponent (though also some common
historical roots) in a third model that has also based its
claims to legitimacy, in part, on its ability to manage the
terms of sexuality, children and the family. This is the traditionally
Christian West and the increasingly Christian South.
These
three models offer today’s dominant choices for ordering
the relations between men and women, marriage, family structure,
and children. And each carries profound and very different
implications for both the secular domestic political order
and the alignment of global politics.
THE NEW SEXUAL MILITANCY
The obvious pioneers of sexual politics are the feminists
and their recent allies in the homosexual rights movement.
The Sexual Revolution has now moved far beyond feminist claims
to equal rights or homosexual demands to be left alone and
now encompasses a vast array of demands that have already
achieved far-reaching changes in Western societies and beyond:
including the terms of marriage, the family, demography, the
economy, international relations, and the very nature and
purpose of civil government.
What some call ‘sexualityism’ or ‘gender
ideology,’ and what one sympathetic scholar terms ‘the
ideology of the erotic,’ has now positioned itself on
the vanguard of left-wing politics.” There is much more
to the new sexual politics than sexual freedom. Demands for
power and empowerment indicate that has evolved is a true
and complete ideology involving extensive political aspirations.
It replaces the old socialistic battle cry of social justice
with demands for what is now being called ‘erotic justice.’
Richard Parker explains how effectively this new ideology
operates to overturn social and political hierarchies, offend
traditional sensibilities, and promote rebellion as a virtue
for its own sake:
The
erotic . . . is linked to the structures of power . .
. The relationship between power and eroticism can only
be understood . . . by situating the erotic . . . as a
kind of alternative to these other systems . . . the erotic
offers an anarchic alternative to the established order
of the sexual universe: an alternative in which the only
absolute rule is the transgression of prohibitions . .
. Transgressing the established order of daily life .
. . even the structures of power can themselves be eroticized
within this frame of reference . . . No less than same-sex
interactions, extramarital affairs, masturbation, or anal
intercourse…destroy the hierarchical values of the
everyday world. . . The workings of power must be understood
through the cultural forms and meanings of the erotic,
and the symbolism of the erotic must be interpreted through
the structures of power and its capacity to transform
them.
Globally and especially in the democracies, the dominance
of sexual ideology is unrivalled at the cutting edge of today’s
left. Virtually every item on the Western public agenda is
now feminized or sexualized and cast in terms of its impact
on women or women and children or a broader gender identity:
health, welfare, immigration, taxation, the environment, development,
military power – all, we are told, require special considerations
for women, children, or sexual minorities. Economic crises
are addressed according to their allegedly special impact
on women. War and foreign policy are transformed by debates
about women and homosexuals in the military and in other societies.
The environment is a women’s issue, we are told, and
so is climate change.
One indicator is the outpouring of triumphalist articles in
prestigious journals gloating over the new feminine power:
In Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam announces “The
Death of Macho” and the destruction of “the macho
men’s club.” In “A Woman’s World,”
on the cover of the Wilson Quarterly, Sara Sklaroff
proclaims that “women are taking over.” In “The
End of Men” on the Atlantic Monthly cover,
Hanna Rosin describes “how women are taking control
of everything.” Revealingly, none of these authors or
journals apparently feels any need to justify this trend,
approach it with any measure of critical or skeptical detachment,
or entertain even the possibility that it may entail any negative
features or injustices of its own.
Domestically, the dominance of sexual ideology over left-wing
politics is seen in the sexualisation of the welfare state.
Originally justified on quasi-socialistic principles as a
measure to alleviate working class poverty and insecurity,
continued welfare expansion today is justified instead mostly
on feminist principles, citing the “feminization of
poverty” and the poverty specifically of children. Welfare
officials themselves are overwhelmingly women, and the combination
of dispensers and recipients constitutes a formidable political
pressure group. This in fact was the core constituency of
former American President Barack Obama, presidential aspirant
Hillary Clinton, former French President Francois Hollande,
and other left-leaning governments, such governments in Spain,
Brazil, and Chile. Even as its costs strain government budgets
and topple prime ministers, welfare spending continues to
increase, with angry protesters (mostly female and adolescent)
in Athens, London, Manchester, and elsewhere striking fear
into any politician who contemplates substantial spending
reductions.
In the United States, welfarist ideology was expanded to government
healthcare, and the sexual left became its principal lobby.
Its formidable power extends to coercive measures involving
both finances and religion – significantly over matters
like abortion and contraception that have less to do with
health than with sexuality. Under Obamacare, for the first
time, American citizens were required to buy someone’s
product as a condition for living in their own country and
overriding their religious or political convictions.
This points to another consequence of sexual ideology: the
impact on religious liberty. Virtually every controversy involving
religious freedom in the West now proceeds from demands for
sexual freedom: preachers are arrested for criticizing homosexuality;
town clerks and registrars have been fired and even arrested
for refusing to officiate same-sex marriages; bed-and-breakfast
owners are sued for refusing to accommodate cohabiting homosexuals;
Catholic adoption agencies have been closed for refusing to
place children with same-sex couples; Christian firemen are
required to participate in political demonstrations that mock
their religion and police to display political symbols in
police stations; homeschoolers have lost their children to
school authorities implementing an increasingly sexualized
curriculum; proposed European Union directives would allow
private citizens to be sued for expressing beliefs about sexual
issues.
Sexual politics has fundamentally transformed the very nature
and purpose of civil government. The most basic state functions
– external defense, border security and criminal justice
– have been altered, with governments relinquishing
their traditional functions and increasingly acquiring new
ones: care of children and the aged, education, medical care.
It is tempting to point out that the traditional functions
being surrendered by the state are masculine, whereas the
new government roles are traditionally feminine. Here as elsewhere,
gender roles are not eliminated but politicized. The face
of the modern state is less the male soldier or policeman
and more the female social worker and civil servant. And yet
critically, the new feminized functionaries are no less police
than were the previous male ones. They simply do not wear
uniforms, and they are not restrained as were traditional
police from the power to exercise coercive jurisdiction over
the private lives of non-criminal citizens.
Correspondingly, the basic internal state function –criminal
justice – has also been dramatically redefined. On the
one hand, the criminal justice system has long been changing
in ways that are seen as more humane and caring, with lighter
sentences, alternatives to incarceration, and special procedures
for youth and others deemed not fully responsible for their
actions. Yet alongside this apparent humanization of criminal
justice and hardly noticed, have emerged new sexual crimes
defined by the new sexual gendarmerie.
Since the inception of their revolution, sexual militants
have been creating a vast panoply of new crimes and expanded
redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexuality:
rape (substantially redefined), sexual assault, sexual harassment,
domestic violence, stalking, bullying, child abuse, sex trafficking
and more. These new crimes often bear little resemblance to
what is suggested by the terminology. Yet they have politicized
law enforcement and criminal justice, rendered both criminal
and civil law vague and subjective, by-passed and eroded due
process protections, and criminalized and incarcerated large
numbers of men and some women who had no knowledge that they
were committing a crime. Recent accusations of various and
ill-defined forms of sexual misconduct against major figures
in the culture and politics are only the latest and most visible
manifestations, elevated to media prominence, of a trend that
has been widespread for years beneath the media radar screen
and where the targets have overwhelming been private individuals.
THE SEXUAL JIHAD
This
paradoxical combination of sexual freedom and sexual punishment
resembles radical ideologies of the past. Though often containing
elements of sexual libertinism, successful political ideologies
have usually been characterized by a certain sexual puritanism.
This is often but not necessarily religious. “Ironically,
those countries which rejected religion in the name of Communism
tended to adopt their own version of sexual puritanism, which
often matched those of the religions they assailed,”
Dennis Altman observes. The most effective radical organizers
have sought to limit sexual license, and a major achievement
of Lenin and Bolshevism was to discipline the cadres’
infantile bohemianism by channeling the libido into party
activity. “Drown your sexual energy in public work,”
urged Nicolai Semashko, the first People’s Commissar
for Health. “If you want to solve the sexual problem,
be a public worker.” When bohemianism crept back into
early Soviet family policy in the form of easy divorce laws,
it caused widespread social havoc and had to be abandoned.
But communist and other secular ideologies have proven far
less effective in repressing sexual license than has radical
religion. This may explain why Leninist-Maoist ideologies,
that dominated post-war movements of national liberation in
the global South have given way to radical Islamism (plus
other forms of radical religion such as Hindutva and radicalized
Buddhism, as well as a Christian revival). Here too the dominant
political motif is sexual.
Sexuality is not peripheral in the agendas of these movements.
“The centrality of gender relations in the political
ideology of Islam,” in the words of Parvin Paidar, is
now widely acknowledged by scholars. Whatever the various
resentments fueling Islamist activism, the Islamist response
largely distills down into sexual regulation. Radical Muslims
understand that controlling sex and claiming sexual purity
translate into political power. “The issue of women
is not marginal,” write Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit;
“it lies at the heart of Islamic [radicalism].”
The relationship between sexual discipline and civic freedom,
at one time well understood in the West (as we shall see),
is now largely forgotten in that culture. But Islamists today
understand it keenly. “The hejab has been identified
by the [Iranian] regime as the very cornerstone of its revolution,”
notes Haideh Moghissi. “It is described as basic to
Islamic ideology and . . . seen by them as denoting deliverance
from the yoke of imperialism ‘and as representing’
a symbol of liberation and resistance to capitalism and of
revolutionary aspirations.”
In a popular work, Danesh D’Souza has argued that Muslim
fear and hatred of the West proceeds from a perception of
Western sexual depravity: “The main focus of Islamic
disgust [over Abu Ghraib] was what Muslims perceived as extreme
sexual perversion.” In contrast to Western liberal sensibilities,
Muslim revulsion over the highly publicized mistreatment of
prisoners proceeded not from its brutality but from its debauchery.
“What that female American soldier in uniform did to
the Arab man, strip him of his manhood and pull him on a leash,”
comments one Muslim, “this is what America wants to
do to the Muslim world.” Osama bin Laden is likewise
quoted as saying that “They want to skin us from our
manhood.” Wounded manhood is also a theme in the literature
of Hindutva and political Buddhism and one to which we will
return.
D’Souza’s suggestion that Western sexual dissipation
inflames Muslim hostility and plays into the hands of Islamist
radicals cannot be lightly dismissed. “The West is .
. . A society in which the number of illegitimate children
approaches and sometimes surpasses the number of children
from permitted unions,” declares one radical sheikh,
accurately. Such perceptions are hardly hyperbole; they touch
on the most acute social crisis in the West today, where the
deterioration of marriage and the family and the proliferation
of single-parent homes is a major source of social anomie
and economic insolvency. “The most basic right of a
child is to have two parents, and this right is taken away
from nearly half of the children in Western society,”
writes one Muslim scholar. The Ayatollah Mottahari describes
the western welfare state and divorce machinery, likewise
with some accuracy:
The
replacement of the father by the government, which is
the current trend in the West, will . . . alter the very
nature of motherhood from an emotional tie into a form
of waged employment with money as an intermediary between
mother and her love; motherhood then is no longer a bond,
but a paid employment. It is obvious that this process
would lead to the destruction of the family.
At the same time, Islamism is far from a simple return
to family values. D’Souza draws his evidence not
from some Islamic version of Focus on the Family but from
leading purveyors of Islamist political terror, such as
Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden. This suggests that, while
perceived Western sexual decadence does indeed fuel support
for Islamic terror, Islamists have moved far beyond the
passive defense of traditional morality to create a new
and fanatical ideology that, far from seeking to preserve
the status quo, aims to alter it radically.
The
resentments fueling Islamist militancy combine grievances
over sexual decadence we traditionally associate with the
right with those previously championed by the radical left
such as imperialism and capitalism. The ideology freely borrows
from its kindred Western ideologies, revolutionary fascism
and Marxism – and indeed, unlikely as it may seem, even
feminism. “While steeped in Islamic myth and forms,
the events of 1979 represented first and foremost a political
revolution,” writes a scholar, referring to Islamism’s
most sophisticated political creation so far, in Iran:
Khomeini’s
revolutionary role models were secular and, for the most part,
Western. During the revolution and since, revolutionary political
goals have always taken precedence over religious goals .
. . Iranian law contains many non-Islamic concepts: legal
(if not yet actual) equality between the sexes concerning
property, employment, and family rights . . .
And the empathy is mutual. Perplexing to many is the affinity
the Western left apparently feels with radical Islamism. “It
is striking,” notes the late Fred Halliday of the “politically
articulated accommodation . . . between Islamism as a political
force and many groups of the left.” Strikingly, even
feminism manages to make its peace with radical Islam.
Indeed,
the central paradox to be explained is why, if Islamism oppresses
women, does it attract such large numbers of them. “Many
observers have wondered why women in the hundreds of thousands,
including educated women, actively supported a movement which
appeared to curtail their rights.” That they in fact
did and do so is undeniable, especially (but not only) in
the complex circumstances of the Iranian Revolution. “A
distinctive feature of the Iranian Revolution was the participation
of large groups of women,” writes a feminist scholar.
“Women have acquired a very prominent position in the
ideology as well as practice of the Islamic Revolution and
the Islamic Republic.” This is often explained away
as part of the general opposition to the Shah rather than
enthusiasm for a specifically Islamist regime, but this is
much too easy. “In the case of women . . . the most
militant advocates of Islamisation are among the highly educated
graduates of universities.” These were consciously dedicated
Islamist women, attired decidedly in veils, and often armed.
“Observers have all noted the presence and activism
of women in the Islamist movement,” writes Olivier Roy;
“recall the demonstrations of armed and veiled women
in Iran.”
Political correctness notwithstanding, these women are not
coerced into this involvement. They are operatives in a movement
consciously determined to acquire political power, and they
understand very well that claiming sexual purity is the most
effective means of acquiring it.
Even
today, as young women from Europe and America enlist in the
ranks of the fanatical Islamic State, it is clear that they
do so because they seek both power for themselves and to attach
themselves to powerful men (thus exploiting, as feminism itself
does, both male and female forms of power). Female recruits
supervise the morals brigades, policing the public sexual
morality of the occupied territories. “Al-Khanssaa patrols
walk the streets of Raqqa seeking out inappropriate mixing
of the sexes and anyone engaging in Western culture,”
according to one scholar.
And
it is the women fleeing Western decadence who are the most
zealous. “The British women are being given key roles
in the brigade because they are considered by ISIL commanders
to be the most committed of the foreign female jihadis to
the cause,” according to the Daily Telegraph,
quoting Melanie Smith of the International Centre for the
Study of Radicalization at King’s College, London: “The
British women are some of the most zealous in imposing the
IS laws in the region.” But it is not just that they
want power for themselves; they also want to be the brides
of powerful men:
Many
of the women heading for Syria had gone there to find
a husband among the jihadi fighters . . . .
Miss Smith says the jihadi social media is “buzzing”
with marriage proposals, and many of the fighters have
taken several wives . . .
Miss Smith said a famous Dutch jihadi, known as Yilmaz,
who married this week has “broken the hearts”
of scores of Western Muslim women who have all made marriage
proposals in the last few months.
A monitor of Yilmaz’s Internet accounts show [sic]
that he received an astonishing 10,000 marriage requests
during his time as a jihadi fighter up until his marriage.
Miss Smith said: “It is clear that some of these women
who have been travelling to Syria have since married jihadists
and foreign fighters.” Some, said Miss Smith, want to
marry a martyr.
Nina Shea comments: “She is no innocent, duped into
a life of terror, or pushover for male domination,”
she writes of one of the leading morals policewomen. “She
is living refutation of the theory that female empowerment
alone is the path to Islamic moderation, as the State Department
has long maintained . . . For too long, American forces seemed
to underestimate such women, taking them to be simply victims
within a large undifferentiated class of oppressed women.”
As
often, both sides of the dynamic involve power, both directly
for themselves and indirectly through their new husbands.
Thus they have the advantages of all worlds: exercising power
as both inflictors and victims. The power dynamic and the
dilemma it poses for Western liberalism is embodied in the
Dutch woman who joined jihadists because she wanted to escape
Western androgyny and marry a ‘real man.’ The
headline is revealing of Western moral and legal confusion:
“Dutch jihadi bride: 'Is she a victim or a suspect?"
RELIGIOUS RADICALISM IN THE WEST
The
West also has a rich experience of grappling with not only
sexual issues but also their larger political implications,
and in the process it created its own radical religious movements
with profound consequences for modern history. Some now suggest
that this resembles today’s Islamist militancy. The
most successful practitioners of the principle of repressing
sexual license and harnessing sexual energy in the service
of civic freedom – whose influence has passed directly
to our own political culture – were, as their name suggests,
the Puritans.
The popular understanding of Puritan as abstinence from pleasure,
including sexual pleasure, may indeed be that movement’s
most significant legacy (and ironically, the one least examined
by scholars). In both England and New England, campaigns against
personal vice – not only sexual license, but swearing,
drinking, gambling, blood sports, and other popular indulgences
– involved much more than “the haunting fear that
someone, somewhere may be happy,” in the famous words
of H.L. Mencken. Very decided public aims lay behind these
prohibitions: to create virtuous citizens. Puritanism might
thus be seen as a massive program to implement what has since
become the cliché that the price of freedom is eternal
vigilance. The Puritans saw freedom as beyond the reach of
people who wallowed in indulgence and licentiousness. Self-government
required self-control. "There is a service which is freedom,
the service of Christ; and there is a freedom which is servitude,
freedom to sin,” one minister told the House of Commons
during the English Revolution. “There is a liberty which
is bondage and . . . a bondage which is liberty."
Not accidentally, these puritans in the popular sense were
also early modern Europe’s most sophisticated political
activists. Indeed, they have been plausibly credited with
nothing less than “the origins of radical politics.”
Their drive for personal purity was writ large in a simultaneous
campaign for ecclesiastical purification, and from there to
advocacy for political reform. The Puritans developed an elaborate
political theology with revolutionary implications.
The politics were played out in two events of inestimable
importance for modern history: the colonization of what became
the United States, whose strongly religious political culture
– unique in the West today – is a direct legacy
of Puritanism (and continues as a major player in today’s
sexual politics); and the first of the great modern revolutions,
the English Revolution of the 1640s, which set the pattern
for others to come – including the American, French,
and Russian revolutions, and even Iran’s Islamic Revolution
of 1979.
Both Puritan commonwealths did exhibit violent and theocratic
tendencies, which renders comparisons with today’s Islamist
theocracies at least superficially plausible. Yet the contrasts
may be more instructive than the similarities. Theocratic
campaigns were moderated by the dualisms that exist in Christianity
but not in Islam and other religions: the two kingdoms, regnum
and sacerdotum, church and state, sacred and secular,
eternal and temporal. These dualisms recognized the legitimacy
of secular institutions, allowing the lay leadership in the
English Revolution to retain the upper hand and preventing
the clergy or any particular denomination from dominating
the state, while still serving as a watchdog on it.
Inseparable from this, the Puritans were obsessed with a connected
matter of profound and continuing influence on today’s
politics, producing early modern Europe’s most voluminous
literature on the organization and operation of the family.
This was hardly a quietist withdrawal from the public square
into private life. On the contrary, the family was Puritanism’s
institution for connecting sexuality and civic life. The Puritans
considered the family a ‘little commonwealth,’
where family members, especially children, were trained in
the habits and techniques of citizenship. Relevant here is
that women were assigned essential responsibilities, and despite
their modern image as champions of the patriarchal family,
the Puritans attracted educated women in large numbers. Like
the church, of which is served as the lowest administrative
unit, the family acted as a counterbalance and check to the
state.
Puritanism is also renowned for promoting economic prosperity,
supplying the evidence for the Protestant ethic thesis of
Max Weber. Given that the family is also the most basic unit
of economic production, one consequence is almost certainly
the material prosperity of the West especially. This, as much
or more than the Puritan soteriology where Weber and most
of his followers principally identified it (though Weber himself
did not ignore the family), is likely to be the basis of the
Protestant ethic of conscientious work leading to widespread
affluence.
ISLAM’S REFORMATION?
Some
suggest that Muslim experience today parallels the West’s
Puritan past. “Islamic fundamentalist sexual puritanism
has more in common with seventeenth-century Christian Puritanism
than with the sexual mores of either the Prophet Mohammad,
Islam, historical Shiism or most Iranians,” insists
Masoud Kazemzadeh. Even allowing for differences, if the West
emerged from its own revolutionary wars of religion and religious
intolerance as a free society and a global powerhouse, perhaps
similar potential exists in Islam? Hypothesizing further,
if Western freedom and prosperity came not despite Puritan
sexual discipline but because of it, perhaps radical Islam
may do likewise?
Yet it does not necessarily follow that all forms of religious
radicalism are equally effective in processing the rage and
resentment that fuels them. In this case, the differences
could hardly be more striking. (And what follows are preliminary
suggestions on which more research from scholars qualified
in Islam is needed.)
Islamism does not appear to have the tools to translate its
resentments into political, social and economic modernity.
Rather than producing the freedom, stability, and prosperity
for which the Puritans are credited, radical Islamism (thus
far) leads to continued rage and self-pity, along with their
accompaniments of instability, stagnation and terror.
Several apparent reasons are often cited: undiluted theocracy
rather than separate spheres for church and state; the absence
of an institutionalized and hierarchical church to serve as
an alternative polity, check state power, and discipline its
own members; no real concept of a state whose power can be
defined and limited; theological legalism and obscurantism,
rather than an ethic of renewal and forgiveness.
Whatever the explanatory value of these theological contrasts,
they have counterparts in sexual morality. Indeed, the role
of women has long distinguished sharply Islamic from Christian
civilization. A Turkish envoy in Vienna in the seventeenth
century (the apogee of Puritanism and political Calvinism)
wrote of a “most extraordinary spectacle: “In
this country and in general in the lands of the unbelievers,
women have the main say.” Bernard Lewis writes that
for centuries, “The difference in the position of women
was indeed one of the most striking contrasts between Christian
and Muslim practice and is mentioned by almost all travelers
in both directions.” Lewis himself describes the status
of women as “probably the most profound single difference
between the two civilizations.” Noting that “The
social systems of the East and West are established on diametrically
different principles,” the noted researcher Ruth Woodsmall
believed that “The pivotal difference is the position
of women.”
The
moral discipline and self-repression Puritans saw as the precondition
for freedom has become for Islamists simply sexual (and political)
repression for its own sake, to the point of internal as well
as external terror. In both instances, repression may be enforced
by legal sanctions, but in Puritanism it began from an imperative
for inner renewal. The individual’s internal renewal
was then externalized in the communal church, which was described
as a kind of extended family (the bride of Christ). Only from
there, did it provide the drive for reform and for wielding
power in the state. Legal enforcement of morality by the state
machinery was usually the last resort, not the first impulse.
The Muslim family does not seem capable of channeling sexual
energy into either economic prosperity or political freedom.
Perhaps this is because there is no clearly defined state
for it to exist in distinction to. Just as the mosque cannot
counterbalance the state because neither is clearly defined
or distinguished, neither can the family because there is
no recognized duality of public and private.
Sublimating sexual energy for political purposes is clearly
fundamental to radical Islam, and though similarities to Puritanism
exist, the process appears to be very different. “In
the Muslim order it is not necessary for the individual to
eradicate his instincts or to control them for the sake of
control itself, but he must use them according to the demands
of religious law,” writes Fatima Mernissi. “Aggression
and sexual desire, for example, if harnessed in the right
direction, serve the purposes of the Muslim order.”
The great Ibn Khaldun wrote that “when he [Muhammad]
censures the desires, he does not want them to be abolished
altogether . . . He wants the desire to be used for permissible
purposes to serve the public interests, so that man becomes
an active servant of God who willingly obeys the divine commands.”
Sensual delights on earth even offer a ‘foretaste’
and therefore an incentive to delay gratification now in expectation
of greater delights in heaven:
Sexual
desire . . . is a foretaste of the delights secured for
men in Paradise, because to make a promise to men of delights
they have not tasted before would be ineffective . . .
Therefore the desire to reach the heavenly delight is
so powerful that it helps men to persevere in pious activities
in order to be admitted to heaven.
Muslim sexual asceticism also applies very differently for
men and women. This is more complex than mere sexism; both
the restrictions and rewards are geared to male functionality.
Sexual discipline clearly has a utilitarian value, but Islamist
soteriology appears to make sex a reward for political and
especially military service, demonstrating both the importance
of the sexual-political trade-off and the one-dimensionality
of the Islamist system for harnessing it. Heaven is likewise
conceptualized in terms of male desire. “Paradise is
full of sensual pleasures in which there are beautiful women,
couches covered with brocades, plentiful wine and luscious
fruits,” writes Patrick Sookhdeo. “Essentially
it is the place where that which is forbidden on earth becomes
allowed.”
Economically, the Islamist revolt against imperialism and
capitalism so far produces only stagnation. Scholars seek
in vain for any affinity of Muslim with Puritan asceticism.
“The main historical examples in the central Islamic
lands . . . [are] very far from the Puritan characterization,”
writes Sami Zubaida. “There are no grounds . . . for
attributing Puritanism (in Weber’s sense) to urban religious
cultures in the Muslim world.” Further: “Whatever
the rights and wrong of Weber’s characterization of
his Protestants, his picture is certainly at great variance
with all we know of the Muslim bourgeoisie in a variety of
historical and geographical settings.”
Even Islamist sexual puritanism may result from a political
calculation. “Looking at themselves through European
eyes, these groups were anxious to banish all the negative
stereotypes of lascivious sexuality, fanaticism and superstition,”
Zubaida argues. “Their construction of pure Islam, therefore,
underplayed or omitted all the elements in the holy book and
the traditions that endorsed or sanctioned such practices.”
In this sense then too, radical Islamism is a Western import.
“Far from being the received Islam . . . it was a brand-new,
invented Islam that . . . also incorporated, without acknowledgment,
many ‘Western’ ideas – from the revolutionary
puritanism of Robespierre to the ‘propaganda of the
deed’ advocated by the Baader-Meinhof gang.”
Regarding Islamism as a political religion that borrows from
secular ideology as needed, it is not surprising that it can
engage in a paradoxical pas de deux with feminism. Ideologies
seldom uphold fixed principles for long, and in the interminable
debates about the compatibility of feminism and Islamism one
might well detect echoes of the principle observed by Milovan
Djilas during the Communism of the 1950s: “Power is
the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,”
he wrote. “Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral
considerations, the nation and the people, their history .
. . – all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.”
Islamists and feminists, like many of us, share the human
craving for power. If it can be acquired through the veil,
the veil will be worn and rationalized. If not, it will be
discarded. But the central criterion is what maximizes power
– or, in today’s formulation, “empowerment.”
Homosexual
activists have adopted similar methods. It may be no accident
that Islamists and homosexualists share an acute sensitivity
to criticism, have devised parallel language to express parallel
grievances against Islamophobia and homophobia, and demand
government protection from discrimination and harassment,
which is often defined as private individuals expressing their
views or the tenets of their faith. These two groups alone
successfully demand government-enforced immunity from criticism
and punishment of those they deem guilty of “hate speech”
for criticizing them or their political agenda.
CONCLUSION
Every
society must control sex, and the most effective mechanism
for controlling sex is religion. “Religion is central
to sexual regulation in almost all societies,” writes
Altman. “Indeed, it may well be that the primary social
function of religion is to control sexuality.” This
oversimplifies the matter, but the point it crucial.
Our modern illusion that we can simply ignore sexuality and
leave it unregulated is highly naïve and leaves us vulnerable
not only to social anomie, but also to those who will step
in and regulate it for their own purposes. As we have seen,
even the Soviets had to impose limits. “Whether it be
Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, or Communism, religions tend
to claim a particular right to regulate and restrict sexuality,
a right which is often recognized by state authorities.”
In confronting this phenomenon, we dispense with traditional
religious faith at the risk of incurring some unforeseen consequences.
The alternative is already clear in our own, relatively stable
societies, where the explosion of single-parent homes in a
financially unsustainable welfare state threatens social stability,
economic solvency, and even civic freedom.
When traditional religion is no longer able to effectively
regulate sexual energy, radical political ideologies, including
politicized religions – all armed with various political
theologies and invariably backed by state functionaries –
move in to fill the void. It is by no means fanciful to suggest
that the decline of Christian faith in the West – along
with the discrediting of secular ideologies that have dominated
the West intellectually from the Enlightenment through the
Cold War – has left a vacuum that is now being filled
by radical Islam. To the liberal mind and its obsession with
progress, Islamism appears to be a perplexing throwback to
a medieval age. In fact, as our own history makes clear, it
is very modern indeed: a radical ideology that harnesses sexual
energy and channels it into political revolution.
The fact that in the West sexual freedom has itself become
politicized in an ideology of its own confirms that a major
and complex ideological realignment in international politics
has emerged as the direct result of the decline of Christian
faith in the West and the consequent rise of politicized sexuality.
In the global South too, it is very likely that the Christian
revival now sweeping that region is, if not driven, at least
occasioned as a response to sexual radicalism. “Most
of the reasons for this involve disputes over gender and sexuality,”
writes Philip Jenkins. “These have provided the defining
issues that separate progressives and conservatives, ecclesiastical
left and right.” The same might be said of secular political
left and right.
Given
all this, how do we confront the Muslim world? Islamism is
not like the economic ideology of Communism that can be discreditedonce
and for all (apparently) by its demonstrable economic failure.
Islam and the radical tendencies it sends forth will likely
be with us for some time. We need to diffuse as well as defeat
those tendencies.
It
is no accident that Islamists claim jihad is a struggle for
their manhood – a theme conspicuously absent in our
evolving Western gender awareness paradigm but one that bears
on both the military and sexual dimensions of the problem,
and well beyond Islamism. (Similar themes can be found in
the literature of Hindutva and politically aggressive Buddhism).
Any soldier will attest that it is always unwise to humiliate
your enemy, and Islamism is an ideology that is quite purposefully
designed to prompt an aggressive response to humiliation.
Our aim must not be to destroy manhood, whether militarily
or ideologically. For the sake of both civilizations, it may
be a matter of finding the right way to accommodate it.
