My recent post on identity and Amin Maalouf seems to have drawn an absolute blank here, even though I personally consider the points he raises to be at the heart of the WoT and related issues. Over in Canada, Randy McDonald has picked up the thread, and relates Maalouf’s ideas to the issue of homophobia, taking as his starting point the recent execution of two young men in Iran for what appears to have been their sexual orientation:
I was saddened, though not altogether surprised, when Ikram Saeed recently commented that criticizing those Muslims who believed that their religion requires the ritualized torture-killings of non-heterosexuals is an act of racism. I say “not altogether surprised,” since Ikram had earlier commented that people victimized under shari’a law were “wimpy” if they lacked the capital–social, economic, political–that they needed to escape. This sort of morally blind privatization of public goods that ends with the privatization of human rights, the kind of process that reduces rights from universal goods to things that you can have only if you were lucky, serves bigots’ ends quite nicely.
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SEX. If you read Khomeini, or Navab Safavi, or other key figures of the new Islamism, you will find a notion of masculinity that is associated with spirituality, as opposed to the earthbound female who represents forces that must be contained. This is a veritable obsession, and it is not restricted to ideologues and clerics, but is part of the identity that many Muslim men have grown up with. The drive to keep women under control has been interpreted as akin to Mediterranean ‘family honour’; it runs much deeper than that in fact, and Reich’s ‘mass Psychology of Fascism’ has now found an even more striking illustration than the Nazi regime. (Never mind that it’s not science).
A sociological study of young Muslim immigrants in Sweden recently evoked this fear that female sexuality provokes, unbridled sexuality as a soul-sucking monstrosity that unmans the lustful. Very different from our Jack the Lad bedpost-notching, the complete opposite in fact.
There is nothing about this in Huntingdon, but this is the real Clash of Civilizations. If we want integrated Muslims in Europe, we simply cannot accept the propagation of attitudes which cast women as fundamentally different from men as spiritual beings, whose only salvation lies in obedience. Muslim attitudes to homosexuality only make sense when this very different set of attitudes to heterosexuality is taken into account.