IF WE REALLY want to understand the mindset of the Muslim fundamentalists, it’s time that the issue of sexual politics was addressed head on. Just how does the total domination of women in fundamentalist societies affect the men? After all, when it comes to sex, both genders are involved. And when it comes to extreme forms of aggression and violence, sublimated sexual fear and repression are all too often at the root of the problem.
Take the heartbreaking story of a young Muslim woman, Fatima (I have changed her name), who was referred for psychotherapy. When I first saw her in the waiting area, she looked hunched and lifeless in her scruffy jeans and T-shirt. She had become so severely depressed she rarely left her refugee hostel. Her English was excellent. She was from a progressive Middle Eastern country where she had been a university lecturer before fleeing to the West. As a teenager she had been raped by her brother-in-law. Her mother swore her to secrecy — imperative to save the family honour. Years later, despite her successful career, her mother, against Fatima’s wishes, arranged for her to be married to a much older man. To conceal her lost virginity, her mother hired a doctor to sew up Fatima’s vagina. In an act of desperation Fatima took rat poison in a mosque. Her mother publicly denounced her daughter to protect the family from scandal. Should Fatima ever return home her brothers would murder her for bringing dishonour to their family. “Honour” killings, Fatima told me, were common — the authorities either turn a blind eye or issue six-month prison sentences.
It’s too easy to pigeonhole Fatima’s distress as a “woman’s issue”. Men are also victims of a cultural mindset that obliges them to display their masculine dominance by murdering their sisters if they are suspected of losing their virginity before marriage, or killing their wives if suspected of adultery.
Fundamentalists demand that women be veiled and segregated at every level of society, starting at puberty. Public displays of affection between husbands and wives are forbidden. Wife-beating is so prevalent, many see it as a normal part of marriage. In bed any sexual position where the woman is on top is haram or sinful. It’s difficult to imagine how either gender can enjoy intimacy in such a climate.
So what is the effect on young unmarried men who, like youths the world over, are subject to a whole host of fears about their burgeoning sexuality? What do they do with their unacceptable sexual fantasies fuelled by the strict regime and the temptations of the mysterious, hidden feminine world? Too often they project their self-disgust on to their object of desire, whom they blame for causing them to have “impure” thoughts. Twenty-five years ago when Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran, women who let a single lock of hair fall beneath their headscarves were beaten for abusing their sexual power. Women who had worn make-up and Western dress under the Shah were denigrated as “Westoxicated”. And the supposedly sexually licentious West became, and remains, “the Great Satan”, purveyor of all evil that must be destroyed.
The connections between sexual repression, extreme violence and a male obsession with war and death are recognisable in the West. In America Christian Reconstructionists, a fundamentalist sect, also advocate the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality and “unchastity before marriage” (but for women only). Studies of the psychology of Fascism show how the Nazi cult of obeying, adoring and fearing the Führer is rooted in the patriarchal family obeying, adoring and fearing the father. The Nazis, like modern Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, were also obsessed with virgins and women as submissive housewives and perfect mothers. Their extreme masculinity values, above all else, male bonding and sacrificing their lives for the fatherland’s high ideals of racial or religious purity, with the promise of glorious martyrdom.
Fascist mindsets promote the abuse and denigration of “impure” women. In modern Islamist Tehran there is a thriving sex trade — an estimated 84,000 women are in prostitution and thousands of girls are sold as sex slaves across the Arab world.
Arguably such societies are in the grip of mass psychosis. Like a paranoid psychotic they split the world between those they hopelessly idealise as pure and good, and those they denigrate as evil and out to destroy them. It is not unusual for a paranoid psychotic to nurture delusions of grandeur and an imaginary hotline to God.
Western and Islamic feminists have for too long agonised about what right we have to assume that the sexual freedoms enjoyed by Western women should be a global gold standard of how to live in the modern world. The debate always becomes ensnared in multiculturalism — that we must respect the diversity of beliefs and traditions even if these include human rights abuses of women in Muslim countries. But we only have to look around us to see how, in the most sophisticated levels of society where women are seen as equal, men also benefit — they are more tolerant, more able to enjoy intimacy and less aggressive towards women and each other. So attitudes towards gender and sexuality are not just a feminist issue for women to discuss while the men set about combating terrorism.
To understand the violence of the fundamentalist fascist mentality, skewed gender relations and repressed sexuality, far from being peripheral, have to be confronted head on.
The author is a freelance writer and psychotherapist.
