MUSLIM MEN ARE SEXUALLY FRUSTRATED....
Sword of Laban
by Omar Sacirbey
Religion News Service
November 19, 2009
(RNS) Did alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan lose control, at
least in part, because he was sexually frustrated?
That's one of the questions being asked in the investigation into the
Nov. 5 rampage that left 13 people dead and dozens more injured.
According to reports, Hasan visited a nearby strip club in the weeks
before the massacre and was frustrated by his inability to find a
pious Muslim wife.
That's sparked a recurring, but still unresolved, debate on whether
strict Islamic sexual mores in Muslim communities are contributing to
a sense of hopelessness some say drives many young men into religious
fanaticism and violence.
"All these men are so sexually deprived so much so that the sperm has
gone to their brain, and they implode," wrote Ani Zonneveld, a female
Muslim activist, on a Muslim online discussion forum which had taken
up the issue.
Others are more skeptical about the claim, and say that if there's a
relationship between religious fundamentalism and sexual repression or
frustration, it is not unique to Muslims.
"I'm skeptical," said Kecia Ali, a religion professor at Boston
University. People have tried to link Islamic extremism and sexual
frustration for years, she said, but a causal relationship "was a bit
of a stretch."
For many, however, the most perplexing question is why men who see
themselves as devout Muslims engage in such un-Islamic behavior.
Hasan, 39, is reported have visited the Starz strip club at least
three times in weeks leading up to the shooting, spending up to six or
seven hours at a time.
"He said he was a medic and that he was being deployed soon, but
mostly he wanted to ask us questions," Jennifer Jenner, a stripper who
Hasan paid $50 for a lap dance in the private room, told Foxnews.com.
"He was respectful."
Mohamed Atta and several other 9/11 hijackers had also visited strip
clubs not long before the 2001 terrorist attacks. In his will,
however, Atta demanded that women not come to his funeral and not
visit his grave, and that whoever washed his body should wear gloves
when washing his genitals. Scholars stress that among mainstream
Muslims in America, women regularly participate in funerals, and
probably don't consider the minutia that consumed Atta.
In his novel "Murder In Amsterdam," based on the murder of Dutch
filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, British journalist Ian Buruma suggests that
sexual frustration played a part in driving Mohammed Bouyeri, the
Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants, to murder Van Gogh in broad
daylight in 2004.
As a teenager, Bouyeri smoked dope and chased Dutch women, but in his
20s, he faced bleak economic prospects, girl troubles, and his sister
got a boyfriend. Bouyeri "felt dishonored, useless, and excluded,"
Buruma writes, but says Bouyeri found his source of power in radical
Islam.
And one of the leading philosophical fathers of radical Islam,
Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, was critical of the U.S. as an exchange student
between 1948-50, especially of what he called the "animal-like mixing"
of the sexes, even at church dances.
Many suicide bombers from Palestine and Iraq are said to be motivated
by Islamic interpretations -- albeit highly disputed -- that 72
virgins await Muslim martyrs when they arrive in paradise.
The frustration that drives Muslim men to violence has at least as
much to do with economic and social factors as it does with sexual
troubles, observers say. High unemployment rates in many parts of the
world complicate job prospects, where a steady income is a
prerequisite to getting a wife, and where pre-marital sex can result
in social ostracizing, jail, and whipping.
"If you can't get a job," Ali said, "you can't get a girlfriend."
Evidence, however, does not point to a link between sexual frustration
and Islamic extremism, says Marc Sageman, a senior fellow at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
"In fact, three-fourths of al-Qaida terrorists are married, and two-
thirds of them have children (and many children at that)," he wrote in
his 2004 essay, "Common Myths About al-Qaida Terrorism." "This
apparent paradox is explained by the fact that they want many children
to pursue jihad, while they sacrifice themselves for their cause and
their comrades."
Another perplexing paradox is why men like Hasan and Atta, who see
themselves as devout Muslims, go to strip clubs and engage in other un-
Islamic behavior. "It's so inconsistent with the portrayals of these
guys as pious Muslims," said Pamela Taylor, co-founder of Muslims for
Progressive Values. "It doesn't make sense."
"There's a cultural double-standard," said Ali. Many Muslim men view
both Western women and Muslim women as mainly sexual objects, but hold
different standards for Western culture that they view as lost to
vanity and promiscuity. "They don't expect their sisters to act like
that."
While Zonneveld said she sees a connection between sexual frustration
and violence, she emphasizes it is not unique to Islamic cultures.
"I say the route to violence is through intolerance, and it doesn't
matter what religion or perspective you hold," she said. "You see that
in the anarchists against capitalism, Jewish settlers against
Palestinians, and of course these so-called Muslims."