ISLAM AND SEX

Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its needs -- hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex. Freud’s focus on sex wasn’t entirely unimportant, as many modern psychologists and therapists would have us think.

The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn't "know" what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology. And it is in this vein of thought where I can see our Muslim “brothers”. Money, power, women seem to have been the historically necessary goals to every direction and conquest Islam has ever undertaken, most often all three (although I’m sure there are more than the three I listed).

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH (real world): The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says "take care of a need as soon as an appropriate object is found." It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason. However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with objects that actually assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential objects in the world of the child -- mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego. It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed. Now we find that there is a conflict within the person him/herself. As sociology teaches us in its most rudimentary form, almost the entire field of sociology is a study of various conflict theories, so it’s no wonder that a human being can be a subject of a study since s/he too is an object of sociological interest, so much more once we realize the onslaught of conflicts.

This particular conflict of (hypothetically speaking) a strong sexual urge, desire, need – once being oppressed and held in check by our superego, may invariably find other outlets of expressing itself.

Evan after a massive use of defense mechanisms some of the urges will find an opportune outlet. According to Freud “The ego deals with the demands of reality, the id, and the superego as best as it can. But when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego must defend itself. It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into a more acceptable, less threatening form. The techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms, and Freud, his daughter Anna, and other disciples have discovered quite a few.
Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense -- no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long! It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it.”

I shall focus on sublimation, even though that I am aware how powerful some other means of self-defense mechanisms can be. Sublimation can be considered a form of displacement which is more broadly defined as “redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you, but the person you direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to someone or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute.

Someone who hates his or her mother may repress that hatred, but direct it instead towards, say, women in general. Someone who has not had the chance to love someone may substitute cats or dogs for human beings. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings. For the sake of Academic accuracy let’s not fail to mention (if only briefly):

2. Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress;

3. Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or threatening impulse.

4. Asceticism, or the renunciation of needs, is one most people haven't heard of, but it has become relevant again today with the emergence of the disorder called anorexia.

But we’ll keep to sublimation, as the transforming of an unacceptable impulse, whether it be sex, anger, fear, or whatever, into a socially acceptable, even productive form. So someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a butcher, a football player, or a mercenary. Someone suffering from a great deal of anxiety in a confusing world may become an organizer, a businessperson, or a scientist. Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an artist, a photographer, or a novelist, and so on. For Freud, in fact, all positive, creative activities were sublimations, and predominantly of the sex drive. By the same reasoning we can also include many of the negative activities as wars, conquests, religious zeal, expansionism, need to amass loot in form of either money (currency) or servitude (as slaves or harems with the case of Islam). To Freud, the sex drive is the most important motivating force. In fact, Freud felt it was the primary motivating force not only for adults but for children and even infants. When he introduced his ideas about infantile sexuality to the Viennese public of his day, they were hardly prepared to talk about sexuality in adults, much less in infants!

It wouldn’t be too hard for the various “sublimation beneficiaries” to be considered examples of aberrations rather than universals. However the degree of devastation, cruelty and sheer damage caused to the immediate surrounding of those in question, amply justifies a deeper analysis. Let’s take a brief overview of some of history’s “malcontents” (we’ll reward them with that noun only for now):

1. Adolf Hitler – according to most chroniclers and historians did have a rather peculiar(another temporary euphemism) sexual history. The Roots of Evil article by: by Sharon Begley (With Andrew Murr in Los Angeles and Adam Rogers in Washington) | May 21 '01
What makes a bomber strike, or a mom kill her kids? How science is shedding light on our darkest deeds. (in applicable part read):” But within us all ... genesis of Hitler's evil, for instance, is variously ascribed to sexual inadequacy, maternal smothering, paternal indifference…
…..the Hitler laundry list of examples is unexhaustive.

2. Stalin (who, in my view OUT-Hitlered the Fuehrer) is also a frequent topic of theories of sexual inadequacies.

3. Our recent president here Bill (slick) Clinton, (may have had some unresolved sexual issues – last time I’m being this generous) referenced in the second link.

Trouble is that human sexuality is still under a thick veil of mystery especially when it comes to public figures, so we will never have the solid scientific proof.

To that end, I shall quote Freud again “It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has but few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind.”

Now, we can breathe a sigh of relief. We just plain cannot compartmentalize, isolate, box and label every single every human activity.

Ask yourselves, isn’t rape an always present partner in Islamic conquests? The question is easy and the answer is much easier YES.

It is a symptomatic occurrence only in Islam that thirst for power, sex, money, slaves (not in that order) is a direct propellant of much of the Islam’s goals even as prescribed by the Kuran. Naturally that even the Muslims are human beings and therefore subject to same physical and mental hygiene like the rest of us. Therefore, their obvious pursuit of pleasurable goals is not so strange but only a manifestation of repressed sexuality, or at best, sublimation.

An earlier study by Nathaniel Wandering, conclusively demonstrated Islam’s warm views towards homosexuality (in relevant part):

[The will not to know": Chapter 2 - a common Islamic ethos of sexuality: avoidance in acknowledging sex and sexualities. 7) Honor & Shame: like the work of other scholars of the Mediterranean, it is the Public transgression of morals that is condemned here, not so much the condemnation of social transgressions themselves. Islamic law requires eyewitnesses to convict someone of certain moral "crimes." 8) Avoidance of confrontation is an ideal of sorts. 9) As long as men conform to a role that is honored (being a husband or a father) it doesn't matter if they have sex with other men or boys discreetly - As long as no one speaks about it 10) Shameful acts are considered an inherent part of human nature. No one talks about them - they are just a part of life. People respect the public role that other people play out, not the rumored stories that people hear about their neighbors and friends. 11) Like the "don't ask - don't tell" policy, men in the Islamic world have wide latitude for opportunities for sex with other men, as long as they don't make their relationships public. 12) There is no public arrangement for men to have premarital sex with women, so men have sex with boys because they can. 13) Anal lust is not considered unnatural, but actually is considered an acquired desire or an infectious disease: Men are afraid to do it because they might like it and become addicted to it. 14) Being sodomized is not necessarily a ruinous experience, but it can be ruinous to a man's reputation. 15) Long history of lover/beloved relationships from Greek and Pre-Islamic Arab models. 16) This ideal was not always the actual reality: some men loved post-pubescent men 17) Sometimes the boy who ideally should be the bottom would top the man. Roles were idealized, but not necessarily conformed to. 18) "Bisexuality" was the norm (Men married, but had relationships predominately with boys) but this convention was also not rigid. Some men had relationships with other men, some had long term relationships 19) Boy dancers: 8-16 year old, for sale in regions like Morocco until the 1920's 20) Homosexual roles were lexicalized and written about in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Urdu and other languages. 21) Authors argue that this history should not be written off as a history of "acts" and "impacts" as David Halperin might want us to assume, but that these historical figures were situated in well defined cultural roles that were lexicalized and situated within a self conscious cultural context. Acts were not divorced from cultural roles in this context, but were vital in the understanding of one's cultural role. 22) Egalitarian homosexuality is largely absent from this social landscape. 23) Egalitarian homosexuality is a historical possibility in Islam, but it is not present in the sources. 24) "Gay" relationships and identity have been imported from the west in recent years to some secular areas such as Turkey. 25) 1952 study at American University at Beirut: 38% of male Arab students acknowledged homosexual experiences. 1963 study found 44%. 26) In some regions, men married boys (Siwa, Libyan desert, 1936 report) 27) As Western consciousness of homosexuality has become popularized, Islamic men have practiced homosexuality less, feeling more shameful about it 28) "Homosexual" is used now to refer to adult men who are passive to other men or who have adult male partners. Men who have "situational" sex or sex with boys are not considered homosexual Will Roscoe]

Given that the natural tendency of most men will be to tend towards “under-reporting” homosexual encounters (especially if they’re already married), we can pretty safely conclude that the realistic number of “situational” or “occasional” homosexuality amongst Islam’s males is probably in the 50% range, conservatively speaking.

This will lead us to the eternal question of what came first; the chicken or the egg? – but such is the essence of philosophy. Sometimes it’s not even important to know what came first as long as we are aware of the outcome.

For the end, I chose a little “after-dinner-mint” in the form of:


“The women pause before a pushcart bearing a mountain of colored silk and nylon. What's that woman holding up? Why, a G-string and a black-lace teddy.
That's right, an open-air sexy underwear souk thrives in the heart of Islamic Cairo, a few brazen footsteps from the Sayyidna al-Hussein Mosque. The mosque is home to the largest congregation in Egypt and a shrine where a head, believed to be that of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, Hussein, is interred. To a Western eye, the contrast seems shocking, as if Frederick's of Hollywood had opened an outlet right next to the Vatican.” Contributed by Susan Hack Oct. 8, 1999 |for the Salon.com with a title “Arabian nighties”, additional “footage” by Wall Street Journal March 2004 at: www.aegis.com/news/wsj/2004/WJ040304.html

Iliya Pavlovich