"The question is perhaps this: why does the human race have this bizarre terror of free sexuality and empowered females, and homosexuals, that drives it to find ways to curb them through extremist religion?"

I don't think this is necessarily the right question to ask. Or rather, there's seems to be a tendency in many cultures where the above is true; but there are also cultures where the above is less apparent (that is, there are greater sexual freedoms and/or less repression of female sexual mores/homosexual activity).

Maybe a better way to approach the issue would be to ask to what degree (or why) culture plays a strong role in regulating "sexual norms" within a given society. I would agree that biology does play an important role in helping shape sexual norms, but it can't be entirely biological as there is quite a bit of variability as to what those sexual norms can be (or actually are).

As an aside (and others can correct me here), I remember reading about a particular Omani bedouin tribe that was quite "libertine" with respect to female sexuality - in the sense that visitors were often encouraged to "sleep" with the women of the tribesmen (I guess as a gesture of a given tribes' hospitality).

I hope you will tolerate a momentary rant, from someone who has the joy of having a chunk of her reproductive organs fried out with a red-hot electrical wire, on the subject of the cervical cancer vaccine. The vaccine has shown huge promise in clinical trials, and an effective vaccine has the potential to save huge numbers of lives, particularly in the developing world where the bulk of cervical cancer mortality occurs (I am apparently a freak of nature), and where women are less likely to have access to regular screening.

The idea that the way for women to avoid HPV infection and therefore cervical cancer by simply remaining abstinent until marriage, and marrying someone uninfected, is completely fucking stupid and unrealistic, especially if you have read any of the medical literature at all, because there is NO TEST that can accurately determine whether a man carries any of the 100+ strains of HPV (as an estimated 50 - 80% of the adult US population does, most of whom are completely unaware they are infected). One of the articles I read post-diagnosis mentioned a link to HPV was first discovered when a correlation was noted between widowed and remarried men whose first wives had died of cervical cancer, and whose new wives later contracted cervical cancer or associated precancerous conditions (cervical dysplasia), yet the men were totally asymptomatic.

For that matter, testing even on women can be unreliable, because current medical knowledge holds that viruses are sneaky fuckers that can remain dormant and hide in the body for years on end. Science holds that the damn beasts are still around somewhere, as with HIV that drops to undetectable levels after treatment - they are unlikely to be eliminated by a short, localized outpatient surgery in any case - and yet my past 3+ years of regular followup testing have indicated no virus at all.

Uninformed fundamentalist idiots piss me off, especially when their actions can kill people. If they want to subject their own minor children to the potential of serious illness and death to comply with their own skewed morality, fine (well, not fine, but marginally less stupid), but if I ever have a daughter, that vaccine will be a discussion with her pediatrician the second she hits menarche, if not earlier.

I have a question on this: it's an anthropological commonplace that patrilineal (inheritance through the male line only) societies are far stricter about marriage fidelity and sex and all that than matrilineal or mixed heredity societies. Were/are Arab societies patrilineal exclusively?

Based on my readings, Arabs in pre-Islamic/early Islamic times were obsessed with lineage (e.g. being able to recite family tree all the way to tribal founder). Fixation on lineage would suggest a similar fixation on paternity, which in turn suggests a fixation on the woman's honour.

I suppose if you take a biology angle, no father wants to waste energy propagating another man's genes.

There's more to it than this of course, especially where fundamentalists are concerned. Meph seems to have done a lot of thinking on the topic of women and honour in those societies, but she's in KSA at the moment.

Not that I want to turn this discussion into yet another degenerate conversation about sex, but did anyone get a look at Rushdie's wife?

Quoted as saying: "I'm an educated woman. If you want to talk to me about the best nail polish I can do that, but if you want to talk about Proust, I can do that too. I don't believe that the two are mutually exclusive."

I think some of the 'Aqoul authors will need to be restrained.

dear eerie,

she's in a relationship & her man is not an asshole. that's enough to induce restraint.

also - there are 500 million indian women. statistics say: she's not the only one of her kind.

'nuff said. on THAT one.

now on topic: a lot of research has been done on the question of "women as center of honor & nation", particularly on india, but also lands west of it. i do think that it is imperative to keep in mind that the current notions of strict female seclusion are mostly a development of the 18th/19th centuries. they are part & parcel of religio-cultural identity becoming political identity ... and of the latter to matter.

--raf*

Well, back to the topic then (though I would observe that 500m women of her ethnicity does not suggest high probability of her type occuring often).

My general view of anti-sex religious scholars is:

(a) they are out of touch with reality, not recognizing (as L & others have mentioned) the difficulties associated with getting married in modern times or rural/urban differences.

(b) They have a very skewed view of Western femininity/feminism, likely derived from sat television and anti-West screeds written by people like Qutb. They likely feel they are protecting MENA women from Western intellectual imperialism and the associated evil of Western feminism. This is an interesting topic, have done a fair bit of reading on it.

(c) They aren't getting laid and it really pisses them off.

Now Meph would say that women in MENA countries are often obligated to uphold the family/nation's honour, even though a similar expectation doesn't exist for men. Regardless of when that notion developed or why, I am curious to see what angle Rushdie uses to support his extremism = sexual fear argument.

Well, at first I thought this was something of a throw away topic.

But in reading it closer and in comments, I have a thought or two.

First, the idea of violence being provoked by threat to the community women folk (or their sexuality, blah blah) is nothing novel. The United States racial lynchings had that theme woven in and out of it over 200 years.

I'll go a step farther and say that male "protection" of "the group's" women (while also sneaking access to others) are pretty basic primate biological traits. We needn't look to Islam or what not.

What I will note from having followed an extremely disturbing set of events in Morocco, is that the aspect of "Western" corrupt sexuality endangering the community strikes me as rather immediately present in tourism countries.

In the case of Morocco, this past summer there was a nasty sex-slavery/porno scandal involving a famous Belgian journo over several years getting involved in the prostitution industry that has sprung up in Agadir. Without going into details, the subjegation of the women involved rather finely played into Islamist narratives about the corruption of young girls (and sadly young girls were indeed stalked by the Belgian), of families etc.

The opposite aspect - of the virile Maghrebine lad boinking the Euro girls (a real phenom - bored drunk Scandi tourists), while outrageous to the moralisers just did not have the right echo.

It strikes me that on one hand, you have a body of Islamist scholars who are essentially hayseeds, and not at all in the urbane learned intellectual tradition of the past - plus a good number of essentially unemployed Islamic studies degree holders playing the role of the two bit ambulence chaser via fatwa.

very well-written; when I first began reading I was worried you were taking the orientalist route...but very well-thought out. Would definately be interested in a longer analysis...you should do one!

I have much to say on this topic but am somewhat limited in posting capability at the moment. Not to mention absolutely fucking constipated due to being force fed primeval naive bullshit by people who should know better and having no means by which to dispel said bullshit.

One thing- my granfather owns a faded yellowed piece of what can only be some form of animal skin parchment that he claims contains the names of his male lineage traced back to the Prophet (PBUH) himself. Of course the facts that my grandfather is about ten shades darker and about three races removed from Qureishis AND comes from a tribe physically separated from Saudi Arabia by a massive landmass, a sea and a river, he believes are neither here nor there.

In the US, inciting the hicks by protecting the womenfolk has had a racial as opposed to religious cast, primarily. It's not only lynchmobs. It is not too oversimplified to note that the American Revolution was won in part by the fears of racial depradation of our womenfolk:

It was the rising militia, rather than Washington, who were to provide the Northern Army with its main reinforcements. Nothing worked more to produce this result than Burgoyne's employment of Indians. The murder and scalping of a beautiful white woman, Jane McCrea, dramatized the Indian threat as nothing else probably could have done. New England militiamen now began to rally to the cause, . . . New Hampshire commissioned John Stark, a disgruntled ax-colonel in the Continental Army and a veteran of Bunker Hill and Trenton, as a brigadier general in the state service . . . and Stark quickly recruited 2,000 men. . . . Two days after the battle, {British general} Burgoyne withdrew to a position in the vicinity of Saratoga. Militia soon worked around to his rear and cut his supply lines. His position hopeless, Burgoyne finally capitulated on October 17 at Saratoga . . . .The victory at Saratoga brought the Americans out well ahead . . . . In February 1778 France negotiated a treaty of alliance with the American states, tantamount to a declaration of war against England.

Never understimate, or over-religionize, the rallying power of the "brutes are ravishing our women".

Or, (even more inflammatory and linking back to fear of women's sexuality), our women WANT to be ravished by the brutes.

Ah, ravishment.
And yes, Salman's wife is rather ravishing.
Given that a couple of people up there cited examples of an obsession with male lineage, I think the patrilineal dynamic applies, said dynamic being, simply put, that mother's baby is father's maybe, so the only real way to make it as certain as humanly possible is to make marriage extremely important, and have a very strong cultural ethic in which non-marital sex on the part of the female is very strongly discouraged.
So, it becomes a strong part of the religious ethic, and before you know it, weird fatwas on marital sex are being sent out.

Well, Pantom old man, the weird fatwas on marital sex in this case has less to do with religious ethic per se - the patrilineal obsessions are old and the like - but the modern sociological profile of the fatwa writers.

In my opinion, there was been an immense ruralisation of the ulema, the Islamic scholarly community, since no longer (for the most part) do children of the great urban (and urbane) families go into Islamic scholarship. They study economics and the like.

Nope, its rural hicks, largely speaking, with little urbanity and all the sophistication of someone from the Appalachians.

Historical Islamic fatwas on sex are a lot more like Sistani's - certainly the sorts of things one expects from religious scholars, but not inherently bizarre.