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Eros In Gaza

By blueness

Islam, like the other major religion to crib its god from Judaism, Christianity, has been shaped by its potentates to require of believers an unnatural and unhealthy sexuality. To remain true to the tenets of the faith, Muslims, like Christians, must continuously repress or redirect sexual impulses.

A piece in Sunday's New York Times suggests that in Hamas-controlled Gaza, people are becoming increasingly resistant to Islamic sexual authoritarianism. They devour Noor, a Turkish TV soap opera steamy with premarital sex, despite the fact that Gazan clerics have pronounced fatwas against those who would view it. In music shops, audiotapes praising the virtue and piety of Hamas gather dust, spurned by purchasers who scurry home instead with CDs and DVDs featuring a pouty, beckoning Jennifer Lopez. Alongside the Koran, booksellers hawk sex-instruction manuals and Arabic translations of Harlequin romances.

A skinny boy with bad teeth, manning the book tables the other morning, grinned when a woman came by and thumbed through What to Do if You Have Weaknesses in Sex.

Pointing to the religious books, she asked, "do many people buy those?"

"Sure," the boy said.

"These, too?" she asked, gesturing toward a stack of flimsy softcovers with a picture of the young Cheryl Tiegs on the front.

"Oh yes!" he said.

Hamas officials are not particularly pleased with these developments. But they are losing. As the Times reporter interviews a Hamas leader in a restaurant, songs by Steely Dan waft over the patio--"Steely Dan" an American rock band that derived its name from a dildo.

In his enflamme novel Platform, Michel Houellebecq steers his numbed protagonist into a Bangkok coffee shop for an encounter with an aging Jordanian banker.

The problem with Muslims, he told me, was that the paradise promised by the Prophet already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim, nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars. It wasn't even necessary to travel to realize such things--all you needed was satellite TV. For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph. Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam. He himself had been unlucky. He was an old man now, and he had been forced to build his whole life on a religion he despised.

It is not necessary or even desirable for Muslims to embrace Western mass-market expressions of sexuality; in those cultures that are today dominated by Islam, there exist rich erotic traditions predating or subverting the forced impression of sexual authoritarianism. Neither would it be wise for Muslims to succumb to the lure of Western-style capitalism, which produces, in those who pursue it, its own forms of emptiness and suffering. And it is not to be presumed that liberation into officially disapproved sexuality inevitably produces a life of sweetness and light. The poster children of Abu Ghraib are modern exemplars of this. Charles Graner and Lynndie England, when not tormenting prisoners, indulged in a sort of sexual smorgasbord; Sabrina Harman, she of the corpse "thumbs-up," is a lesbian.

Still, it is generally best when any religious faith, anywhere, is frustrated in its attempts to molest in that pursuit identified to the Times by a 20-year-old Gazan: "We do as we like in private."

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 09, 2008 (boomark / email).