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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Hege Storhaug</title>
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		<title>Muslim Child Brides in Britain</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/hege-storhaug/muslim-child-brides-in-britain-by-hege-storhaug/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-child-brides-in-britain-by-hege-storhaug</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/hege-storhaug/muslim-child-brides-in-britain-by-hege-storhaug/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:08:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hege Storhaug]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46028</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How does a civilization based on humanism tolerate such conditions?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46063" title="marriage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/marriage.jpg" alt="marriage" width="450" height="299" /></p>
<p>It is heartbreaking, even as it is unsurprising.  In Britain, the authorities are now reporting the forced marriage of girls as young as nine years old on British soil.  We are not talking about one case, but several, which take place under official protection.  We are not speaking, then, about parents or “husbands” who are being charged with a criminal offense.  The situation, in other words, is completely unacceptable and makes clear that we have a crying need for a new approach to these matters.  Government must put its foot down – and powerfully so – so that there will be no doubt as to the way in which such grotesque crimes will be addressed.</p>
<p>First, when I say that the marriage of nine-year-old girls in today’s Britain (and the rest of the EU, for that matter) is unsurprising, my statement is based on my own 17 years of experience in the field of immigration: forms of assault based on tradition and religion – including child marriage, forced marriage, genital mutilation, so-called honor-related offenses such as rape and murder – have become established here as a result of immigration, mostly from Muslim countries.  Instances of these offenses have been documented in countries such as Norway (where, to be sure, there have been no recorded cases of marriage to girls as young as nine, but where the marriage of an 11-year-old came to light in a TV documentary that I worked on as journalist; such cases have also been known in Sweden). The only phenomenon that has not been documented in Norway thus far is forced eating by girls before they are to be married off.  I was told about this practice by feminists in Paris in 2003, and the phenomenon had been imported into France by immigrants, mostly from Mali.  Girls are locked up and fed like geese before being married, because in their culture being fat is considered beautiful.</p>
<p>This being said, the news from Britain, which has been reported in the <em>Times, </em>deserves widespread attention.  Because the authorities are obviously aware of very serious information about actual children who are supposedly under the protection of those very same authorities.  In other words, Britain’s Ministry of Justice, if the <em>Times </em>is to be believed, knows who these children’s parents are, parents who have attempted to arrange for the rape of their own children.  For this is what we are talking about here: the deprival of children’s freedom, plus countless years of repeated rape.  Such phenomena must force authorities to sit down with a cool head and a warm heart and ask themselves: who are we, and where are we going?  What are we doing to ourselves as a nation, to our heritage, to our culture, to our future?  According to the <em>Times, </em>however, British authorities are not doing anything of the kind.  Here comes the proposed initiative, and before you read this sentence you had better take a deep breath.  The Ministry of Justice says that the children’s parents are receiving help from the authorities “to solve the problem.”</p>
<p>I must admit that the principal methods being used in such cases in Norway and in Europe generally – namely, information and dialogue – no longer hold a particularly cherished place in my heart.  In my view, the methods must be appropriate to the crime.  By far the majority of parents in Europe understand that marriage to children is not “good”; it is precisely for this reason that such weddings do not take place in display windows. The same goes for the husbands with which these children are compelled to tie the knot – and by whom they are raped.  As a consequence of the very high levels of immigration from majority-Muslim countries to Europe, we have seen the establishment in European cities of more or less closed enclaves which live according to the norms and values of the residents’ countries of origin. These enclaves, as a rule, have turned their backs on the countries of which their residents are citizens; you might say that they close their blinds.  My view is that the current situation calls for stronger measures.  Because we are entirely behind the times.</p>
<p>The political establishment has allowed things to go too far.  What is happening within extended families and within these immigrant communities is out of control, and the victims of this state of affairs are the most vulnerable people of all.  If one is to have any hope whatsoever of regaining control of the problem, it must be answered back with firm and uncompromising demands and measures: in cases of child marriage, first with a long prison term and then, most important, after the prison term has been served, with expulsion from the country.</p>
<p>I mean this very seriously: if we do not begin to make use of such methods immediately in serious cases such as child marriage, genital mutilation, the dumping of children, so-called honor killing and honor rapes, then we will simply continue to be tilting at windmills for the rest of this century.  These grotesque practices will not peter out over time – as our leading politicians quite seriously believed was the case, in the last decade, with both genital mutilation and forced marriage.  (I could provide the names of actual politicians with whom I have discussed this, but these have been conversations in closed rooms which one does not write about if one hopes to maintain their trust.  I can, however, say this: that they believed that the problem would disappear in the generation of immigrants’ children, their reasoning being that this ”second generation” was born here and would therefore behave like other Norwegians.)</p>
<p>Allow me to give a specific example from a criminal case in Norway that is currently under litigation.  In August 2005, Human Rights Service reported to the police a couple whom we suspected, with good reason, that four of their then six daughters had been genitally mutilated.  All of the children had been born in Norway (meaning that they had not been genitally mutilated as children before immigrating to Norway, which is not a crime), and the four oldest, who were then aged 5 to 11, were sent to one of the parents’ three exquisite properties in Gambia “to learn about their parents’ culture and religion,” as they so nicely put it.  When I visited the girls at their parents’ residence, they had already been there for two years, under the “care” of their father’s second wife (he now has three wives).  The girls were not only emotionally mistreated by  this woman; an adult individual told me that they had also been genitally mutilated in the jungle in the Gambian interior shortly after their arrival in 2003. They were to be “disciplined,” as this source put it, and the girls were “totally disciplined,” according to the source, when they were returned to wife #2 a week after their mutilation.</p>
<p>After we filed our report in 2005, the police in Norway worked intensely – and the case went entirely up to the top prosecutorial levels in both Norway and Gambia – to get the four little Norwegian citizens back to Norway.  Now we are writing in 2010, and the girls are still ”imprisoned” in Gambia, while their parents live freely – and supported by the government &#8211; in Norway.  In short, the police have made several unsuccessful efforts to persuade the courts to allow them to hold on to the parents’ passports while their case is being investigated, so that they, for example, would not be able to travel to Gambia (where the oldest girl, age 15, is waiting for her parents to come and marry her off to a cousin, according to sources in Gambia).</p>
<p>In 2008, Norwegian authorities decided to investigate the parents’ two youngest daughters, who lived with their parents here in Norway.  The three-year-old girl was not genitally mutilated, but the five-year-old was.  (The latter had also been in Gambia, while the former had not.)  The father was taken into pretrial custody (a historic imprisonment in Norway), while the mother escaped punishment on the grounds that she was once again pregnant.  After a few weeks, the father was a free man again, but has still refused to bring his daughters back to Norway.  So far he has not been punished.</p>
<p>What do you think would have happened in this case if the father’s citizenship could have been revoked?  The case would most likely never have been a case at all.  The parents would never have played Russian roulette with what appears to be the only thing they love, their Norwegian citizenship and the financial bounty it affords.  For that’s all that Norwegian citizenship means to parents like this: money.  In their minds and hearts, they are still back in Gambia.</p>
<p>If someone now comes along waving international human-rights conventions in defense of such parents, I can reply with the same conventions, for example the convention on children’s right to live with their parents, and as long as the parents deny their children this right, Norway can ensure that the children are given this right by sending their parents back to Gambia. Also, if we allow us to use our critical common sense, what matters more: an adult’s right to retain a citizenship he has acquired in his adulthood when in fact he could just as easily live in his country of origin, or a child’s right to be protected from ritual mutilation, and then from forced marriage with rape to follow – not to mention right to be brought up with the care and love he or she deserves?</p>
<p>We have seen the development in Europe through the 1990s and up to the present time, and it can no longer be denied: larger and larger groups from the Muslim world are living in self-imposed isolation and practicing criminal traditions that negatively affect the health of children, young people, and women.  No one can answer the question of how many of these practices have become more common, precisely because they take place “in the dark, on the inside.”</p>
<p>I believe<em> </em>that the practices have increased in frequency and will continue to do so in line with the rate of immigration, the number of Muslims living in Europe, and the resultant increase in the isolation of these minorities.  In any event, we cannot “sit and wait for better times” – because this is about the destruction of human life, and the sustainability of our welfare state.  Simply the fact that women’s rights are now going in reverse (see also <em>Aftenposten’s </em>report on the Muslim moral police who operate in the Oslo neighborhood of Gronland, and who among other things deprive women and gays of their freedom) is completely intolerable.</p>
<p>To sum up, I think that it is alarming that we should be so extremely naive as to believe that the conditions will <em>suddenly </em>become so much better in this decade.  We need for the police to take an entirely different approach.  We need to speak and act in such a way that no one can misunderstand that things have crossed the limits of patience.  A society based on humanism cannot live with such conditions.  It is, after all, about helpless and defenseless children and teenagers, and marginalized women.</p>
<p>My last word on these matters, then, is this: the ideas I am presenting here are about ten years ahead of their time. Still, I am quite certain that it is only a matter of time before citizenship will not be so sacred anymore as to be untouchable.</p>
<p><em>Translated from the Norwegian by Bruce Bawer</em></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Will Europe Put its Foot Down? &#8211; by Hege Storhaug</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/hege-storhaug/will-europe-put-its-foot-down-by-hege-storhaug/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-europe-put-its-foot-down-by-hege-storhaug</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/hege-storhaug/will-europe-put-its-foot-down-by-hege-storhaug/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:20:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hege Storhaug]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=41145</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We must learn from the Swiss as quickly as possible.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41147" title="FRANCE BURQA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/niqab1.jpg" alt="FRANCE BURQA" width="450" height="562" /></p>
<p>“Either Islam will be Europeanized, or Europe will be Islamized.”  In recent years this prediction has been made by many major experts, among them the American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis" target="_blank">Bernard Lewis</a>, the Syrian-born German <a href="http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassam_Tibi" target="_blank">Bassam Tibi</a>, and the French <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel" target="_blank">Gilles Kepel</a>.  This is, without question, an uncomfortable and sensitive topic, but it’s one that is very pertinent now that the Swiss have put their foot down and said that they will not accept another minaret within their borders.</p>
<p>In recent decades, Islam has exploded in Europe.  You can see the changes with your own eyes from year to year – whether it’s the increasing presence of hijabs on the street in a city like Oslo, or the bearded men with ankle-high baggy pants, or the new and resplendent mosques that are under construction.  For my part, I’ve noticed an increasing insecurity and unease among “ordinary” people who feel like aliens in their own country.  People ask: what is the purpose of this project?  Don’t we, as a nation, have a right to pass our own cultural legacy, our traditions and values, on to our children and grandchildren?  Should we, in the name of tolerance, give in to the demands made by “others” whose influence is growing, and whose voices are becoming louder, as their numbers increase? Or as a Norwegian Labor Party politician said to me in a private conversation: “On the day that most of the members of the city council are Muslims, what do you think will happen to the right of Oslo bars to serve alcohol?”  Another leading Laborite with over a couple of decades’ experience in politics put it more bluntly when I asked him “What you think about immigration from the Muslim world?”  The answer was so crisp, merciless, and genuinely felt that I gasped: “What have they contributed?”  Period.</p>
<p>Let it be said that of course there are many Muslims in Europe who are getting along just fine and who get the same chills down their spines that other European citizens do when they think of Sharia and the lack of freedom that accompanies classical Islam.  But as a rule those aren’t the Muslims who are the most prominent members of their faith among us; they aren’t the ones who enjoy power in the Muslim community, and they aren’t the ones who are best organized and who have developed exceptionally strong connections to our public officials.</p>
<p>No, it’s not the secularized Muslims who are leading the way – far from it.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali made this clear when I and a colleague of mine from Human Rights Service in Oslo met her at the Dutch Parliament in The Hague in 2005.  As she put it, there most certainly <em>are </em>Muslims in Europe who want a Europeanized Islam – that is to say, a private, personal Islam without political and judicial influence.  But these <em>aren’t </em>the Muslims who are powerfully positioned in Europe’s community organizations, Europe’s corridors of power, and Europe’s universities.</p>
<p>Here is an interesting point: immigrants from Iran tend to be secular, well-integrated, and – very often – well-educated.  Here in Norway, Iranians have generally integrated themselves into our culture, accepting Norwegian values even as they’ve maintained Iranian traditions that don’t conflict with human rights, such as celebrating Iranian New Year.  But Iranians are not the leaders of Europe’s Muslim communities.  Nor can I think of a single mosque in Norway, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, that has been founded by Iranians.</p>
<p>If Iranians, generally speaking, have been an immigration success story, enriching Europe and becoming fully participating members of European society, this isn’t true of the members of many other major immigrant groups, whose origins are in traditional villages in other Muslim countries.  It’s precisely these people’s unwillingness (or inability?) to assimilate to European society – indeed, to appreciate such typically European values as freedom, equality, social participation, and personal responsibility – that may be a major reason why Switzerland said no to more minarets.  At some point, Europe <em>must </em>put its foot down if it truly wishes to continue to be the Europe we know today.  There is a limit as to how many minarets a society can live with, how many hijabs and baggy pants the streets of Europe can tolerate, before the public space becomes as ideologically charged and as palpably unfree as the streets of, say, Pakistan.  We need to stand up and preserve our culture – a successful culture that is itself the only reason why immigrants are streaming from the Muslim world to our continent rather than in the other direction.</p>
<p>Here’s a specific example of how misguided our politicians have been in their handling of the challenge of Islam – an example that I think provides a very clear picture of grotesque weakness.  In 1974, Muslim immigrants from Pakistan established the first mosque in Norway, the Islamic Cultural Centre (ICC).  The name has a comforting, harmless sound: a “cultural center” sounds like something very different from a mosque.  In reality, however, the ICC is a direct subsidiary of an extreme religio-political movement and political party in Pakistan, Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which was established by one of the leading Islamist ideologues of the last century, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_Ala_Maududi" target="_blank">Abu Ala Maududi</a> (1903 – 1979). When Pakistan’s worst despot ever, General and President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Zia-ul-Haq" target="_blank">Zia ul-Haq</a> (1977 – 1988), Islamized that country from top to bottom, his main inspiration was Maududi. Today <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussain_Ahmad" target="_blank">Qazi Hussain Ahmad</a>, who has been a top JI leader for several years and has been banned for security reasons from entering about 25 European countries, as well as Egypt.  He has been under house arrest in Pakistan several times for having instigated violent riots that took human lives. Unsurprisingly, he’s also a fan of Bin Laden. Yet he’s not prohibited from entering Norway, and when he landed at Oslo Airport in August 2004, the arrivals hall was packed with Norwegian-Pakistani men and boys who openly cheered him as a prophet.</p>
<p>The ICC, then, which has a grandiose new mosque with minarets in downtown Oslo, follows an ideology that is a carbon copy of Maududi’s terrifying, violent creed.  It doesn’t just belong to a philosophically dangerous movement; it belongs to a movement which preaches that Muslims should not become fully integrated members of Norwegian society.  This is exactly the same attitude that is preached at every mosque in Europe that has “respect” for itself.  And yet the ICC, like many other mosques that share its theology, was allowed to establish itself in Norway, and in Europe generally, without protest from anybody.  And that’s not all: today it’s one of the largest and most influential so-called faith communities among Norwegian Muslims and has, over the years, received tens of millions of kroner in government support because it is regarded – absurdly – as a purely religious body.</p>
<p>But Europe’s cultural elite is blind to this ugly reality.  On the contrary, that elite, which lives largely off of the dialogue industry – exchanging endless amiable platitudes with Muslim leaders – is all bent out of shape over Switzerland: it views the ban on minarets as an assault on free speech and on freedom of religion; the ban, according to the elite, is an offense against cultural diversity, an expression of intolerance, prejudice, and extremism that will lead to a clash of civilizations.  Not to mention that the ban violates international conventions.</p>
<p>Yet this same elite never gets worked up when Christians are murdered in Pakistan or when their churches and homes are burned down.  Or when women and men are stoned to death in Somalia, or when burka-clad women in Afghanistan are crammed together with goats in the backs of trucks.  Nor do they pay the slightest heed to a woman walking through the streets of Oslo in a burka – a garment that must be described as the clearest possible manifestation of antipathy to Western culture, a powerful statement of complete rejection of the society in which the woman lives.</p>
<p>It is not too much to say, then, that the elite is completely off-balance.  And it’s this lack of balance, this lack of sensible attitudes in the salons of the privileged, this lack of respect for their own culture and for the values on which that culture is founded, that the grass roots are reacting to.  Simply put, ordinary people are sick of being told by their “betters” what to do and think: they want with all their hearts to defend themselves and their own.  Their message is: <em>By all means, come to </em><em>Europe</em><em> and become one of us.  But don’t come here to turn our culture and our values upside down. </em> The people have, in short, begun to wake up and to say no to the utopian multicultural dream. For they realize that Norway will no longer be Norway, and the West will no longer be the West, if the country’s essential culture is not preserved; and Christianity is an indissoluble part of that culture.  Whether one is personally religious or not, that’s simply a fact.  If Islam is going to place itself at the heart of our culture, most Norwegians understand that what we now consider Norwegian will be dead and buried.  The only alternative would be a miracle: a revolution within Islam that would place all of Muhammed’s inhumane actions on the ash heap of history and reduce all of his “sacred” legal and political pronouncements to the status of fairy tales like <em>A Thousand and One Nights. </em>Of course, such a revolution would also require an end to all of the violence and hatred preached in the Koran.</p>
<p>For about a millennium, Islam has failed spectacularly to pull off such a revolutionary project.  It’s precisely for this reason that people are pouring out of these failed states (yes, they’re also failed on account of other kinds of ideological despotism, including socialist projects, which when combined with authoritarian, oppressive religion produce something like gunpowder). The big question, however, is this: why should we expect a form of Islam to develop in Europe that is entirely antithetical to the form of Islam found in the Muslim world?</p>
<p>Of course Norway, and Europe as a whole, should not embrace any and every kind of culture or religion that finds its way here.  But where to draw the line?  There is no one answer to this question.  The answer will vary according to the nature of the culture or religion and the strength of the challenge that it represents.  But if we sell out our mainstream culture, and relativize it, accept a watering down of our rights, we may end up with a set of supposedly democratic but in fact empty and meaningless ideals that fail to provide us citizens with a values-related map or compass.  And what can happen in critical situations if the people don’t share a sense of community?  How can we ensure a sense of belonging if, for example, freedom of speech faces a major threat or if we suffer a terrorist attack?  Can we risk having civil war-like conditions, as we is already the case in Europe’s no-go zones?  Democratic order is, above all, a technical and practical matter, and it can thus <em>never </em>replace people’s need for a community, their need to be part of a common culture.</p>
<p>People must, then, have feelings – positive ones – about one another.  Last winter I had a thought-provoking experience on the east side of Oslo on my way home after work.  A thin layer of snow covered the icy streets.  A Somali women dressed in a tent slipped on the ice as I passed her.  Instinctively, I grabbed her and thus managed to prevent what could have been a bad fall, and helped her back to her feet.  I asked if she was okay, but she just hurried on with a completely expressionless look on her face.  Not a single sign of human connection, not a single glance at me.  I stood there feeling empty and alienated.</p>
<p>Awareness of a society’s and a culture’s need for a sense of community seems especially absent from the EU system.  The kind of communal feeling I am talking about contrasts sharply with the multicultural mentality of the pro-EU and antinational forces.  They refuse to understand that a nation’s culture – its folk songs, traditions, holy days, flags, and national anthems – is different from a broad-based constitution based on ideals of equality.  A text, simply put, cannot replace a feeling of community.  A national community with strong survival instincts is founded not on a text but on matters that are close to the heart, on traditions, on things that are palpable, on things as obvious as a common language and a sense of belonging to a fatherland.  And yes, this sense of community also has something to do with the churches and church spires, as well as the church’s rituals and traditions.  The principles that tie people together cannot be legislated by politicians; such bonds call for something more – trust between citizens, national loyalty, a high degree of agreement as to what freedom is and is not, and a broad sense of support for the obligations that a real community demands of its members.</p>
<p>The minarets, then, don’t symbolize community in the European sense – they symbolize the umma, the Muslim community.  They don’t represent loyalty to Norway or Switzerland or any other European country – they represent loyalty to Mecca and to the umma.  They don’t signify freedom, but illiberalism (women’s oppression, the punishment of apostasy with death).  The minarets, in short, embody the antithesis of the Declaration of Human Rights (as is clear to anyone who has read the 1990 Cairo Declaration about so-called “human rights in Islam,” which was formulated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference).  Nor are they, one might add, a part of our architectural tradition or any other Western tradition.  On the contrary, they bear witness to a state of mind that views us, the “others,” as strangers.</p>
<p>The policy of forcing oneself to tolerate something for which one has no sympathy whatsoever will, moreover, only erode the national culture.  Pointing fingers and making moral judgments is not the way to enhance tolerance.</p>
<p>In light of the immigration from the Muslim world, it’s very important for us to be aware of the history of our Western democracy.  It’s not true, after all, that we adopted democracy, with all the magnificent liberal values that accompanied it, and <em>then </em>developed a broad community of the people.  On the contrary, our free society is a historical consequence of a communal society based on trust, a shared culture in which Christianity has naturally played a central role.  Norway would not have managed to come together under our constitution, signed at Eidsvoll in 1814, if the country that produced it had been split along cultural and religious lines.  The people whose representatives met at Eidsvoll were a people who shared essentially the same culture and religion and who could hence agree on the text upon which their nation was to be founded.  The same thing happened when the Puritans settled in New England and built a society that grew into American democracy.  It is actually somewhat odd to think that America owes the liberal democracy enshrined in its founding documents to a group of original settlers whose strong sense of community was based on conservative religion and illiberal traditions.  It is, then, shared cultural norms, and not theoretical or abstract ideals of equality or international conventions, that lead people to stand shoulder to shoulder and to find community together.  A liberal democracy such as that of Norway or Switzerland is not and never has been self-sustaining.</p>
<p>The minaret case, then, can be very critical for Europe’s future.  How many minarets can Europe tolerate before our strong sense of communal connection is dissolved?  What will happen, then, to our democracy’s liberal values and to the social harmony we have enjoyed?  These are questions that most of the political parties in Norway and in a number of other European countries do not wish to address.  <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-the-swiss-were-right-to-prohibit-construction-of-minarets">As I wrote </a>a few days ago, they absolutely refuse to recognize that Islam is an <em>ideology </em>and a <em>social system, </em>a religion of laws – a religion with a political orientation and with political ambitions.   Yet Islam and Christianity are still treated by Norwegian (and European) officials as identical twins.  This misguided way of thinking may end up costing us heavily.  We must learn from the Swiss as quickly as possible – must learn, that is, to face up to, and respond appropriately to, the political and legal realities of the Islamic congregations in our midst.</p>
<p><em>This essay originally appeared in Norwegian on the website of Human Rights Service, <a href="http://www.rights.no/">www.rights.no</a>, and was translated into English by Bruce Bawer.</em></p>
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		<title>Subduing Women’s Sexuality &#8211; by Hege Storhaug</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/hege-storhaug/subduing-women%e2%80%99s-sexuality-by-hege-storhaug/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=subduing-women%25e2%2580%2599s-sexuality-by-hege-storhaug</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:01:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hege Storhaug]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why Islam’s obsession with sex must become a subject of debate in the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-39450" title="burqa" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/burqa.jpg" alt="burqa" width="450" height="309" /></p>
<p>My first encounter with Pakistan in 1993 took my innocence.  I discovered a culture pervaded with sexuality &#8211; sexuality in a very negative sense.  Absolutely everything, from the most trivial day-to-day matters to the most earth-shaking issues, had to do with sex – at least where girls and women were concerned.  The same fixation on sex has found its way to the West through immigration.</p>
<p>For example, the use of hijab, which is a key element of Islam’s view of sex, has all but exploded in Norway during the last few decades.  Earlier this year we had a big national debate about hijab.  It’s time to ask why Islam is so preoccupied with subduing women’s sexuality.  Women had a pretty high level of sexual freedom in the heathen, pre-Islamic society on the Arabian peninsula.  A woman could have relationships with several men at once, she could divorce easily, and she could decide who would get to be the father of her children.  Above all, women and children were, socially and economically, part of the tribal society.  A striking example of women’s freedom prior to Islam is that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadja, was a leading businesswoman in Mecca, and it was she who proposed to Muhammad, who was twenty years her junior.  One could look far and wide in today’s Mecca without finding such a free woman in today’s Mecca.  What happened?</p>
<p>In order to make Islam a reality, Muhammad introduced the idea of the family as a system.  Through the institution of the family, a man would be able to realize personal financial success.  But how to ensure that a man could know that his wife’s children were his own progeny and therefore deserving of his inheritance?  This is where Islam’s strict law against extramarital sex comes in.  Not to mention sexual segregation in public spaces.  And the covering of women, because women were viewed as wielding a dangerous sexual power – as <em>fitna, </em>which is Arabic for social chaos, chaos in the sense that if the woman is not subjected to severe sexual control, she will tempt men to break Islam’s harsh sexual prohibitions.  So it is that women are given the primary responsibility for ensuring that this essential element of sharia law is obeyed.  For the same reason, she is placed under the authority of men.</p>
<p>Islam doesn’t attack sexuality in itself, but rather women’s potential for exercising total power over men.  In Islam, sexuality is seen to have three main positive aspects: the human sexual drive ensures reproduction; it produces intellectual energy; and the sexual act itself provides the man with a foretaste of what he will experience in paradise – the eternal orgasm.  On earth, however, man’s most important task is devotion to Allah. Therefore, love between man and wife is viewed as an enemy of Muslim society.  Marital love can disturb the husband’s attachment to Allah.</p>
<p>Imam Ghazali (1050-1111) is considered the greatest and most influential theoretician of Islam.  Woman, according to Ghazali, is synonymous with the Satan.  She is the hunter; man is the passive victim.  By controlling women’s sexuality and limiting it to marriage, society protects the male outsider from being lured into illicit sexual activity.  Ghazali believed that a man has an absolute need to have his sexual needs met – and that if these needs are not satisfied, he is more likely to commit adultery.  A wife can therefore <em>not </em>refuse to sleep with her husband.  If she does, she will be punished on earth by her husband, who has the right to stop supporting her, and she will also be punished after death.</p>
<p>To counteract the possibility of real intimacy and affection between husband and wife, Ghazali prescribed religious formulas that the man is to recite during the sex act itself and when he achieves orgasm, the purpose being to reduce the act to its most elementary purpose – that is, reproduction.  Why did Islam introduce polygamy for men and simple and fast divorce laws for men?  Again, it’s all about Islam’s fundamental idea that the man’s ability to abandon himself fully and entirely to Allah is weakened by a lack of sexual satisfaction.  Polygamy and simple divorce laws make it possible for a man to fulfill this obligation to Allah – and prevent infidelity.</p>
<p>In the view of the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the notion of man as an almost notoriously sexual animal, a beast who will throw himself at any woman who is not “decently” covered in public, is essential to an understanding the stagnation of the Muslim world and of the immense problems with integrating Muslims in Europe.  As Hirsi Ali points out, Islam places all sexual morality on the woman’s shoulders.  From a very early age, she notes, girls are viewed with suspicion and learn that they are untrustworthy creatures who represent a potential danger to their extended families – for there is, in them, something that makes men lose their minds.</p>
<p>What consequences does Islam’s radical fixation on sex have for the West?  Without a doubt, Islam’s sexual obsession represents a major obstacle to integration – and an impediment to the free participation of Muslim girls and women in our society.  The control of their sexuality closes them in – and thus closes them out of key social arenas.  The severe social control of females also prevents natural contact between the sexes across religious lines and within the religion itself – a situation which seeds the ground for forced marriage.</p>
<p>But there are more serious factors.  At the age of 50, Muhammad became engaged to a six-year-old girl named Aisha, whom he married when she was nine.  The idea was that she was, by that age, sexually mature.  This explains why Ayatollah Khomeini set the minimum legal age at which girls could be married in Iran at 9 years old. If a girl is sexually mature, she possesses <em>fitna. </em>Little girls are also married off in the West, in accordance with Muhammad’s example.</p>
<p>The most extreme form of biological sexual control of women is genital mutilation.  Many people claim that genital mutilation has nothing to do with Islam.  This is untrue.  Muhammad issued a blanket prohibition against eating pork.  But he did not forbid genital mutilation.  Instead he encouraged his followers not to perform the most radical form of mutilation, telling them in his <em>sunna </em>not to “overdo it.”  Thus we have the practice known as “sunna circumcision.”  Today, Muhammad’s statements continue to be cited in support of the tradition.  According to the shafi school of Islamic law, which is followed by Somalis (among others), it is an obligation to “circumcise” girls.  This rule, naturally, has consequences for Muslim girls throughout the Western world today.</p>
<p>Another dramatic result of the strict control of Muslim female sexuality in the West is the “dumping” of girls in their families’ countries of origin, either to prevent integration (the concern being that they may violate sharia’s sexual laws) or because they already have been integrated.</p>
<p>Islam’s obsession with sex must become a subject of debate in the West.  If Muslim women and girls (and men) are not liberated from a view of sex based on religious law, integration into Western societies based on freedom and sexual equality will never become anything more than an illusion.</p>
<p><em>This piece first appeared, in Norwegian, in the newspaper </em>Bergens Tidende, <em>and has been translated into English by Bruce Bawer</em><em></em></p>
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