Sexual abuse widespread among Muslims
What follows is a frank discussion of sexuality in much of Islam. The language is graphic but not offensive, at least to me. Some brilliant wisdom is revealed below. It is well worth the read.
By: Nicolai Sennels, psychologist
Here we will dive into a dark and closed universe; a universe where women are forced to commit to lifelong sexual relationships with close family members, where abuse of women is seemingly extremely widespread, where girls and women are forced to hide their female beauty behind veils, long unflattering coats, burkas etc., where men are free to rape women, because women are often automatically seen as the ones at fault.
Rape and forced sexual relations
In the article ‘A Question of Honor’ in The Independent on February 10th 2009, British police were quoted estimating that nearly 17,000 women in Great Britain fall victim to honor related assaults, including rape and forced marriage, every year.
Vibe Klarup Voetmann, director of the Copenhagen women’s refuge Dannerhuset, said to the Danish daily Kristeligt Dagblad on the 11th of June 2008 that 70 percent of the nearly 1,400 women who contact the centre each year come from a Middle-Eastern background. As ‘Dannerhuset’ is just one of 40 women’s refuges in Denmark, there is reason to fear that the number of Muslim women who seek shelter or counseling due to forced marriages, domestic violence or sexual abuse, is actually much higher. It is also worth taking into consideration the fact that many Muslim women keep quiet about assaults out of fear of retaliation from the family. Thus, in Denmark alone, the number of Muslim women who are abused each year is likely to exceed several thousand.
Where is the honor in raping a woman or forcing her to marry a man she does not love?
A forced marriage is a sexual assault
When it comes to forced marriages, journalists and media still fail to understand that it is not just an assault on the woman’s basic human rights, but also, and especially, on her sexuality. In a forced marriage, the fact is that the woman is forced to engage in sexual relations with a man she has not chosen herself. Furthermore, this sexual relationship often lasts a lifetime, as divorce is rarely an option for the women.
The many forced marriages are only made more detestable by the fact that the women are often forced (here from Danish daily Jyllands-Posten) to marry members of their extended family: “In Pakistan it is estimated that close to 70 percent (other sources quote 60 percent) of all marriages are inter-familial marriages and in Turkey the figure is between 25-30 percent.”
How would you like it if you were forced to have sex with your own cousin?
Forced sexual relations between close family members is not only psychologically traumatizing, but also biologically unnatural. According to the article “The inbreeding of immigrants costs millions” in the Danish daily BT on the 10th of November 2003, the consequences are often physical and mental handicaps:
“When two cousins have children, the risk of having a handicapped child is doubled – and that costs the municipalities,” and further, “Already in year 2000 it was calculated that while 13 percent of all children in Copenhagen were immigrants, they also made up 24 percent of severely handicapped children.”
Unfortunately, in many forced marriages in Muslim culture, the bride is very young. As the young girls are without any realistic possibility of resisting the marriage, it is not too much to consider these marriages institutionalized sexual abuse.
Swedish researcher, Pernilla Ouis, herself a Muslim, has on behalf of “Red Barnet” produced a report of the so-called honor-related violence. The research took place in the Middle-East and Ouis’ conclusion is: “early marriage can be seen as sexual abuse, as the girls involved are very young.” The conclusions of the report were so damning she ran into censorship of it.
Muslim culture is a paradise for horny men
According to the Quran, Muslim men who die for Islam in battle will be rewarded 72 virgins, who are seemingly restored to virginity every time a martyr has penetrated her. Seen from the perspective of Western psychology, it is quite embarrassing and immature that a world religion promises sex – fair and square – and this, in addition, with sexually un-experienced women, as the highest prize. Most people who have already grown out of the hormonal waves of the teenage years, and have gained just a pinch of human maturity, will probably agree that such a goal is built on, and directed at, a very crude type of man.
This is not to say that the Islamic paradise is first and foremost meant for horny and callous men, who are too insecure to deal with experienced women’s free view on sexuality. However, the widespread glorification of this paradise within the Islamic environment indicates that the Muslim culture has succeeded in producing not so few of this type of man.
This sexual paradise, where one can just take a woman and do with her what one wants without asking, is unfortunately also existent among living Muslim men who have not martyred themselves for their religion. In many cases, Muslim men can rape Muslim women without consequences, because the women do not dare tell the family or the police. In fact, the view on women in the Muslim culture is often that it is the women themselves, who are to blame for the rape.
On the 3rd of August 2009, the Danish TV-station, “Danmarks Radio”, reported (English translation of original, longer article is here) how organized gang rape is a widespread phenomenon in immigrant circles: “Young men with a different ethnic background than Danish are responsible for organized rapes of girls from their own environment and background. The young men are well aware that the girls are so frightened of the reactions from their family that they keep quiet about the rapes.”
Kristina Aamand, a nurse who, herself, comes from a Muslim family, has worked with immigrant girls, who have been sexually abused, at the “Centre for Rape Victims in Denmark”. Today, Aamand is the manager of the counseling offer “New Virginity”, which is contacted every month by one or more immigrant girls who have been sexually abused by immigrant boys or men. Aamand comments on the phenomenon: “As a Muslim immigrant girl you are raised to believe that if you have pre-marital sex, you are punished by Allah. Pre-marital sex is, according to Islam, the most shameful act you can do. Some of the boys use this concept of honor against the girls, because it is the girls who carry the shame and will be punished accordingly.”
It is the more fervently religious families who consider the unfortunate girls guilty of their own rape. The same kind of family will often not allow female family members to be alone with men who are not members of the family. Furthermore, girls and women must always be accompanied by male family members whenever they leave the family home. Therefore, there is reason to suspect that the rapist is often a member of the family, such as uncle, brother, cousin, father, grandfather etc.
The Islamic paradise for horny and perverted Muslim men received its own legal paragraph in the spring 2009 in Afghanistan. Here the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, signed a law which actually granted men the right to rape their wives if more than four days had passed without sex. Luckily, the law was withdrawn due to international pressure. Unfortunately, the media and biographical literature is filled with accounts of Muslim men’s sexual abuse and violation of girls.
The beautiful, intelligent and brave Somali woman Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes this in moving detail in her books about life in Muslim society. The media can often provide more absurd examples. One of many recent examples is that of a 16-year-old Jordanian girl who was killed by her uncle with eight bullets at different places in her body – all because she had been raped. The only act of mercy, if it is even reasonable to talk about it as such, was that the uncle waited to kill his niece until after she had given birth to her rapist’s child.
Earlier in the summer, a girl, only eight years old, was abandoned by her Muslim parents because they wanted to save the family honor after their daughter had been raped by four boys. The Organization for Women’s Refuges in Denmark has experienced a fourfold increase in the number of children and young people who seek protection from domestic abuse. Manager of the secretariat, Lene Johannesson says: “Although efforts for integration has been persistent for quite a few years, young girls especially are still subjected to honor-related assaults.”
Making suicide bombers
Muslim men’s view on women is perhaps the reason that 100 percent of assault rapes (where perpetrator and victim do not know each other beforehand) in Oslo in both 2006, 2007 and 2008 were committed by immigrants with a so-called non-Western background. A particularly malicious version of this phenomenon was revealed in February 2009: An Iraqi woman had arranged the rape of no less than 80 other women. The purpose was to give the victims the impression that now that they no longer had anything to live for, becoming suicide-bombers was the only way to save their own and their family’s honor.
Furthermore, according to Islam, women must provide at least two male witnesses if they are to take any case to court. Should a woman in the Muslim countries which judge according to Sharia thus have the guts to report a rape, it would be impossible to win the case, as any possible male witnesses to the rape would most likely have been involved in the assault themselves.
In reality, a large part of the world’s almost 700 million Muslim women are thus without any real source of protection against sexual assaults by family members or other men in the surrounding environment. Only too often, this is exploited by Muslim men. When it comes to considering the actual wishes and desires of the women, the fact that a woman has any desire at all is frowned upon in many Muslim countries, even to the point of cutting off the erogenous parts of the female genitals preferably before puberty is reached. The New York Times thus related in the article ‘A cutting Tradition’ on the 20th of January, that 96 percent of all girls in the world’s most heavily populated Muslim country, Indonesia, are circumcised before they turn 14. Disgusting!
Islam perverts its followers’ sexuality
Why are women, and women’s right to decide over their own body and sexuality, worth less than men in Islam and Muslim culture? Why are Muslim women beaten, raped and mutilated so much more often than women of other cultures? There are many possible answers, of which the Quran is the most concrete: According to Allah and his prophet Muhammad, women are simply inferior to men (The Quran, chap. 4, 34th stanza).
Apart from the Quran, as a psychologist I will also point to the psychological fact that what we are afraid of, we do not like. After treating more than 100 Muslim men, it is my clear impression that Muslim men feel scared and insecure that women’s sexuality is in many ways stronger than men’s. Women can make love for a longer time than men, and men often feel ashamed if they cannot control their ejaculation and are thus not able to satisfy the woman. By disregarding women and their needs, these men try to handle the fact that women are stronger than men in this basic area of life.
Of course it must be mentioned that this psychological mechanism is also a factor among male-chauvinists in other cultures. However, no religion or culture has succeeded in creating as pronounced a cult around female sexuality as Islam – a cult that is centered on the suppression and concealment of female sexuality and female desire.
Kristina Aamand said in my interview with her, “Project New Virginity – Interview with Kristina Abu-Khader Aamand” from the 21st of September 2009: “Social control of women serves the purpose of preserving the core of the Muslim culture. For, a larger part of the core of the Muslim culture is about the female sexuality.” And here, it does not matter whether the women themselves claim to have chosen to wear a scarf, a veil or a burka. The fact that the women share Islam’s condescending view on women does not make things better, rather the contrary.
As a professional psychologist, I thus argue that the Muslim view on women is not only harmful to Muslim women. The condescending view on women and the mass-neurotic control of their sexuality is also harmful to the psychological development of the men. The sexuality of Muslim men is perverted because they are not able to experience a relaxed and loving relationship with women, and thus miss out on the deep emotional joy and development that loving, tender and respectful love between man and woman brings.
Muslim men are becoming callous, and their sexual performance becomes insensitive and without consideration for the needs and desires of the woman. And according to the women, among whom two experienced prostitutes that I have interviewed, the result is that Muslim men last a shorter time in bed and give less joy than other men.
When venturing into depth-psychology, which was first explored by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, we find the same psychological analysis. If one suppresses the female in the outer world, one correspondingly represses one’s own female qualities (so-called “anima”), and one thus becomes less sensitive, creative, calm, intuitive, self-secure, social and peaceful.
The rest of us, all us men who love women, and who worship the things we learn by opening up to them, and wish women to be free to choose their partners, wardrobe and lifestyle, feel that it is our duty to protect them if they are being attacked or suppressed, and can only shrug at the men who do not let their women live the way they want, and who do not have eyes for the many qualities of women. Men who do not have a relaxed relationship to women are often male-chauvinists and emotionally immature – a sign of lack of openness and real life-experience with the beautiful sex. In therapy, this type of man often shows himself to have a distorted image of his own attractiveness and sexual performance.
Unhealthy sexuality
This perversion of sexuality and lacking experience of equal and mutual love might be the reason why many fervent Muslim believers also have been shown to have a great interest in child porn. In the article “Link Between Child Porn and Muslim Terrorists Discovered in Police Raids” from 17th of October 2008, Times Online could thus report how British police have found lots of child porn during investigations of assumed terrorists’ computers.
The police was surprised to find a clear connection “between people who were followers of theocracy and Islamic fundamentalism, and their use of child porn.” The pedophile terrorists’ behavior is not far from that of their prophet: Muhammad married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her for the first time when she was nine. And yes, he terrorized his surroundings with scores of wars and gave his followers permission to rape non-Muslim women. (and girls)
The fact that more than half of all brides in Afghanistan are under fifteen years old is also far from the biologically and mentally more responsible Western practice, which is based on the idea that girls should not have sex before they are sexually mature. One of the more grotesque examples is an eight-year-old girl in Saudi-Arabia, who was forced to marry a 47-year-old man. With the help of her mother, the girl filed for divorce, but according to Saudi-Arabian law, which is based on the Quran, she had to stay with her husband, who was six times her age.
One of Islam’s highest leaders, the now deceased Ayatollah Khomeni, who lead the Islamic revolution in 1979 in Iran and who, until his death in 1989, was the highest authority of the country, both politically and religiously, also wrote the book Tahrirolvasyleh, which is a collection of Islamic rules of conduct for Muslims. Here he is quoted for: “A man can quench his sexual thirst by use of a baby. The only condition is that he does not penetrate the vagina, but anal sex is okay.”
Elsewhere, he writes that: “It is better if a girl marries so early that she gets her first period in the home of her husband rather than in the home of the father. Every father who gives his daughter away in marriage at such an early age will have obtained a place in heaven.”
And further: “A man can have anal sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels, etc. However, he should kill the animal after ejaculating.”
And some words on the rights of women: “A woman who has entered into a true state of matrimony does not have the right to leave the house without her husband’s permission – she must be available to him and fulfill his every need and must not refuse to give herself to him unless there is a valid religious reason.”
Khomeni also does not think that a husband having anal sex with his own son is a valid reason for divorce: “If a man has anal sex with his son, brother or father after he is married, the marriage is to continue.”
Prophets, religious leaders, the Quran and culture or not, seen from a psychological perspective, sexual relationships between grown men and adolescent girls, or women who are not participating voluntarily, is an expression of a perverted sexual life and culture. It is a sign of some thoroughly depressing and dysfunctional character-traits – these character-traits are, in far too many cases, the result of growing up in the Muslim culture. Thus, many signs suggest that Islam and Muslim culture perverts men’s sexual drive and desire. This is, presumably, the reason why sexual assaults on girls and women are so frequent and widespread among Muslims.
The largest search-engine on the internet, Google, seems to confirm that the interest in the most perverted and traumatizing kinds of sex is largest in the Muslim world. Google Trends is a program, which can show in what countries and languages a certain word is most frequently searched for. If you write “children sex” in Google Trends, Muslim countries take up four out of five places on the top-five.
The languages, in which “children sex” is most often searched for are Indonesian and Arabic. If you search for “rape sex”, Muslim countries take up three out of four on the top-four. And again Indonesian and Arabic are the languages in which this type of sex is most frequently searched for. Just for fun, I tried searching for “donkey sex” and again it turned out that Muslim countries take up four out of five places on the top-five.
However, this time the languages in which the search for donkey sex is most frequently executed were Turkish and Arabic. Ayatollah Khomeni would not have raised an eyebrow. Of course there can be different explanations as to why the interest in searching for these kinds of sex is so great in many of the largest Muslim countries, but it is, nevertheless, thought-provoking seen in the light of Islam and the Muslim culture’s view on free sexuality and love as sick and wrong. You can try searching yourself on Google Trends.
Conclusion
The ability to open up to a free and giving love and sexuality between man and woman is the foundation on which mental health rests. As long as women are not seen as equal in the Muslim culture, Muslim men and Muslim society will lag behind psychologically. On this basic human level, Islam and Muslim cultural psychology can be very unhealthy for human development. The conclusion is thus that the result of this psychology is that sexual assaults are worryingly widespread among Muslims.
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