Misunderstanding Islamic Sexual Mores

In the wake of the story about the Saudi prince who beat his black male sex slave to death in a swank London hotel, a couple of Jihad Watchers claim, from their experience sojourning in various Muslim countries, that Muslim men tend to gravitate to functional homosexuality (and that usually pederastic) because Islamic culture supposedly renders sex with women rare and difficult to be had.

I've always had a problem with this theory, which in my experience is a common trope; and now one of those Jihad Watchers, "mike ryan", provides us -- unwittingly -- with a cause for skepticism.

Evidently, "mike ryan" didn't realize the screaming inconsistency he managed to package into two paragraphs:

Anyone who has traveled in Muslim countries knows of the existence of "opportunistic" homosexuality as men, forbidden normal sexual and social access to women, (as is also the case in prisons wherein heterosexual sexual contact is impossible) will dabble in homo-erotic contacts in its place, even if not normally homosexual in the proponderance of their proclivities. I've experienced this in a number of Muslim-Arab countries.

Islam's moral code and laws relating to marriage breed hypocrisy. Take "temporary marriages" for example. A man has the "right" to establish sexual contact with as many women as he wishes, as long as he can afford to do so, and even when he can not afford it, by using a number of legal fictions afforded by Islamic law. Find yourself in a strange city for a month? No problem! Just hook up with a woman, proclaim you're married to her, and you can demand free sex without any of the annoying inconveniences of owing the woman anything.

Obviously, if Muslim men can get sex from women through Islamically sanctioned "temporary marriage" as easily as "mike ryan" claims in paragraph #2, then there isn't the dearth of heterosexual sex as "mike ryan" claims in paragraph #1.

In addition to "temporary marriage" in Islamic societies, we may also add the prevalence of rape (perhaps mostly of insufficiently hijabbed women as well as of non-Muslim women who find themselves in the unlucky circumstance of being alone in a Muslim neighborhood) as a common way for Muslim men to find sex around the ostensible strictures against fornication outside of Islamic marriage.

We thus are led reasonably to the conclusion that homosexual sex (with a leaning to pederasty) for Muslim men is not the result of not having access to women, but has its source in the general demonic psychopathology of Islamic culture, along with everything else they think, feel, say and do.

This common trope -- that Muslim men are denied sex with women and therefore seek out homosexual sex in its place -- is yet another manifestation of the Western tendency -- even among those in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement -- to see Muslims through a Western prism, as though deep down, the way to understand -- and thereby to lessen -- the bizarre monstrosity of Islamic culture, is to find something familiar (i.e., Western) to explain it somehow.

Thus we tend to anthropomorphize (viz., Westernize) this utterly alien and ghoulishly repellant world called Islam -- even as we increasingly recognize its monstrous otherness. (By "we" I mean others around me in the West, including nearly everyone, apparently, in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement.)

No doubt, this tendency to misunderstand the Muslim mind comforts, as increasingly we -- and particularly those of us in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement -- learn to our growing horror and dismay more and more about the freakishly demonic culture of Islam. Comfort at the price of truth, however, doesn't last, and sooner or later will come back to bite us in the ass.