Do Western women deserve to be raped? Are they “begging” for it?
Not a few Muslim men seem to think so.
Consider the following excerpt from the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry Report,” which found that Muslims have systematically “groomed” and raped over a quarter million British girls:
Although female sexuality is seen as a source of fitna [temptation which leads to societal chaos], sharia assigns men regarded as more rational and better able to exercise self-restraint the God-given responsibility to oversee and regulate women. From this perspective, a woman who fails to comply with sharia norms – for instance, by appearing unveiled and unaccompanied in public – represents a danger to social order. In such a framework, responsibility for any sexual assault she suffers is often attributed to her own behavior, especially when combined with notions of the inherent impurity of non-Muslims. This outlook leads to non-Muslim women who appear uncovered and move freely without male supervision being labelled as ‘sluts’ who are eager to entice men. In this cultural context, a Muslim man who engages in sexual activity with such a woman bears no blame; the fault lies entirely with the woman. Islamic teachings concerning the perilous nature of female sexuality and the moral inferiority of non-Muslims can reinforce and legitimize this pattern of attributing responsibility to the victim.
All of this is true.
For example, in the academic book, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, Nadia Maria El Cheikh writes:
Fitna, meaning disorder and chaos, refers also to the beautiful femme fatale who makes men lose their self-control. Fitna is a key concept in defining the dangers that women, more particularly their bodies, were capable of provoking in the mental universe of the Arab Muslims.
After explaining how the fair-haired/-eyed Byzantine woman exemplified Islam’s femme fatale of fitna, Cheikh writes:
In our [Muslim] texts, Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality…Our sources show not Byzantine women but [Muslim] writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female — constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity….
Cheikh documents how Muslims claimed that these white Christian females were the “most shameless women in the whole world”; that, “because they find sex more enjoyable, they are prone to adultery”; that “adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium” — so much so that “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”
Concludes Cheikh:
While the one quality that our [Muslim] sources never deny is the beauty of Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is anything but beautiful. Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive, virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative…. Such anecdotes [of sexual promiscuity] are clearly far from Byzantine reality and must be recognized for what they are: attempts to denigrate and defame a rival culture through their exaggeration of the laxity with which Byzantine culture dealt with its women…. In fact, in Byzantium, women were expected to be retiring, shy, modest, and devoted to their families and religious observances…. [T]he behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.
Several centuries later, in a written excerpt that goes to great (if not pornographic) lengths, Imad al-Isfahani (b. 1125), a celebrated Persian court scholar and poet, explained how he once saw a ship containing “three hundred lovely Frankish women, full of youth and beauty” arrive by sea. The flattery ends there and the fantasying begins:
They glowed with ardor for carnal intercourse. They were all licentious harlots, proud and scornful, who took and gave, foul-fleshed and sinful . . . making love and selling themselves for gold . . . with nasal voices and fleshy thighs, blue-eyed and grey-eyed. . . . They dedicated as a holy offering what they kept between their thighs. . . . They maintained that they could make themselves acceptable to God by no better sacrifice than this. . . . They made themselves targets for men’s darts.
Fast-forward to the present, and we find Muslim men in the West operating on the same exact logic. Not only do they see European women as “beautiful femme fatales who make men lose their self-control,” but, like their ancestors from a thousand years ago, today’s Muslim men also insist that European women are “all licentious harlots, … foul-fleshed and sinful . . . making love and selling themselves for gold . . . with nasal voices and fleshy thighs, blue-eyed and grey-eyed.”
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