Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

The curious history of the codpiece

I generally steer away from racier topics, schizophrenic quasi-prude that I am.   On the one hand, the romantic (Or is it elitist snob?) in me can't get enough "Murder She Wrote", "Rumpole the Bailey", and "Brideshead Revisited", but I'm probably better known among friends for switching on David Chappelle or, history's funniest movie ever, "Booty Call" (to which I'm not going to provide a link, beta).  In fact, "Booty Call" was, to poor Shabana's horror, the first movie I rented after we got married five years ago.  It's a movie I can watch all day and all night.  As I can the "Jamie Foxx Show", as well.  His comedic talents seem to know no bounds.  But I digress.  Sure, it's raunchy and highly un-Islamic fare, but, lord, it's has the touch of genius.   

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I reserve the right to  include the occasional titillating tidbit that I find amusing and/or edifying in these ethereal pages, prudish Muslim sensibilities or no.  (As the hadith says, La haya fi din.  "There is no shame in [discussion of matters of] religion.")   

Anyway, I was reading a quite innocent webpage and came across a word I remembered faintly from English literature class but couldn't quite place: The "codpiece".   So I googled it and discovered a  bounty of interesting and titillating information that I think is worth sharing.

It is an article of clothing worn by men in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries to ostensibly to cover their genitals (this was a time before underwear and apparently the hemlines of men's tunic kept rising during that era; that's a fad I'm grateful has been left in the past) but which became highly increasingly exaggerated, erotically stylized and sometimes even imbued with political significance. 

You've probably seen this curious item in old paintings depicting scenes from English history or literature and not given it any thought because of how accustomed we are today to the sight of men's legs or the fact you can't tell how revealing these curious items were by looking at the old paintings.

There's a lot of entertaining stuff (e.g., the author speculates that the Spaniards in Columbus' day choose a vertical style to celebrate the dynamism and virility of Spain in the Age of Discovery), but you might be wondering why I'm sharing it.

Here's the fascinating thing. Note this intriguing observation:

Of course, all of this was an affront to the Church that considered that the body was sinful and should be covered. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1347, the Church was quick to declare that this was, in fact, divine punishment for the sinful clothes men were wearing. However, terrible that the Plague was, it did not put a stop to the fashion and afterward coats continued to grow shorter and things became ever more fanciful.

What a refreshing notion.  The Black Death was the result of the male sin and decadence!   It wasn't because of that old standby explanation, women running around out of control, but rather men who weren't covering themselves properly.

That has to be the first time I've ever heard of any religious establishment singling out men for immodest dress and viewing calamities as divine judgment for male vice and immorality.  And not any old calamity, but the Black Death, one of the words natural disasters of history.

It's also quite striking to consider that a style that was basically little different from a penis gourd [Warning for the squeamish: Illustrates the idea with National Geographic-style pics of scantily clad tribesmen.] you'd associate with pagan "natives" could become the rage centuries ago in Christian Europe and across class lines (i.e., this wasn't just something uncouth peasants did). 

I'm no historian of Islamic history and realize that Muslim societies have known their share what a moralist would deem vice and deviance (see for example, "Pederasty in the Islamic World" in Wikipedia), but I doubt you could find comparably libertine social trends in the Muslim world then.   Is this an example of how early the process of secularization began to develop within the bosom of Christendom? 

Speaking of penis gourds, this fascinating report from 2000 in Salon explains how this rude accent piece has become a symbol of political resistance in Irian Jaya, the province of Indonesia annexed by Jakarta in 1969 and which still has a separatist movement.

Let's all get down on our knees right now and pray that this trend doesn't catch on among rebels elsewhere.  The world has enough problems without Basques, Kurds, Baluchis, Palestinians, Irishmen, Kashmiris, West Saharans, Uyghurs, Dinkas and so on running around naked. 

Gay marriage, the "polygamy" of 20th century America

Speaking of polygamy (see my recent post), there was a very interesting article by Cathleen Kaveny in Commonweal  last year tracing the parallels between our controversies today over the place of gay marriage in society and the debate over polygamy in 19th century America (i.e., before the Mormon Church abandoned the practice).

I note for the record that, contrary to possible appearances, polygamy is not a preoccupation of mine.  I found this article when I happened to investigate a peculiar referring link from Google in my web traffic stats. (Note: I don't control how people find my blog through search engines.  Don't blame me for their crazy choice of keywords.)

Anyway, it's a stimulating read. 

I found the anecdote about "coab hunts" to root out polygamous families particularly thought-provoking (see text in bold below).  It's worthy of the Taliban, though such a sensationalistic comparison is ultimately unfair given the religious norms of the era.  And, as is usually the case when people suddenly get serious about cracking down on vice, it's women and children who bear the brunt of it while the male perpetrators blend into the woodwork.

The article also gives you a sense of how religiously conservative America was at the turn of the century, at the very same time that Continental Europe was busy burying God.  Only a generation later, you had the  Prohibition Era (which grew out of the earlier Temperance Movement), for example.

The US must've seemed prudish to European sophisticates at the time.  I once read that a turn-of-the-century French diplomat was so dismayed at being posted to Washington,  then perceived (perhaps rightly, at least relatively speaking) on the Continent as a dull backwater of bland food and puritanical hangups, that he actually killed himself.  (Just imagine the misery of sybarite Left Bank Parisian forced to host dry soirees in Washington during Prohibition.  Quelle horreur! )

You also see what kind of political pressure the Mormons were under and the prejudices they faced, with the US government treating the Church like an organized crime syndicate.  In some respects, it's reminiscent of the treatment of Muslims and Muslim organizations in post-9/11 America.  (Times have sure changed, though.  I pity the fool who picks a fight with the Mormon Church today...)

Commonweal: Remember the Mormons: thinking about the nature of Marriage

As Richard Van Wagoner describes in his fascinating book, Mormon Polygamy (Signature Books), Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism, appears to have practiced polygamy from the early 1830s, although he did not announce his "Revelation on Celestial Marriage" until 1843. According to Mormon theology, polygamy was no mere alternative lifestyle choice; it was an essential aspect of the divine plan, to be set aside by the faithful at their eternal peril. To say that the world did not applaud Smith's theological revelation would be an understatement. The 1856 Republican Party platform denounced slavery and polygamy as "the twin relics of barbarism."

In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, which made bigamy a criminal offense. Subsequent legislation not only attempted to stamp out polygamy, but also tried to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. "Unlawful cohabitation," easier to prove than polygamy, was made a crime. "Cohab hunts" were conducted on a regular basis, forcing polygamous men to abandon their wives and children to go underground. Polygamists were excluded from juries, deprived of the right to vote, and denied any "place of public trust, honor, or emolument." Wives were forced to testify against their husbands in polygamy trials. Children of plural marriages were disinherited. The Mormon Church itself was stripped of its status as a law-abiding corporation and treated almost as a criminal conspiracy. According to Van Wagoner, the church finally capitulated to the government's unrelenting pressure in 1890, when its leader announced that he "had sought the will of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit had revealed that it was necessary for the church to relinquish the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives."

Homosexuality in Afghanistan

There's a really engrossing article in the LA Times, "Kandahar's Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits", from 2002 on the coexistence of widespread homosexual practices with Afghanistan's infamously rigid "traditional" values.
[HT: Saracen.nu]

The most interesting thing is how they do not define it as homosexual, even though it sounds like some of these guys are very actively engaged in what in the US would be considered a gay lifestyle.  (Only the recipient, as it were, is gay.) 

This macho doublestandard isn't unique to Pashtoons, of course.  I've heard of similiar attitudes in Mexico, for example.

Gay "special treatment" and Muslim "special treatment"

Came across an interesting statement in an excerpt of an interview from a Danish newspaper on the threat to all that is holy posed by Europe's increasing multiculturalism that should give homophobic Muslims pause.   [Reluctant HT:  Danske øjne på svenske forhold]

The excerpt from the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, inexplicably translated into Swedish, is garden-variety alarmism over immigration and true multiculturalism (as opposed to the fake multiculturalism held up as a model by nationalists where immigrants know their "place" and leave their own cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs on the boat), but the language is striking in how it employs the tropes of American gay rights opponents regarding Muslims:

Danmark har inte lika stora problem med integrationen som Storbritannien. Vi har varit bättre på att styra invandringens omfattning och på att säkerställa samhällets grundvärden som en gemensam utgångspunkt, till gagn för såväl danskar som invandrare. Men det finns fortfarande en stor risk för att uppsplittringen blir djupare och parallellsamhällena griper kring sig. Därför ska vi inte heller begå samma misstag som Storbritannien och böja oss för muslimska särkrav på samhällets inrättning.
Denmark's integration problems are not as serious as those of Great Britain.  We've been better at managing the scope of immigration and at making society's values the point of departure, which has benefitted Danes and immigrants alike.  But there an increasing risk of the divide becoming deeper and a parallel society forming.  Therefore, we must not make the same mistake as Great Britain by yielding to Muslims' demands for special treatment in society.

Tvärtom ska vi lyssna till de ganska barska varningar som nu hörs från människor som Wolf och Rieff – inte bara till Storbritannien men till hela Europa. Wolf talar om att samhällen som inte bygger på en gemensam förståelse för demokratiska grundvärden blir förtryckande eller kommer att stå på randen till inbördeskrig. Rieff skriver att den stora utmaning som Europa står inför är att undvika att multikulturalismen utvecklas till allas kamp mot alla. Denna uppgift får alla Europas andra problem att verka triviala, anser han och konkluderar: ”Drömmen om det multikulturella samhället är över”.
[It then continutes with guff about the risk of multiculturalism leading Europe towards oppression or even civil war, concluding that the dream of a multicultural society is over.]

Muslims aren't asking for respect and equality, goes the thinking. They're obnoxiously demanding "special treatment" from the already beleaguered mainstream. 

The similiarity of this special-treatment rhetoric, with all its unspoken assumptions of  the mainstream being bullied by a powerful and dangerous minority, to that of the American Right when opposing gay rights is quite striking and eye-opening, I think.   

These is the kind of emotional argument made in American politics that many Muslims instinctively support when the question of homosexuality comes up.

It's inevitable that Muslims and gays will disagree on some important matters, but if they are to be just (not to mention consistent) Muslims must remember the difference between legitimate demands for equality and respect by fellow citizens and demands for "special treatment" that impose a minority's values on others. 

Muslims must should also remember their own treatment at the hands of xenophobes and modernday Procrustuses of cultural purity before instinctively dismissing the grievances of other groups that make them feel uncomfortable.

NYT on children, sex & the media

Speaking of the saturation of American pop culture with sex that I lamented in a recent post, Faisal  was nice enough to alert me to a particularly germane piece in the New York Times, "Children, Media and Sex: A Big Book of Blank Pages - New York Times". 
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January 31, 2006

Personal Health

Children, Media and Sex: A Big Book of Blank Pages

By JANE E. BRODY

In last summer's prize-winning R-rated film "Me and You and Everyone We Know," a barely pubescent boy is seduced into oral sex by two girls perhaps a year older, and his 6-year-old brother logs on to a pornographic chat room and solicits a grown woman with instant messages about "poop."

Is this what your teenage children are watching? If so, what message are they getting about sexual mores, and what effect will it have on their behavior?

The journal Pediatrics addressed the topic last July in a supplemental report, "Impact of the Media on Adolescent Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors." It is an important and, sad to say, much neglected subject. The report, based on a thorough review of scientific literature, was requested by Congress and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

A Neglected Subject Pursued

I'll start with the bottom line: "Although a great deal is known about the effects of mass media on other adolescent behaviors, such as eating, smoking and drinking, we know basically nothing about the effects of mass media on adolescent sexual behaviors," the report's principal investigator, S. Liliana Escobar-Chaves of the university's Center for Health Promotion and Prevention Research, concluded.

But to hazard a guess based on clear evidence that media representations influence teenage eating, smoking and drinking habits, adolescents are almost certainly affected — negatively — by sexual references and images from television, in movies and video games, in music, in magazines and on Web sites.

Who's monitoring what teenagers see, read and hear about sex? For the most part, no one. "There is growing concern that youth are accessing media in environments isolated from the supervision or guidance of parents or other adults," the report says. "The average American youth spends one-third of each day with various forms of mass media, mostly without parental oversight."

Despite the advent of V-chips, movie ratings and televised warnings of appropriateness for young people, American teenagers have no trouble getting access to graphic sexual presentations. And no one restricts what they hear in popular songs. The effect of abstinence-only education pales by comparison with the many graphic messages that portray sexual activity — especially unprotected sex outside of marriage — to be a part of our culture as normal and acceptable as eating a Big Mac or drinking a Coke.

The proportion of high school students who say they have had sex has declined some and the rate of teenage pregnancies has dropped, but the numbers remain staggering. The report states: "Approximately 47 percent of high school students have had sexual intercourse. Of these, 7.4 percent report having sex before the age of 13, and 14 percent have had four or more sexual partners."

Each year, nearly 900,000 teenage girls in the United States become pregnant (340,000 are 17 or younger). The rates of sexually transmitted diseases are higher among teenagers than among adults, and 35 percent of girls have been pregnant at least once by age 20. In 2002, chlamydia infections were six times as prevalent among sexually active adolescent girls as they were among sexually active women.

The risks don't end with pregnancy and disease. "Data suggest that sexually active adolescents are at high risk for depression and suicide," the report states. "Early sexual experience among adolescents has also been associated with other potentially health-endangering behaviors, such as alcohol, marijuana, and other drug use."

In an accompanying article, Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney Jr. of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health in Austin, Tex., wrote, "Many parents and some physicians underestimate the negative and lifelong impact of early sexual activity." The main report said that, in hindsight, many sexually active teenage girls wished they had waited longer.

Exposure Is Widespread

Television is the best-studied medium, and the average teenager watches it for more than three hours a day. Two-thirds of youngsters 8 to 18 have TV's in their bedrooms, and two-thirds live in homes with cable TV, providing unsupervised access to sex talk and scenes.

The sexual content of TV is pervasive and increasing. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that "the shows most watched by adolescents in 2001-2002 had 'unusually high' amounts of sexual content compared with TV as a whole: 83 percent of programs popular with teens had sexual content, and 20 percent contained explicit or implicit intercourse."

"On average," it continued, "each hour of programming popular with teens had 6.7 scenes that included sexual topics."

The foundation study found that "characters involved in sexual behavior in TV programs rarely experience any negative consequences."

"Programs with a primary emphasis on sexual risk and responsibility themes represent only 1 percent of all shows that contain sexual content," it continues. Furthermore, only 3 percent of sex scenes observed involved protection against disease and unwanted pregnancy.

What little is known about the effects of television sex on teenage attitudes and behavior comes primarily from a national telephone survey conducted twice, in 2001 and again in 2002, among 1,792 youths ages 12 to 17.

Growing Up Faster

The survey showed that watching TV with sexual content artificially aged the children: those who watched more than average behaved sexually as though they were 9 to 17 months older and watched only average amounts. Twelve-year-olds who watched the most behaved sexually like 14- and 15-year-olds who watched the least.

The research indicated that adolescents who watched shows with sexual content tended to overestimate the frequency of certain sexual behaviors and to have more permissive attitudes toward premarital sex.

As for movies, two studies that analyzed the content of top movie videos rented by young people revealed a large amount of sexual content, mostly sex among unmarried partners.

The effects of such viewing have been minimally studied. In a 2001 study of sexually active black girls ages 14 to 18, those who were exposed to X-rated movies were more likely to have multiple sexual partners, to have sex more often, to test positively for chlamydia and to be less likely to use contraception.

The music videos aimed at teenagers are rife with sexuality or eroticism, much of it explicit, the report noted. But the effects of this exposure have yet to be studied. Likewise, nothing of a scientific nature is known about the effects of magazines, advertising or video or computer games on adolescents' attitudes and behavior toward sex.

As for the Internet, one national survey of 10- to-17-year-olds found that one in five had "inadvertently encountered explicit sexual content, and one in five had been exposed to an unwanted sexual solicitation while online."

The report called for better studies to assess the effects of sexuality in the mass media on adolescent beliefs and behavior, especially studies that measure over time how the cumulative effects of sexual content in different media affect teenage sexuality.

America's Most Endangered Species: the Virgin

In "single and chaste: the yearning", Shabana writes about the challenge of loneliness for singles and the need for them to approach marriage carefully and without unrealistic expectations of their spouse or themselves.

In a similar vein, I suspect it's hard for those born in less sexually charged times or in more religiously conservative lands to understand the incredible pull of sex for people who've come of age recently in America.  Regardless of one's values, class, race, or religious background, if you grew up anywhere in America over the last 30-40 years, you've probably been inundated with a constant barrage of sexual titillation and propaganda for promiscuity since the minute you left your mother's womb.  Forgive the nerdy comic book metaphor, but we're all sexual mutants born of a childhood bathed in the "gamma rays" of a libertine culture.  We're transformed from mature, balanced Bruce Banner's to, well, Incredibly Horny Hulks. (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

I don't think to make this observation is in any way prudish or pessimistic, nor am I holding myself up as an exception (quite the contrary, alas).  That's the way America--and, alas, increasingly, the rest of the world--is, and we're all a product of it, willingly or not.

Let's face it:  Sex (and materialism, a topic for another time) permeates the air we've breathed for generations.  When it comes to sex, we're living in a modern-day Babylon.  Now, part of this stems from the fact that many people, including people who would consider themselves religious, no longer think there is anything wrong with Babylon.  I don't have a problem that, so long as they're honest about where they're coming from.  If you don't have a problem with that kinky state of affairs for philosophical reasons--e.g., if you believe that traditional sexual mores are psychologically unhealthy or inherently patriarchal (there are serious arguments)--that's fine with me, so long as you do not employ pseudo-religious rhetoric to justify Babylon, the anti-thesis of traditional values. 

If you think I'm overreacting or exaggerating, take a look at popular culture.  Anybody with eyes can see how sexually charged movies and TV programs are for adults as well as teens. And observe cultural  programming for children--sometimes even on relatively culturally conservative media, like the PAX cable network--and note not only how quickly traditional (and, I suspect, instinctive) inhibitions about gender mixing are invalidated but how quickly even the youngest of children are introduced to the notion of dating.  The list goes on and on.

One way I think that the burden is especially heavy on men is how ruthlessly the concept of virginity is delegitimized and how men are conditioned to measure themselves by their sexual expertise and "success" in the dating game.  I don't mean to imply that women are free of burdens, by any means, so much as discuss something I know from my own experience as an American man.

I suspect that Americans born in an earlier era or people born abroad are unlikely to grasp how deadly the combination of good old American machismo with a hyper-sexualized, increasingly secularized society is for the self-esteem of young men who abstain from sex. When you've grown up with bed-hopping heroes like James Bond and Captain Kirk as your icons of masculinity; and when you've grown up in a cultural mileu where the concept of male virginity is so relentlessly mocked that a movie like "The Last American Virgin" --a 1982 high school comedy about the quest to finally deflower America's lone remaining male teenage virgin; stop and think about the implications for societal norms there and consider what an incredible rupture it is with the past--is comprehensible it's impossible for your inner compass not to be warped to some extent, no matter how much you may aspire to live up to traditional values.    [Update: Someone was kind enough to point out in a comment that I overlooked a pretty obvious and more recent example of this phenomenon,  "The 40 Year Old Virgin".   Very true.]  Occasional sermons or khutbahs about family values are unlikely drown out those omnipresent influences when the hormones kick in late on a Friday night.   

It's one of the few arguments I can think of for hijrah.  This is a reason why, for all my various radical/liberal streaks, as I look ahead to the birth of my first child I can relate to the instinctive desire of many immigrant parents to send their children abroad to be raised in a more conservative environment.  Muslims societies have all sorts of  serious social, cultural, and political problems--with serious gender hang-ups and injustices often being foremost among them, I hasten to add--but at least there's a chance for a child to remain a child for a while. The same can't be said for America today, when young children are learning far more every day about life from Brittany Spears or Snoop Dogg than their parents thanks to the media.  With apologies to the United Negro College Fund, a childhood's a terrible thing to waste.

There is no question that young women are put under enormous pressure to "put out"--and then, ironically, punished for not remaining pure (a la the Madonna/Whore complex)--and there are all sorts of other kinds of unhealthy pressures on young women vis-a-vis their appearance, but I don't think women in this society face the same internalized *psychological* pressures to be promiscuous.  Women are pressured in a myriad of ways, but I would argue that they tend to be more external (e.g., social pressure) and the price paid for not giving in to this pressure is milder.  In a nutshell, from a very early age men are conditioned to base their most profound sense of manhood on their sexual resume, as it were.  I do not think the same can be said of women.  There may be every manner of pressure and enticement to get women to be sexually active, but they are not taught to hate themselves for not being sexually active or for "conquering" men. 

I submit that in American culture today, an adult female virgin is treated as a quaint oddity, but not as a clinical disorder.  She might even occasionally get an iota of respect.  An adult male virgin, to the contrary, is treated like a freak of nature, something that I consider incredibly harmful to young men's psychological development.

I'm not implying one is less of a problem than the other, so much as addressing what I consider to be important differences.  It's still "Man's World" that marginalizes women in so many ways, great and small, but this is problem that I think is specific to men.

What do people think?  I'm especially interested in hearing from women on this.  Am I way off base, ladies?  Are you compelled (noticed that I didn't write "encouraged") to measure yourself by the number of notches on your belt, too?

Shabana on "Clothes, Class and Religion"

My better half just blogged insightfully about the intersection of money, class and gender among North American Muslims.

Some excerpts:

The most high-profile second-generation American Muslims of immigrant origin tend to be high-income, upwardly mobile, elitist. And very fashion-conscious.

As a result, their notions of "modesty" are pricey ones. These notions are pretty specific. The clearance aisle at KMart does not cater to these notions of modesty. Heck, Marshall's doesn't. Sears doesn't. Yes, you can tell meri haisiyyat (my status) from the store-names I drop ...

Since I arrived as a FOB on a scholarship, I've struggled with these assumptions as I tried unsuccessfully to keep up with the Jamalses.

I've also observed other people who are NOT daughters of doctors and engineers agonize over the same issues. Mention "tailored jackets" and "long but elegant modest skirts" and we moslem scrubs know exactly what you're talking about. The Gap aisles are cleaned out of those $50 skirts before we get to the sales. Scrubs like me can't afford them Saks tailored jackets. We end up with sagging chenille sweaters and Payless shoes.

She's not bashing immigrants. 

She's talking about serious social (and, I suspect, sometimes spiritual) blindspots that have long bedeviled the vision of many of the American community's annointed leaders, who tended to be immigrants.  That elitism is/was unintended, but no less inescapable or harmful for that fact. 

And no less narcisisstic and obsessed with appearing "respectable" in the eyes of the world.  I don't say this to be nasty, but I've long felt that the most powerful intellectual influence on contemporary North American Islamism isn't Wahhabism, Rationalism, or any of the other usual philosophical suspects, but rather that old sociological standby, Conspicuous Consumption.  In layman's terms, we do many of the things we do not because of some ideology or philosophy in the back of our heads but because of the intense, primordial desire to show off for our peers.

The next generation of Muslim leaders that is emerging has made great strides on many important issues facing the community, but much of the subtle classism and elitism sometimes found among their parents remains, and like a virus has mutated into a hardier and harder to detect strain. 

In fact, one could argue it is worse in important respects today, as just as Corporate America today commodifies the language Hippy Counterculture to pawn off greed as idealism, so have many Islamist idealogues appropriated the discourse of anti-racism, gender equity and egalitarianism to camoflage the same tired old hierarchical power relationships that left Blacks, the American-born-but-not-Arabicized, and other American Muslim minorities out in the cold for so long.

Think about that next time you marvel at an MSA khateeb's painstakingly nasalized Arabic jargon during a khutbah to a group of people who speak only English, or perhaps the  erudite and insistent warnings about modesty delivered by a sister in a modest-but-strikingly-elegant Gulf-style abaya.  There are all sorts of ways to indulge one's hawa, and to make beautiful things into ugly shibboleths that raise you above others.   Some of them are so common in the community that they've become invisible.