— by Clive Kessler
The Malaysian Insider
Nov 03, 2011
NOV 3 — Dina Zaman, in her commentary entitled “Let’s talk about (halal) sex” (The Malaysian Insider, October 26) has already commented that: “Like many Malaysians, I was flabbergasted and speechless when I read online accounts of the launch of the [now-banned] book titled, ‘Seks Islam — Perangi Yahudi Untuk Kembalikan Seks Islam Kepada Dunia (Sex in Islam — Wage War Against Jews To Return Islamic Sex To The World)’.
“One, the English titled begged to be deciphered as it made no sense. Two, the title, even when understood, also begged for a suspension of disbelief. They cannot be serious about this: Having kosher sex meant that the Jews would be destroyed? How? What position would help destroy the Zionists for good?”
Not out of prurience, or any love of “raunch” and sexual scandal, nor even to cast much merited ridicule on these pathetic “wannabes”, but to indicate and exemplify the peculiar nature of the “full-on” Islamist “political psyche” — and, more generally, for the contemplation of the depth psychologists and political symbolism “decoders” — attention must be called to this weird variant, or “transformation”, of the 1960s slogan “make love, not war”.
Here the pious injunction is that the good wife should obediently make true Islamic love to her Muslim husband — as a way of making war on the Jews, against Jewish domination.
Or in other words, the Obedient Wives Club, and the “militant Islamist lifestyle” organisations behind the OWC ladies, are here offering this neo-pietistic, “over-conformist” and highly “patriarchal” Islamist sexuality (and their own obsessively prurient concern with that very thwarted and unfree yet highly licentious kind of sexuality and libidinal energy) as a way to counter supposed Jewish domination of Islam: of the private intimate lives of Muslims, and thereby of the world generally.
They are offering this rampant, voracious yet also frightfully constrained and obsessively coerced “full-on Islamist sexuality” as, in effect, a way for the good Muslim men, upon the bodies of their obedient wives — and please excuse here my, in this context inescapable, indelicacy — “performatively” to say, or declare, or in fact to enact the proposition “f**k the Jews!”
Go figure!
It sounds insane.
But it goes to (or perhaps erotically “touches upon”?) something that people need to recognise.
It calls direct attention to the deeply ingrained, florid, and rank anti-Jewish attitudes, prejudices and obsessions that are “in-built”, if not into classical Islam, then into the collective psyche of those who make from its sources a kind of “old-time religion.”
For those who are committed to such regressive forms of conspicuous and over-conforming yet prurient piety, these obsessions serve as key, powerful and (quasi-) religiously infused and “sacralised” psychic motivators, or “drivers”, of the militant Islamist mentality and all its often bizarre projects.
* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.