I’ve always said that aggression in the Arab world is caused by permanent sexual frustration – on both (all) sides. Get laid instead of getting blown up could be the slogan for the Muslim world, somewhat akin to our ’60s “make love not war”. Kamel Daoud’s take:
These contradictions create unbearable tensions. Desire has no outlet, no outcome; the couple is no longer a space of intimacy, but a concern of the whole group. The sexual misery that results can descend into absurdity and hysteria. Here, too, one hopes to experience love, but the mechanisms of love — encounters, seduction, flirting — are prevented: Women are watched, we obsess over their virginity, the morality police patrols. Some even pay surgeons to repair broken hymens.
Sex therapists are few in the Muslim world, and their advice is rarely heeded. So Islamists have a de facto monopoly on talk about the body, sex and love. With the Internet and religious TV shows, some of their speeches have taken monstrous forms, devolving into a kind of porno-Islamism. Religious authorities have issued grotesque fatwas: Making love naked is prohibited; women may not touch bananas; a man can be alone with a female colleague only if she is his milk-mother, and she has nursed him.
The West has long found comfort in exoticism, which exonerates differences. Orientalism has a way of normalizing cultural variations and of excusing any abuses: Scheherazade, the harem and belly dancing exempted some Westerners from considering the plight of Muslim women. But today, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.What long seemed like the foreign spectacles of faraway places now feels like a clash of cultures playing out on the West’s very soil. Differences once defused by distance and a sense of superiority have become an imminent threat. People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.
We act as though sex doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Sex is everywhere. Especially after death.
Source: The Sexual Misery of the Arab World
French version (original): La misère sexuelle du monde arabe