Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Licentiousness breeds extremism

By YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN - THE INDEPENDENT
Added: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Ivan for the link.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-licentiousness-breeds-extremism-1863919.html

Last week I once again condemned the burkha and will do so till the end of my days. By that time, with the unstoppable rise and rise of Wahhabi Islam, they will probably have incarcerated me in black polyester and turned off my voice.

I unconditionally hate fanatical proselytisers – male and female – what they do to my faith and the faithful. The way they ban pleasures and progress, fill young minds with strictures to paralyse the will and suppress god-given desires in lands of freedom and autonomy. Their inner lives are stormy, psychological dramas which turn dangerously unstable. Some of the resulting turmoil and sexual unrest may be swelling the seething brain of the next terrorist manquÃ©.

On blogs now thought to be written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, you are given the impression from news reports that he was a lonely boy, unhappy with his peers who drank and partied. At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint. Millions of Britons of all backgrounds are alarmed by the dissipation and debauchery that now defines Britain.

For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused. You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-licentiousness-breeds-extremism-1863919.html

TAGGED: COMMENTARY, MORALITY, RELIGION