Denmark’s government is being called upon to employ a lethal new weapon in the fight against Islamist extremism: bare breasts.
No, I’m not making this up – and also deny outrageous suggestions that I’m looking for an excuse to tear myself away from the world-changing Wikileaks exposé. Peter Skaarup, the foreign policy spokesman of the Danish People’s Party, wants footage of topless women at beaches to be included in a video shown to prospective immigrants, in order to deter religious fundamentalists.
“Topless bathing probably isn’t a common sight on Pakistani beaches, but in Denmark it is still considered quite normal. I honestly believe that by including a couple of bare breasts in the movie, extremists may have to think twice before deciding to come to Denmark,” he said.
The Dansk Folkspartei aren’t a bunch of fringe loons. In 2007, the won 13.8 per cent of the vote, and 25 seats in parliament. Its support is important to the ruling alliance, which means we should take Mr Skaarup’s ideas seriously – even if it’s difficult.
Now, Mr Skaarup’s right about one thing: I’ve never seen topless women frolicking on Clifton Beach in Karachi. They would liven the place up. I doubt, though, that Islamists are going to flee screaming at the sight of breasts, shock-and-awe inspiring as they might be. Because Mr Skaarup has made the mistake of reading through puritanical Islamist literature, and concluding that it constitutes a guide to the mindset of the movement’s adherents.
Few Islamists, in fact, have any serious grasp of Islamic theology or heritage; their religiosity is for the most part gestural. I’m always appalled to see the Yemeni al-Qaeda pamphleteer Anwar al-Awlaki described as a religious scholar: he has no formal theological training whatsoever. There’s a difference between Islamic conservatism and Islamist radicalism, which Mr Skaarup needs to get.
Both the evidence and my instincts lead me to believe that the young men who make up the Islamist rank-and-file will, most likely, react to bare breasts in much the same manner as other young men. Last year, the Pakistani-American jihadist David Coleman Headley was arrested while plotting to blow up the newspaper – the paper that has now printed Mr Skaarup’s views.
Mr Headley had a colourful life before he underwent what some might call a spiritual experience, and decided to become a violent Islamist. The New York Times reported that “the teenager soon rebelled against his mother’s heavy drinking and multiple sexual relationships by engaging in the same behaviour”. But Mr Headley proved equally susceptible to the pleasures of an Islamist adulthood. He married three times – the third time without bothering to tell, or divorce, his second wife, which landed him in legal difficulties.
There are plenty more examples: Raeed al-Banna, who killed himself and 132 other people in an attack on a medical clinic in Iraq, was “into partying” too, his southern California friends recalled. “We hit some pretty wild clubs in Hollywood,” one of his friends said.
Oregon student turned al-Shabaab suicide-bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud, before he blew himself up in Somalia, was known to his friends as someone who “hung out with people who partied and drank alcohol”.
9/11 hijackers Hamza al-Ghamdi and Marwan al-Shehhi found time to purchase porn and sex toys in Florida, attended strip shows and hire hookers.
It has long been clear, of course, that there’s a peculiar relationship between sex and Islamism – as indeed, there is between sex and other forms of religion-fuelled chauvinism. Back in 1949, Sayyid Qutb, the ideological father of al-Qaeda, spent the better part of the year studying education in Greely, Colorado. Greely, at the time, was the kind of town you’d expect neo-fundamentalists to approve of: its puritanical city government, notably, had outlawed booze.
But it wasn’t conservative enough for Mr Qutb. In his memoirs, The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values, which were published in the Egyptian journal al-Risala in 1951, Mr Qutb railed against what he saw. “The American girl,” one passage reads, “is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, in the expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs – and she shows all this and does not hide it.”
He also hated jazz – “music”, he explained, “that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other.”
It seems to me that Mr Qutb had issues with sexuality that transcended the purely ideological. Those issues are common in societies making the transition to modernity, which brings with it not just economic change, but enormous transformations of culture, of which sexuality is a part.
Tawfiq Hamid, a former member of the Egyptian Jemaah Islamiyya, casts some light on the sexual questions Mr Skaarup has raised. Mr Hamid wrote that “while relations with women were strictly proscribed, the erotic passages in Salafi writings simultaneously aroused in us a powerful sexual desire. This dilemma led us to conclude that dying for Allah provided our only hope for satisfying our lust, because that lust could be satisfied only in paradise.”
Part of the problem, I believe, is that we see jihadists through a kind of inverse prism that robs us of the ability to see the parts that make up the whole. Individual terrorists might indeed be ideologically-obsessive murderous maniacs, but at the same time also be for example, football fans, loving parents or Eskimo ear-wrestling enthusiasts.
Like those of all human beings, their motivations are complex.
In a thoughtful report on Western jihadists, Frank J Cilluffo, Jeffrey Cozzens and Magnus Ranstorp noted that dozens of factors – among them, the search for greater meaning in life, perceived adventure, and the desire to impress girls – all played a role in driving individuals to join jihadists.
Put another way, the behaviour of individual young recruits to jihadist groups isn’t different, some specifics aside, from that of street gang members or non-violent cultists. Naser Khader, the spokesman for the ruling Danish Conservative Party, has it right. He pointed out that “a pair of naked breasts is no protection against extremism.”
“Fundamentalists,” Khader argued, “are so obsessed with sex that they will be pouring in over the borders.”