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.
She's got a point - and it's one she's made before. But it doesn't take full-on slapperdom to arouse the ire of the faithful. Sayyid Qutb, spiritual guru of the Muslim Brotherhood, wasn't too impressed with a church dance in late 1940s Greeley, Colorado.
"And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire."
(Qutb also noted 'The American Temptress' - a paragraph on the American Girl which made it quite plain that he had clocked every seductive thing about them. What would he have made of Mindy Jones ?)
Now I know that even back in the 40s the Septics were considered 'fast' by UK standards (now we've long since left them behind), but the atmosphere has always contained a greater or lesser amount of desire wherever young men and young women have been in proximity to each other. The genius of pre-cultural revolution Britain (and I'm sure to some extent the States) was that this desire was constrained and controlled - as I wrote here :
Alas, the same cultural collapse that causes drunken slappers is the one that brought Yazza - and lots of other Muslims - here (I'm not saying she's not an ornament to this country - but under a pre-deluge administration Uganda wouldn't have got premature independence, Idi Amin would have hit his ceiling at Captain, and Yazza's family would still be making a good Ugandan living). Good Muslims and drunken slappers don't go together like a horse and carriage, but you don't seem to be able to have one without the other. Not a situation that will endure, though. Though the current, hypocritical accommodation (fornicate with said slappers but marry your own) will doubtless suffice for the moment.
Christianity and the other major world religions have been around a long time. They understood, accepted and respected the power of sexuality, which was precisely why it was bound in with all manner of prescription, proscription, culture and custom. Procreation, the link between sexuality and the family, then and now still the chief transmitter of culture between the generations, was similarly attended.
