The Myth of Muslim Male Superiority

On July 29th Jihad Watch ran an interesting article by Ralph Sidway of the Facing Islam blog, “’The Nightmare’ – Europa and the Incubus.” The Gothic painting illustrating his column, by German-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, depicts an incubus sitting atop the limp and helpless body of Europa.  The mythical Europa is more notoriously noted for having been carried off by Zeus in the guise of a bull. Sidway dwells in the metaphor that Europe is instead being conquered and ravished by an ugly ogre or incubus – or by Muslims. It has been abducted, as well, and is daily ravished by Islam. He begins:

Sometimes an image — a metaphor — is much more effective at presenting truth than even the most persuasive argument or laying out of facts.  ‘The Nightmare’ is such an image.

Europeans may still have some dim collective memory of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula (Spain) in the early 8th century, of Islam’s nearly successful colonization of the rest of Western Europe (Gaul, etc.), of centuries of Muslim raids on Italy, of Muslim piracy and dominance in the Mediterranean Sea, of repeated Muslim attempts to invade Europe through the Balkans, and of the eventual fall of Constantinople in 1453, and of Turkish crimes against the Greeks during the 18th and 19th centuries and the Armenian Genocide in the early 20th….

The metaphor of the demonic Incubus (Islam) preying upon the paralyzed sleeper (Europa) is hardly a stretch, as this particular demon was believed to engage in sexual activity with its victim, trying to foster a hybrid human-demon child, and if unable to do that, then to bring about madness, demon possession, sickness and ultimately death to its host.

It was the mention of the belief in the incubus’s sexual activity that caused me to wonder why no student or scholar of Islam had ever much investigated the Muslim’s preoccupation with the rape of Western and other non-Muslim women. Possibly a psychological study of the condition has been produced; I don’t claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the ugly and sordid facts of Islam.

The brutal treatment of the Yazidis is a case in point. The Yazidis are between dark and fair complexioned, but have blue or green eyes. It is their captive women who are valued the most in ISIS slave auctions. They are either” married” off to ISIS fighters or held prisoner in ISIS brothels, guarded by armed, burqa-clad women who are mostly fanatical Nazi-like converts to Islam and who are as cruel and callous as the ISIS fighters who rape the Yazidis. ISIS has stated that it wants to exterminate the Yazidis, to “erase their blood line.” Neither the captives nor their captors are much interested in a debate on whether or not Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio presented a true picture of Turkey and Islam, or if Muslims of both sexes were honestly and accurately portrayed in Amadeus’s Turkish finale.

It is reported that between sixty and seventy of these girls and women commit suicide every month rather than endure more savagery or have the fighters’ babies.

Defenders of Islam claim that its adherents and its doctrines are not “racist,” even though racist tenets are rife throughout Islamic texts, such as in the Koran and the Hadith (Mohammad’s sayings). The camel’s nose in the tent of those Islamic denials is the fact of the institutionalized slavery of black Africans that predated Western institutionalized slavery (which was abolished; Islam has never actually abolished it, and won't).

The next day Jihad Watch published Raymond Ibrahim’s “Why Muslim Rapists Prefer Blondes: A History.” This article first appeared on Ibrahim’s site, together with an Orientalist-style painting** of a naked Caucasian slave being ogled and sized up by three Arab sheiks. (The artist’s name was not noted on the site.)  In drawing a comparison between Byzantium and the modern West, in the context of “why Muslims prefer blondes,” Ibrahim begins:

The Muslim penchant to target “white” women for sexual exploitation—an epidemic currently plaguing Europe, especially Britain and Scandinavia—is as old as Islam itself, and even traces back to Muhammad.

Much literary evidence attests to this in the context of Islam’s early predations on Byzantium (for centuries, Christendom’s easternmost bulwark against the jihad).  According to Ahmad M. H. Shboul (author of “Byzantium and the Arabs: The Image of the Byzantines as Mirrored in Arabic Literature”) Christian Byzantium was the “classic example of the house of war,” or Dar al-Harb—that is, the quintessential realm that needs to be conquered by jihad.  Moreover, Byzantium was seen “as a symbol of military and political power and as a society of great abundance.”

The similarities between pre-modern Islamic views of Byzantium and modern Islamic views of the West—powerful, affluent, desirable, and the greatest of all infidels—should be evident.  But they do not end here.  To the medieval Muslim mind, Byzantium was further representative of “white people”—fair haired/eyed Christians, or, as they were known in Arabic, Banu al-Asfar, “children of yellow” (reference to blonde hair).

It’s noteworthy that in the course of investigating (or not investigating much) the Rotherham Muslim sex slavery of British girls,

A local police officer aptly illuminated the reasons for the cover-up. "They were running scared of the race issue… there is no doubt that in Rotherham, this has been a problem with Pakistani men for years and years,” the officer explained. "People were scared of being called racist.” But the Muslims targeted their victims on the basis of race.

So, they were  also afraid of calling the Muslim criminals racists, even though these dark-skinned Pakistanis were targeting white British schoolgirls? This is how political correctness can destroy men’s minds.  It can neutralize the willingness to make moral judgments.

What is one of the sources of this brand of racism? Mohammad, of course. As Ibrahim relates, quoting an Arabic writer:

Continues Shboul:

“The Byzantines as a people were considered as fine examples of physical beauty, and youthful slaves and slave-girls of Byzantine origin were highly valued….The Arab’s appreciation of the Byzantine female has a long history indeed.  For the Islamic period, the earliest literary evidence we have is a hadith (saying of the Prophet).  Muhammad is said to have addressed a newly converted [to Islam] Arab: “Would you like the girls of Banu al-Asfar?”  Not only were Byzantine slave girls sought after for caliphal and other palaces (where some became mothers of future caliphs), but they also became the epitome of physical beauty, home economy, and refined accomplishments.   The typical Byzantine maiden who captures the imagination of litterateurs and poets, had blond hair, blue or green eyes, a pure and healthy visage, lovely breasts, a delicate waist, and a body that is like camphor or a flood of dazzling light.”

While the essence of the above excerpt is true, the reader should not be duped by its overly “romantic” tone. Written for a Western academic publication by an academic of Muslim background, the essay is naturally euphemistic to the point of implying that being a sex slave was desirable—as if her Arab owners were enamored devotees who merely doted over and admired her beauty from afar.

Indeed, Muhammad asked a new convert “Would you like the girls of Banu al-Asfar?” as a way to entice him to join the jihad and reap its rewards—which, in this case, included the possibility of enslaving and raping blonde Byzantine women—not as some idealistic discussion on beauty.

Or raping and impregnating blue and green eyed Yazidi women. ISIS fighters don’t patronize the brothels to have civilized tea-and-crumpet discussions with the captives about their beauty and the question of whether or not a Muslim’s “right hand” can possess any of them. As Ibrahim notes:

Thus a more critical reading of Shboul’s aforementioned excerpt finds that European slave girls were not “highly valued” or “appreciated” as if they were precious statues—they were held out as sexual trophies to entice Muslims to the jihad.

As Pamela Geller notes in one of her Atlas Shrugs  columns,

“Prosperous are the believers who in their prayers are humble and from idle talk turn away and at almsgiving are active and guard their private parts save from their wives and what their right hands own then being not blameworthy.” (Quran 23:1-6)

Those whom their “right hands own” (Quran 4:3, 4:24, 33:50) are slaves, and inextricable from the concept of Islamic slavery as a whole is the concept of sex slavery, which is rooted in Islam’s devaluation of the lives of non-Muslims.

Ibrahim subsequently points out the fallacies and fantasies of the Islamic view of Byzantium and of Byzantium women.

Moreover, the idea that some sex slaves became mothers to future caliphs is meaningless since in Islam’s patriarchal culture, mothers—Muslim or non-Muslim—were irrelevant in lineage and had no political status.   And talk of “litterateurs and poets” and “a body that is like camphor or a flood of dazzling light” is further anachronistic and does a great disservice to reality:  These women were—as they still are—sex slaves, treated no differently from the many slaves of the Islamic State today.

For example, during a recent sex slave auction held by the Islamic State, blue and green eyed Yazidi girls were much coveted and fetched the highest price.  Even so, these concubines are being cruelly tortured.  In one instance, a Muslim savagely beat his Yazidi slave’s one year old child until she agreed to meet all his sexual demands.

Islam proclaims that the rape of infidel women is not the fault of Muslim men – who are portrayed as morally and even racially superior to everyone else – but that of the infidel women who shamelessly flaunt their beauty, thereby advertising their alleged promiscuity and immorality, and become “exposed meat” that causes Muslims to lose their self-control.  For the infidel women, there is no forgiveness; for the Muslim male, there is plenty of dispensation to be found in Islamic texts, because he’s superior and privileged by virtue of being Muslim, so his raping an infidel woman is no more a crime or a lapse in his morality  than his raping a ewe.

Ibrahim’s article is broad in scope and extremely informative. After having read it, I left a comment on both his site and on Jihad Watch, and this comment comes closer to the subject of my own column:

About the subject of Muslims preferring to rape/own/enslave white women, whether they're captives of ISIS or in Europe and Britain, especially blondes (remember Lara Logan's experience in Cairo?): The ostensible motive for it is to destroy the good for being the good. To despoil beauty. The second aspect of these crimes hasn't been dwelt on much, which is the fact that these Muslim men consider themselves as unclean and unworthy as a fundamental tenet of Islamic metaphysics, and regard the act of rape as a means to consciously befoul beauty with their own persons. This is another reason why Islam is evil.

To qualify the contention that “these Muslim men consider themselves as unclean and unworthy” is the much-noised Islamic assertion and contradiction that Muslims are superior to all others of other faiths and races (even though Islam is not a race). But, superior in which respect? The Muslim male initially regards himself as foul and decrepit. This is a notion (or incubus) of Original Sin shared by Islam and Christianity; Islam  doubtless cadged it from Christianity, which predated Islam by about 500 years, just as Islam cadged elements of other religions from the 7th century onward, including, significantly, the pagan moon god, Allah. Being an imperfect plaything of Islam’s Allah necessitates a Muslim male’s needing to observe a strict moral code that will keep him on the “straight and narrow” path to Islamic virtue and “perfection” and “purity” with the expectation of Allah’s praise.

And, it’s okay to wander from the “straight and narrow” to rape infidel women, especially blondes. They deserve the treatment. It’s Allah’s will. Nay, his command.

I mentioned Lara Logan in my comment.  In an ABC interview about her rape and experiences in 2011 in Tahrir Square, Cairo, she reveals that it wasn’t just the rape that was dooming her to death. It was Muslim men trying to kill her in the most tortuous way possible:

Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo's Tahrir Square the night that longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, opened up about the brutal attack in an emotional interview on "60 Minutes" Sunday. The reporter said she decided to go public to call attention to sexual violence against female journalists, offering a tearful recollection of the horrific night she thought would be her last.

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying," Logan told CBS News' Scott Pelley. "I thought, 'Not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever.'"

Logan said her clothes were torn off and her muscles were agonizingly stretched as she was separated from her crew and swallowed into the 200-to-300-strong mob. She recalled the flashes of cell phone cameras taking pictures of her naked body as her merciless attackers raped her with their hands.

"I didn't even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things because I couldn't even feel that because I think the sexual assault was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over and over and over again," Logan said in the interview….

"They were tearing my body in every direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp, they had my head in different directions."  Logan said she hoped her screams would stop her assailants, but they only provoked them. "Because the more I screamed, it turned them into a frenzy," she said. [Italics mine]

These details are important. For it isn’t just a matter of sexual gratification that a Muslim will rape an infidel woman. It is an issue of destroying the good for being the good, and a Muslim male in a sexual predator mode will want to accomplish the obliteration of his victim in as painful a way as possible. The screams of Lara Logan – and those of any other infidel woman in Britain, Scandinavia, and the Mideast – are integral to the Muslim rapist’s sense of nihilist efficacy.

There is a scene in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that illustrates this point dramatically. John Galt, the scientist hero, is being tortured by a government-built machine with electrical shocks calculated not to kill him but to send pulses of agony through his body. One of the torturers isn’t satisfied with Galt’s response to the pain:

“Go ahead!” cried Taggart. “What are you waiting for? Can’t you make the current stronger? He hasn’t even screamed yet!”… Taggart was staring at {Galt’s body] intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.*

Muslim men – and especially Muslim rapists – are not virile in the usual sense.  A virile man is someone like Sean Connery’s James Bond, and is seen as such by men and women alike. Rand’s heroes Francisco d’Anconia and Howard Roark, as well as John Galt, are virile. In the sex act, they celebrate their lives, their values, their selves as living, rational beings who love life. The women they “conquer” are their equals in spirit who also view sex as a celebration.

Muslim men, however (and this observation applies equally to non-Muslim rapists), are maquettes. They are half-formed creatures trapped inside the physical bodies of men. They have no values or selves to celebrate. Their notion of manhood and virility is one of nihilistic conquest, of force, of proving the efficacy of their capacity to destroy or cause pain.

Their only sense of “enjoyment” is in the act of killing. ISIS has sent us numerous beheading and gun barrel to the head videos that demonstrate that aspect of compliance with Koranic imperatives.

For the ISIS rapists, for the British and European Muslim rapists, the sex act is not a means to celebrate life, but to celebrate death, and the potency of their evil.

*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton, 35th anniversary edition, 1992.  pp. 1142-1143

**Orientalist paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, while exquisitely executed and accurate in many details, romanticized the Islamic and Mideast worlds, overlooking the harsh realities of especially the Muslim slave markets. See, for example, Kristian Davies’s Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India, or The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, by Nicholas Tromans.