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By Root 834 0

Bernard Lewis convincingly refutes this claim. He believes the delay in Muslim development arises out of Muslims’ feelings of grievance against Westerners. For centuries, dating back to even before the Middle Ages, Muslims saw Westerners as stupid and backward, lacking in cleanliness, morals, and civilized conduct. The Moors, who conquered Spain and ruled there for seven hundred years before 1492, were responsible for introducing basic hygiene, for preserving the great Roman and Greek classics, for introducing modern agricultural practices such as irrigation, and for a great flowering of culture. Starting in the twelfth century, however, the Muslim mind-set became less tolerant, less inquisitive, more extremist in its views. At the same time, the Judeo-Christian West realized it needed to improve, and its people began learning, traveling, and exploring. As a result, the West caught up with Islamic culture and overtook it in a very short time.

An explanation from the Islamic point of view is provided by Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, the founders of radical Islam. According to them, the umma, the community, can flourish only if its members keep to the letter of the Koran and the Hadith, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. They are of the view that Muslims have strayed from the path that the Prophet Muhammad outlined for them and have thereby brought their misery upon themselves. But actually, politics that follow Islam to the letter have failed dramatically. Islam does not possess a credible and workable political model, as the wavering regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia illustrate. The Islamists are correct in stating that the huge majority of Muslims do not succeed in closely following all the commands and prohibitions of Allah. Nor should Muslims follow them, nor will they be able to follow them as long as these proscriptions are defined by fundamentalists.

The problems—aggression, economic and scientific stagnation, repression, epidemics, and social unrest—that confront most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims spread over five continents cannot be explained by simply one or two factors. A complex combination of factors, sometimes regional, has evolved over time, one of which is the sexual morality of Islam, originally a tribal morality that has been elevated within Islam to the status of a dogma. This explanation appears too rarely in the existing literature. This premodern morality was sanctified in the Koran and then further developed in the traditions of the Prophet. For many Muslims this morality expresses itself through an obsession with virginity. This obsession with mastery over the sexuality of women is not limited to Islam, but is also evident in other religions (e.g., among Christians, Jews, and Hindus). Yet it has not hindered these other religious cultures’ modern development as much as it has the Muslims’. The value attached to a woman’s virginity is so great that it eclipses the human catastrophes and social costs that result from it.

Muslim girls are often told that “a girl with a ruptured hymen is like a used object.” And an object that is once used becomes permanently worthless. A girl who has lost her “seal of being unused” won’t find a marriage partner and is doomed to spend the rest of her days in her parents’ home. Moreover, if defloration occurs outside wedlock, she has dishonored her family to the tenth degree of kinship. Other families will gossip about them. They will say that the family is known for its loose women who throw themselves away to “the first man who comes along.” So the girl is punished by her family. Punishments range from name-calling to expulsion or confinement and may even extend to a shotgun wedding either to the man who is responsible for the defloration or to some “generous man” willing to cover the family’s shame. These so-called generous men are often poor, feebleminded, old, impotent, or all of these. In the worst-case scenario, the girl will be murdered, often by her own family. The United Nations reports that five thousand girls are murdered annually for this reason