“..Republicans are stupid. Democrats are evil. It’s a distinction without a difference anymore.
Stupidity is evil, and evil is stupid.
I despair too easily. It gets easy with practice…”
-the Woodchuck of Penn’s Forest, papal contender, hacker, patriot, Marmot
“we are in the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate revolution. Its next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to bother with prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that we may have enough sense, if not to stop fighting altogether, at least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century ancestors.
The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern.
For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to the Times, suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it.
The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know – Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all but universal famine.
Assuming, then, that we are capable of learning as much from Hiroshima as our forefathers learned from Magdeburg, we may look forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited and only partially ruinous warfare..”
– Aldous Huxley, in the Forward to the 1946 re-print of Brave New World (emphasis added)
QUESTION: many Afri-Americans are influenced in one way or another by Islam. How do they reconcile Islam’s approach to sexuality, only within marriage, with their own?
So… some people white or black, Muslim or non-Muslim, may not like this comment.
It’s very long anyway, so there is a real chance they won’t even bother reading it.
That said I’m playing with certain ideas more in a way to get people to think about things in different ways than they may be used to thinking.
You have an interesting question, with some not so intuitively obvious answers.
I ended up writing an even longer reply, one I might just shoot to you in an email.
This said, a “few” thoughts come to mind.
A: I really don’t think Islam’s approach to sexuality – or rather certain conceptualizations of sexuality in Muslim thought are that foreign to sexual ideals in Black American culture. Ideals not ideas – ideals and realities being different thing.
Islam has varying degrees of attractiveness to varying peoples worldwide, irrespective of their native sexual culture.
The ways in which certain historically Muslim cultures have internalized Islamic ideas, concerning sexuality, differs worldwide. From the Philippines to Indonesia, to India and Pakistan, to Arabia and Syria, to Turkey, to North Africa, to West Africa, and then to the Americas, practices of individual believers, and practices of larger communities, may vary and reflect real world adjustments to spiritual ideals, in complex human historical contexts.
I think that for many Blacks, male and female, Islam advocates a type of spiritual and sexual discipline that is a type of acesis – leading to a heroic and disciplined life of fasting, prayer, and self cultivation.
To many people, this ideal is more important than sexual gratification, and this ideal includes a sexual reality that encourages specific communal and familial structures.
After all, many things in life provide more pressing and compelling priorities than getting off sexually.
This in mind, people often fall short of their ideals. I certainly do and frankly, so does everyone. Too much of a good things can be not so good, and a little bit of a naughty thing may simply be chalked up to human failings and slips.
Islam can be seen as having, implicit in its narrative, ideas about sexuality that are not incompatible with the cultural ideals (ideals not ideas) about sexuality prevalent in some black communities.
The fact that Islam is so popular in Africa suggests that it is not in itself incompatible with the souls of black folk.. or at least not with many black folk. This said, I think there are more Muslims in China than in all of Africa, but then again the Chinese as a sheer aggregate mass of humanity have more of everything than the rest of the world…
One adaptation of Islam in Africa can be seen in polygamy. Male Polygamy is rare in the Muslim world outside of the Arabian Gulf and, well, Africa. Sure you find mullahs in Bangladesh or Waziristan with 2 wives, but without being disingenuous polygamy isn’t that common in Muslim areas of Asia. It exists, mainly either in very poor rural areas, or among elite wealthy circles, but it is most common in Arabia and the Gulf region, in rural areas of North Africa, in mountains or deserts, and particularly in West Africa.
(The recent story of the poor Nigerian old man with 100 wives, and counting, is amusing in this)
This might reflect the fact that male polygamy was already.. eh.. extremely prevalent in many parts of West Africa, and while it is connected to male status and prestige it is also a simple matter of extended family structures, forming alliances between families, as well as conjugal and domestic desire, and such polygamy was and is often found on the most humble strata of society. So the idea that polygamous cultures are primarily characterized by a small circle of alpha makes with huge harems of hypergamous women and a large number of suffering and lonely beta males is more of a modern Western fantasy, having not much anthropological reality.
In many areas of Africa Islam ended up sharply restricting something that was in many ways an extraordinarily prevalent matter, but one not without real social rationales and usefulness. Westerners, especially Americans, when they think of polygamy think of *sex* – not family, not responsibilities, not social cohesion, not building generations. I suggest in the rest of the world, through history, sexuality was about far more than physical sex, sexuality is about how the sexual reality of humanity builds and sustains new generations, dynasties, lineages, and foremost communities.
B: I think that accounts of the general licentiousness of black American culture, when juxtaposed with white American culture, are typically exaggerated. In my opinion this exaggeration follows the social agendas and predispositions of those giving such exaggerated accounts. Some people may have a problem with this, but all they have to show are statistical accounts that are, in themselves, capable of being read in many ways.
Expressing ideas in public is powerful, saying or writing certain things can tend to amplify certain real-world social effects. Narratives about the sexual wantonness, or frigidity, of an ethnic other can often serve real social agendas. You should never forget to ask, when reading something, what does the writer covet? What worldview does he express, and who or what benefits from his or her words?
An example, upper class White or Jewish female feminist and liberal writers on sexuality are going to express complex social contexts in a different way from upper class White male conservative writers on the same.
In both cases, both will have captured some truthful picture of the sexual realities of which they write, but would have exaggerated or filtered out some matters. This is manifestly clear to anyone with the time on their hands so scan through, for example, a bunch of feminist blogs, a bunch of MRA blogs, and then sit down and look into their collective claims.
When surrounded by a culture war, persuasive writing and speaking in public is often a normative and prescriptive act. The writer can and will slant things to his or her perspective. So the careful listener should dig around.
The cultural ‘other’ always makes a nifty foil upon which to frame fears and anxieties.
A quick example; take the word “Buggery” in the English language (stemming from the Buggery Act 1533) – ultimately means “Bulgur” e.g. a Bulgarian.
Doubtless the poor Bulgarians were unwitting of their general reputation as, well, Buggers – and that Englishmen saw fit to characterize the act of sodomy as an essentially Bulgarian vice, connected with specific religious heretical communities and practices.
Often various sexual practices seen as unpleasant or unspeakable in various European cultures were commonly just attributed to the French, or Germans, or the Bulgars, or the English, etc. Europeans in general often attributed effeminacy and sexual deviance to Asians period. Arabs attributed sexual license and immodesty to Franks and Europeans, some amusing literature to this effect was written during the crusades. This was also significant when liberals in a culture wanted to valorize sexual habits as “other” and thus exotic when compared to the common place humdrum world of home. It is easy for people today to forget the very real tensions and ethnic hatred that once characterized the relations between various nations. And sexual anxieties are easily transferred onto others.
American Blacks can be unbelievable prudes in some ways, especially middle class Blacks.
American Blacks can also be unbelievably permissive in some ways.
American Whites are no different in this respect.
In both races, class also enters the picture. Lower classes, middle classes, and upper classes having differing ideal sexual mores – and often breaking those ideals reflexively and habitually and taking other classes to bear.
An example is the tendency of white middle classes to attribute extreme sexual license to poor whites, if you decided to do a search for “trailer trash porn” you will find enough amusing material to keep a sociologist busy for weeks on the sexual ideation of white American under classes. At the same time, anyone who has spent real time with poor or working class Whites know that, frankly, their sexual mores aren’t that much different from middle class whites. I mean, how many Swinger parties go on every day through suburban America, and take any metropolitan city – how many sex clubs and parties cater to the fashionable set.
There are differences in sexual mores between classes, I’ve noticed, and they are often more nuanced and less intense than most imagine, and they often do not so much concern actual practice, as much as ideas about propriety and what one is willing to let hang out or admit to in public, as opposed to behind closed doors.
As with class, so too with race, and vice versa.
Middle classes have an idea of middle class virtue, as opposed from trashy lower classes, and decadent upper classes. Upper classes have an idea of their virtue and looking at lower classes as trashy. Working classes have an idea of their virtue, and looking at middle and upper classes as decadent. And the poor, are well.. probably too poor to give a damn what anyone thinks of them, their attentions occupied by other matters, like getting by and paying their rent.
A personal example of middle class suburban Black prudery, in the early 1990s anyway, when I was in high school and college some of kids I knew were shocked that white kids would go down on each other. Why? Because kids in our prep-school milieu were raised to think that going down on someone was “nasty” And as for anal? Well, that was seen as stuff that God would strike you down for; one of the biggest players I knew said that. I could think of other examples, but this is a family blog… well, not really.
Anyway, this was the early 90s, social attitudes have changed. Drastically, in the span of 15 years, but it’s an example. Also people are wont to think of certain things as “nasty” or “dirty” and hence something that only other races or classes would do… but then do them anyway behind closed doors. I’m sure that some of the guys or girls who looked at oral sex as “a nasty white people thing” got, and received, plenty of head in their sexual lives. But the perception of an activity being “dirty” and “nasty” and “slutty” and hence only something that someone of another race or class would do is what I’m looking at.
In general, both Black people and White people in America display some rather similar ideas about sexuality.
Commensurate with their social classes, and economic classes.
Social class differs from economic class, to some degree, especially in Black communities.
Anyway, I am not saying that there are not real differences in the way many blacks and whites in America view their sexualities – there are such differences.
I’ve known people who were prone to doing things that I thought were utterly depraved, but when it came to a practice that I thought was tame they were absolutely shocked that anyone would consider doing it, I’ve known of people whose sexual partner count was over 30, but who when some miscellaneous practice was described to them said “Oh that is so slutty!”
Differences in sexual culture between races, ethnicities, and classes, are often matters of degree that are often greatly exaggerated for effect.
In some cases the exaggerations are promoted from inside the community whose sexuality is being exaggerated, to promote a certain view for outsiders.
For example, look at the older archetype of the Smooth Black Player, think Billy D Williams – Yes, Lando Calrisian in Star Wars (now that brother had some “interstellar game”). It would obviously be in the interests of a young Black male, like me, to promote the idea that all of us are ultra smooth players, full of charm and dripping with alpha male sensuality and the sort of smooth baritone voice that could remove panties with just a word.
Except we aren’t, or at least not all of us. But it sure sounds real good on TV. Or in a nightclub. In reality many black males, just like many white males, are highly insecure about our personal sexualities. But that doesn’t sound as good on TV.
Another myth that has greater claims to truth, but is still a bit of an exaggeration, lies in the.. let us say.. physically well endowed nature of black manhood. I like to call this the “Mandingo” myth.
Like all myths, there is a nugget of truth somewhere surrounded by heaps of exaggeration. More on this shall not be said at this point.
All of these matters are nuanced and context dependent, take race, take social class, take economic class, take religiosity, take and social attitudes of liberality or conservativeness, take many factors, and view the complexity of the matter. Environment affects biological physicality as well as psychology, and vice versa. Specific environments condition physical responses, be it through epigenetic or other means. The overall total of environmental factors, economic factors, and innate genetic predispositions, interact with each other in many ways.
Culture encourages and discourages many things. Religions encourage and discourage many things. In the US, some of popular culture reflects existing conditions, but much specifically valorizes and amplifies certain traits and conditions, and feeds them back into the public, thus acting as both a selector and a filter – making some matters fashionable and other matters unfashionable. Sometimes this is more easily seen by an outsider looking in, and more difficult for someone inside the box to see.
The fact that many Blacks are attracted to Islam (and increasingly many, many, Whites as well – but this trend has not been noticed, or focused on, in American society at large – for some reason or another) in spite of sexual practices that are, in many ways, restrictive simply indicates that to many people there are far more important things in life than sex. Black American culture can often be imbued with nostalgia for Spirituality, and Religiosity, and outsiders frequently do not notice how strong this tendency really is. If someone says “the spirit is string, but the flesh is weak” it is to indicate that the ideal of the Spirit is more important than physical gratification, in spite of one’s falling short of this idea.
Islam does encourage some things sexually, and discourage others, encourage disciplines and acesis in some areas, but has a fundamental basic idea that sex is a licit and legitimate source of pleasure and a legitimate human appetite that, like all fundamentally human appetites, should be tempered and channeled in ways ultimately beneficial to humanity, but not denied. Ultimately the formation of stable family units and clan structures seems a priority behind many Islamic sexual practices. This and a concern with tracking lineage, and minimizing inter-communal violence – hence the encouragement of things like limited exogamy, allowance, but to restricted degrees, of male polygamy, and discouragement of physical consummation of homosexual relations (while allowing extremely close and emotionally passionate friendships that did not lead to physical expressions of homosexuality) also combined with a discouragement (in earlier Islamic societies, this melted away as Muslim communities grew older and more decadent) of fraternalisng between young “beardless” youths and older men.
al-Nikah, Marriage, is seen as the appropriate expression of sexuality. Unlike Christianity (I’m talking about historical Christianity, not modern liberal re-contextualization of Christianity) nothing is seen as inherently sinful or dirty in any appetite, sex or otherwise, just specific expressions of that appetite. Historically, in many Muslim communities desires or appetites for otherwise illicit sexual pleasure were not seen as inherently sinful or bad per se, rather their actual physical expression. So Pashtun or Tajik poets writing about beardless boys (something I can’t understand in a million years – I don’t get the attraction of little boys in certain Central Asian cultures, frankly I find their women to be far more interesting, Burqas notwithstanding)
Also it bears mentioning that in the vast majority of Islamic cultures people were married off when they turned 14, I think the overall social benefits from this practice outweigh the disadvantages. Frankly singles dating cultures in the Western world have become increasingly puerile over the last few decades; there is something comically tragic about people in their mid to late 40s running around trying to live an adolescent sexuality. I suggest that most people really are not happy with their sexual and dating lives and that – not to romanticize the past which had its own unique problems – fewer options made for a more stable society. Some people would disagree with this, I suggest that in most cases when such people look at their lives after a decade or so they pretty much have to admit that what they were chasing really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
So in short.
– Mass culture conditions sexuality, and the mass culture fed to one racial or ethnic group is often crafted by outsiders to that group, and serving to condition that group’s sexuality along specific commercially lucrative lines.
– The sexual freakiness of American Blacks is highly exaggerated, both in degree and frequency.
– This said there are substantive differences in the ways in which sexuality is viewed, and expressed, in Black communities and in non-Black communities.
– Again the matter of degree should be kept in mind, and also in some cases the differences will be along conservative or even reactionary vectors in some specific segments of the black population.
– A people’s spiritual longings may often be more intense than their physical longings. And at times one may find conjoined with intense physical passion, equally intense spiritual passion and fervor.
– Islam’s sexual narratives aren’t necessarily incompatible with the innate expressions and experiences of sexuality in Black American culture, in some Black Cultures such as West Africa certain Islamic ideas may be very, very, compatible, and this is also the case with many non-Black cultures.
Privately behind closed doors I’m willing to notice and consider the possibility of certain real differences in sexual longing and appetite between racial communities, while realizing that often the general public isn’t very subtle, is prone to gross misunderstanding, and that the number of people who are even capable of discussing such ideas without bias, seriously desiring the truth, and without pre-existing prescriptive agendas for how they want society structured – and the tendency to hammer facts into a shape fitting their agendas and ideologies, and not hammering their ideologies and agendas into a shape fitting reality and facts, are few and far between.
So such musings mainly are just a matter of personal amusement, or shared in a very small circle.
So that comment ended up being longer than the original comment I was going to post, but decided not to, because of its length.
This is all anecdotal here, I’m not rigorously arguing for anything and readers should keep this in mind. Something else that comes to mind to sort of clarify some points, the fact that Islam legitimizes a form of polygamy is often looked at in a purely sexual way in Western cultures.
I suggest that it shouldn’t be understood primarily sexually in the narrow, and sterile, sense common in the Modern West, but also in a larger social sense – in terms of cultivation of family units. Somehow in the modern West, sex has become looked at separately from the family. This is a fatal trait of modern (as opposed to traditional) Western civilization, and one that has been deliberately encouraged by some quarters to allow the social seams of the culture to unzip.
A lot of stereotypes float around about the Black Family; I do think there is some truth to the idea that extended family structures are more favorably viewed in many black communities. Why? Heck if I know, maybe because of our recent agrarian past. American Blacks have mostly been urbanized for 70 yrs. Social attitudes and structures change slowly. There may also be something else going on here, but the social reality is complex and most people become very emotive when it comes to looking deeply into it.
Something I notice – the importance of family networks and structures found even in some inner-city ghetto milieus looks a lot like the sort of reliance on family networks and structures I’ve noticed in rural poorer white areas. I’ve had many friends from rural Kentucky or Indiana, who have had similar family dynamics as I’ve noticed in many urban black families. This is the case whether or not their rural origins were poor or working class or middle class.
However I notice different family dynamics in URBAN lower-middle, middle, and upper middle class urban white families..
EXCEPT Irish families and Italian families.
Again this is all anecdotal – and verges on stereotypes, all I can say is what I’ve observed or what others have observed and have expressed to me I once dated an Irish girl whose family had very similar dynamics as mine, she even had same number of siblings (more than a basketful – and yes, all from the same father and mother).
I’ve had some Italian friends and other Irish friends and their family dynamics were very similar to mine.
These are subtle things that can be over-stated and over-emphasized. But I do think that an argument can be made that in some ethnic communities families seem to be far less isolated and atomized social units, and more consciously communal units. Even when there is a significant amount of non martially bound families, networks of half siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc are very powerful.
There are some more ideas floating around my head that I might simply email, these comments are longer than the original post.
A recommend a couple of books on sexuality in Islam
Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s “Sexuality in Islam” is a good exploration of the very complex, and very nuanced, attitudes to sex, the body, and pleasure in traditional Islam. It’s biased mainly towards North African culture (the author’s Algerian) but his observations and analysis also apply with some modification in traditional Asian cultures.
Sachiko Murata’s “The Tao of Islam” is a good exploration on sexuality and gender in milieus influenced by Sufism and Peripatetic philosophy; She deals more with attitudes as expressed in literary tropes and as philosophical themes. But it’s a useful (though somewhat dense) work. Per the title she spends a good deal of time contrasting in particular Ibn Arabi’s thoughts on sexuality with Chinese Taoist, and looking at how these thoughts and ideas manifested through Islamic history. Given the subject matter it doesn’t really look at sexuality on the level of general society, since most people involved with the ideas outlined in this book hailed from intellectual elites. That said, it’s an interesting read.
I might post some book reviews or synopsis. Both are interesting books.
Kamal, I hope you didn’t send me an email like you said, because the emails I use on net are fake. I wouldn’t want you to waste your time writing one only to have it go in vain.
You said, ”This in mind, people often fall short of their ideals. I certainly do and frankly, so does everyone.”
How can you know that “everyone” falls short of their ideals? Maybe you are just using that as an excuse to rationalize your own falling short???
Nah, I ended up writing way to much, pruned it down, posted some of it, and decided not to bore the world with the rest.
By definition an ideal is a perfect matter. Since we are finite and contingent, so too are our actions. From a metaphysical point of view it is impossible for any of us to reach our actual ideals, consistently. There’s also the matter of entropy.
Things fall apart, as Yeat’s put it “The center will not hold”
Realizing one falls short does not require rationalization, it simply requires becoming as cognizant of my faults and limitations, and my potentials, as possible. Given that I’m governed by contingencies and can only maintain awareness of a finitie nmber of things about myself, and the world I find myself in.
So almost by definition the state of being human involves falling short of our ideals.
This doesn’t mean we can’t try for them, and get very, very, close to them. I can’t say “Gee I try my best”
Because “I tried hard, honest” is a cop-out.
All that I can say is that I try, sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, when I do, the appropriate thing for me to do is to pick myself up and to keep going.
This is a consistent thing about human nature. In some cases it’s more subtle to notice, in other cases it’s more blatant.
When I say ideal, I’m generally looking at it in an almost Platonic sense, in a way. Humanity is “Kamil” in essence, in that there is a perfect humaness we can aspire to, but every human is but a partial expression of this potentiality. Some by force of will, determination, or sheer good fortune, may find themselves able to reflect more of their ideal than others.
And with that, good night.
Let’s say someone has as an ideal “lifelong celibacy”. You think they can’t do it just because they are human? Of course they can. People who indulge in wanton lust like to assume everyone else is. There is no irresistible force that compels one to have sex. It is completely within the control of the individual. If one has it, it’s because they consciously CHOSE to.