Correct Use Of Sex

 

 

CORRECT USE OF SEX

 

Sex instinct is created to serve two complementary aims: procreation and socialisation.

Procreation first. All higher animals are bisexual, that is two say they come in two types- male and female. The offspring springs from a union of the two gamete cells, namely a spermatozoon and an ovum. To enable the two cells to merge the male animal has to mate with the female at a time when she is fertile, i.e. with an egg released and available for fertilisation. Providentially this time slot is revealed by the female’s excitability and also her issuing highly provocative if very subtle scents which make male animals pursue her. Animals being what they are usually fight over her possession and this is believed to ensure that strongest males usually winning the battle then contributes to the health and success of the species by fertilising the female with highest quality sperm, that is to say, with best genes.

 

In man such contests are not missing but they are often engaged in more subtle ways such as several men aiming at marrying the same woman and probing their way by rival bids, often indirectly through intermediaries. What is more, it is often not only the woman so desired who makes or announces the choice but her guardians like parents and other kin. This shift of decision-making authority from the female herself to her kin reflects the economic and political necessities her family must take into account, political like tribal alliances and economic like an increase or decrease in assets. As a result it amounts to no oppression of females but to a wider perspective of the potential long-terms results from the marriage and girls and to a lesser extent perhaps boys also are habituated to the idea that their elders know best. The more freedom to marry whom we want in our time may look to result from an improvement in human freedoms but it more reflects the new economic realities in which family is increasingly ceasing to be so much an economic unit because of production increasingly shifting from a family agricultural or trade basis to anonymous large-scale production in farms and factories owned by companies.

 

We may gladly observe in passing however that the Prophet did not leave the matters entirely as they were in his time: he strongly advised that in matches the mutual feelings of prospective partners should be taken account of and most preferably accommodated. In actual fact he advised that divorcee women should have the right to say yes or no to proposals made to her while virgins’ consent, if not already voiced by them, could be deduced from their silence and blushing. It was such that the Prophet gave his daughter our mother Fatima to our master Ali; Ali went to the Prophet to ask for Fatima’s hand but could not speak out out of shyness; the Prophet could easily read his mind and told him so and also his acceptance. He then went to his daughter Fatima and put the offer to her whereupon she blushed and could not say a word. They were soon duly married. Islam also gave mature women the right to personally decide whose offer to accept for marriage and once accepted marry themselves to the suitor without a guardian being present. So with divorce. A woman can always seek divorce through legal channels.

 

An extension of the legally sanctioned procreation arrangement, namely marriage is polygamy. Before Islam this area was totally unregulated; a man could marry any number of women if given him by their guardians and divorce any at the drop of a hat so-to-speak. Islam did not abolish polygamy but placed stricter controls on it.

 

Before we say what those are we need to explore the justifications for polygamy if any. Firstly polygamy is not peculiar to man but to many other animals. Lions are the most well-known species as regards this issue. A dominant lion emerges from semi-serious battles who then wins the lordship of a pride of lions consisting of lionesses and their cubs of both sexes and various ages. Usually the new lord evicts the older cubs lest they soon begin to challenge him while he may kill at least some young cubs, who being suckled by lionesses may make the latter unavailable for mating with the lord. This is wild and cruel to us but among lions it is a matter-of-factly accepted state of affairs. The overall result is the vital improved state of the pride: the individuals keep becoming healthier and stronger lions in an environment where even smallest defects in a group can spell extinction for them in the face of stronger rivals.

 

This is the case with human beings today as well and as true as it was yesterday. Companies rise and fall on the basis of smallest margins of advantage, take-overs scavenge the not successful enough and survivors must battle on as desperately as lions do against lions, or lions against hyenas etc. The only difference is that men being organised on far vaster scales and far more variegated forms have other factors to play against each other like law and morality, espionage and forming alliances. Yet as far as mating (marriage) is concerned the need for some polygamy remains since like in other polygamous species there is always a surplus of females because of the higher mortality among males as well as some both financial and sexual incapacity. The surplus women have needs like all other sisters of theirs and one way or another must find a male to satisfy them. If polygamy for abler males is denied it is inevitably replaced by prostitution and mistress-taking to the greater disadvantage of the women. After all, in Islam polygamy is not a commandment, nor it is encouraged at all but a sadly acknowledged necessity in certain cases whose alternatives are worse. Read if you wish:

 

“If you are afraid of not doing justice to orphans then marry women you who look good to you, two, three or four of them. If you are afraid of being unable to treat them equally well then only one or (if you cannot afford marriage) then make do with what you own (slave women). This is closer to not departing from fairness (4: 3)

 

Of course this verse reflects the state of affairs all over the world at the time which was not peculiar to Arabia. It also reflects the heavy loss of male population due to almost constant war among clans, tribes and kingdoms. These wars create both male shortages and slaves who were basically prisoners of war whether just war or not. Each kingdom or smaller group by taking any number of their defeated enemies as prisoners tried to keep the enemy side down while exploiting both male and female slaves as cheap labour and suitable females as more wombs to increase their economic output on the one hand and fill their ranks with more manpower at the expense of their enemies on the other. From the great and cruel Roman empire even under a Christian guise to the equally great and wanton Persia as well as throughout the so-called barbarian world this state of affairs prevailed as an unbreakable institution and the young and small Muslim community could not afford to lag behind in the exploitation of opportunities so vital for their survival.

 

The verse above came down in the wake of the battles fought by Muslims under their Prophet or commanders he appointed in which battles the Muslim male casualties and proliferation of widows and orphans made the ancient institution of polygamy even more precious for addressing the problems so created. A similar situation arose in the West after each of the two world wars of the twentieth century and because polygamy was not allowed the far worse solution of promiscuity came along; women slept casually with men they could find, they got no compensation let alone security in return and had to either bear fatherless children or abort. That was the trigger to build the so-called welfare state in Europe whereby governments undertook to ensure that none starved or froze to death among their citizens. It never solved the problems polygamy did but set in motion a gradual process of demolition of most traditional values and institutions, de-spiritualisation (or crass secularisation) of human mentality with a clear and unstoppable tendency to bestialisation of human behaviour and vulgarisation of human culture. What abominations we have today in the form of promiscuous as well as too early sex, pornographic exploitation of children as young as newborn, homosexuality trying not only to be respectable but the more chic option and the general obsession with sensual pleasures from gourmet food to a life of fun and fun and more fun whatever its content (often drugs) and many more… these compare only too badly with the state of affairs in a social and moral sense at the inception and early development of Islam.

 

All in all, Islam liberated sex from the opprobrium Christianity had unwisely put on it and thus avoided the sordid excesses of it Christians had to fall into. It was because of the laws of cause and effect which says, each action creates a reaction equal to it in magnitude and opposite to it in direction. By satanising sex too much Christians caused a backlash among themselves and ended up deifying it. Nowadays sex is such an all-consuming concept, subject, obsession and pastime in the West that its new religion may be called ‘sexolatry’, the worship or cult of the sex! With this as it is the West should not be called ‘secular’, a better term for its creed may be ‘sexual’!

 

Is polygamy feasible today? Why not, is not human rights saying that consenting adults can engage in any kind of sexual relationships? Are not people today engaging in two-some, three-some, hetero- and homo-sexual activities and mixed orgies of all sizes and shapes? Are not some richer or powerful men having regular and at times stable access to more than one woman whatever the status of each? Are not some women even having their harems of men by juggling between them and often also fleecing them? Are not sometimes children born of such variegated relationships who are cared or not cared for to various degrees? Are not these far worse forms of access to more than one sexual partner than Islam’s polygamy between able and willing men and women? Is not children’s welfare paramount and if so which of the two alternatives, namely Islamic polygamy and Western promiscuity takes better care of them?

 

We are not saying that polygamy is better than monogamy; it is not and both Allah and His Messenger grant that. In the verse above Allah ends his options for marriage with monogamy while the Prophet is on record for asking women not to be hurt by unnecessary polygamous desires by their husbands. A good example very close to the Prophet was the desire of Ali to marry another woman on top of Fatima the daughter of the prophet and Ali’s first and only wife then. Fatima was mortified. What is more the woman was a sister of the new and real good Muslim Ikrima b. Abu Jahl. The Prophet was very much upset by Fatima’s distress, was shy of telling Ali about how he felt and anyhow Medina was rife with gossip on the matter. In solution, he climbed the pulpit in the mosque and made public his displeasure. “By Allah” he said “The daughter of the Messenger of Allah will never come under the same roof as the daughter of the enemy of Allah”. Abu Jahl was the worst enemy Islam had until he had perished at Badr. Ali was chastened and abandoned the new bridal candidate and until Fatima died he did not dare to marry any other woman. Nor the other son-in-law of the Prophet ever married any women while he was married to one daughter of the Prophet and at the death of that he continued his status of son-in-law when he was given another daughter of the Prophet.

 

Even more tellingly the Prophet, contrary to all the malicious thoughts of his European critics observed pure monogamy so long his wife Khatija was alive, despite she being fifteen years his senior and most probably no longer a sexual partner for the last ten years of their marriage. Only after her death and a long mourning he was ready to marry again and surprise surprise he opted for another old woman, namely strong Muslima Sauda bint Za’ma who was of his age, i.e. over fifty. His string of marriages came after he moved to Medina and established his sovereign Islamic community there and around it. Apart from young Aisha who was given to him by best friend and closest soulmate and confidante Abu Bakr by which both parties intended the honour of close kinship; what is more, Aisha was a genius and her youth ensuring her survival long after the Prophet died gave her all the chance to pass on Prophet’s traditions and also issue legal rulings none could provide because she had a specially close relationship with and incomparable aptitude for Prophet’s discipleship. All are agreed that our mother Aisha is the first woman savant of Islam, both prolific and versatile. For decades the companions and their followers consulted their spiritual mother Aisha and thrived on her erudition.

 

Other wives were married on either compassionate or political grounds (to reconcile the hearts of recently conquered enemies from which he chose a wife); all except Umar’s widowed daughter Hafsa were old by the standards of the times and ex-wives of others, mostly martyrs and with children from their earlier marriages. The one thing which distinguished these wives was their intelligence; apparently the Prophet valued intelligence in women at least as much as handsomeness and the two, by the testimony of physiological science, often go hand in hand since handsomeness and intelligence are genetically based and also related. Exceptions do exist but as the saying goes ‘exceptions prove the rule’. Why intelligence? Because, after him it would be these exceptional ladies who would teach and guide Muslims, women as well as men contemporaries of theirs. And that is what actually happened. In appreciation, Umar, when he was made caliph, appointed monthly stipends for these ‘mothers of the believers’ and all caliphs after him continued with the practice. They were not only the reminders to Muslims of their sorely missed Prophet but also professsors of ‘prophetology’ if we may call them so. Who could know the Prophet at closer range and as intimately as they, the Prophet whose every little word, act, gaze and facial expression conveyed so much in and about human perfection?

 

PROSTITUTION

 

This phenomenon, namely people hiring other people for sex, is not ‘the oldest profession’ for sure; that merit goes to priesthood; even the hunter-gatherers before farming was invented had their shamans while having no prostitutes; after all shamanism is about leadership and even many lowest animals like bees and ants have their leaders. For example, flocks of birds take their directional orders from a leading bird and ants are famous for their organisational and communications skills within each colony of theirs.

 

Prostitution seems to have begun with farming revolution when private land ownership created social class alongside priesthood. We see this economy-based class structure survive to this day among Hindus who as such constitute for us a living social fossil. Among them the Brahmins, their priestly class form the top of the social pyramid under which come the inevitable warrior class indispensable to help the Brahmins to keep their eminent position and in return share some of their influence and prosperity. Then come the merchants and tradesmen class who form the third and last level of freemen. At the bottom are the pariahs, those wretched tillers of and toilers over land and doers of other domestic and proletarian duties; they enjoy no rights to speak of but are imposed on only obligations. In this and other similar systems among the ancients, like the Babylonians and Greeks, prostitution was mainly a temple profession in which the role and function of being a priestess and prostitute merged. On the one hand these priestess-prostitutes served the priests for free as a matter of duty while on the other they served the freemen outside the temples for fees and donations to the temple. Only in this sense and at this stage it becomes the old profession it is.

 

In more modern times prostitution is entirely divorced from religion and in fact became a profanity; prostitutes command no respect and enjoy no rights in actual fact. They are both desired and despised, the epithet of ‘prostitute’ being one of the most damning form of address to any woman. Although there have been privately working prostitutes, privately because such are beautiful and intelligent women who are after wealth and influence and at least sexually too unscrupulous to worry about their honour; such sibyls dotted great cities of pre-modern West like Paris and moved about palaces and lordly mansions and other common venues of the richer classes. They were openly known but too much appreciated and desired to be insulted or persecuted. When attached to one man such a high class prostitute was called a mistress and more or less performed the function of a polygamous second, third etc. wife minus some of the rights of such wives in Islam. Almost all Western kings had such mistresses, often more than one, in rather long term relationships and what is more, children born of such relationships were often if informally admitted as the genuine sons of the lord concerned. Among such ‘bastards’ some even ascended the throne of their fathers and in case of bishops their bishopric office. Even popes were not above taking mistresses, producing bastards and then appointing the same as bishops while still young boys. I draw the attention of my dear readers how similar was this practice to Islamic polygamy in its sexual aspect and disadvantageously dissimilar in the risks it poses to all parties, the mistress-taking man, the insecurity of and the contempt for the mistress and the very possible plight of the children born of such relationships.

 

All in all, there is little doubt that the inevitable phenomenon of one man accessing many women in a breeding mode is regulated and made juster in Islam while it is unregulated and abandoned to its fate in non-Islam: the practice is the same; the effects and results could not be more different except in the case of very powerful men being responsible and taking good care of both their mistresses and bastards. This last case makes it almost Islamic polygamy minus the unnecessary and unhelpful shame side. Polygamy is natural to a lot of higher animals and regulating it must be a far better arrangement than satanising and banning it. And its volume has never been a problem in Islam. Overall, polygamous marriages among Muslims did not exceed one or two percent of all marriages simply because few could afford it or could cope with its demands and responsibilities. On the main, it remained the domain of powerful men as in the West where it was practiced in the illegal form of lover-taking over a wife and occasional reproduction through the lover.

 

But accessing more than one woman out of sexual hunger or desire for variety need not remain the domain of financially and politically powerful men. Far less men with strong sexual urges (and few are without when young) also sought it but given their humble means they could only afford hiring a woman instead of buying it. It was like hiring a car once in a while instead of buying one. It is this arrangement that we now understand to mean prostitution. The usual arrangement is business-like: a company of men and often also women set up a business whose aim is to recruit and provide prostitutes to paying customers. The form of actual arrangement depends on the laws of the country it will operate in. In the UK prostitution is illegal although its magnitude can beat any country in Europe. Here pimps, that is to say prostitution managers arrange everything for the trade and collect the profit from the proceeds. In one form of it, prostitutes are made to ply a beat (a usual area of a town) displaying some signs of their profession like sexy dress and walking and customers seek and follow them to pick one they fancy. A car ride together or a meeting at a designated house does the rest. In another and often more luxurious and expensive form some houses are used as regular business premises under the nose of the police; there seems to be a mutual if unofficial understanding between the police and the illegal firm of the pimps that unless some other serious crime is involved the parties can ignore each other: that must be it because it is impossible to have so many brothels in a town like London about which all interested men know but not the all-pervading police with so many informers under their thumb. Some sordid mutual accommodation must be going on as it also must be with drug trade and other abominations. It may be that in order to catch the bigger fish the police have to tolerate smaller fish, but that again ‘depends’. Even quite large fishes may have to be let alone in order to catch dolphins and whales of such evil trades unless these biggest fish manage to buy the bigger bosses of politics and law-enforcement. You see, there seems to be hardly any doors bribes and mutual favours cannot open. That must be why, despite being both illegal and absurdly conspicuous prostitution is only thriving in this country.

 

As for its higher and more luxurious and lucrative forms we may point at those almost openly advertising businesses advertising under names like sauna, massage parlour and the like and openly boast of their ‘girls’ whose obscene curvy photos accompany the advert. Again, the police do nothing. Lastly, many prostitutes are young women lured into this country from poorer countries with a false promise of some respectable employment and then pressed into prostitution in its various forms. On the continent, prostitution is legalised with equal shamelessness and thereby taxed. Still high class prostitution remains the domain of criminal gangs who pay no taxes but far less costing bribes plus the cost of thugs with guns to fight against rival gangs.

 

From all above about prostitution we can see that it promotes sexual promiscuity with all its very serious dangers to human health; if the chief bogeyman is AIDS today it was syphilis in the preceding centuries which syphilis has in fact made a comeback thanks to the increasing promiscuity through prostitution or otherwise. Uttering these words is one thing, realising what terrible experiences they point to is quite another. AIDS for example is a deadly epidemic in some poorer countries which kills hundreds of thousands a year irrespective of their culpability in the matter which is often next to nothing: both the abusing and abused adults and children born to abused women pay the same penalty- a life of lingering in pain and a slow death of the most horrible kind, the sufferer falling to pieces from inside. All such tragedy for what? To have sexual experience outside what God allows! Is it really worth it, even slightly? Is it only the health side which is regrettable? All involved in prostitution suffer in many other ways and may be said to live in hell: even the top bosses have their share of hell, not the least because each capo (boss) is in constant fear of his rivals with whom he competes for territory, human resources and buying of the forces of law. Add to it all other fields of illegal business activities each with their own rivals and vendettas and you can imagine what the life of a capo and his cronies is like.

 

No gang fully specialises in a single field; each need a share in drugs, human trafficking and organs for transplant and false documents as well as illegal arms dealings if they want to grow and compete. So, prostitution is not a solitary phenomenon of curse and tragedy but just one bad apple in the same basket with other abominations of Western culture which is a malignant end-product of a misguided and deluded Christian past. By abandoning the real Jesus Christ the great Jewish prophet in favour of a synthetic Greek version of the same the West condemned itself first to a Dark Age and after, in reaction to it, to a Godless (or rather ‘sexolatrous’) civilisation which has been attempting to reconcile two irreconcilable things: For people having no God inside them and they behaving in ways which can only be called godly or saintly, with sex being absolved of all blame and therefore no sin except in case of a rape. The West expects its citizens to only believe in material things and indulge their senses as much as they can afford (the materialistic-hedonistic mentality) while at the same time to be just, conscientious, kind, honest, polite and in general humanitarian and egalitarian. It simply won’t wash- one cannot both worship the Mammon (al Taghut in the Qur’an) and behave justly and humanely enough. The needs of the secular Western citizen are too many and too great to allow too much charity for others; even a primary school child needs its frequent almost synthetic drinks and snacks, dabbles in its budding drug habits, his small dallies in gambling and his extravagant birthday parties and the likes. As for the ‘needs’ of the adults, at the most expensive end one can witness their private jumbo jets and round-the-year paid-for hotel suits of most luxurious quality. Even more sadly many Muslim super-rich are competing in extravagance and vanity with their Western peers only too successfully. That is what I mean by worshipping the Mammon and what Allah means by ‘worshipping al Taghut’.

 

To conclude, prostitution victimises a lot of women by enslaving, degrading, degenerating and often making them very ill; it amounts to exploitation and wasting of otherwise very valuable sisters of ours and brings in its wake, quite inevitably, many other branches of great crime. It rots and corrupts a large segment of society, both men and women, prevents or destroys families, shifts wealth to the most undeserving away from those innocently needy. It creates a moving panorama of depravity and misery hardly any other activity other than total war can cause although the pathological signs of prostitution are more like those in deep organs like heart and liver than those on the surface like war wounds.

 

Islam’s attitude towards prostitution is two-fold: It cannot incriminate and condemn its perpetrators and cannot excuse its victims the unwilling prostitutes more. Read if you wish:

 

“Do not press your girls wanting to remain chaste into prostitution in pursuit of the transitory benefits of this world. Whoever forces them thus then because of the compulsion applied to them Allah will be mercifully forgiving towards them” (24: 33)

 

Compelling people into sinful (read shameless and harmful) activities is greater a sin than the sum total of all sins committed by all interested parties in the carnival of sin and while those compelled are excused by Allah and also compensated with Paradise at the latest those who compelled them are to be punished in the Hell at the latest again. This is only fair and shows how reasonable and realistic Islam is. It is not so much the actual deeds done which incriminates a servant of Allah but the circumstances surrounding it. Good news for all trapped by others into crime and sin and bad news for the trapper-exploiters.

 

ADULTERY

 

This abomination is cheating on the conjugal rights of one’s legal spouse. Not much explanation or argument is necessary to demonstrate what an unjust and dirty act it is. Even in our time and our extremely permissive Western environment it is one of the causes of murder at the worst and of various forms of unhappiness, some at a suicidal level on the part of the cheated as well as any abused party. On top of concealing parentage and mixing up various rights and obligations, like maintenance and inheritance it also is part of the network of venereal illness spreading. All this trouble and shame for just bedding another person whose conjugal rights belong to another partner.

 

Marriage is not a mutual dedication of sexual favours between two persons of the opposite sex alone- it is also an arrangement for joint responsibilities like procreating and raising children and obligations of each towards the rest, all wrapped up in a financial packet whose dissipation will have serious consequences for all.

 

What suffering adultery causes to an innocent partner is almost beyond endurance for that innocent party on top of the hurt caused to any joint children. Suddenly these innocents find themselves practically bereaved of a partner or parent, robbed of their stable and cosy lifestyle despite some problems which are always there more or less and one parent eternally shamed together with the other person who stole the shamed one from his or her family. The tectonic damage extends far and wide into the in-laws territory, lots of plans and certainties are upset, once happy relationships are killed by poisoning. All this just extortionate bill is foolishly and criminally paid to change the sex organ in one partner for another in another partner. If that was necessary it could be far less traumatic and slightly more honourable to first divorce from the first partner, pay the compensation going with it and then slip away in the pursuit of the new and no different sex organ. Please do not misunderstand: divorce is legitimate if discouraged in Islam, but its grounds should be more serious than acquiring a new love. In case the partner divorced from also wants the divorce the matter changes character and becomes reasonable. In any case however adultery should not be the trigger, divorce should always happen before one partner migrates to and joins another, all with social approval, sanely and legitimately.