April 20, 2010

Female promiscuity causes earthquakes

An intriguing piece in The Weekly Standard, the American neoconservative opinion magazine, about a leading Iranian cleric who told worshippers in Tehran that he blames earthquakes on female promiscuity: “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes.” This may sound wacky, says the magazine, but it can teach us a valuable lesson: “The question it poses is: How well do we understand the thinking of the Iranian leadership on questions small and large?”

There then follows a quote from a CIA study and a suggestion by the article’s author: We have just to change the word ‘Soviet’ to ‘Iran’ in a certain passage from the essay—where the Soviet Union was described as “a strange and idiosyncratic polity, not to be understood or dealt with without considerable conscious effort”—and the difficulty we face becomes readily apparent.

It may be true, of course. Other cultures, other lifestyles and different ways of thinking, etc. But, paraphrasing the interesting question at the end of the article, one might well ask, “If promiscuous women can cause earthquakes, what kinds of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s behavior might cause a nuclear bomb to detonate or be detonated?”

1 comment:

  1. One wonders first of all if this is really a sincere way of thinking of present Iranian
    leadership, and if it is, how many reasonably intelligent, Iranian women would be influenced by such rubbish?

    These pre-medieval, sweeping statements seem to be fabricated in order to perpetuate womens' servility, their scapegoat status. Perhaps it originally stemmed from fear of the female capacity, a vain, masculine desire to constantly belittle women and their fabulous ability to give birth, in favour of what appears to be degenerate, ego-centric, bearded, masculine dominance.

    That such 'leaders' constantly refer to 'immodest women' leading young men astray, is also an admission that they consider that 'young men, if not men in general, are seriously lacking in maturity and self control. This could also amount to another pretext which allows that their rapists are more likely to be pardoned than the rapists' female victims.

    This of course is a vast subject. We could also refer to the mobile prison of the burka, which might have been an appropriate dress to weather desert sandstorms or offer protection to young women, identically dressed amongst old women to discourage their being carried off by rival, marauding tribes, again of the pre-medieval periods, (in fact the burka dates back even before Mohammed) but it not only has nothing to do with religion, in Europe it's senseless, even dangerous and could be considered a security risk.

    It would be interesting to have some opinions from Muslims regarding all this.

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