Islam And "Manliness"

Raymond Ibrahim has an interesting piece in Pajamas Media which raises several points central to the matters of homegrown Islamist terrorism and the presence of Americans and Europeans of the "blond hair, blue eyed" sort in Islamist centers such as Yemen. Ibrahim's main thesis is that the religious tenets of Islam have an essential appeal to young men who are not comfortable with the totems of gender neutrality current in the West generally and the US in particular.

There is no doubt but that a large germ of truth resides in Ibrahim's analysis. The past forty years have not been comfortable ones for those of us of the male persuasion who came of age before the explosive growth of feminism and its concomitant drive for cross-the-board equality. The effects of the feminist and post-feminist thinking on younger men struck the Geek hard as he taught college students who had apparently been led to believe that men were solely and completely responsible for all the unpleasant features of life from wars to crime to, presumably, the flu and common cold.

The eons long "battle of the sexes" has morphed into an uneasy coexistence between parties who do not really know one another beyond the fact that neither can exist without the other's presence, support, and (hopefully) intimate cooperation. It isn't a cold war exactly, but neither is it a hot peace of mutual understanding and appreciation.

There is no surprise that the need for constant reinterpretation, re-engagement, re-evaluation and re-negotiation of the details of life between man and woman in all spheres of life proves more than a little unsettling to some men--both those who are young and those for whom youth is but a faraway memory. Life in the Islamist environment of stiff rules and requirements, clear definition of responsibility--and definite subordination of women would seem halcyon to those who are discommoded by life in the West with its hazy lines, changing rules, and shifting tectonic plates of relationship.

The problem comes in that the Islamist view of the role of men in society as well as their firm belief that men in the West are soft, decadent, and deeply feminized are wrong in all respects. Those who migrate across the great cultural divide between the civilization of the West and the retrograde barbarism of Islamism are pursuing a mirage far more destructive of life than the optical distortions of the desert heat.

The true role of men--both before and after the tidal wave of feminism--is and always has been to protect, cherish, and love. It is not and never has been as the Islamists argue proper or necessary for men to subordinate women--let alone imprison them or kill them over something as specious as honor.

Men do kill. Typically they kill of necessity without any joy or desire. Those who do kill without sufficient cause or justification are considered outlaws not heroes by others of their sex. Similarly, men who hunt without necessity nor discretion are viewed not as supermen but rather akin to a weasel in the chicken pen.

Hunting--and killing--are male. There is room for both, deep and ample room, in the genetically determined back brain of all men. This realization caused men long ago, long back in the deepest fog of the prehistory of our species to derive the rituals of passage between the estate of the boy and that of the man.

All the rituals including those practiced by the Apache portion of the Geek's ancestry emphasized the vulnerability of the individual man, the need for him to cooperate completely with other men for the benefit of the group. A group which necessarily included women and children. These rituals provided the means by which the candidate for manhood would control and focus his aggression, his strength, his totality for the good of all and not simply for himself and his desires.

Islamism does not do any of these things. It places no limits and encourages no man to control his passions, his strength, his aggression for the real, immediate, and specific benefit of the collective of which he is one small but vital component. Rather, Islamism commands men to act as though they have never outgrown the first rush of adolescence when hormones ran high and self-control sank to the lower depths.

In a very real way those males who flee the West with its uncertainties for Islamism with its false sureness are seeking a never-ending bout of untrammeled adolescence where self-gratification and specious notions of potency triumph all else. These fugitives from manhood seek to prolong the freedom of the teenager.

Koranic justifications, invocations of the life of the Perfect Man, Mohammad, or the lives of his nearly perfect Companions do not alter the ground truth. That truth is simply this: False men, living false lives of dreams, dreams of killing, raping, subjugating, are travesties of the reality of manhood.

The reality of manhood is far less attractive. It is accepting the bitter truth that men are expendable. Men take risks. Men are here to face down the mastodon, the saber tooth tiger. To die if need be so that a woman--or another man--might live.

It is far easier to take the teenage route. To fancy one the best, the conquerer, the smiter of evil, the killer. It is hard, damn hard, to accept the way of the man, the way of sacrifice, the way of injury, the way of dying to protect another, to interpose one's only body between the perpetual teenager with a gun and the lady one loves.