Sex and the Single Minded Muslim

A search for the cause of terrorism with the tools of sexual sociology was ridiculed by me here. Now we're instead in the domain of sexual psychology and things immediately become more interesting. We’re familiar with the basic assumption that sexual repression leads to aggression. See how this author links such research to terrorism:

[W]hat is the effect on young unmarried men who, like youths the world over, are subject to a whole host of fears about their burgeoning sexuality? What do they do with their unacceptable sexual fantasies fuelled by the strict regime and the temptations of the mysterious, hidden feminine world? Too often they project their self-disgust on to their object of desire, whom they blame for causing them to have “impure” thoughts.

Egyptians by large manages to keep religion away from their lower body parts but ok, so far I’m buying the line of thought.

Arguably such societies are in the grip of mass psychosis. Like a paranoid psychotic they split the world between those they hopelessly idealise as pure and good, and those they denigrate as evil and out to destroy them. It is not unusual for a paranoid psychotic to nurture delusions of grandeur and an imaginary hotline to God.

The author doesn’t exclusively speak about Muslim societies which we wouldn’t want to describe in terms of mass psychosis. But for devotees to imagine grandeur and a hotline to God, sure, there are too many of them on my street too. Now, here is why we ought to listen:

[W]here women are seen as equal, men also benefit — they are more tolerant, more able to enjoy intimacy and less aggressive towards women and each other. So attitudes towards gender and sexuality are not just a feminist issue for women to discuss while the men set about combating terrorism.