The panic of the sheikhs

I once stayed in a hotel in Istanbul’s Yenikapi district. Returning in the evening from a day’s sightseeing, I found the street leading to my hotel swarming with men. It didn’t take long to notice the sexual energy animating them. These men were all homosexual and all looking for partners, possibly for long term, probably for the night, but most likely for a quickie. Similar scenes play out in every city in the Muslim world. Homosexuality is one of the Muslims’ greatest hypocrisies, for they protests way, way too much.

Prominent religious authorities in the Muslim world have lately made numerous statements against homosexuality and against what they called the Western campaigns to promote it. Senior clerics and official religious institutions, such as the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the Saudi Grand Mufti, Jordan's Iftaa Department and the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), issued announcements and fatwas on this topic, which claimed that the West is trying to force Muslim societies to accept homosexuality as legitimate. Claiming that homosexuality is in fact a perversion that contravenes human nature and the laws of Islam and of other religions, they urged the West to respect the values of other societies instead of trying to undermine them under the pretext of promoting freedom and human rights. Al-Azhar also published advice for parents "to help them protect their children" from the threat of homosexuality.[1]

Religions zero in on two dimensions of being to establish control over people, the first is pain and the second is pleasure. They administer pain and control pleasure. It is the control of pleasure, in particular sexual pleasure, that is currently giving the Muslim sheikhs and “scholars” sleepless nights. Stone by stubborn stone, the great totalitarian edifice that is Islam is dismantling itself, hence the panic of the sheikhs. How close did George Orwell get to the mark, seemingly without any knowledge of Islam?

Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. …No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. …All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.[2]

Whether the Soviet Union, China, an Islamic caliphate, Kokka-Shinto Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or any other totalitarian entity, Orwell’s description fits perfectly. Of course, a totalitarian system devised in the ninth century will have had no “neurologists at work upon” the problem of orgasm. Islam does have its "cutters" removing little girls' clitorises and labia, thereby at least solving the problem of orgasm in women. In men, the architects of Islam contrived to control the way orgasm was arrived at. It was at best an imperfect solution, at worst a compounding of the problem. Not only did the caliphate not have neurologists, it also lacked the means of surveillance to ensure compliance. If you can neither kill the desire at source, nor prohibit pursuit of it, you are left only with the conscience of the one who desires, and the hope that the inevitable transgressions will take place in the shadows. This conscience you can assail with guilt. All religions do this. Sheikh Yasir Qadhi expresses the problem of children marrying outside the faith in this way:

Fear doesn’t work. They don't have that fear in this society. The stick is not going to work. You don't raise your children like this. They must have a love of Allah, the love of the sunnah, the love of the religion of Islam, so that they understand: I don’t want to do something that would be displeasing to Allah and his messenger.[3]

Yasir Qadhi sets out to "make the halal easy," while Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping flatters the youth. Both men are simply gilding the cage. Xi says to the young Chinese who refuse to have children:

For the Party and the country, youth are the most worthy of love and expectation. Young people are like saplings that thrive on the earth and one day they will grow into towering trees and hold up the sky. Young people are like the rising sun that constantly gathers energy and one day, they will shine in every corner of the earth with their heat and light. The hope of the Party and the country rests on the youth.[4]

One totalitarian controller is more laughable than the other. Sex, especially sexual pleasure and sexual love, contradict totalitarianism. All love must be for Allah and his messenger; all must love only the Party; all must love only the Führer. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. Totalitarianism will abolish sex as soon as it can do so without threatening its own survival. Communist China is very close to that point.

Self-abasement is the condition of all who are formed under totalitarianism. Religion removes all pleasure from sex, reducing it to a social or religious duty alone: that of procreation. Chinese parents, especially mothers, drive their unmarried daughters to madness the closer they get to their twenty-seventh year, after which they will be stigmatised as “left-over women” should they still not be married.

Only those Chinese young people wealthy and privileged enough to go to university find a short reprieve in their lives to experience romantic love. The moment they leave university, the pressure on men to find a job, buy an apartment and a car and find a wife, and on women to marry, will be relentless. As soon as they marry, they must produce the child. Thus is the orgasm negated, spoilt, debased, unable to be enjoyed, irrelevant, as good as abolished. Except that the sexual urge remains; there is just no reward at the end of it.

Within this reality, the CCP has gone so far in controlling sexual outcome that its signature creation, the one-child-policy generation, has decided in significant numbers never to have children, a civil disobedience action born of despair called ‘lying flat’. In Shenzhen, the city with the youngest population, i.e., the quintessential one-child-policy city, a netizen urged young people to lie flat: "The Communist Party won't stop until the national economy and people's livelihoods are completely ruined. Lie flat all, really, there is no point."[5] Short of suicide, of which there is plenty, the only power left to the long-oppressed Chinese is generational suicide. In an incident during the Shanghai Wuhan virus lockdowns, city officials forced their way into people’s apartments to take them into quarantine. One young couple refused to let them in. The following exchange ensued:

City official: We are telling you, listen carefully. You will be punished by public security [police] when the time comes.
Resident: You are not qualified to forcefully take us away. Sorry.
City official: Whether we are qualified, you can be the judge based on the law. I tell you we have informed you. It’s on you now. If you don't follow the city's orders, you will be punished and it will affect three generations of your family!
Resident: We are the last generation. Thank you.

In other words, this ends with us.

The same has dawned on Sheikh Yasir Qadhi, who is clearly offended that a Muslim, and a woman at that, should so demonstrably reject his hallowed Shari’a:

There is no question from a legal perspective: such a marriage is not a marriage. There's just no room for reinterpretation. There is unanimous consensus (sic) amongst all the scholars of Islam and all the law of madhabs that exist, that when it comes to nikah [marriage], a Muslim lady must marry a Muslim man. There is no difference of opinion and this is something that there is unanimous consensus about. So we say unequivocally that any person who comes and wants to re-change (sic) this law, we say ‘no,’ it cannot be changed. The Qur’an is explicit and the Sharia has come with what is called ijma‘ or unanimous consensus [making it legally binding on all Muslims, AP], but the issue and the problem is that at this stage of her life, she doesn't care what ijma‘ says. She's not interested in Islamic law. She’s made an emotional decision and she is going to go ahead with it. (Emphasis AP)

In other words, this ends with me.

Yasir Qadhi is well aware that if conditions in the lands of the kufaar make it unfeasible to practice Islam, then the Muslims must emigrate to where they can practice their religion. So says the Shari’a that Yasir Qadhi is so keen to enforce. Muslims, we have a problem.

China’s demographic crisis was already existential long before ‘lying flat’ took hold amongst the youth, given the extreme shortage of females. The one-child policy was imposed in 1980. It dawned on the CCP twenty-five years later, that the country did not have enough people of child-rearing age to sustain its population. Instead of getting out of people’s private lives, it adjusted its controls. In 2015 the one-child policy became a two-child policy. In Shanghai, where I lived, it was obvious within about four months that many couples were going for it. But that was far too little, far too late. The policy was changed to a three-child policy in May 2021. This policy lasted for exactly two months after which all restrictions were lifted, amid widespread ridicule on Chinese social media, especially as the one-child policy had visited forced abortions upon millions of women, as well as triggered a dramatic surge in the aborting of female foetuses.[6] If they are going to have only one child, then better it be a boy.

There is no social security system in the People’s Republic of China, and the legal obligation on the young husband to care for his parents, his wife’s parents, himself and his wife, and their two children is often an unbearable financial burden. The young couple’s sole relief, ironically, lies in limiting their children to one, and even that is often done only to stop their parents’ incessant nagging for continuing their line. On this basis, the Chinese population becomes unsustainable. The only way the Communist Party is going to stop China from ceasing to exist, is for the state to nationalise women and to industrialise procreation by forcibly harvesting and fertilisation their eggs, “as one takes eggs from a hen.” Fortunately for the Party, the society has been totalitarian for so many generations that there should be no problem.

Islam pre-empts the Chinese demographic conundrum by, for want of a better term, “nationalising” Muslim women. Muslim women are strictly reserved for Muslim men only. The Chinese and Muslims hold to the same genealogical precept that the child issues from the father. Whoever plants his seed in the woman owns the child from that seed. As long as the Chinese exercise only minimal control over whether a woman may marry a foreigner (her parents decide), this relative laxity compounds the country’s demographic attrition. In May 2022 this legal loophole was effectively closed when almost all Chinese were banned from leaving the country.

While rural China has whole villages of bachelors unable to find wives, the cities have notable numbers of highly-educated single women unwilling to marry men socially inferior to themselves. One idea floated within the Communist Party is to forcibly marry these sophisticated urban women to those bachelors languishing in rural villages. Islam pre-empts this problem, too, by defining women as inherently inferior to men and subordinating them to men: "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other... So good women are the obedient," (Qur’an 4:34). The same obtains in Christianity, almost verbatim: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife," (Ephesians 5:22-23). While the male sex drive is a priority in Islam, the securing of broodmares for Muslims is an equal priority. Shari’a ensures that no Muslim woman escapes her availability for this purpose.

While not all Muslim men will necessarily find Muslim women, all Muslim women will be found by Muslim men, for each man may marry up to four wives. Men left without wives, or fewer than four, are encouraged to go on jihad and capture the women of the towns and cities as sex-slaves, on which number there is no limit. This they have largely been unable to do due to colonialism and the substitution of national armies for religious ones, a development that Sheikh Yasir Qadhi both regrets and resents. This hindrance notwithstanding, the number of Muslims always increases. A lucrative trade in women has sprung up in China, both domestically (based on seizure, abduction and imprisonment), and internationally (Hindu and Christian girls captured in Pakistan and sold to China). The Communist Party is also manoeuvring to remove the stigma from unmarried motherhood, and making it a duty on senior Party officials to have more children, including by their mistresses.

Whether Muslim men marry their slaves or not, the children born to them will be Muslim. While it is the duty of Chinese couples to produce a child and a stigma on their parents if they fail to do so, a Muslim woman may not refuse sex to her husband, and when he is not having sex with her, he may confine her to the home. No matter how badly a Muslim man beats his wife, it is impossible for a Muslim woman to initiate divorce. Should she seek refuge in her parents’ home, they will simply send her back to her abusive husband for shame. Such laws and practices ensure that every Muslim man can theoretically father a child every night.

The demographic safeguarding of Muslims leaves no stone unturned. Paedophilia can yield offspring, so it is permitted, and parents are encouraged to marry off their girls “before they see their blood,” which means that there is no minimum age for marriage (yes, a Muslim man may marry a baby girl the moment she is born and have sex with her—for the avoidance of doubt, 'sex' means penetrative intercourse). Of course, a one-child policy becomes that much less feasible in the absence of contraception, so contraception has been readily available in China. How long this will continue to be the case is an open question. Coitus interruptus, the only contraception available when Islam was devised, is discouraged in that it is held to have no effect on “Allah’s will that a soul be born,” thereby making the practice pointless.

Two forms of attaining orgasm militate directly against totalitarian control and the duty to procreate: masturbation; and homosexual sex—attaining pleasure for themselves by themselves, and attaining pleasure for themselves in collusion with others, without Allah’s or the Party’s permission. Both of these undermine totalitarianism if not prohibited. Yet Muslims practice strict gender segregation. What else is left to Muslim men but to indulge in homosexuality? They just don’t talk about it.

The Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign against effeminate men, both to discourage homosexuality and to correct the extremely pampered character of the one-child-policy recruits that are now all that is available to its military. Islamic governments, through their media mouthpieces, voiced their objections to Western governments, in particular the United States, pushing them into accepting homosexuality.[7]

Such protests are undermined by the buzz on the dark streets of places like Istanbul’s Yenikapi, and the determination of Muslim minority communities in the West to show their religion as civilised, open and pluralistic. The humanity of Western lay Muslims is breaking through the chains Shari’a has placed on it. At time of writing, they were openly embracing homosexuality, much to the consternation of the “scholars,” who were going to great pains to stem the tide.

The control of fertility boosted the already arbitrary power of Chinese official at all levels, who applied it both sadistically and to their own advantage. Such responses are inherent to societies of strict social hierarchy and subordinate dependence, a prerequisite for totalitarianism. To this day, Chinese villages and towns take their grievances to officials on their knees, quite literally, begging and pleading. Islamic society, too, is one of strict social hierarchy. The “scholars” and sheikhs, above, know the innermost secrets of Islam, such as the depth of Shari’a depravity, and conceal these from lay Muslims below, whom, Shari’a dictates, cannot know anything except that which the “scholars” have vouchsafed as suitable for them to know. Their role is simply to hear and obey (Qur’an 24:51); “they memorise it and regurgitate it out,” according to the good Sheikh Yasir Qadhi. Even when a lay Muslim is perfectly capable of reading and understanding the Qur’an in Arabic, he will still turn to his sheikh to explain to him what he has just read. If the sheikh’s explanation contradicts what he has just read and understood himself, he will always go with what the sheikh says, because the sheikh has knowledge and he has not. So compels the Shari’a.

The panic of the sheiks arises from Islam’s contact with the kufaar under conditions where Islam does not dominate. China now locks its citizens within its borders à la North Korea. There being no caliphate, this option is not available to Islam. Not only have large Muslim minorities been exposed to non-Shari’a conditions in Western countries, where it is very difficult to maintain social hierarchy, subordinate dependence and absolute deference towards “scholars” and sheikhs, but Western governments, both as colonial powers and as super-powers, have by carrot and stick sought to ween Islamic countries off their most egregious barbaric practices, such as beheading, stoning, amputation, and throwing off high buildings, in short, pushing human rights onto societies that hold rights anathema.

While the only action left to the Chinese is to not procreate, lay Muslims in the West can and do erode the mechanisms by which Islamic control is maintained, even if they achieve this unwittingly. It has been the case for decades that when a kafir man wishes to marry a Muslim woman, he must first convert to Islam. It is no longer unheard of for couples to not bother with this requirement, the bride remaining Muslim and the groom non-Muslim. Understandably, it is a matter that disturbs the sheikhs and “scholars” deeply. Islam is Allah’s religion. Muslims are “the best of people.” It is a profound undermining of the natural order for Muslims to not maintain their pre-eminence.

Upsetting as these developments might be to the sheikhs, Islam does anticipate interaction with Christians and Jews (“people of the Book”) and other non-Muslims, and the Shari’a provides detailed guidance to the Muslim and how to deal with each of them. The “scholars” can find answers in the Shari’a. The real killer blow comes with Muslim women marrying atheists. Atheists! Even all-knowing Allah has never heard of such a thing. How can my god be greater than your god, if you have no god at all. The Shari’a says that Muslims must turn to their “scholars” for everything. What guidance can a “scholar” offer to a distraught Muslim mother whose daughter is about to marry an atheist, when the divine law is unaware that such people even exist? For questions of why we exist, how we should live and what happens to us after we die to be taken out of the realm of inter-religious rivalry, makes the Shari’a and all that is based on it irrelevant. Which god do you bash when your adversary has none?

This is why atheism spooks the sheikhs so much. People cannot turn to them for answers, and must perforce seek and find their own answers. Lay Muslims will acquire knowledge that the “scholars” do not have. The hierarchical control of knowledge falls away and the sheikhs face oblivion. Lying flat, and its later form, Let it rot, dissolve the CCP’s power over the Chinese people in exactly the same way as a Muslim woman marrying an atheist does. It dissolves the Shari’a's hold over her and all generations that follow from her. In the Chinese case, there are no generations that follow, meaning no one for the CCP to wield power over. In both cases, totalitarianism ends.

During the long course of Islamic history, the “scholars” relied on the inequality between themselves as “the guardians, transmitters and interpreters of religious knowledge,” on the one hand, and lay Muslims, “We hear and we obey,” on the other. It was an inequality guaranteed by the “scholars” knowing the Shari’a and lay Muslims being ignorant of it, an ignorance the Shari’a insists on.[8] The only way Muslims could know what their religion teaches is if a “scholar” told them what it teaches. Thus has the strict social hierarchy and totalitarian control been maintained. But Muslims are exposed to the kufaar and the cat is out of the bag. Not only the kufaar know the extreme depravity and barbarism of Shari’a, lay Muslims, from whom the “scholars” have kept such knowledge a secret, are learning it from the kufaar.[9] Increasingly, they have disturbing questions that the sheikhs and “scholars” have no answers to. Two phenomena are guaranteed to increase: apostasy from Islam; and panic amongst the sheikhs.

Notes:

1. B. Chernitsky, “Religious Authorities Across The Muslim World: Homosexuality Is A Dangerous Abomination That The West Is Trying To Impose On Us,” MEMRI, 2 February 2022
   https://www.memri.org/reports/religious-authorities-across-muslim-world-homosexuality-dangerous-abomination-west-trying
2. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
3. Yasir Qadhi, The crisis of marrying outside the faith, Yasir Qadhi, YouTube 21 May 2022 https://youtu.be/_OO4rv4adKg
4. After lying flat, a new trend among China's youth is to “let it rot (bai lan)” which worries CCP, China Insights, YouTube 7 June 2022 https://youtu.be/wgl-45gmoDE?t=884
5. Outbreak shifts to Shenzhen and lockdown scares people/How long can China's Zero-COVID policy last? China Insights, YouTube, 2 Jul 2022 https://youtu.be/GOkw3HO4kDI
6. It must be mentioned that the aborting of female foetuses is also a problem in India, where it is illegal. The demographic crisis that has blown up in the face of China, will be a slow-burn in India. It will not escape the crisis until cultural attitudes to sex changes.
7. Deeply Christian African countries, such as Uganda and Ghana, extreme persecutors of homosexuals, are similarly forthright in their rejection of being lectures to by those who have forgotten God’s law.
8. In the crisis of young Muslims marrying outside of Islam, the learned sheikh has no answers, and appeals to his congregation for an open conversation, a sharing of ideas, “I could be wrong,” etc., in short, equality between a “scholar” and lay Muslims, the one’s whose role it is in Shari’a to only hear and obey. This is the same Yasir Qadhi who insists, in the matter of the non-preservation of the Qur’an, that “this must never be discussed in public,” the role of the lay Muslim being “to memorise what we say and regurgitate it out.” The real crisis in Islam is that, increasingly, lay Muslims have simply had enough of hearing and obeying. For 1200 years, Muslims have been the most duped people in history.
9. See, for example, the amazing work done by Lloyd de Jongh to expose Shari'a: https://www.youtube.com/c/LloydDeJongh/videos ;
   https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BGrC1fxB-ym-ZQ64TtfYEG0vQtYCOIL6