Not so long ago I worked for a company which had as one of its clients a large enterprise from a Middle Eastern nation. The country from whence they came is a theocracy, known for its devout adherence to sharia law. There is no law other than god’s law and all that. A major part of god’s law for some reason – jealousy, anger, nastiness – is opposed to all things sexual, except as a means to increase the numbers of the tribe.

The representatives of the company visited our North American office as frequently as they could, preferring to travel rather than host. They were always pleasant, always male and always in a hurry to get to the peeler bars. The time spent in the office for the tax deductible part of their trip was but a distraction to their real mission, to have and to hold as much titty as they could squeeze into their itinerary.

They behaved like they had never seen such things in their homeland, which of course they hadn’t. Where they came from, it is forbidden to socialize with women, to have physical contact with a woman to whom you are not married and to view naked women in a strip club, were there any. All of these things can lead to sex which as god has made clear is dirty, disgusting and on earth punishable by caning, stoning and head chopping off. In the next world, should you arrive as an adulterer or a pervert who has had sex before marriage, or even shaken hands with a woman who is not your wife, well Dante didn’t create enough circles to accommodate you.

Fortunately for Muslim men, there are sin cities, mostly in the decadent west, where god’s all seeing eyes are obscured. Spain, since Muslims were welcomed back, has been a whoring haven for horny Muslim men. Not only is Spain itself deviant, it is from there that Christopher Colon sailed, he who discovered the equally depraved Americas. Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile are not well-thought of among Muslim fundamentalists. This pair of infidels launched the ships that found two caliphate free continents, were supporters of the divinely inspired Inquisition and put the boots to the last of the Muslim rulers, In the last instance, they drove Muhammad XII out of Granada and back across the Mediterranean, prompting the famous quote from his much tougher mother, “Do not cry like a woman for what you could not defend as a man.”

But the antipathy towards Spain doesn’t stop well-heeled Muslims from going there for sun, fun and sex. No one does those three things better than the Spanish. There has even been the odd Muslim sighting on Ibiza which is somewhat like the pope spending the night in Amsterdam, sans chaperone.

There are of course more open Muslim lands nearby, some of the Persian Gulf countries for example, where to misquote Mark Twain, relief denied even to prayer can be obtained. It wouldn’t be a surprise if even a few correct and erect Wahabis head or get head, there. They just put on their sane look and cross the border.

The problem is that not all Muslim men, indeed very few, can afford to go to the west or to the Persian Gulf. There are millions of young Muslim men and women who are unnaturally deprived of interplay and intercourse with the opposite sex because of the deranged preaching of angry and ignorant men with beards. These wizened demagogues assume the right to command young people, those at the height of hormonal influence, to contradict their natural instincts to pleasure, a force as innate as the impulses to eat, drink be secure and survive. For Christ’s sake, Jesus and Mary were young teenagers, in Mary’s case, really young, when they knew each other, biblically speaking, and begat Jesus and his siblings.

Using the invented words of a fictional book as an excuse for cruelty, for it is nothing less, these mad despots argue against biology, insisting that there be no social mingling, never mind sexual contact, between the sexes. They create conditions which breed loneliness, despair, rage and vengeance. This lack of companionship and release, the non-ending wretchedness in much of the Arab Muslim world is a large factor in young men and women being influenced to give up their lives or take up jihad. Outside of a few journalists, Christopher Hitchens comes to mind, there is little mention of the sexual torment which Muslim men and women suffer playing a key role in their decisions to die and take innocents with them.

It is the norm in the stern Muslim empires that young people don’t even get to choose their spouses. Marriage is arranged for them or at the least, subject to approval from the family. Of course wedding below your station is a family offence in western culture as well. At least in the west if a few well hurled epithets don’t cow the parents, there is always elopement. In the land of the devout, you’re stuck with someone whom you may not love, like or respect. If you’re a woman, it is worse. If you’re married to an asshole that beats you, you must endure it because anachronistic and misogynist laws enable instead of punish such behavior.

In the west, the young and not so young, plan their whole week around going out on the weekend, having a drink or several, and getting laid or at least embarrassed trying. It’s a right of the freedom we enjoy, a right which we have, and would justifiably battle again, to preserve. The pursuit of happiness is as important and wise a phrase as is found in the U.S. or any other declaration of independence. For if we are not allowed to chase that which makes us happy, even though we may fail in its capture, what is life about?

Muslim clerics and mullahs would have the young believe that the goal of happiness in this life is immoral, that the here and now must be dedicated to finding a place closer to god in the next life. Denial of pleasure is the standard to which a good Muslim must aspire. Of course, the clerics guard the portal by which one enters the kingdom of god, coinciding nicely with their scheme to maintain control of frightened believers. The more reliant the flock is on clerics and mullahs and priests and other purveyors of voodoo, the more frightened they are of the eternal fires of hell, the more important the earthly gatekeepers become.

I once read that Spain translates more books in one year than the Arab world has in the last five hundred. Be it apocryphal or not, it is accurate to say that Muslim youth are taught from only one book, they are taught severity and self-denial, they are taught to be subservient to god and to his earthly proxies. They are taught that what they feel in their hearts, unless it is the love of god, is the work of the devil. They grow up knowing nothing outside of the Koran. They grow up poor, deprived, alone and melancholy. They grow up with little and with nothing to hope for beyond the barren and manipulated future laid out for them.

They are lied to in the most wicked of ways, by men of god who direct they eschew happiness in favor of misery in this the only life of which they can be sure. Is there a place on earth cold enough, hot enough, harsh enough to send these false voices of bogus gods, who so willingly destroy the lives of others? There is nothing more barbaric than using authority to steer a person from happiness in his one certain life with the illusion that a better and longer existence lies ahead. Such nonsense is impossible to know and criminal to preach.

If any of us were subject from birth to the severity and lies that are pounded into the heads of Muslim children, force fed the bullshit from one concocted tome, made to learn and repeat it endlessly, if we were poor and despondent, if we had no access to movies or video games or literature or music or members of the opposite sex, if what loomed ahead seemed as bleak as the squalid past, would most of us not be subject to the diatribe of lunatics bent on carnage? If some of us in the modern world were denied sex for more than a few days, we would explode. Imagine a lifetime so bereft.

The Bin Laden’s, al-Zawahiri’s, Taliban’s, Ayatollahs, mullahs and clerics of the world are a scourge not so much to the evil west they ostensibly despise, but to the very people they claim to represent. The best hope we have is that what these liars espouse is such an obvious pile of shit that they themselves will eventually be thrown in and drown.

For the ghosts of all those sent to their deaths as holy warriors and the living souls whose lives have been made intolerable, the day will arrive, however slowly, that the oppressed will hunt and tear asunder, not some created and convenient enemy, but the local religious tyrants. Free at last to choose, the years of pent-up emotion can be channeled to the pursuit of happiness so long delayed.

Their austere masters should be granted an island, Islamisbad perhaps, where they can rant to their vile hearts’ delight. They can bring along Pope Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Donohue, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, the preacher not the superstar, Bibi Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and other such megalomaniacal mouths of malignant mythology. And then go fuck themselves.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno