Don’t we have a certain sympathy with the ideology of radical Islam? I don’t mean in the way of earning virgins with a suicide belt or in advancing the cause of a desert loon named Mohammed, but in a desire to promote public decency in dress and morals, especially between the sexes. Maybe this is too much to ask of folks; maybe if the government doesn’t allow immodesty between the sexes, fallen human nature will break out in unnatural lusts, as seems to have happened in places such as Saudi Arabia.

But it still frustrates me when I read conservative authors, with whose views generally I otherwise agree, making sport of radical Mohammedans for their loathing of Western mores. Of course, some of them profess to loathe these behaviors while they enjoy a fair share of them on their way to martyrdom - you know, getting a foretaste of their Heaven and all that. Yet I imagine that some others of them are really in earnest when they express offense at the lewdness of our young women and our depraved notions of sexuality.

Yesterday at the National Review Online, James S. Robbins wrote that “last week the targets were not foreigners clubbing in ‘Muslim lands,’ they were young Londoners out having a good time. That alone was enough to condemn them in the eyes of the terrorists.” Then after describing how some Mohammedans had a rather low view of the women who frequent London nightclubs, such as Tiger, Tiger, which had been targeted, he goes on: “[t]heir target was ‘those slags dancing around.’ This tells us that their objectives are not simply political, they go much deeper than that. The jihad is not about Britain’s Iraq policy, not some form of revenge for lack of economic opportunity, but is rooted in a basic rejection of the human spirit as expressed in any life-affirming activity.”

Clubbing at Tiger, Tiger is a life-affirming activity?! Did I miss something? Okay, I suppose it’s the kind of thing that is liable to lead to acts which often generate new life - when not interrupted by contraception or terminated by abortion. It’s “life-affirming” in the same way that those who “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” are affirming life. I can only imagine what fun Romano Amerio would have taking apart the phrase “rejection of the human spirit as expressed in any life-affirming activity.”

Robbins goes on to quote from “Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian godfather of the contemporary jihadist movement.” I first came across this passage while listening to Bernard Lewis’ The Crisis of Islam, which book I highly recommend. In Qutb’s book, The America I Have Seen (1951), he describes what he saw at a dance in a church basement in 1949:

Someone put on a recording of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’ which had just hit the charts that year. As Qutb described it, “The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs . . . Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.’”

Robbins comments on Qutb’s reaction:

Looks like everyone was having a great time. But, alas, not poor Sayyid, who already held his fellow students in contempt. The young men he considered sports-obsessed oafs. The women clearly intimidated him. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

Sounds like he needed a date badly. But from this point on Qutb was at war with what he defined as immorality.

Sounds to me like he needed some good ole life-affirming activity! What?!

I think that any young man who has tried to live chastely can testify to the challenge which immodestly dressed women - let alone immodest dances with immodestly dressed women - can pose to one’s peace of mind. I think it’s fair to say that the Catholic, just as quickly as the Mohammedan, can say that immodesty in dress and behavior is not something to be proud of or dignify with the label of “life-affirming”.

Presumably Robbins is in part appealing to the general toleration and, indeed, acceptance of such behavior among his readers who, I imagine, are not likely to engage in such behavior themselves, but who are not worked up about mini-skirts, tight clothing, women in men’s dress, or the casual and lewd mixing of the sexes. This is now taken as normal and even appropriate behavior for young men and women (and not always young!) so that we can laugh at Qutb as a life-affirming-activity-starved, puritanical bore.

Robbins isn’t alone in taking this tone; Mark Steyn has on a number of occasions derided the Mohammedans of Western lands for calling for different bathing times for men and women in public pools. (He mentions it briefly in this article, but has brought it up in others.) What could be a better suggestion? Who ever thought that stripping down to next to nothing - basically, wearing one’s underwear - in mixed company, wet, was an idea liable to promote modesty and chastity?

So these authors must not be Catholics: it has never occurred to them whether the public behavior we take for granted promotes chastity or its opposite. They’ve never thought whether it would be desirable to keep guard over one’s eyes. Frankly, I think that it would be a sin against life-affirming-ness to go to a public bathing place, frequented by many, and avoid looking a little too long and fondly at the more healthy members of the opposite sex. God created us with certain natural attractions, after all, and yet reason reminds us that they can’t be directed or used any old way, willy nilly; therefore, we avoid those places and occasions which are more than nature can handle.

Clubbing at Tiger, Tiger and such like is nothing but beastly behavior, though granted, I’ve never yet seen a beast drink a gin&tonic whilst preparing to copulate. To call such activity “life-affirming” is beyond ridiculous. The adherents of radical Islam can be damned on other grounds, Mr. Robbins! leave off this nonsense about clubbing and life-affirming. They are evil because they are callous adherents of a false religion which counsels them to act contrary to reason, such as by slaughtering innocents, not because they also have a (legitimate) concern for public decency.

I’ve written more about this topic of Mohammedans and public deceny here.