Strange Sex Stories from the Muslim World

by Daniel Pipes
April 9, 2008
updated Feb 14, 2013

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The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality. Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. (The term termagant sums up the surprising way Westerners saw Muslim women before the seventeenth century.)
Here are some examples of customs and social attitudes from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head. I have made sure only to include instances that represent a general outlook, and not just a single person's idiosyncrasy.

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Cover baby girls in burqas: Abdullah Daoud, a Saudi religious figure, wants parents to cover female babies in burqas to protect them from sexual exploitation. To argue his case, Daoud claims that sexual molestation of babies takes place in Saudi Arabia, without providing specifics. (February 3, 2013)

Fayhan al-Ghamdi on a television show about Islam.

Saudi father pays "blood money" to mother for raping and killing their 5-year-old daughter: Fayhan al-Gamdi is a well-known Saudi religious figure and frequent guest on Islamic television shows (click here for an example: al-Ghamdi is sitting on the right side). Apparently worried that his little daughter Lama was not a virgin, he decided to take matters into his own hands, as a news report elaborates:

[Lama] Al Ghamdi was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns. … Randa Al Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl's back was broken and that she had been raped "everywhere." … According to the victim's mother, hospital staff told her that her "child's rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed."

Fayhan confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries. Lama died ten months later, on Oct. 22, 2012.

The late Lama al-Ghamdi, 5.

Then, based on a Saudi law that a father cannot be executed for murdering his children, plus the custom that a father effectively owns his children, a judge ruled that the prosecution could only seek as Fayhan's punishment "blood money [to be paid to Lama's mother] and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death." Blood money refers to the ancient Arabian practice of diya, absorbed into Islam (see Koran 5:45): it means paying the next of kin in compensation for murder. Feb. 4, 2013 update: Lama's mother has appealed the negligible sentence. Also, the Saudi Islamic Affairs Ministry has said that Ghamdi is not officially sanctioned by it as a preacher. One official is quoted illogically saying that "He had committed a heinous crime and he cannot be a preacher." Marrying Syrian refugee women: L. Barkan of MEMRI uncovers the "lust jihad" whereby female Syrian refugees get wed via something called "protection marriage" (sutra in Arabic). This

involves Arab Muslim men marrying female Syrian refugees, often girls aged 12-16, under the pretext of saving them from the harsh living conditions in the refugee camps, protecting their honor, and assisting the Syrian revolution. According to reports, the girls' families are often willing to marry them off for a very low bride-price in order to spare them life in the camps while securing some income for the family's subsistence. Media reports indicate that these cases exist in Jordan, Turkey, Libya and other countries, and that Muslim men from across the Arab world travel to the countries neighboring Syria in search of a young refugee bride. Some reports claim that certain Muslim clerics encourage this practice, calling it "a national duty," and are even taking part in it themselves.
The Arab media's recent exposure of this phenomenon has triggered a wave of outrage among Syrians and other Arabs, and activists have launched a campaign against it, including on Facebook. According to the activists, these marriages constitute an exploitation of the refugees in the camps, especially of young girls. They have reported cases of girls marrying elderly men, marriages leading to rape and prostitution, and men from different Arab countries bargaining for Syrian women on the internet.

(November 12, 2012)
Two British imams agree to marry girl, 12: The Sunday Times ran a sting and got two mosque leaders (Mohamed Kassamali of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, and Abdul Haque of the Shoreditch Mosque, East London) to officiate at a wedding with a girl not yet through puberty. (September 10, 2012)
Child brides in the West: Girls as young as 11 and 9 are fairly often married off to older men in London in Shari'a courts, reports the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, as reported by the Islington Tribune. Dianna Nammi, director of IKWRO, explains more: although the girls are not legally married according to British law,

They are still expected to carry out their wifely duties, though, and that includes sleeping with their husband. They have to cook for them, wash their clothes, everything. They are still attending schools in Islington, struggling to do their primary school homework, and at the same time being practically raped by a middle-aged man regularly and being abused by their families. So they are a wife, but in a primary school uniform. The reason it doesn't get out is because they are too terrified to speak out, and also the control their families have over them is impossible to imagine if you're not going through it. The way it is covered up is so precise, almost unspeakable."

(January 27, 2012)
Afghan father says kill both young lovers: Halima Mohammedi and, Rafi Mohammed of Heart, both 17, met inside an ice cream factory and were caught riding in a car, presumably alone, were pulled out, interrogated, and nearly executed vigilante-style as adulterers. When the police rescued the couple, angering a mob of several hundred, it proceeded to riot for hours, setting fire to police cars and storming a police station, leaving one man dead and the lovers confined to separate wings of a juvenile prison. Jack Healy takes it from here in the New York Times:

Ms. Mohammedi's uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out. "What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them," said the father, Kher Mohammed.

In contrast,

the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government's protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married. "They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities," said Abdul Zahir, the council's leader. But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security. …
They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other's sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes. Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.