Another crazy story from the Middle East/South Asia.

Kabul, Afghanistan (TML) – The Muslim world is full of violent, graphic and alarming stories of “honor killings,” in which young woman are killed by male family members for dishonoring the family.

"Honor rape,” in which the gang rape of a woman is used as a tool of social punishment, is spoken of less.

Almost unheard of is an “honor killing” or “honor rape” of a man.

But the northern Afghanistan province of Jowzjan is grappling with just that, after the sons of the region’s governor and police chief were found having sex with two women almost a month ago in the Dasht-i Leile desert, north of the provincial capital Shiberghan.

According to local media reports, a man named Yama, the 30-year-old son of the Jowzjan governor, and his friend Hashmatullah, the 28-year-old son of the provincial police chief, were seen by local herdsmen having sex with 24-year old Shokreya and 22-year-old Jamila.

The herdsmen allegedly stole the men’s guns and money and gang raped them in retribution for the “dishonor” they had committed by having sex with the two young women.

“The farmers tore the clothes off the two young men with sickles and raped them,” a local official told Pajhwok Afghan News. The herdsmen later described to local organizations that the attack was an “honor rape.”

As the story goes, the two men were left naked in the desert, only to return home covered by the women’s burqas and unable to sit down due to their injuries. The two women were reportedly unharmed, but told to leave the area within two weeks.

Muhammad Hashim Zare, the provincial governor, has refused to comment on the case, but his spokesperson Mahboobullah Zare has claimed that the governor is being targeted as part of a political smear campaign.

Brig. Gen. Khalilullah Aminzada, the police chief, has claimed that his son was not in the desert at the time of the alleged incident, and blamed the accusations on local farmers.

The response to this is usually to just chalk it up to Islam.  But how powerful of an explanatory force is this?  I’ve only heard of “honor rape” occurring in Afghanistan and Pakistan, though never in Egypt and Somalia.  On the other hand, those two African countries practice female genital mutilation, while Muslims in South Asia don’t.  How can Islam be responsible for both FGM and honor rape at the same time, when some Muslims practice one but not the other and most partake in neither, but nobody does both?

My theory: Islam makes you immune to globalization.  You distrust the infidel West, are confident in your society and refuse to change your culture to conform with modern norms.  Thus, all kinds of arcane practices abhorrent to the Western mind survive even though they have nothing to do with Islam.

China, for example, got rid of foot binding in the early twentieth century, probably after their elites started encountering other peoples who found it repulsive.  Had they been Muslims, the forces of reaction would’ve been stronger and maybe prevented this reform.  Modern professional Muslim haters would see foot binding as yet another piece of evidence in the case against Islam.

This is relevant to the Alternative Right as many of us curse the homogenizing of the world that globalization is bringing about and like the idea of different cultures confidently asserting themselves against international liberal activists.  But undoubtably cultural relativism has a dark side and barbarism is too common to be the fault of any one faith.

Continued From Part I

While the Russian people might want to oppose wars in Chechnya for humanitarian reasons, the internal pernicious influences of a militarized state alone should convince them that attempting to rule the North Caucuses isn't worth the cost. After the First Chechen War, the Republic was nominally independent but in a state of chaos. The region was awash in weapons and the Grozny government had little control outside the capital. Already by 1997 there was a split in the Chechen leadership between those who wanted to find an eventual solution with the Russians and others who saw the need to not only completely break away from Moscow but "liberate" the province of Dagestan and the 100,000 Chechens who lived there.

With Chechnya filled with many weapons but few jobs, partly thanks to Russia's blockade, kidnapping became big business. Four British telecommunication workers were beheaded in December 1998 and the Russian deputy interior Minister General Gennadii Shpigun was killed while in Grozy to negotiate with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.  

In 1995, Al-Qaida commander Ibn Al-Khattab arrived in Chechnya.  Bringing funding from Gulf wahhabists, he became a close ally of rebel leader Shamil Basayev. In its international isolation, Chechnya became dependent on the Arab world for money between the two wars. President Maskhadov tried to co-opt the radicals by appointing Basayev prime minister, though the latter himself found the Islamists difficult to control.  In February 1999, Maskhadov announced that Chechnya was in the process of adopting sharia law.  

Why is the Muslim world in the condition it is? Why do Muslims do such odd and inhuman things? Why does Spain translate more books in a year than the Arabs in a thousand years, Pakistan edit physics textbooks to get rid of references to causality, and the Arab world remain at the bottom of every measure of development for countries outside sub-Saharan Africa?

Robert R. Reilly, in his forthcoming book of that title, says it's all because of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. According to its subtitle, his book, to be published by ISI, tries to explain "how intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist." As such it's a clear and informative account that emphasizes basic issues and quotes lots of primary sources. (Like all accounts, it's imperfect, but more on that later.)

According to Reilly, the closing is longstanding. It began in earnest with the overthrow of the Mutazilites by the Asharites in the Abbasid caliphate around 848 A.D., and was pretty much completed by the 12th century. The Mutazilites were theologians who read the Greeks and liked what they saw, so they made reason primary in understanding everything, including God. The Asharites, in contrast, believed in God as absolute will, so that His uniqueness and unity meant that His arbitrary decision determines everything. If you said that reason determines God's actions you were denying His supreme freedom and omnipotence, and if you said that something that wasn't God (like human decision or the essential nature of things) had any effect on anything you were a polytheist.