Did one such woman, an American, anger Osama bin Laden?
By Jeannette Belliveau
Ms. Belliveau is the Baltimore-based author of An Amateur's Guide to the Planet and Romance on the Road (forthcoming), describing intimate encounters between Western female tourists and foreign men.
In Islamabad, after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the contorted faces of Pakistani youths appeared on MSNBC, screaming anti-American slogans with a fury simply not seen in the comfortable West.
"These guys aren't getting laid," I mused -- a thought grounded in years of studying numerous accounts of Western women and Muslim men.
Many, many female travelers have long noted the desperate amorous advances of "devout" Muslims. I asked a number of personal friends to comment.
The sexual frustration "is so obvious," says a New York traveler, who recalls a Ghanaian who begged her for sex while declaiming he would only marry a virgin.
Crossing the border (political and religious) from Buddhist Thailand to Islamic Malaysia, "the change was instantaneous," a Massachusetts academic remembers. Two aggressive Libyans and other local Muslims asked her with little subtlety to take them to her hotel.
"You just have to look at the Taliban to see how conflicted their views of women are," a Maryland writer notes.
A sizable body of little-noticed literature depicts the sexual dimension to Islam's love-hate relationship with the West.
One report even suggests a possible link between an American woman's behavior and the deaths on Sept. 11 -- to be explored in just a moment.
First, let's look at the overall picture. Sexual frustration, unrelieved by agreeable tourists, allied with general helplessness creates angry young men who become attracted to radicalism.
For terrorists-in-training at mountain camps, lacking female company, sexual frustration must reach its epitome, giving a razor's edge to their religious hysteria.
Even outside these monastic bivouacs, Muslim youths lack sexual outlets (except for prostitutes) prior to marriage, which may occur in the late 20s. So in tourist areas, local men by the thousands approach foreign females. Sexual harassment, especially of women in Western dress, hair uncovered, is endemic from Morocco to Malaysia and can be of frightening intensity, as recounted in scores of essays by female travelers.
Some of these Muslim men, those with a gentle and sincere approach, do succeed in obtaining sex from the holidaymakers. Less nationalistic Muslims already prefer Western tourists in the here and now to 72 virgins attained only after martyrdom.
At the ancient rose city of Petra, for example, young Jordanian guides strike poses on their ponies to impress the ladies and then offer gigolo services, heretofore a phenomenon reported more often in Athens and Jamaica.
Yet after intercourse, Muslims such as these guides may suffer anguish over violating religious precepts.
In an act of calculated hostility, other men have sex with the tourists as an anti-Western political gesture and after, belittle them as whores.
Young Arabs view sexual license up close, practiced by both tourists and Israeli youth. Their yearnings grow urgent. No wonder their mullahs detest the West. They see the appeal of our decadent sexuality and its threat to their authority -- and to ancient Near-Eastern attitudes.
Curbs on female sexual freedom first became codified by states in the Near and Middle East, beginning with Assyria circa 1100 B.C. These curbs arose from needs specific to societies based on intensive agriculture. It is no accident that women's property rights, feminism, and female travel sex did not appear until the Industrial Era and then flowered in the Information Age.
For 30 years, academic and literary figures have noticed and written about female sex tourists (a consummate outcome of modernity) in the Middle East (an outpost of Old Testament vehemence against "harlotry").
Only quite recently, however, have the popular media made inadvertent allusions to the nexus between sex and Islam. Terrorist profiles reveal these men as either phobicly anti-female, merely celibate, or flat-out raunchy:
- The Boston Globe reported on Oct. 12, 2001, that four alleged terrorists spent their last night looking for prostitutes in Boston before hijacking two planes out of Logan Airport and smashing them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, according to law enforcement sources.
- At a Daytona Beach, Fla., strip joint, "pious" terrorists, despite being hours away from their air-based jihad, enjoyed lap dances.
- A Maryland-based terrorist spent his time looking at the video covers in a porn outlet.
- Conversely, terrorist mastermind Mohamed Atta, according to the Times of London (Oct. 3, 2001), "left a will barring women from his funeral" and never had a girlfriend.
- A former CIA operative told The Atlantic Monthly how impossible it would be for a suburban Virginia employee to infiltrate Osama bin Laden's terrorist circle and "spend years of his life with shitty food and no women [emphasis added] in the mountains of Afghanistan."
- Most remarkable: A supermarket tabloid describes bin Laden's life as a teen-aged playboy in Beirut, Lebanon, and how he "fell in love with a young woman from Chicago working there," a Middle Eastern writer who interviewed Osama's family told the Globe:
Bin Laden suffers from a medical condition that left him with underdeveloped sexual organs, and his hatred of the United States began when an American girl laughed at his problem.Thus sexual insecurity in this instance, as well as sexual frustration, may play a role in terrorism.
While bin Laden's encounter with a tourist may well be apocryphal -- the Snopes.com site analyzes the likelihood of this possibility -- nonetheless it depicts the terrorists' internal struggle between religious precepts and lust.
Further, the searing hatred of the United States by bin Laden seems difficult to explain in purely ideological terms and more akin to a personal vendetta -- by a proud man who must avenge an insult. And an encounter with a laughing American woman might explain why the United States, and not Europe -- or even China and other countries that persecute Muslims -- was attacked Sept. 11.
The best antennae on the significance of sex between Muslims and Westerners sprout from four observers: social scientists Erik Cohen and Glenn Bowman, and London-based travel writers Anne Cumming and Annie Caulfield.
Though female sex tourism can be documented over the past century in Italy, Greece, North Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, the first report ever by a social scientist on the phenomenon was not made until 1971, by Hebrew University's Erik Cohen.
In 1966, Cohen studied Arab youths and Western women in a small Israeli city. That young Palestinians attracted such early notice signified how obvious their sexual frustration was to observers.
"The sexual dilemma which an Arab youth faces" is daunting, Cohen wrote. Leaders of "pitiful" and "eventless" lives, jobless, poor and too unsettled to marry until their late 20s, the youths had no way to casually interact with their own young women. And few Jewish girls would risk the wrath of Jewish boys to date Arabs, despite the Arabs' reputation as hot lovers.
Yet the youths saw at first hand the "free and informal relationships" between Jewish boys and girls. They wanted in. Cohen's observations can be applied to youths throughout the Arab world today, who see tourists and watch Western media and desire what appears to be "utter sexual freedom or promiscuity."
In the city Cohen studied, Scandinavian and other hippie travelers began to arrive in the mid-1960s, and "these boys unexpectedly found in the foreign girls an almost perfect object for their emotional needs." The gentile women harbored no prejudice against the youths and found their innocence appealing. The tourist might have sex with a youth, or she might merely go to his home, to meet his family and to share a meal.
Cohen gave first alert that these intimate contacts:
- "provided the young Arabs with a 'window to the wide world.' "
- allowed the boys a sympathetic audience for their nationalistic views.
- could have positive consequences, if the hope and escapism of tourist romances defused the powderkeg of anger that might be tapped by radical movements.
- held out the possibility of the romance leading to emigration as "the resolution of their manifold problems."
In 1989, Bowman revisited the world described by Cohen and interviewed a teenaged Palestinian shopkeeper. "Salim" told of how he met a 31-year-old, married customer from New York. The shopkeeper told Bowman that he had "asked the woman to meet him later in the evening."
Salim picked up the woman at the lobby of her hotel, managing to leave behind her husband, an older man. Salim brought her to a squalid room and until 5 a.m. "took her to the heights of sexual fulfillment."
On the other hand," Bowman wrote, Salim "was dropped into disgust and depression by the whole experience." After orgasm, he looked down at the woman and said she was "just a slut."
Impotent in most ways compared to Western men, Salim could "prove himself more masculine" than the tourist's wealthy husband and feel powerful by controlling his wife.
Women themselves provide their version of these encounters. In the 1950s and 1960s, Anne Cumming loved having sex with Arabs, including while on horseback riding around the Sphinx.
In
The Love Quest: A Sexual Odyssey, she described a male friend who asked, based on her considerable experience, who were the best of all Mediterranean lovers.
Arab men, she said, were:
... tops for size and performance -- but it's their attitude as much as their aptitude. ... There's no false puritanism.Sounds like a risky venture to keep that much lightning bottled up.Have you ever stopped to wonder why the Arab women are so veiled and protected? To protect them from their own raunchy race. The sexual urge is an accepted appetite, to be gratified daily like any other. Women are for that purpose. So if you are alone with a woman for a moment, it is quite normal that you should gobble her up.
In the 1990s, Annie Caulfield embarked on an affair with a young man "with Omar Sharif eyes" met in Jordan. In
Kingdom of the Film Stars: Journey into Jordan, she described Rathwan's affection and friendship and their shared hot passion -- which tore at his religious beliefs.
At risk of ostracism or jail, they had to visit the desert for lovemaking, or sneak to each others' hotel rooms and creep back before morning.
Rathwan begged her, without success, to marry him.
"At least then the sin and secrecy is over and no one has a right to look at us in a bad way," he said -- his disquiet a metaphor for the Arab man's attraction to Western ways and allied guilt.
At first, one grapples in vain for a way to apply these observations to U.S. policy.
Does the West need a revamped Peace Corps? A Sex Corps of obliging Scandinavian hippies, catering to Arab men, making them mellow and hopeful?
More likely, modernity in its inexorable spread will force reformation of the Islamic world, much as contact with the West had wrought change among preindustrial people from the remote Amazon to inland Borneo.
Jeans, colas, secular education, scientific method, Hollywood videos, elections, Big Macs, free speech and jobs will probably arrive one after the other and render the Muslim cosmos less different to the rest of the planet, though such transformation will face violent resistance from oligarchs and radical fundamentalists alike.
In some places, however, sexual reformation is not waiting for the rest of modern attitudes to arrive. Though female company still eludes many Islamabad radicals, their brothers in tourist areas are tasting a different reality. Listen to the whispers of foreign women visiting Petra, Amman, Arab Israel and the Sphinx.