The Islamists' "Camel-centered" Worldview

Ayatollah Khomeini established a theocracy in iran where personal injury damages are calculated in camels. Figures often include decimal points.

By Hos

Over at Foreign Policy, Karim Sadjadpour has an excellent analysis on the love-hate relationship between an Islamic theocracy and sex.
According to Iran's constitution, the supreme leader has to be "an outstanding Islamic scholar". What that essentially means is that, in order for all branches of government to be accountable to you, you have to have spent many years studying "Islamic jurisprudence". The latter is a complex code of rules put together over the centuries, based on the Koran and the Hadith (the words and deeds of the prophet and saints).
This mumbo-jumbo deals to a great extent with issues concerning personal hygiene and sex. The level of obsession of clerics with the most private aspects of lives of the faithful is mind boggling. As is their imaginativeness with the weird scenarios their followers may need to deal with. The following is an excerpt right out of the writings of ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran: "If a person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel, their urine and dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful". Sadjadpour adds:

"Indeed, Khomeini's religious prescriptions are often the butt of jokes among Iran's post-revolutionary generations. "I've never even seen a camel in Tehran," prominent Iranian cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar told me, "let alone been tempted to have sex with one.""

But sex is not the only place in the ayatollah's writings where camels are in spotlight. When it comes to rules concerning compensating someone you have injured, the currency is the camel. Figures such as 2.5 (camels) are common.

The apologists are quick to point out (as you'll see in Sadjadpour's article) that "context" is everything and that Islam appeared first among desert-dwelling camel-herders, for whom all of the above would have been relevant. In doing so, they ignore another, more obvious context: Islam is no longer the faith of camel herders exclusively, neither has it been for many, many centuries. So why is it that even the most "outstanding" of the "scholars" are still camel-obsessed?

The answer is rather simple. Islam does not tolerate change. Many muslims brag that Islam is a "progressive" faith, that is, it has answers for new questions arising with changing times. Reality, however, tells us a very different story. Any Muslim who suggests that Islamic laws should change with time is likely to learn the hard way how "progressive" Islam really is. Just ask Taslima Nasreen, who was thrown out if her "moderate" Islamic country of Bangladesh for doing just that. Still, she lived to tell the tale; no such luck for Neda Agha Soltan. The latter was singled out for being shot during protests against election fraud in Iran in 2009, for being too attractive and failing heed the warning that this would get the attention of the sex-starved pro-regime militias, according to the account given by her mother.

The valued tradition of crushing any dissent against orthodoxy has deep roots in Islam. In fact, it goes back to the Koran itself, where "God" commands the prophet to wage war on the infidels and "hypocrites". The latter were Muslim converts suspected to be secretly holding on to their past polytheistic beliefs. This command and others like it have been used ever since by hardliners to brand all dissent as apostasy, hypocrisy, blasphemy etc, which then open the door to harassment and murder. To get a taste of that, take a look here.

I strongly suspect this is one of the most important reasons Islam hasn't had its own "Enlightenment".

There are those in the Western world whose knee jerk reaction to the words "camel" and "Islam" in the same sentence is to cry out "racism". The real racism, however, is to turn a blind eye to the suffering of millions of people under Islamists' rule, using the pretext of "respecting cultural differences". Their true crime is having been born in the wrong place.