Op-Ed: Sex, Violence and the Other - Always Making Headlines

It has taken me a little while to put down my thoughts about an article that was published in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times last week. The headline read: Sex as a Flash Point in Clash of Civilizations. (Though I have tried to find an accessible link, the article may be blocked by the Times' online subscriber program.) The article, by John Vinocur, discusses how two recently published novels, John Updike's Terrorist, and Max Gallo's Les Fanatiques, raise the question as to whether sexual frustration plays a role in Muslims becoming terrorists. According to the article, Updike and Gallo explore this idea through narratives involving a central character whose one, Muslim parent is absent. In each books' plot, this character grows up increasingly disgusted with their Western parents' active, and perhaps careless, sex life. In case the link doesn't work, I have excerpted below:

Each writer points to sex as a zone of incompatibility - or clash - involving radicalized Muslims, desire, repression, and Western sexual freedoms managed imperfectly by Europeans and Americans. And their books insist it's no incidental matter in relation to terrorism.

In both books, the central character, in growing older, engages with radical political Islam. I assume that this is where the hijinx ensue, but I haven't read either book.

What is troubling to me is that the article, rather than questioning the basis on which each author is psychologizing terrorism, takes the notion that there is a clash of civilizations as a given, and suggests that sex and its role in terrorism might be cutting edge social theory. If we are to assume that Islam is a singular, monolithic entity that in its uniquely, unchanging form predisposes its believers toward terrorism (and a lot of people believe this), then Vinocur's article might be worth digesting. What seems much more plausible to me, however, is that the popularity of radical political Islam - and its virulent anti-Semitism and martyrdom - has a lot more to do with social, cultural and political contexts in which many Muslims find themselves, and less to do with whether a Muslim has sex on a regular basis.

In dismissing this viewpoint, Vinocur misses the view. He writes:

It's certainly a less than welcome subject for those Westerners, like Gallo's fictional professors, who do not want to hear of civilizations' collisions - and believe that if just Bush, Blair, Merkel and/or Israel vanished, all would be cool, and life suddenly revert to one without Islamic bombers.

What Vinocur (and Updike and Gallo, I think) fail to recognize is that these social movements have less to do with, Bush, Blair, Merkel, or the kinds of lives led by the writers above, and perhaps more to do with decades of repression and failure in the postcolonial states in which many Muslims live, as well as the frustrating encounter with modernity - an encounter begun with colonial violence whose scope continues to increase through immigration to Europe and North America.

Of course, I find it admirable for a writer to attempt to imagine the human condition of someone presumably very unlike themselves. And again, I have not read either book. What I am criticizing is Vinocur's review of these novels, and his amateur psychological take on "the roots of terrorism." The consequences of accepting the clash of civilizations quid pro quo - and it is served up as such on a daily basis through various mass media - is the subsequent assumption that "we" are forever at odds with a people because of their inherent, unchanging, different values. This lends itself well to the endless war on terrorism.

Lastly, and perhaps randomly, the outline of these books plots' got me thinking to the best work of art that I have ever read or seen about parental separation and infidelity. I loved The Squid and the Whale because, to me, it captured the emotional strain inherent in a difficult human condition - without suggesting or presenting any formulaic conclusions.