MUSLIMS STRESS SEXUALITY IN HEAVEN

Photograph by Darrel V. Willis

While Muslims may stress sexuality in heaven at the expense of life's more natural inclinations in the here and now, they are eager to suppress to the point of murder their own and any other woman who dares any hint of revealed skin or individuality. Yes, most religious cultures, including the Jews and the Christians have incarcerated their women in similar phases of blatant irrationality with regards to what constitutes a woman's place in society and the home, so I'm guessing this display of raw bosomly cheer won't pass the Muslim stress test, even if it would save them from a bomb.

Now for the moral equivalency brain twister of the day. Which religion among us currently boasts one point two multitudes of followers now roaming the face of the earth who would love nothing better than to stone or behead these two old hippies sporting a snappy catch-phrase and a chestful of dangling flesh? This is an open book test, people, so take your time.

"In 1992, Islamic assassins had gunned down my good and brave friend Farag Foda, a professor and columnist, a human-rights activist, and an outspoken critic of the Islamic militants. The murder had shocked Cairo and terrified intellectuals... Egypt's most popular preacher, Abdel Hamid Kishk, a blind sheikh who constantly attacked both the government and its official religious establishment. Kishk had been telling his audience that Muslims who entered paradise would enjoy eternal erections and the company of young boys draped in earrings and necklaces. Some of the ulema, the religious scholars at al-Azhar University, the governments seat of Islamic learning, had disagreed. Yes, they said, men in paradise would have erections, but merely protracted, not perpetual. Other experts disputed the possibility of pederasty in paradise. "Is this what concerns Muslims at the end of the 20th century?" [Farag] Foda asked in a column in October magazine. "The world around us is busy with the conquest of space, genetic engineering and the wonders of the computer, while Muslim scholars," he wrote in sadness and pain, 'were worried about sex in paradise.'... he was killed."

—Judith Miller

The repercussions of ridiculing Islamic scholars...