Are Western women responsible for provoking Muslim men into raping them? Some Europeans certainly seem to think so.
Recently, after a 20-year-old Austrian woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna wasattacked, beaten, and robbed by four Muslim men from Afghanistan—including one who “started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women”—police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair:
At first I was scared, but now I’m more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn’t be alone on the streets after 8pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way. Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult.
She is not the first victim to be blamed. According to FrontPage Magazine editorJamie Glazov:
Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker’s response to the assaults under her watch [when 1,ooo German women were sexually molested and raped by Muslim migrants] has been to reprimand the victims, suggesting that they had asked for it. She has vowed to make sure that women will change their behavior, so that they don’t provoke Muslims to sexually assault them again. There will now be published “online guidelines” for women to read so they can prepare themselves…. Oslo Professor of Anthropology Dr. Unni Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women is not for the rapists to be punished, but for Norwegian women to “take their share of responsibility” for the rapes because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. Norwegian women, she has counseled, “must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
These responses overlook the fact that, from the very start of Islam 14 centuries ago, European women—even chaste nuns—have always been portrayed as sexually promiscuous by nature.
This is easily discerned by examining medieval Muslim perceptions of Byzantine women. (Islam’s initial contact with Europe in the seventh century was through the Christian empire of Byzantium; it came to represent European women in Islam). Consider the following excerpts from Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, by Nadia Maria el-Cheikh:
One quality that the Arab Muslims inevitably assigned to the Byzantines was beauty…. This characteristic, beauty, is associated with Byzantine women in particular. Byzantine women are described as being white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes.
This view traces back to Muhammad. The prophet once asked a new convert “Would you like the girls of Banu al-Asfar?”—the “yellow haired people”—to entice him to join the jihad on Byzantium and reap its rewards, which, in this case, included the possibility of capturing blonde women. “O Abu Wahb,” Muhammad cajoled another, “would you not like to have scores of Byzantine [fair] women and men as concubines and servants?” Wahb responded: “O Messenger of Allah… if I see the women of the Byzantines, I fear I will not be able to hold back. So do not tempt me by them…”[1]
Nor was this predilection limited to Arabs. In regards to the Turks, Bernard Lewis writes inIslam and the West, “Europeans saw themselves primarily as Christians threatened by a new assault from the old Islamic enemy…. Among the faults and vices ascribed to the Turk, two themes dominated: arbitrary power and unbridled lust. So universal were these themes and so striking the terms in which they were presented, in both letters and arts…”
Unfortunately for European women, they also came to exemplify Islam’s femme fatale. Continues the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs:
In our [Muslim] texts, Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality… Our sources show not Byzantine women but [Muslim] writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female—constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity….
Then there’s Muhammad’s assertion that there is no “fitna more harmful to men than women.” El-Cheikh explains:
Fitna, meaning disorder and chaos, refers also to the beautiful femme fatale who makes men lose their self-control. Fitna is a key concept in defining the dangers that women, more particularly their bodies, were capable of provoking in the mental universe of the Arab Muslims….
Cheikh documents how Muslims claimed that Byzantine (or “white”) females were the “most shameless women in the whole world”; that, “because they find sex more enjoyable, they are prone to adultery”; that “adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium”—so much so that “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”… Keep reading
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