I have been thinking about the unacknowledged role that imaginary privilege of birth plays in both Christian and Jewish society. It has never really struck me before, because I come from the generation that grew up in the 1960s, which saw itself reflexively as irreligious, and as more or less dropped-out of British society, and to the extent that most of us gradually dropped back in (I myself never did) we perhaps fell back into the mentality of being Anglican-by-default, just as most Jews in reality are Jews-by-default. By this I mean, the subject only arises in connection with matters of hereditary national status. It is on this obscure level that the Anglicans remain bonded to the Jews, I suspect—by virtue of an imaginary privilege of birth, that doesn’t even make sense when looked at closely. This must be why Masons cherish among other things a myth that the European royal families are of Davidic descent. It sounds silly, but becoming a Muslim means becoming declassé in this normally unconscious, semi-sacral sense. That must be why it shares the stigma that becoming a communist had, when communism was seen as a real threat and as a real rejection of ‘society’.
I found something even sillier than the imaginary privilege of birth, and I can’t yet see exactly how it connects : contrary to the mass media stereotypes, it is the Christian gender roles that contain sado-masochistic elements, derived from a notion that, at least symbolically speaking, males have to conquer females in courtship—interesting term, “pay court to”—there seems to be something mock-chivalric about it, like besieging a castle. Anyway, this is specific to Christian mass culture, as far as I can see, and not found among Muslims or Jews. Yet the mass media in the Christian culture zone encourage a process of projection, which imagines that it is the MUSLIM world that is full of violent males seizing females and “oppressing” them. Most odd—I wonder where it comes from—it must be a lot older than Hollywood, after all.
Niqnaq 
4 Comments
We are going to study this under-represented aspect in the future but in the meantime would love any illustrations you have of Muslim men not suffering an obligation to pursue and conquer their women. If it’s present in the cultures of the other people of the book how do you suppose the break occurred?
You are asking me to prove a negative, but it’s only possible to prove the positive, and this is easy if one traces back the ‘orientalist’ depiction of sexist Muslim men, past its recent capitalisation by a coalition of Jewish ideologists and right wing feminists (such as Catherine MacKinnon, the bane of historic left feminism, who recently received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew U., Jerusalem).
Trace it back past the frightful Hollywood stuff chronicled in Reel Bad Arabs.
Trace it right back to the religious symbolism of the Crusades and chivalry—that’s where it starts as a mass phenomenon, surely. A job for me, with my occult interests, and my memories of seventies feminist theory, which I shall be fascinated to write about some day, if I live long enough, insha’Allah.
It occurs to me that apart from Edward Said, there isn’t much political psychology criticising this aspect of the judeo-christian cultural subconscious yet.
We’re not saying you’re lying but there are an awful lot of constants and equivalents with meaningless changes in accent in every clime in place across patriarchy. We are totally unsure what conquestless patriarchal fracking looks like. Also and importantly we and most people are and will be unfamiliar with and unversed in Arabic and Muslim erotic and romantic traditions and tropes.
It isn’t so much a matter of ‘lying’ as it is of offering a counter-generalisation to the one constantly put forward by Western right-wing pseudo-feminist propaganda. It would be idle to expect ‘truth’ on such a broad topic. Also, of course, one can load the terms by saying that only ‘genuine Muslims,’ genuine Christians,’ or whatever, are intended.
However, it does seem to me that the Christian version of the Garden of Eden myth is uniquely misogynistic. The Jewish version contains nuances which instrumentalise the supposedly ‘fallen’ nature of the female sex, so as to make it a positive advantage to ‘the Jewish people.’ Consider Esther, Jael, and other Jewesses who seduce and destroy ‘enemies of Israel.’ In Christianity, such concepts of factional advantage simply do not exist.
Another thing to bear in mind is that ‘Allah’ is not really gendered. Though referred to grammatically as a ‘He’ in the Qur’an, Allah is never—repeat, NEVER—referred to as ‘Father,’ either of mankind in general or of anybody in particular. I think that if it were possible to explain the Muslim idea of God as ‘like a parent, but ungendered,’ it would be possible to show that from the shortcomings in the gendered God-concept of Christianity arise all the moral contradictions of Christian behaviour. I say ‘if it were possible,’ because I am enough of a mystic to know that the ‘God concept’ can no more be captured in a verbal formula than in an icon or an image.