There are all kinds of dirty wars going on in this post-Soviet world where, thanks to the Internet and social networking—the deadly physical kind and the more abstract one involving the ‘civilized’ world and a ‘medievalist’ one, the fundamentalist and the enlightened, believers and atheists, etc.—all are in combat. And although the President and his cabinet may attempt to treat the Moslem world with sensitive kid gloves, the NSA handles this subject differently. As the Moslem nations are undoubtedly the world’s top consumers of porn, the agency keeps a tight watch on what is being used and shared on the porn space. Their other agenda is blackmail. Snooping in on what kind of porn Sunni and Shiite radicals choose and use, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden, gives the NSA possession of a cornucopia of embarrassing sexually explicit information to blackmail or ’turn’ Sunni extremist communications.
This little proxy war within a war has gone on for years. Atypical are the cases of the 9/11 hijackers, Osama Bin-Laden and, separately, the fanatically anti-Shiite tag-team of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his religious advisor and ‘partner’ Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman. According to every available account of what happened on the day before the bombing of the World Trade Center, instead of ritually bathing, doing ablutions and preparing themselves through ritual prayer and shaving hair from their bodies, the terrorists spent the full day getting drunk, watching porn purchased by group member Majed Moqed at a Christopher Street bookstore and having sex with each other.
After the psychopathic killer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his spiritual adviser, Sheik Abd-Al Rahman were both killed by U.S. bombs on June 7, 2006, their hideout, raided soon after by U.S. Delta Forces, located scores of VHS tapes and thumb-drives filled with “LadyBoy” porn, according to various pseudonymous witnesses. Finally, according to Corporal Mark Owen, the man who claims to have been the shooter where Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin-Laden, was finally hunted down and killed in Pakistan, there’s the largest porn stash of all; porn tapes, DVDs and thumb-drives in the hundreds, according to Owen’s book No Easy Day.
The smut in bin Laden’s compound served to expose what we all kind of knew, anyway. The Moslem world, just like our own, absolutely loves porn. Porn is ubiquitous. The ‘surprise’ our soldiers found, that so much of it is gay shouldn’t surprise either, considering the fact that in so many religious teachings women are seen as vessels of blood and sin. Anyone with a knowledge of military history knows that small armies of young boys were always brought along to accompany troops from the first annals of war kept in hieroglyphics and cuneiform to the early 19th century, when Napoleon Bonaparte figured out the French army would be a happy army if they were accompanied by a platoon of well remunerated prostitutes.
Many conspiracy freaks in the Islamic world believe the porn story a hoax, claiming the stash was planted by the U.S. after killing bin Laden to embarrass him. Yet pornography is every cultural world’s dirty little secret, rife in even the most conservative realms—including among the extremists. One thing is for sure, it already has a name. Referred to as fuhsha in Arabic, pornography is considered haram, or illegal, according to most interpretations of Islam. Why? Because it graphically exposes one’s awrah, the Arabic word for the private zone of the human body, which the Q’ran forbids from the public eye. Yet, according to the Moslem liberals Ergun Caner and Emir Fethi Caner in their book Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Moslem Life & Beliefs, the debate over pornography, masturbation, and the wavering line between the erotic, the pornographic and fundamentalist negativism is an ongoing one.
Finally there’s the analysis survey Google did which found that Pakistan is the number one nation in the world for porn searches using its search engine. This prompted those whack reactionary folks at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to label India and Bangladesh’s troubled neighbor as Pornistan. As hypocritical and funny as Pakistan does indeed seem, the grim truth is the Muslim societies which are the most repressive toward women and have the strictest gender segregations, like Egypt (#2), Iran (#4), Morocco (#5) Saudi Arabia (#6) and Turkey (#7), also have some of the highest rates of pornography usage in the world.
