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PARTISAN REVIEW
Let it not be forgotten, after all, how countries ruled by Koranic law
treat their homosexual citizens. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan put at
least ten homosexuals to death; on New Year's Day,
2002,
our good
friends in Saudi Arabia beheaded three men for sodomy. According to
one report, Iran has executed several thousand men for homosexuality
since
1979.
Even in Egypt, with its relatively moderate and secular gov–
ernment, a widely publicized mass arrest of suspected homosexuals in
early
2001
resulted in the torture and imprisonment of dozens of males
as young as fifteen. And these figures are undoubtedly dwarfed by the
annual number of "honor killings" of female family members who have
strayed sexually (or who have shamed their families by being raped)-a
form of murder that is so much a part of traditional Muslim culture that
it goes unprosecuted even in relatively moderate Islamic countries like
Jordan. In May
2002,
Amnesty International reported that in Pakistan
at least three honor killings occur every day, and that the perpetrators
are usually not even arrested, although their identities tend to be known
to family, neighbors, and even the police.
It
was hardly surprising, then, that in the Netherlands, a country with
same-sex marriage and legally regulated prostitution, there was cultural
friction between natives and the Muslim community. Yet few Dutch
people discussed this friction openly. To do so, it appeared, was taboo.
One night over dinner, a Dutch writer of my acquaintance-a maverick
gay conservative who could usually be counted on to speak his mind
unflinchingly-insisted proudly that the Netherlands, unlike the U.S.,
had no Religious Right. I knew very well, of course, that the Nether–
lands did indeed have a Religious Right; that it consisted of Islamic, not
Christian, fundamentalists; and that sooner or later the Dutch would be
forced to deal openly with the challenges it posed. For the time being,
however, they were plainly too uncomfortable with the idea. Criticizing
any kind of Islam at all, I gathered, felt too much to them like voicing
racial or ethnic prejudice. While freely condemning Protestant funda–
mentalism-which hardly exists nowadays in that once strictly Calvin–
ist country-they couldn't bring themselves to breathe a negative word
about Islamic fundamentalism. There was no logic in this; but the Dutch
were clearly still at a point where it seemed possible, and easier, simply
to avoid such uncomfortable issues.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD for a Western world with a growing
minority of fundamentalist Muslims?
It
was only after moving to Ams–
terdam that I found myself asking this question. It seemed to me a fair
and important one. But it was, I found, a question that startlingly few
