“If you believe in the cultural idea of virginity , and support the gender inequality behind it, seismic societal change might have to take place to make you think otherwise.” Indeed. The revolutionary change a region such as MENA needs is not one of only a fundamental political-economic change, but in social relations too. Decades ago radical Arab critics such Abou Ali Yassine analysed the taboos – the sexual, the political and the religious – in their interconnection.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51