In late October of 2014, Iraqi News reported, as ISIS forces rampaged through Diyala province, one of their soldiers found a thirty-year-old woman resting at her home and attempted to rape her. She fought back, wresting away his gun and killing him. This incredibly brave woman was brought before ISIS’s Sharia Court, which promptly condemned her to death and had her publicly beheaded for this defense of her honor, thus laying bare the utter hypocrisy of all claims that draconian laws regarding sex are intended for the protection of women.
The gory spectacle of radical Islamism at work that began in the Middle East and has spread its crimson tendrils abroad from there is terrifying to behold. To the eyes of those lucky enough to enjoy a secure place in one of the prosperous modern democracies, the violence unfolding on our television and computer screens has an almost hallucinatory quality. Surely, our brains say, this cannot be real. This sort of thing cannot be happening in this day and age!
Recently have I felt as if I can begin to taste the desperate fear of the Byzantines as Attila the Hun pressed against the walls of Constantinople. Who are these barbarians? What will they do next? How, how can they be so evil as they nakedly are?
While the sporadic attacks on Western soil are frightening, they are not what induce this existential terror in me. Rather it is the merciless force that ISIS, Boko Haram, and their imitators unleash on the very populations from which they arose. They systematically behead long lines of “unbelievers;” they mow down prisoners of war; they toss gay men from high buildings; they rape and enslave every girl and woman unfortunate enough to fall into their hands; and they obliterate their own history by dynamiting and destroying archeological sites. And while all the offenses in this list make me weep and gnash my teeth in helpless rage, it was the sight of the last one that finally sent a deep chill all the way into my bones.
For when I saw the pillagers attacking the giant winged bulls of Nineveh, when I saw them tear down the ancient gates and walls of the city those figures guarded, it made their real mission visible. These men are not trying to build up a glorious empire; they are not concerned with bringing the world’s souls to Allah; no, they are in a mad fury against civilization itself. In an ecstasy of rage fueled by their thwarted desires, they would burn the world.
Make no mistake: it is indeed desire that lies at the heart of this storm. It’s astonishing the degree to which both ISIS and Boko Haram are openly obsessed with sex, and yet how little this is commented on in the media. Both groups routinely abduct, rape, and forcibly “wed” girls. ISIS issued a pamphlet delineating the proper way to handle one’s personal sex slaves, and has strict rules even for women that are voluntarily part of the movement; each is awarded to a man, and if widowed they are quickly married off to another fighter. Boko Haram gained notoriety for its mass abduction of schoolgirls, yet it was barely implied in articles about the incident, not openly stated as the foregone conclusion it surely was, that those girls were certain to be brutally and repeatedly raped by many fighters for as long as they managed to survive the abuse.
This misguided reticence is a product of archaic cultural mores that make sex a thing of shame for women, but one of pride for men. No one wants to call these groups what they actually are, roving bands of armed rapists, because that would inevitably damage the standing of the women who fall prey to them. But unless we accept that this is a large part, perhaps the largest part, of their motivation (remember even suicide bombers are dying for the promise of eternal, unlimited sex) we will never understand them and thus, never learn how to defeat them.
This is not to say that the leaders and followers of these movements don’t desire power; they do. But in their hierarchical worldview, power is about status. That’s why massive destruction is an actual policy: since status is relative, degrading you exalts me. Like Lucifer, they would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The caliph of ruins is still a caliph.
And that prize of status is so appealing because in primate troops, status determines access to females. What these groups are doing is no different from the Gombe Chimpanzee War, where four years of sporadic but horrific violence resulted in a total gain for the victors of three captured adult females and a small strip of territory that was quickly lost to another, bigger troop. Consider the fact that of 234 women and girls recently liberated from Boko Haram, no less than 214 were pregnant. The bloodshed in Iraq and Syria and Libya and Nigeria and everywhere else this contagion has spread is a savage primal conflict, where the whole point of conquering your neighbors is to steal their women.
In fact that primal character is what makes it contagious. And that’s exactly what frightens me. The glittering edifice that is contemporary civilization is built on the ground of evolved human nature, which is riddled with ancient faults, and sometimes, one of them moves. Moves, perhaps, with enough power to rip the modern world apart.
The last such earthquake to strike us was World War II. Nazism was a perverted apotheosis of kin selection; that is why it appealed. At the cost of millions of lives, humanity rendered a final decision: tribalism must go. This time, the slipping fault is the conflict between the evolutionary interests of men and women, and this explosion of violence will ultimately answer the question of whether male supremacy will continue to be tolerated, or be cast out at last. How many women will be slaughtered or reduced to breeding stock before enough men find the inner grit to make that choice rightly?
