I’ve seen my share of porn, and it’s never made me want to blow someone up. Not everyone is so lucky, says Hamza Yusuf, née Mark Hanson, an Islamic scholar who is the co-founder of an Islamic liberal-arts college in Berkeley, California, an institution whose curriculum includes “rigorous training in traditional Islamic disciplines.”
During a recent panel discussion at Georgetown University, Yusuf declared that young Muslims become drawn to jihad because they feel morally contaminated after watching too much Western porn. Obviously, then, acts of terror are their path to purification.
Yusuf offered a theory in which young men “become deeply defiled” by [their] pornography habits and blame the West for providing the corrupting influences. They turn to jihad for religious purification and redemption.
“I really think that we underestimate the amount of people that have this experience of wanting to restore some kind of purity to themselves,” Yusuf said, “and the only restoration for them is blowing themselves up and get rid of the part that is the source of my defilement which is [the] body.“
A fellow panelist cited a poll that ostensibly reveals that Muslims join the jihad more for political than for religious or moral reasons. Yusuf would have none of it.
“They’re always going to tell pollsters that crap. They’re not going to say, ‘The real reason I decided to get into terrorism was that I was watching pornography 24 hours a day.’“
I feel a lot filthier for having read Yusuf’s words than I did after I last visited mormongirlz.com. Go figure.
(Photo via Wikipedia)
