[The following is a review by Omar El Kouch of Al-Madina al-Islami wal-Ouçoulya wal-Irhab: Muqaraba Jinsya, (Islamic City, Fundamentalism and Terrorism: a Sexual Approach), Beirut, Arab Rationalist League, Dar Es Saqi, 2008, 208 pages, ISBN 978-1-85516-287-7 by Abdessamad Dialmy. The review is translated here from Arabic into English by Said Allibou and Imad Mahhou (Mohamed V University, Rabat, Morocco).]

The new book of Prof. Dr. Abdessamad Dialmy holds a new treatment and handling, where the author attaches a particular importance to the sexual factor in the composition and the reasoning of a fundamentalist, radical and terrorist personality. This is a factor which is absent in the various studies on fundamentalist and radical movements in the Kingdom of Morocco and witnessed in the rise of radical movements and incidents of violence and bombings, fields of study and research.

Professor Dialmy does not deny the importance of economic, political and ideological factors in both national and international levels, in handling and reading the fundamentalist and terrorist movements, but he approaches the issue from a sexual and psychological point of view, in order to enrich and feed the former approaches particularly with the psychological and sexual elements. The link between sexual deprivation and the fundamentalist terrorist is at the end just a detail alongside the economic and social deprivation. In depth there is a complex relationship between poverty and terrorism.

The researcher assumes that sexual deprivation does not result from sexual impotency; it is linked to urban and housing conditions, which create an environment characterized by sexual excitement at the same time that there is no space for fulfilling the satisfaction of sexual desire. Neighbourhoods where terrorists come from are located in major cities such as Casablanca, Fez and other cities. These are poor and marginal neighbourhoods, which are characterized by narrowness and overcrowding in the housing and a lack in health care, education and other vital services.

The argument is based on an attempt to build a relationship between sex and space at the theoretical level, as a cognitive act, which results in the identification of four types relation between the space and sex: the symbolic pattern, the lexical pattern, the territorial pattern and the functional pattern. The emergence of these four patterns enables the rise of the hypothesis of spatial mediation between fundamentalism and sex. The lack of sexual functionality in Arab housing subconsciously plays a role in the rigidity of the personality and the extremism in moral values. That leads to the desire of a gendered division of the space so as to make the Muslim man regain all his privileges and power, which are threatened by the modernity as a mixing zones between the sexes.

The author presents a reading into the Moroccan terrorism which was launched since 2003, a fact that does not create an exception for Morocco. As a result it can be argued that kamikaze bombing is an illegal immigration, or «Hrig» as the Moroccans call it in their Arabic dialect. This is the word currently used to designate all clandestine immigration from northern Morocco to the shores of southern Spain in the death boats. This word is derived from the verb “haraqa” (to burn) meaning that the clandestine immigrant burns his past –erases his past- by burning all his identification papers in order to acquire a new status and a new identity. If this illegal immigration towards Europe is horizontal, then the illegal immigration of the terrorist before bombing himself and the others around him, is a vertical one. From the bottom toward upward, from earth to sky, from hell (suffering) in this life to God’s Heaven where the nymphs are waiting for him.

There is no doubt that in the Arab world, the presence of women in public street often raises a violent male behaviour; it begins with the curious, insisting look, leading to harassment, and ending in the extreme with rape. This is due to the fact that the Arab social actor, through his spontaneous sociology, makes the woman as responsible for his ethical and social degradation, from which suffer the Arab societies that do not impose the veil or the strict separation between the sexes.

Because they do not enjoy the goods and the pleasures of modernity, the poor Arab social segment reject sexual modernity, claiming that it is contrary to Islam and also returning to their identity. The living conditions of those groups does not help them at all to participate, and ideas do not help them to accept the liberal sexuality and to understand its ethics. For the oppressed poor Muslim the gaze at those beautified women who can talk and laugh loudly without being accompanied with no chaperone and who resemble the ladies who can be easily kissed by men on the TV screen is greatly stressful.

The author finds that all these psycho-social evidences allow considering Islamism as well as a subconscious yearning and looking for a complete and satisfying sexuality. Indeed, it seems more difficult to reach sexual satisfaction in houses with high population density. The substitute sexual behaviour practiced by bachelor or single men does not reach a real sexual satisfaction. The physical space is not amenable, and the women in their turn have started to refuse male sexual advances, which is not exchanged and they find no self-accomplishment in it.

Thus, it may be assumed that Islamism could also reflect the search of the plural sexual peaks with several wives. The economic, social and political deficit, from which the oppressed Muslim suffers nowadays, also prevent him from controlling women. This leads him to cling strongly to this kind of Islam, which preserves him his privileges as a male, regardless of his poor material (financial) conditions and protects the right of polygamous sexual enjoyment. This is seen as a right socially and psychological based only on the necessities of his pretended virility.

Islamism lays claim to reproductive sexuality rather than enjoyment sexuality and a claim to polygamy rather than an equal couple, because it represents a rejection of sexual modernity. Islamism as a political project does not renounce its control over power or sex; it also seeks to regain the polygamous privileges of the Muslim man, and it tries to resist both modernization of gender relations and modernization of sexual relations.

Today, there is no doubt that the image of Islam is associated with fundamentalism and terrorism, which means that the symbolic violence practiced by fundamentalist on rationalist thought finds an extension in the physical terrorism that targets innocent people in the Arab and Islamic world. It is impossible to reduce Islam to this negative image, although this image is not entirely wrong because it is related to the dominance of islamic extremism as a violent expression over the other expressive forms of Islam such as Sufism and philosophy.

Thus, the book raises many questions, including: why is there this rigidity in reading the holy texts? Why do some choose violence as a means to make the Muslims’ voice be heard in the name of Islam? Why is there the emergence of a rigid islamic personality? Why does the Muslim turn to fundamentalist militants? How did there come about a fundamentalist radical shift to the fundamentalist kamikaze bomber, to a human bomb to kill the other? What are the basic deep motivations that would allow an understanding of Islamism, this pathological phenomenon, from which suffers Islam today?

The author of this book, Dr. Abdessamad Dialmy, is professor of Sociology since 1977, at the Universities of Fez and Rabat, Morocco. He was the Director of the Social Health Studies Laboratory at the University of Fez. He is a member of the editorial board of “Social Compass”, the international journal of sociology of religions edited by Sage in London. He also works as a consultant and expert for international organizations such as the World Health Organization, UNFPA, UNICEF…. Since 1975, he is the author of numerous books and articles in Arabic, French and English.