http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/a/an_anti-teen-dating_diatribe/
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An anti-teen-dating diatribe
BY MOHJA KAHF, OCTOBER 2, 2009
Teen dating: What demented dunce invented it? Aunty Mohja wants to
know. What possesses U.S. consumerist culture to promote it as the
norm? Let’s send a boy and a girl, their horniness joyfully newfound
but woefully untamed, into the dark of a theater or the back of a car,
unsupervised. Let’s urge them to contort their emerging personalities
around what makes them pleasing to the other they wish to attract.
Let’s expect them to go through relationship after relationship in
their teens, getting jaded before they’re out of high school. What
species of parent permits such perversion? A dayyuth, in Arabic, is a
person who gives someone sexual access to a member of the family: a
variety of pimp. Aunty Mohja is just innocently pointing out this
word.
Teen dating supplanted family-based courtship in the U.S. fifties.
Sure there was dating before, but only for adults. Whole industries
spawned to support teen dating, and now the entire culture seems to
assume it is a universal human right.
Cotillion pressure begins early in Aunty Mohja’s Southern hometown.
Mothers gussy up eleven-year-old daughters in strapless gowns to be
pawed awkwardly by boys at a school dance where lights are low and
paper decorations evoke adult notions of “romance.” Fathers grin and
push seventeen-year-old sons out the door with car keys and hotel
reservations for this bizarre ritual called “prom.” Oho, Aunty Mohja
went to American high school and knows all about prom night.
This, but delicate sensibilities are shocked, shocked, at traditions
of teen marriage among some sectors of Muslims. Aunty Mohja is not
saying early marriage is best. But compare the two customs, both
acknowledging teen sexuality. For Muslim parents to provide a nubile
woman with a reliable life partner, with whom she can build a home as
well as satisfy her sexual desires—someone who bears witnessed
responsibility if she conceives a child, in a union nurtured by
surrounding family—this is oppressive, while parents providing
ill-prepared teens with the means for furtive groping amid all sorts
of conflicting messages about what they are to do in this badly set-up
ritual, that’s benign?
Some folks uphold the implications of teen dating brazenly, like Aunty
Mohja’s neighbor: “Sure, we knew exactly when our son lost his
virginity. On our sofa. At sixteen. We didn’t mind.” At this cavalier
depravity, Aunty Mohja shudders.
Yet there is an undercurrent of discontent even among reg’lar
Americans, not just nutjob inassimilables like Aunty Mohja. Aunty
Mohja detects it when her co-worker sighs, “It’s hard on a mom to
watch her fifteen-year-old boy behave like a cad when girls fawn over
him.” She hears it when a friend notes that his fourteen-year-old
doesn’t pursue extracurricular activities because most of her
after-school time revolves around her boyfriend. Many Americans
documented in books by Wendy Shalit and others, do not agree with the
mainstream culture’s celebration of casual teen sex. Some Americans
whisper to Aunty Mohja that they were traumatized by teen dating, and
don’t even like the practice but acquiesce because it is the dominant
mode. Muslims can liberate Americans from this entrapment by modeling
healthy lives free of teen dating.
“How will boys and girls ever find life partners?” Bogus! A) Life
partnering is not what teen dating is about. B) Teens don’t need to be
put in contrived romantic rendezvous to develop relationship
competence. C) The teen dating scene cultivates the shallow opposite
of life-partnering skills, privileging pretty girls (fat girls, back
of the bus) and swaggering boys (shy boys need not apply).
Family-based or community-based courtship, on the other hand, excludes
no one automatically because of looks, valuing character instead, and
screening candidates not for kissing talent but for shared values.
Graduates of the Western teen scene, having failed to find lasting
relationships despite diligent dating, pay impersonal internet match
services to do the kind of screening Muslim families and communities
lovingly provide to their youth for free.
“Arranged marriage!” someone will scream. Everything that isn’t
untrammeled teen dating is not therefore arranged marriage. Also:
What’s wrong with arranged marriage?
“No individual choice! Arranged marriage is basically arranged rape!
Another part of Muslim women’s oppression!” Please. Every social
practice has its fraction of cases that abuse its intent and need
reform. Masses of marriages are arranged every day having nothing to
do with this caricature. Does it occur to fanatic foes of arranged
marriage that most arranging parents actually care about their
children’s happiness and therefore strive for matches that suit them,
seeking their daughter’s and son’s input and choice?
“It’s only natural for adolescents to be interested in sex.” Some
teens may be naturally curious about death, but that doesn’t mean they
should be given the key to the gun cabinet and a fresh box of shells
each weekend and sent out to practice.
Don’t go thinking Aunty Mohja is a Puritan or a Victorian, those
bogeys dogging U.S. sex culture. Aunty Mohja is a product of Islamic
tradition, in which sex is a must for everyone, to be had early and
often, but with proper care. Aunty Mohja says sex education should
give boys and girls, at appropriate ages, full disclosure: facts and
science at school and, at home, knowledge of the morals and emotions
that go with sex. Give them diagrams, books, handheld mirrors for
private bodily self-exams, says your Auny Mohja.
She ventures that wisdom traditions the world ‘round do not advise
treating the body and its orifices casually. Orifices, which the Quran
calls furuj, naming even male organs after the form of the vagina, are
worth tender respect. The beginning of their sexual use requires
gatekeeping and ceremony in nearly every wisdom tradition. Aunty Mohja
urges that youngsters postpone partaking in the feast of the body with
another person until such sharing can be entered in good faith. Those
who cannot contain themselves have recourse to masturbation, a choice
totally within fiqhi approaches to horniness, although the favored
Muslim prescription for aiding abstainers is frequent fasting.
Aunty Mohja hears her liberal friends guffaw. Absolutely, abstinence.
Youth who fail the challenge of chastity must be offered not
punishment but compassion, complete restraint from gossip, and bracing
encouragement to get back on the wagon—and their respect for limits
must be restored. Fear of early fatherhood and motherhood, STDs, and
infection by HIV/AIDS are great—and realistic—tools for encouraging
abstinence. Until the foolish become wise, and gain developmental
maturity, or at least an honorable sexual outlet, they should be urged
to abstain. Urged by every ethically sound ounce of parental authority
and community pressure available. “Ethically sound” does not include
honor killing! which is not shariah-based, nor is it exclusive to
Muslims. Honor killing violates Islamic values of individual
responsibility to God, not tribe, and must be uprooted.
Sharing your orifices is an act worthy of awe and glory, not like
swiveling a cotton swab in your ear. Aunty Mohja wants everyone to
have good sex. And she refuses to recognize as good sex the
cotton-swab casual kind that is only good physically, scratching an
itch. Good means good, on every level, orgasmic to cosmic, flesh
coming together with spirit, all are one one one, and there’s a reason
why you’re screaming “Oh God oh God.” Good sex, God blesses. Good sex
partakes in all that is La ilaha illa allah. It arrives at the climax
of the Oneness of What Is Real.
That is what is worth striving for, not contemporary Western
casualness about sex. Not this gullible groping, snotty one-upping
business of teen dating. Maybe Muslim traditions and cultures don’t
have all the answers in our changing world—that doesn’t make teen
dating the answer. Aunty Mohja hopes her tetchy tirade will fortify
spineless Muslims who think they have to high-five teen dating to be
the nice liberal sort of Muslim.
Mohja Kahf is a celebrated poet, novelist and a faculty member in the
University of Arkansas’s King Fahd Center for Middle East & Islamic
Studies. This article was previously published at Wajahat Ali's blog
Goatmilk.
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