re: #1 freetoken

re: #3 Dark_Falcon

I’ve reading these stories about “jihad al-nikah” for a while now and the whole concept sets off my bullshit meter is a major way.

It sounds like something straight out of urban legend, something that takes a grain of truth and twists & magnifies it all out of proportion to scare/warn people about something. It’s reminiscent of Egypt’s supposed “farewell intercourse” necrophilia law that was making the rounds last year, which was widely reported by the Arab media and then latched onto by by every news outlet form the Daily Mail, to the Huffington Post, and every right-wing & Islamophobic blog in between Turned out it was nothing more than pre-election propaganda initiated to discredit the MB Islamists.

I don’t like the extremists any more than the next person, and it’s their very extremism that causes people to be willing to believe these types of stories, but this is wayyyy out there even for them. We’re in Poe’s law territory here.

In the early days of Islam “temporary marriage” was permissible under certain circumstances, but it was banned during the caliphate of Umar and hasn’t been permissible for Sunnis ever since. It never stopped being permissible as far as the Shia are concerned, but there are rules that go along with it regarding dowry, minimum length of the marriage contract, and the required iddah (waiting period) after the marriage is dissolved (due to the legal importance of paternity). And that’s the short list of rules.

No Sunni—let alone a hardcore Islamist type—would ever sanction “sexual jihad”, it’s just absurd.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about the Middle East here. You know, the same Middle East where many countries have a huge problem with the cultural (and culturally accepted) practice of honor killing, and where (in some places) if a girl is raped she’s thrown in jail, and/or given lashes for fornication, and/or forced to marry her attacker.

We’re supposed to believe that all of this has suddenly been abandoned and these girls’ families are now totally okay with them waltzing off unaccompanied to a foreign, war-torn country and having sex with 20-100 strange men per day, resulting in pregnancies where it would be impossible to establish paternity? Seriously?

You guys need to keep your skeptic’s hats firmly in place on this one and not let your distaste for jihadists cloud your judgement.

I strongly suspect that either the girls in question or their families are trying to cover up for something else, or the story is pure propaganda being churned out by the Assad regime. Hell, as evil as the Assad regime is, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if these girls were in Syria for some other reason and government troops captured & gang raped them, and then, instead of simply killing them, decided to let them live and use them as propaganda tools. Far fetched? Maybe, but no more so than the notion of “sexual jihad”.