Where do I start?

Submitted by FrenchKiss (United States), May 6, 2006 at 02:10

First off, let me point out that anything Donna Hughes has to say about sex slaves or prostitution is highly suspect. This isn't libel, it's an easily proven fact. The woman clearly has an agenda and won't let facts or statistics get in her way. As you can see here http://www.nswp.org/pdf/KINNELL-FEMINISTS.PDF on p. 10, she not only misquotes figures from her sources but resorts to attack when corrected. In fact that whole "academic freedom/ libel lawsuit" fiasco came about because she was slandering a woman who doesn't share her abolitionist views. After this woman had been cleared in a court of law of all charges they brought against her, she continued to make the false claims in her "academic research" papers.

Now, as for your story. I did a google search on "Maulana Hameeduddin Aqil" AND "Millat-e-Islamia" and I got 39 hits for various blogs (yours at the top, of course) all about Muslim sex tourism and child brides. Then I did a search on just "Maulana Hameeduddin Aqil" for which there were 45 results, including the one you linked to and several others from legitimate arab sources. But Maulana Hameeduddin Aqil Hussaini (the man you linked to) is a religious leader who said nothing of child brides or sex tourism in any legitimate source.

The NGO Prajwala, a key source of your information, received over a million US dollars last year for their efforts to combat prostitution under the guise of helping "trafficked children" http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/65484.pdf so I think it's fair to say they have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth. Of course this is not to say that Arab Muslim men do not see prostitutes. As a sex-worker, I can confirm that I have seen Arab, Persian and Turkish Muslims, just as I have seen Hindi men from India. Most of my clients have been Christian or Jewish whites, with South/East Asian men not far behind them. I've probably seen slightly more black men than middle easterners, but I've had a fair sized sampling from all those men as clients, and they were all -each group as a whole- very nice and charming.

A lot of Muslim men are as unlike their fundamentalist counterparts as Jerry Seinfeld is unlike a Hassidic Rabbi. If you keep lumping them all together, your depiction will be inaccurate. As for the brothel owner, I'm sure he included the Saudi and Iranian flags as a way of acknowledging their inclusion in the World Cup soccer tournament. When they found out that it offended certain followers of Islam, they pulled it, because that's what polite people do. Honestly, I don't know why some of you think an advertisement for a whorehouse is a good thing to take a stand on. Perhaps he should have offered to remove the flags as soon as they asked him to nicely. Who knows, perhaps they might have come around in time, and learned a valuable lesson in diplomatic resolution.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".