Saudis fear virgin shortage if women allowed to drive

You can't make this stuff up. The Saudis, our close allies, are dramatically illustrating their mindset. We share the planet with them, and have a deep (and often troubling) relationship with the regime, but we live in different moral orders.

The Daily Mail reports:

Repealing a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia would result in 'no more virgins', the country's religious council has warned.

A 'scientific' report claims relaxing the ban would also see more Saudis - both men and women - turn to homosexuality and pornography.

The startling conclusions were drawn by Muslim scholars at the Majlis al-Ifta' al-A'ala, Saudi Arabia's highest religious council, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the King Fahd University. (snip)

The report warns that allowing women to drive would 'provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce'.

Within ten years of the ban being lifted, the report's authors claim, there would be 'no more virgins' in the Islamic kingdom.

And it pointed out 'moral decline' could already be seen in other Muslim countries where women are allowed to drive.

This "no more virgins" paranoia reveals one or two assumptions:

One is a mindset that sees women as unable to assume moral responsibility, so they must be held captive by males. There is a palpable fear that the only thing restraining women from escaping Sharia's teachings is male restrictions on their behavior. They must "submit" as Islam demands.

There are those who claim that Islam really respects women, and that women (within their female sphere) are more carefree than American women, whose lives and loves are much more complex and troubling. But if the religious authorities believe there would be no more virgins, they believe that no women are capable of restraining themselves and honoring the teachings of Islam.

Another assumption might be that if women are able to be mobile without male supervision, they will fall victim to predatory males, who will force themselves on the women. All those Sharia teachings apparently don't carry much weight in Saudi, if that's what they think would happen. And here I thought that lopping the hands off of thiefs really kept crime rates low.

Oh, wait a minute! That's right. When a rape takes place, they punish the woman!

The assumptions are not mutually exclusive, of course.

Hat tip: tysknews