While interesting, Potters conclusion is wrong.
To understand the violence of the fundamentalist fascist mentality, skewed gender relations and repressed sexuality, far from being peripheral, have to be confronted head on.
Nowhere in his article does Potter put the blame for this "skewed gender relations and repressed sexuality" where it belongs - on Islam. It is Islam therefore that needs to be confronted.
Potter uses a Muslim woman, Fatima, to make his points.
Take the heartbreaking story of a young Muslim woman, Fatima (I have changed her name), who was referred for psychotherapy. When I first saw her in the waiting area, she looked hunched and lifeless in her scruffy jeans and T-shirt. She had become so severely depressed she rarely left her refugee hostel. Her English was excellent. She was from a progressive Middle Eastern country where she had been a university lecturer before fleeing to the West. As a teenager she had been raped by her brother-in-law. Her mother swore her to secrecy — imperative to save the family honour. Years later, despite her successful career, her mother, against Fatima’s wishes, arranged for her to be married to a much older man. To conceal her lost virginity, her mother hired a doctor to sew up Fatima’s vagina. In an act of desperation Fatima took rat poison in a mosque. Her mother publicly denounced her daughter to protect the family from scandal. Should Fatima ever return home her brothers would murder her for bringing dishonour to their family. “Honour” killings, Fatima told me, were common — the authorities either turn a blind eye or issue six-month prison sentences.
Potter ignores the fact that the religion of Islam is responsible for all of this. Instead he offers this:
It’s too easy to pigeonhole Fatima’s distress as a “woman’s issue”. Men are also victims of a cultural mindset that obliges them to display their masculine dominance by murdering their sisters if they are suspected of losing their virginity before marriage, or killing their wives if suspected of adultery.
Potter should have been more forthright and said Isalm instead of "cultural mindset". Instead he goes further and gives cover to Islam.
Fundamentalists demand that women be veiled and segregated at every level of society, starting at puberty. Public displays of affection between husbands and wives are forbidden. Wife-beating is so prevalent, many see it as a normal part of marriage.
Is Potter asserting that all of Saudi Arabia is fundamentalists? I agree with that.
If this is how Potter defines fundamentalists and he is correct, there are a whole lot of fundamentalists out there; perhaps more than moderates.
Now Potter gets scary.
Arguably such societies are in the grip of mass psychosis. Like a paranoid psychotic they split the world between those they hopelessly idealise as pure and good, and those they denigrate as evil and out to destroy them. It is not unusual for a paranoid psychotic to nurture delusions of grandeur and an imaginary hotline to God.
Too bad Potter doesn't warn us which "societies" he is referring too. If what Potter says is true, can you imagine a "paranoid psychotic" Iran with "delusions of gandeur and an imaginary hotline to God" with nukes?
Neither can I. Which is why Islam needs to be confronted head on.
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