‘The AIDS crises: A Natural Product of Modernity's Sexual Revolution by Prof. Malik Badri’

The term ‘modernity’ refers to the subjective critical change in the worldview of Western societies as a result of the great impact of modernisation.

For more than three hundred years, modernity has overruled Western ideas and practices with its indefatigable emphasis on secularisation and its accent on freedom from all religious and traditional moral constraints. Though this influence is only being greatly felt in our modern age as a world wide phenomenon, its roots go back to the Renaissance; to the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century, and to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It was, from the start, a revolutionary overreaction to religion and its repressive traditional values, exploding with anti-Catholic fervour and using secularisation as its implement in demolishing old, ethical and religious edifices to inaugurate its new worldview.

As an extreme opposite reaction, secularisation turned the worldview upside down. The new big picture accepts no sanctity for anything, claiming to free man from religious and metaphysical control by crowning science as a new Allâh and bestowing man with the right to decide upon shaping his own utilitarian values. It is within this atmosphere of libertarian, secular reprisal that the sexual revolution found its early roots under the umbrella of modernity, and AIDS is a natural product of this.

The Western motto is "experience sex-making with more people for more reasons than ever before." Sex is thus amoralised, commercialised, and practised in any form without the feelings of evil doing, sin, or guilt. In fact, some of the most influential protagonists of the Western sexual revolution extend the sexual relations of modern 'revolutionaries' to animals!

Change of Terminology

The sexual revolution found full expression in the sixties and seventies of this century, like a seemingly dormant volcano it took many years to reach this eruption point. It took Western Europe and America many years to unleash the libido of the revolution and to get rid of terms like adultery, fornication and sodomy and replace them gradually, first with words like promiscuity and homosexuality, only to be replaced by 'extramarital relations', 'sex with multiple partners', 'gay relations', and 'alternatives to heterosexuality'. This change in terminology was brought about by changes in sexual attitudes.

Drug and alcohol addiction is aggravated by the very style of life created by Western modernity. To modern Western societies, moralising or talking about doing "good" and avoiding "evil" reminds them of the outdated religious preaching against which they had revolted. From this philosophical stand, Westerners prefer to spend billions of dollars on external means like fighting drug traffickers, paying less developed countries so that they do not grow the dangerous stuff, or spending millions in treating addicts. Using external means does not only appear to be more 'democratic', but it goes very well with the mechanistic and behaviouristic concept of the nature of man as a machine totally determined by changes in his environment. Drug and alcohol intake are intrinsically bound up with the sexual revolution. Many people take drugs to stimulate their sexual drive. In this respect, the drug cocaine is the most popular.

The conception of HIV as the only sufficient and necessary factor in the development of AIDS and the adoption of the failing 'safe sex' prevention model of condoms and clean syringes are obvious confirmations of modernity's refusal or inability to change its sexual mores and its soft attitude to drug and alcohol intake. Adopting a more firm prevention strategy may go against its historical, philosophical, psychological and technological foundations. So, it is only natural for Western countries to adopt a non-moral prevention model which does not interfere in people's heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, or any other preferred sexual practice, so long as it is done in a 'safer' manner! Thus, two of the major sins (sex and addiction) which Western modernity accepted to live with weaken the immune system and predispose people to HIV infection.

Though this book is mainly concerned with the AIDS crisis from the Islamic and non-Western perspectives, its general goal is more comprehensive. The AIDS dilemma serves as a good and clear illustration of the inconsequential, blind aping of Western ways in dealing with ethical and social problems in the Muslim world. Western colonisation of the comparatively underdeveloped nations of the Islamic world has for a long time created a general feeling of inferiority and lack of self confidence among Muslims. The great superiority of Europeans in technology has gradually been translated into superiority in dealing with social and ethical issues and hence the blind copying. There is a deliberate inducement to Muslim societies to break the chains of mental slavery to Europe and to forego their untimely attitude of timidity and apologetic defensiveness.

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