For years I have always agreed and argued for the theory that humans do not progress through education alone but through entire environmental change. My family in particular, who mainly follow the mainstream politics of Muslim so-called "scholars" have always either argued against the idea or shied away from even discussing the issue. They espoused the idea held by alot of Muslims that to cultivate a progressive human society we need to start from the bottom up, ie, we need to better ourselves and gradually once we reach a highly cultured level within the majority of the population, our leaders and politicians will be reformed automatically.
Yes it's utter bullshit, but what can you do when you have televangelist half-wits in a beard under some dictator's pay, yapping on this nonsense constantly to keep the people from rising up against tyranny?
But due to excessive financial and social pressures, the people in the Arab world can no longer take oppression and have went out with their intrinsic instincts and emotions and rebelled against the tyrants while the "scholars" sat back and watched the show. Some, when it became clear that the protestors will eventually overthrow the regime, have joined the people in protest and pretended to be espousing this all along. Others remained loyal to the despots (him, him and him).
The issue with the "virginity tests" really should come as no surprise as the mentality of the Mubarak era cannot be erased overnight. Even if we overthrow his regime and begin implementing a new more progressive one, we still need time to culture ourselves and enforce the new ideas that such actions are not only unacceptable, but reprehensible and should be actively stopped - not defended! When that happens, then even if a party to a group suggests something as disgusting as this, someone from within the group will insure that this is stopped, reported and fought. Because the people will be cultured by their enforced environment that such a thing is inhuman. And it will be unimaginable that the ruling party will defend such a practice openly!
The point of this post I suppose, is the question; what is the next step? In the argument of nature vs nurture, I am firm believer in the stronger position nurturing has over the nature of a being. The next step, I think, is to ask ourselves what kind of environment do we want our people to be nurtured in. We then have to apply a governing body to provide, protect and propagate this particular environment so as to finally create the progressive human society we all aim to achieve.
