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"The opposite of self-isolation? Tell me, what protects the fire from the water?" Astrid interrupted, speaking to me, as if she wanted to change the focus to justify her self-isolation.
"What protects the fire from the water?" Mohja repeated. She paused. "You mean a special kind of firewall that keeps the water out and the fire in?" she said moments later. "You want a firewall that protects the fire? If you were equating the fire with passion for sex, the passion for being alive with a joy that radiates from experiencing the riches of our humanity, then I would say hijab is the answer that you seek. It protects the fire within. To me, hijab is that firewall that protects the fire of the passion for being alive from the floods that would drown it. As far as I am concerned, hijab fulfills that role. It truly is a gift from Allah, because without it that fire would be drowned for sure as it largely has been downed throughout the world by imperial cultural warfare. Just open your eyes and look around you. There is no passion left for being alive, in people's life."
"I see lots of passion in the world for sex," Astrid interrupted Mohja.
"I think you are mistaken," said Mohja and smiled. "What you call passion is likely darkness. Too much of the fire has been drowned. There's no firewall left standing to protect it, which I can see. The firewall that protects the fire of living as a human being, is love? How much of it do you see? I see greed, hate, rape, fascism, slavery, killing, exploitation, abuse, jealousy, and so on. The firewall is love, but I see little of it. And without the firewall, without love protecting the fire, the fire dies. It becomes quenched. Hijab is that firewall that will keep it from being quenched. Hijab is universal love."
"Universal love?" I repeated. "Are you prepared to go as far as to say that this fire of passion for life, protected by universal love, includes a passion for sex, even sex across the marriage boundary, which Islam strictly forbids?" I said to Mohja.
Mohja nodded.
"Islam forbids nothing," said Jamal to me in her stead. "Islam enables. It does not disable. We ourselves do the disabling. As Mohja said, the determining factor in keeping the fire alive is love, nothing else. Love is the critical sphere. Sex outside the sphere of love is not passion for life. It is a dead thing that affords nothing, like a quenched fire affords neither warmth nor light. Outside the sphere of love there is no fire possible. Such a fire that would be started there is instantly quenched. Nothing is protected there. It doesn't matter therefore under what umbrella sex happens, within or without marriage. The determining factor isn't marriage. The determining factor is love. And the determining factor for love is the great renaissance principle, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other. That principle comes to light at the sublime level of the self-discovery of our humanity. It is linked to the principle of the universal marriage of mankind as human beings. In that universal marriage the fire is protected, because universal love is sublime, whereby the fire is unquenchable. At the lower levels the fire is at risk, with our without our marriage in the small domain. If the fire is quenched, regardless under which umbrella this happens, the sexual scene is dead. Pornography represents a quenched fire, with or without marriage, and so does sex that has become drowned with lust and countless forms of rape or rage or emptiness. Hijab protects us from all of that. Hijab keeps the fire alive and burning brightly by keeping it in the sublime domain protected by love and its focus on the Principle of the Advantage of the Other.
"We need to have many such protected fires burning in the modern world in order to radically develop the passion for life around the globe that empowers us to create an Ice Age Renaissance," said Mohja. "We need that fire in order that life will not fizz out into nothing for the lack of food resulting from a lack of universal love. Right now I can see no fires lighting up the horizon. I see a scene that is so dead that an Ice Age Renaissance appears totally impossible. I see no passion left for life anywhere, with a few exceptions. The whole world appears to have been drowned in greed, hate, envy, pitiful smallness, or appears to be asleep in dreams of mythologies where nothing is real. There are no fires in abundance that can power the kind of vast renaissance development that puts agriculture indoors and protects it in a nuclear fusion powered world, bright with material abundance so that the Ice Age can cause us no harm."
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