The Gaza Mosque as Mother

Ummi Ar. mommy and Ummah Ar. The global Muslim community

Both words come from the same root in Arabic

Screenshot from IDF

By

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.

War Blog #29

Consider this: 94% est. of thinking is unconscious & 95% est. of communication is nonverbal, thus symbols and fantasy are at the core of the problem of political violence. Form follows function; function follows fantasy.

Along time ago before I started to write The Jihadi Dictionary for the military and police because they don’t have the opportunity to study early childhood development, I wrote a blog for the now defunct Family Security website. The title was The Mosque as Mother. I return to the topic of the mosque because once again it is in the news coming out of Gaza about the misuse of the mosque according to the Western view.

Yet the mosque has a central role in the history of jihad and has always been at the epicenter of warfare providing not only a meeting place to consolidate a fused destructive group’s identity of jihadis but also to provide training and the storage of weapons as well as the point of attack when under threat. These points which I mention, are completely missing from the two recent news articles, whose links are cited below. There is a blatant lack of understanding about the role of the mosque in jihad and more significantly the unconscious symbolic meaning of the mosque and why it is such a potent image in the psychotic mind of Hamas. This blog post will address these matters.

Cf. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/army-says-it-found-hamas-training-site-inside-a-mosque-in-northern-gaza/  and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/31/why-hamas-stores-its-weapons-inside-hospitals-mosques-and-schools/

I turn to the entry of the Mosque from The Jihadi Dictionary. We begin with the standard dictionary entry from Webster’s defining what a mosque is:

A building that is used for Muslim religious services.

Notice there is no mention of jihad though one could argue that jihad is part of the “religious” services as found in the Quran.

Next we should examine the etymology for the word mosque:

√ 1717, earlier moseak c. 1400, also mosquee 16c., probably in part from Middle French mosquée, from Italian moschea, earlier moscheta, from Spanish mesquita, from Arabic masjid: temple, place of worship, from sajada: he worshipped + prefix ma-, denoting place. Mangled in Middle English as muskey, moseache, etc.

Please note here that the word enters into English in the 16th century and its reception seems to be through the Iberian peninsula when and where Tariq Ibn Ziad, the North African Muslim military commander,  came on jihad in 711 AD to conquer Spain. My doctoral work focused on aljamía i.e. Old Spanish in Arabic script of the Hadith which are like “midrash” as in Hebrew.

My doctoral advisor was the late Professor Anwar Chejne who wrote the canonical historical work entitled Muslim Spain: Its History and Culture. When I studied with him from 1978-1983 I intensively read this history. There was NO mention of jihad in its 559 pages. Tariq Ibn Ziad is not mentioned in this light. Jihad was therefore “whitewashed.” This was standard practice in the 1980s and 1990s leading to and helping the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood in America and its Academy.

We now move to the standard psychological or psychoanalytic definition for mosque but since there is none, the definition given is for “religion” in general. The following definition is taken from H. Stein’s The scope of psycho-geography: The psychoanalytic study of spatial representation, Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 7(1): 23-79.

Ψ In psychoanalysis, religion and its spatial representation have often been associated as symbols and unconscious representations of the early mother in a maternal fusion with religious adherents.

Stein stresses the important role of the mother in fantasy. And from this psychoanalytic definition we delve further into the psyche of the mosque within the jihadi’s life:

Screenshot taken from my PPT lecture to Abarbanel Hospital 2017

of Shahin Najafi's Album Cover for which he received a death threat from the Ayatollah's Regime

cf. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-18057402

[You see I am not making this stuff up!]

X (the crossed swords of jihad) The mosque is an unconscious representation of the mother’s breast, according to Shahin Najafi, an Iranian rapper who received a death threat for portraying the mosque’s dome on a record cover as a gigantic, engorged female breast. The cover touched “the third rail” in what was unspoken and unconscious imagery, the nourishing mother in the Muslim mind, especially in Shiite culture. I wrote about this album cover, which I took “to mean that a perverse sexuality lurks below the surface of Mahdist culture, which hates the female. The dome of the mosque is an unconscious representation of the female breast of the nursing mother. This is the essence of a shame–honor culture signifying that there is maternal deprivation and paranoia. They go hand in hand. The little girls and women are abused. With shame, comes blaming the other but hardly ever the mother because the mother is the object to be protected by the little humiliated, shamed boy who witnesses his mother being abused. The little boy feels his mother to be an extension of himself. To see her hit is for him to feel her pain. He must protect her at all costs. Picture a frightened little boy clinging hysterically to his mother’s skirt.”* This is the image often perceived when Muslims feel that their mosque is under attack. The heroic mother is a jihadi defense against the devalued, shameful female.

What is of significance here is that it is an Iranian who exposes the meaning of the mosque for the fanatics of the regime. Iran is the head of the octopus with its jihadi proxies. This cycles back to Hamas in Gaza and the use of the mosque as their key training center for jihad.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the fact that I did not specifically include the concept of the mosque as jihad’s training center in my definition. While I would like to think that I could just apologize and state that no definition can be entirely inclusive, this lack that I note now may be due to a counter transference and its denial that how could one use a place designated for religious gathering as a place of war?

However, two things come to mind – the misuse of an object constitutes a perversion; hence the misuse of the mosque should be considered a perversive act but secondly I hasten to add that we should understand and remember that Hamas live in “the reverse world,” where good is bad and bad is good. In the Bible, Isaiah 5 the sages understood this, that there are those whose thinking demonstrate a blatant cognitive deficit. Isaiah 5. [20] Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! I do not write this to let Hamas off the hook for its wanton psychotic violent behavior with its rage that exceeds murder itself.

To conclude

To this day it remains very difficult for westerns to grasp this problem of why the mosque is misused. In Hamas's mind’s eye this perverse misuse of the mosque is standard fare like teddy bears that don't have a heart only a sniper rifle, or tunnels for jihad built under a kid's bed or playground or school or hospital.

Think too of the violence surrounding Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – the mosque is their mother and they feel that their mother is constantly under attack where the Arab Muslim shabaab, youth, swarm to protect "Her" like little boys as cited above clinging to their mother's skirts. In short Hamas has a political attachment disorder to their mothers. Until the West begins to understand this, nothing will change.

Cf. The Jihadi Political Attachment Disorder & Its Incitement to Violence During Ramadan, https://www.academia.edu/76201046/The_Jihadi_Political_Attachment_Disorder_and_Its_Incitement_to_Violence_During_Ramadan

*N. Kobrin, The Mosque as Mother, 30 May 2012, http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

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