Why they saw girls as prey

Britain is finally reckoning with what many of us have warned about for years. The newly released Rape Gang Inquiry Report, commissioned by Independent MP Rupert Lowe, documents what the report itself calls a conservative estimate: at least 250,000 white British girls were subjected to rape, trafficking, torture, and forced conversion over five decades, largely at the hands of organized Pakistani Muslim gangs.

I wrote about this evil last year, calling it what it is, and Joe Rigney has now written insightfully about Britain’s institutional cowardice—the multiculturalism and fear of man that let it happen. Many thinkers have rightly emphasized the cowardice and cover-up of British politicians, but there is a question that rarely found its way to the public—a question that British society doesn’t want to ask: Why did these Muslims see white, non-Muslim girls as prey in the first place?

Classical Islamic law built an entire legal category around women seized by Muslims through conquest. These women don’t have the rights and protections owed a wife. The Quran establishes this directly: A Muslim man may not take another man’s wife, with the exception of those women whom his “right hands possess,” that is, women captured by force. Not only in the Quran, but Muhammad’s life embodied clear testimonies of women seized by Muslims and taken for sexual exploitation. Muhammad supplied the normative pattern.

After the Muslims invaded the Jewish settlement of Khaybar in 628, Safiyya bint Huyayy—a Jewish noblewoman whose father and husband had just been killed by Muhammad’s forces—was specifically given to Muhammad. Another Jewess, Rayhana bint Zayd, captured after Muhammad massacred 600–900 Jewish men of her tribe of Banu Qurayza, was also selected to be given to Muhammad.

These aren’t obscure stories, but a pattern given in the life of Islam’s prophet. Collectively, they establish that a woman’s body could be lawfully possessed apart from her consent or her faith. This has become not merely a fringe reading in Islamic texts, but the mainstream classical jurisprudence on the treatment of captive women, and it created a permanent theological category. Thus, while Muslim men can marry up to four women, they have unlimited allowance with women possessed by force. When “ordinary” Muslims read these “sacred” stories, many realize not only that the texts exist and carry authority in Islam, but that they are plausibly, religiously sanctioned for imitation.

Many Pakistani men in the United Kingdom were shaped by clan cultures that already treat honor as something to be taken from non-Muslim whites, and these stories give that impulse fertile theological soil. Reasonable and humane Muslims will recognize the evil in such actions, but others will reach for these same theological texts to justify horrific crimes against non-Muslim women.

These Pakistani Muslims came to view non-Muslim girls as inferior—morally, socially, culturally—as lesser beings next to “superior” Muslims. That evil perspective is built on Islamic theology. Bringing a non-Muslim woman into the household, whether by marriage, or, as survivor testimony to the Rape Gang Inquiry describes, by coercion, has historically carried a kind of religious credit that the reverse never could. One survivor told the inquiry she was informed her Christian morals were already lower than a Muslim girl’s and that God had abandoned her because of what was done to her.

That isn’t random cruelty. It echoes a structure in which a “Muslim girl” possesses an honor that a non-Muslim girl is assumed never to have had. While the Bible teaches that every person is made in the image of God and deserves honor and dignity, the Islamic worldview, built on “sacred” Muslim texts, shapes Muslim minds to see people as varying in honor and dignity.

Honor-shame cultures across the Muslim world tie a family’s honor to the sexual purity of its own women. A British Pakistani father polices his daughter’s chastity fiercely, while at the same time permitting, even celebrating, his son’s exploitation of “their” girls, which means girls outside that honor system. For these Muslims, corrupting an outsider girl costs nothing, because she was never honorable to begin with. She is exposing her cheap white flesh, they say, because she is dishonorable and seeking to be “taken.”

To be clear, many Muslims are decent people, raising families, working honestly, horrified by this evil as anyone should be. We do not indict a billion people for the crimes of a network of predators. However, we cannot pretend these men invented their justifications from nothing. They drew on real categories in the Islamic legal and prophetic tradition—categories that, left unreformed and unchallenged from within Islam itself, will keep producing men who believe a white girl’s body is theirs to take.

Britain’s police failed these girls. Its politicians turned a blind eye to secure Muslim votes. So did its councils, its press, its so-called progressives. But before any of them failed, a theological permission structure was already in place, waiting to be used.

Many have named the cowardice. It’s time someone named the doctrine.