It all began with a lonely Syrian blogger named Fadal Atmaz Al-Sibai, a 23-year-old marketing student.
The vices of the Syrian public seem to have become overbearing for Mr. Fadal, who earlier this month took it upon himself to launch an online campaign [1] against masturbation in Syria.
Masturbation, Fadal wrote, is "spreading like wildfire." In the name of God the Merciful, he called on young Syrians to join a national campaign to "eliminate the secret habit" and sign a petition.
"Come on guys," he wrote, arguing Syrians "should not be silent about it because of modesty."
Fadal then listed "the problems caused by this abominable practice," among them a loss of focus, physical inactivity, testicular pain, bloody excretions after excessive masturbation, and loss of ones ability to control urination.
Warning his followers about the speed of ejaculation, the blogger quotes Koranic passages referring to chastity and masturbation, and argued that those who masturbate would someday find themselves on their wedding day having sex that would "last only a matter of a few seconds." Their new wife, he wrote, would then look at them "in shock and surprise, and perhaps contempt."
But parts of the Syrian blogosphere took issue with Fadal’s campaign to eradicate masturbation and launched their own campaigns in support of the practice.
"Apparently our Syrian youth is obsessed with playing with itself," wrote [2] Abu Fares, an influential blogger from Tartous who started the backlash. "Boys are unable to concentrate on their studies and are looking very pale before prematurely ejaculating and losing consciousness in schools. Their balls are blue and sore as hell and when they sneeze or cough they are allegedly pissing in their pants. They are falling on their backs after bleeding to death from their weenies."
"Girls, Lord Have Mercy on us all, are doing this despicable, blinding and atrocious act secretly without the written consent of their male pimp," Fares continued. "They, someone hold me please before I pass out, are losing their virginity to their fingers out of wedlock."
"You see why we’re a little disappointed with Obama here in Syria," he added. "We expected him to help, in particular with the rampant problem of masturbation."
Fares called on his followers to join him in a counter campaign.
"Let’s move ahead, forge our destiny and join forces together in beating our meats and beating around the bushes, to reach an unprecedented Syrian Orgasm against absurdity, hypocrisy and sanctimony," he wrote.
Abu Fares’ readership, many of them also bloggers, replied with a litany of supportive comments, linking to anti-masturbation campaigns, videos and songs such as Gerald Anderson’s ‘Don’t Play With Your Noodle’, the first verse of which is "If you move it too much it’ll break one day. So you better think twice if your thinkin’ bout’ doin’ it tonight."
One supporter pointed out that, in their opinion, the masturbation crises in Syria was caused by boys and men who find themselves in embarrassing situations.
"The main dilemma is that not everybody has intermittent or even regular "wet dreams" to cool down their throbbing reproductive parts," the blogger theorized. "To top it off, sometimes the "little man" wants to come out uninvited, which can cause quite an embarrassment because of the bulge in the pants."
Blogger Yazan Badran, from Latakia, Syria, then started a campaign in favor of (rather than against) moral decay, calling on his readers to listen to heavy metal, smoke joints, eat publicly during Ramadan, drink hard liquor and engage in public sexual experimentation.
"You shall skip school and stay home enjoying the vast porn directory on the Internet," he wrote [3]. "Your plan for the day should include nothing but long sessions of masturbation."
Damascus-based blogger Yaser Sadeq answered [4] the call with a "blogging week against hypocrisy". Blogger Abu Kareem followed suit [5] with a blogging campaign "Against fossilized thinking." ‘Dubai Jazz’ started "A Week of Blogging Against Tribalism", which he posits [6] is a greater threat to Syrian society than masturbation.
Blogging in Syria has tended to fall along linguistic fault lines, with religious Syrian bloggers writing in Arabic while most secular Syrian blogs are written in English. Tension between the two blogging communities is nothing new.
"When the blogosphere all started in late 2004 and 2005 it was mostly liberal minded expatriate bloggers writing in English," Badran told The Media Line. "As it expanded exponentially the blogosphere became more Arabic-based and started trending towards more socially conservative and religious blogs. While there are a few liberal blogs in Arabic, socially and religiously conservative Arabic blogs have come to make up the vast majority.
"They are not extremists, they are an accurate reflection of Syrian society," Badran said. "Left wing bloggers, mostly writing in English, felt threatened by this kind of growth and the divide has just grown greater between the two sides ever since."
"It’s already become somewhat of a bickering fight rather than a conscious debate," Badran stressed. "One side calls the other hypocrites while the other side responds ‘infidels!’ There are a lot of bottled emotions on both sides, as both have been politically oppressed in Syria’s modern history."
"In retrospect the masturbation debate got a little out of hand," Badran admits. "But it spiraled out of frustration over all of these conservative ideas being thrown out onto the net unchallenged."
‘Dubai Jazz’, a UAE based architect who grew up in Aleppo, Syria, disagreed with the depiction of the Syrian blogging scene as excessively contentious.
"Generally the Arabic speaking bloggers and the English speaking bloggers don’t speak to each other, but I would not portray the situation as a division," he told The Media Line, asking that his name be withheld for security reasons. "There are more conservatives among the Arabic blogs and more liberals among the English language blogs, but it’s more like a diversity of opinion that sometimes leads people to polarize around a certain issue."
"Points of contention tend to be around homophobia and religious practice," he added. "But there is a diversity of opinion even among the secular crowd."
There has been some dissent within the ‘pro-masturbation camp’, most notably by blogger Anas Qtiesh [8].
"The campaigner is likely to have a crowd supporting his campaign that you could fit in a phone booth," he wrote. "But does that warrant the ridicule of the blogger? CUT IT OUT!"
Qtiesh, who also serves as an Arabic editor at Global Voices, a global blog aggregation and curation site, argued the sarcasm which the original anti-masturbation campaign had engendered had crossed the line.
"The ridiculing was unwarranted," he told The Media Line. "If someone wants to make fun of that post it’s fine but to launch all out campaigns is just a bit over the top."
"What really bothered me was that the timing of those campaigns corresponded with the imprisonment of the Syrian blogger," he said, referring to Karim Arbaji, a Syrian blogger recently sentenced to three years imprisonment for writing about human rights issues in Syria. "Bloggers in Syria are still under threat of being persecuted for whatever they write so the whole discussion was just outrageous and completely oblivious to what was going on in Syria."
Fadal Atmaz Al-Sibai, the original anti-masturbation campaigner, did not reply to requests for comment.