The Problems Facing Modern Civilization

partnerships, it is the women who suffer psychologi­cally. Emotionally, they have to pay a very high price for their emancipation. The famous Australian feminist, Ms. Germaine Greer, has acknowledged, now that she is of a more mature age, that her zeal for the sexual liberation movement in her youth was not realistic. In an interview with the Indian Express she lamented over the present state of affairs: “What is worrying today is the results of the sexual liberation movement -— the number of teenaged girls who have been on the pill since they were 12 and 13, the number of teenaged girls who get pregnant by the time they are 15 and 16. What is happening to them? Sex means something quite different for men. They can love and leave. When the time comes to go to university, they can take off quite easily. Women have a different sensibility. They love with their heads, hearts and loins. And a broken love affair leaves them quite shattered. I have seen it happen to people close to me. And it is terrible.”7 In modern times Muslim society has fallen prey to many evils, but the reasons for this having happened are different in respect of the West and Islamic civilizations. In the case of the latter, it is deviation from Islamic principles which has caused the rot to set in, whereas in the former case, it is adherence to a new set of man-made principles which has had so deleterious an effect. ARTIFICIAL PROBLEMS The unique Nobel Sperm Bank set up by Dr. Robert Graham, a California millionaire, preserves the sperm of Nobel prizewinners so that women, who wish to produce children of above-average intelligence, may be impregnated with it. Dr. Graham established this bank with the aim of compensating for sterility on the part of husbands. But now, unmarried women — such is the degree of modem, western permissiveness — are coming forward to avail of the bank’s facilities. More interested in bearing above-average children, they prefer to ignore the possibilities of marriage, and freely seek the assistance of the bank. One such unmarried mother is forty-year-old Dr. Afton Blake of California. When she contacted the Nobel Sperm Bank and explained the kind of child she wanted, she was advised that sperm number 28 was what she needed. (Donors of sperm remain unnamed, and are given a code number.) Dr. Blake duly became pregnant with the specially selected sperm, and bore a son whom she named Doron (a Greek word meaning “gift”). His photograph, at age four, appeared in The Hindustan Times of September 7, 1986. A Daily Telegraph representative, Ian Brodie, who met Dr. Blake at her Los Angeles residence, reports that her happiness is gradually turning to gall, the birth of a child without a father having created a number of problems. Top of the list of such problems is the boy’s repeated queries about his father, which he began to make as soon as he could speak. Dr. Blake told Brodie that “there was one occasion when Doron got angry with me. He said he was going off to live with his Dad.” For Dr. Blake, what had started off as an interesting experience, latterly seems to have