After the mid-1960’s, when adolescent sexuality went completely out of control in the US, the next development, following like night after day, was pederasty. Here is what an older pederast – an American Muslim convert (later in and out of jail) – explained about having sex with children. He said it helps to develop them as human beings. He said it raises their maturity to understand what being human was really about. And he said that it was much better to have sex with a child than to try and teach ‘sex education’ in the schools.

As these developments became more commonplace, the US government instituted a ‘sex education’ curriculum for pre-school children at the ‘Head Start’ program in the 1980’s. ‘Head Start’ was originally supposed to provide childcare services for working parents, combined with more efficient academic preparation for elementary school, since many children can begin learning reading and writing well before the age of six. And so American children were exposed to ideas of sodomy, homosexuality, bisexuality, sex with strangers, masturbation, and so on, well before the age of government schooling.

The government claimed that their sex curriculum was intended as a protection for the children, so they would understand the dangers growing against them in the public domain. And parents went right along with this explanation.

If Malay-Muslims find these assertions fantastic, be assured they are direct observations by trained social scientists who were working in America in those years. And if any argument against ‘sex education’ in the schools is needed, perhaps these observations will serve. In a multi-cultural society, such as we have here, nothing can be said in school about sex other than mechanics, since the spiritual understanding is not shared.

And then we end up with this concept of ‘safe sex’, that is to say, sex with condoms that are supposed to prevent ‘STD’’s (sexually transmitted diseases such as Aids), when, in fact, for Muslims any sex outside marriage puts our lives in mortal danger in the Hereafter. But this is a value that we are discouraged from teaching publicly, since it falls within the domain of the religious scholars, who can never agree how to manage sexually sinful behavior.

We don’t even know what to tell our children inside our own families, much less by means of school curriculums written by strangers who may or may not share our values and ethics. Is it right to even broach the subject of sexual perversity into the pure minds of our small children? Evidently, the Americans could not think of any alternatives, and here in Malaysia, child molestation and murder has already begun as well.

There is only one ‘sex education’ for Muslims. This education must be based on the sexual union of man and wife as a totally holy function, one which must be publicly endorsed by the entire community. Without that endorsement (which we call ‘ aqad nikah ’), unmarried sex remains an animal function that can only produce children with animal souls.

There is a compromise going on in the bigger Muslim cities, such as Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, that young couples, unable to restrain their God-given hormones until some postponed date of graduation from college or even ‘getting a job’, sleep together until they become pregnant, and then marry. Indonesians call this ‘MBA’, ‘marriage by accident’.

Indeed, many of them could not get permission to marry before graduating, before finding jobs, or whatever. And so many recent wedding celebrations we have attended are of couples who have already conceived children in the animal state of being unmarried and unblessed by Allah swt. One can only wonder how these children will ‘turn out’.

If the spiritual status of the parents has any bearing at all upon the nature of the human soul that is attracted to the child when they conceive, then it would seem ‘MBA’ carries quite a risk of parenting problem children, those children less than obedient, less than respectful, less than law abiding. And what could trouble young parents’ lives more than such children?

We cannot prove that children of unwed parents are deficient in the arts and values of civilized life. After all, Leonardo da Vinci was one of these. Even Barack Obama was born seven months after the marriage of his parents. Yet it is a consideration held by many religious scholars more attuned to the reality of having children, that the key element in producing offspring of good character lies in the spiritual state of the parents at conception.

Unless this principle lies at the very heart of ‘sex education’, the whole enterprise of solving social problems by teaching sex in the public schools totally collapses. Indeed, one of the possible meanings of the Islamic teachings that illustrates this danger of conceiving children out-of-wedlock. Those of us who have disobedient, lying, clubbing, drug-taking, or even criminal children, will perhaps know the meaning of being taken to hell.

We parents, who have set up an educational and economic world that demands priority for activities other than love and marriage when their hormonal time comes due, will have a lot to answer for in the Afterlife. We had better wake up and learn how to safeguard our children’s virtue with or without the advantages of higher education and women’s rights to work. We had better take the responsibility which is ours and ours alone to educate our children in the ways and meanings of sex between husband and wife.

The writer is vice-president, Muslim Lawyers Association of Malaysia chairperson, Islamic Outreach, Abim .