I did something haram knowingly which makes me unable to repent in front of Allah. I have strong sexual desires, and I am still in search of a sexual partner. I have no concentration in work or in anything else except sex. I prompted and told them on many occasions about my marriage, but they ignored me. Sometimes, I get angry with them.

They are afraid of the society and that people will blame them if I get married before my sister. I can't tell them my problem. I read many of your fatwas on how to control sexual desire, and how we should fast.

But even while fasting the month of Ramadan, I couldn't concentrate and fulfill the requirements properly, because my mind was always in need of sex. So how could optional fasting help me control myself? Please, give me solution for my problem. How should I make my soul alive? What about the baby I have?

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How should I face that fact when it cannot be changed? I am afraid that if that lady returns, I will meet her. We are in continuous communication over the phone. How can I convince my parents about my marriage? How can I return to the path of righteousness?

Nina Kraviz - Desire

I am very stressed. I live neither for Allah nor for myself. I am just like an earning machine for my parents. Brother, you are in a very difficult situation. His first major foray into sales and marketing manipulation was in overturning the social taboo against women smoking cigarettes in public. He organised a large group of women to light up during a parade in New York.

Confessions: 'I didn’t want to be the slave of my desires'

No thought of health consequences though he would pay for this disregard before long. When asked what they were doing, they were prepped to respond: Bernays had first consulted a psychoanalyst who, for a large fee, told him that cigarettes were a symbol of male sexual power and if women smoked, they would have their own penises. If only equality was this easy!

Sales of cigarettes to women grew firmly like an erection? To show his gratitude, Freud gave Bernays a copy of his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis — which greatly influenced him. Products could become compelling emotional symbols of how we want to be seen by others.

This solved a major problem for American corporations that were afraid that supply could easily outstrip demand because mass produced goods were flying off production lines. Luxury goods were only a province of the rich. Paul Masser, a prominent Wall Street banker who worked for Lehman Brothers at that time realized the value of shifting from a needs-based culture by training people to desire new things before the old had been consumed.

DON'T BE A SLAVE TO YOUR DESIRES

They set out to shape a new mentality where our desires overrule our needs. Bernays, armed with theories learned from his uncle Sigmund, was the person to bring about this shift, with particular respect to what motivates us. Bernays invented and employed many techniques of consumer persuasion and manipulation that still inform advertising, marketing and sales cultures today.

Bernays was the first to link Hollywood film stars to products and also to politicians. President Coolidge was regarded as something of a national joke but Bernays invited a group of famous actors to hang out with Coolidge. It was picked up by all the major newspapers and suddenly Coolidge was cool.

Are we slaves of our desires?

Bernays dressed the stars in the products of his clients, the corporations. He employed psychologists to write reports to tell us that products are good for us, represented as independent studies. He originated the use of questionnaires to determine general trends and opinions.

Psychologists who rely too heavily on such questionnaires today often miss the individual with their one size fits all approach. But Bernays fuelled the idea that we need to express our hidden, individual selves and show our feelings, moods, and values to the world; he largely conceived and gave birth to it.


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Our very responsibility as a citizen became to support the economy stupid by being an active consumer. The wave of consumption was further fuelled by the Bernays-generated idea that ordinary people should borrow money from the banks his clients to buy shares. But ultimately, the happiness machines crashed when the stockmarket suffered its worst collapse in history in Bernays had written a series of books claiming that he had developed techniques to control the masses by stimulating their inner desires and sating them with consumer products, thereby managing the irrational forces of the Freudian unconscious.

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He called this The Engineering of Consent think: Noam Chomsky who opposed such techniques, much later. The key to social control is to manage people as passive consumers. Jump ahead 50 years or so to the s and the human potential movement, ideas of being authentic, being oneself and being present, became employed by American corporations as a way of inducing us to buy things to express our selves ramps up into full-swing.