Throughout history, certain patterns have repeated when Muslim armies or militant groups have conquered territory or carried out large-scale attacks. One of the most consistent features is the systematic sexual exploitation of women and girls from the defeated population. From the early Islamic conquests in the seventh century through later empires, the 1971 Bangladesh war, the ISIS campaign against the Yazidis, grooming gangs in Britain, and the Hamas-led assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, the same basic behavior appears again and again: non-Muslim women and girls are treated as spoils of war, objects to be raped, enslaved, or humiliated as part of victory. This is not random crime. In many cases, it has been justified by specific religious texts and classical Islamic legal rulings that permit sexual relations with female captives. The attackers often view these acts as religiously sanctioned. The October 7 attack fits directly into this long historical pattern. What happened that day was not an isolated outburst of violence. It was the latest chapter in a recurring story that stretches back over 1,400 years.
The Early Islamic Conquests and the Rules of War Booty
The pattern began with the rapid Arab Muslim conquests after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE. Within just two decades, Muslim armies had destroyed the Sasanian Persian Empire and seized huge territories from the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Persia took roughly 17 to 18 years, from 633 to 651 CE. As cities and regions fell, large numbers of women and children were taken captive. Islamic legal tradition developed clear rules for these captives. The Quran uses the phrase “those whom your right hands possess” to refer to slaves, including women captured in war. Several verses, including 23:5-6 and 4:24, were understood by classical scholars to permit Muslim men to have sexual relations with their female slaves. These women were considered war booty, to be divided among the fighters after one-fifth went to the state or the leader. This was not hidden or controversial at the time. Muslim historians themselves recorded the taking of female captives as a normal outcome of victory. The women were often raped shortly after capture, then distributed or sold. Some were kept as concubines. If they bore children to their owners, their status sometimes improved, but the initial sexual exploitation was accepted under the law. This system continued for centuries under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the Ottoman Empire, and other Muslim powers. The Ottoman Empire, for example, maintained large harems filled with women captured from Christian populations in the Balkans, Caucasus, and elsewhere. Slave markets operated openly for hundreds of years. The pattern was clear: when Muslim forces took new territory, the women of the conquered people became sexual property.
The Legal and Religious Justification
The justification comes straight from classical Islamic jurisprudence. The four major Sunni schools of law — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali — all permitted sexual relations with female captives taken in jihad. These rulings were not fringe opinions. They represented the mainstream legal consensus for over a thousand years. The women captured were legally classified as property. Their bodies could be used by their owners at will. This framework removed any sense of wrongdoing from the act of rape. In the mind of the conqueror, he was not committing a crime — he was exercising a right granted by God and confirmed by religious law.
The 1971 Bangladesh Genocide
In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, Pakistani soldiers carried out widespread and systematic rape against Bengali women. Estimates of the number of women raped range from 200,000 to 400,000. Many were held in military camps and subjected to repeated sexual violence. This was not the chaos of war — it was organized. Soldiers were told they were “purifying” the Bengali population. The pattern of using sexual violence as a weapon of conquest and domination appeared once again.
ISIS and the Yazidi Genocide (2014 onward)
In August 2014, ISIS overran the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, home to the Yazidi religious minority. They massacred thousands of Yazidi men and older women, while abducting an estimated 6,000–7,000 women and children. Young boys were often separated for forced conversion and military training; women and girls (some as young as 9) were systematically enslaved. Captives were registered, sorted (married vs. unmarried), held in warehouses or houses, inspected, and sold in slave markets in places such as Mosul, Raqqa, and other ISIS-held towns. Prices varied; some were given as “gifts” to fighters. Ownership was formalized with documents issued by ISIS courts. Owners could buy, sell, gift, or inherit the women. Sexual access was treated as a right of ownership. Survivors described repeated rape, forced marriage, physical abuse, and reproductive control (including forced contraception or abortions in some cases). Many were moved between multiple owners. Thousands were later freed through family ransoms, escapes, or military operations, but several thousand remained missing years later. ISIS did not hide the practice. It published detailed theological defenses. In the English-language magazine Dabiq (Issue 4, October 2014), the article “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour” argued that enslaving Yazidi women was a religious duty. They referenced a hadith interpreted as predicting the return of slavery as a sign of the approaching Day of Judgment (“the slave girl will give birth to her master”). A pamphlet issued by the ISIS Research and Fatwa Department, titled “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves,” provided practical rules: It is permissible to capture unbelieving women. Sexual intercourse with female captives is allowed, including with those who have not reached puberty “if she is fit for intercourse.” Captives may be bought, sold, or given as gifts because they are “merely property.” ISIS presented this as continuous with the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and the early caliphs.
The October 7, 2023 Attack on Israel
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched a large-scale surprise attack on southern Israel. What they did that day followed the same ancient pattern. Multiple independent investigations, including a major report released in 2026, concluded that rape, gang rape, sexual torture, and mutilation were widespread and deliberate. Women at the Nova music festival and in the attacked kibbutzim were systematically targeted. Many victims were found naked, bound, shot in the genitals, and sexually mutilated. Some were raped in front of their families. There were documented cases of sexual violence against both women and men. The attackers filmed many of these acts and sent the videos to the victims’ families. This was not random brutality — it was part of the attack plan itself. The same mindset that justified the enslavement of Yazidi women in 2014 was present on October 7, 2023. The female body was treated as territory to be conquered and degraded.
Grooming Gangs in Britain
In the United Kingdom, organized grooming gangs, overwhelmingly composed of men of Pakistani Muslim background, operated for years in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and others. Official reports documented the systematic targeting, grooming, and repeated rape of thousands of vulnerable British girls, many of them underage. These crimes occurred as the Muslim population in Britain grew from roughly 3% to over 6%. While not military conquest, the pattern of targeting non-Muslim girls for sexual exploitation by organized groups of Muslim men shows the same underlying attitude toward women outside the group.
A Jungian Analytical Psychology Perspective on the Historical Pattern
From the viewpoint of Carl Jung's analytical psychology, the recurring historical pattern of conquest, captivity, and systematic sexual violence described in this article reveals something deeper than mere cultural or religious custom. It points to the activation of the collective shadow — the repressed, unacknowledged dark side of the human psyche that exists both in individuals and in groups. When this shadow remains unintegrated, it does not disappear. It erupts in destructive forms, often cloaked in religious or ideological justification.
Jung taught that every individual and every culture possesses a shadow: the sum of all those qualities we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. On the personal level, this includes impulses toward cruelty, dominance, and lust for power. On the collective level, it contains the repressed instincts of the entire group. When a group identifies itself as pure, righteous, or divinely chosen, the shadow is projected outward onto the other — in this case, non-Muslim women and children. What is rejected in the self is then enacted upon the outsider without guilt or restraint.
The classical Islamic legal framework that permits sexual relations with “those whom your right hands possess” can be understood psychologically as a formalized channel for the collective shadow. It gives conscious permission to acts that would otherwise trigger moral conflict. This is not true integration of the shadow — which requires painful self-awareness — but rather a splitting off and ritualized expression of it. The result is a psyche that can commit extreme violence while maintaining a sense of moral superiority.
This pattern becomes especially dangerous when combined with Cluster B personality traits — particularly psychopathy, malignant narcissism, and sadism — operating within a group or ideological system. The psychopath lacks genuine empathy and remorse. In Jungian terms, the bridge to the feeling function is severed, allowing the shadow to act with cold efficiency. The systematic registration, sorting, pricing, and repeated rape of Yazidi women and girls by ISIS, or the gang rapes and mutilations carried out on October 7, 2023, show this chilling organizational quality. These were not crimes of passion. They were bureaucratic, documented, and justified theologically — the hallmark of the psychopathic shadow operating without internal restraint.
The malignant narcissist, by contrast, requires constant inflation of the ego. Jung warned that when the ego identifies with an archetype — such as the Warrior, the Conqueror, or the Avenger — the result is psychic inflation. The person (or group) feels god-like, above ordinary morality. The sexual humiliation of the enemy becomes proof of one's own power and divine favor. On October 7, the deliberate broadcasting of rape videos to victims' families represents a particularly vicious form of narcissistic sadism — the need not only to destroy but to be seen destroying, to force the enemy to witness their own degradation.
Sadism itself, the deliberate enjoyment of another's suffering, represents one of the purest expressions of the unintegrated shadow. Jung noted that cruelty often arises when the shadow is both repressed and projected. The victim becomes the carrier of everything the perpetrator has disowned in himself — vulnerability, fear, femininity, impurity. By torturing and degrading the victim, the sadist attempts to annihilate those qualities in his own psyche. The repeated reports of sexual torture, mutilation, and enjoyment during both the ISIS campaign against the Yazidis and the October 7 attacks reveal this archetypal sadistic dynamic at work.
What makes this threat to women and children particularly significant is the way ideology fuses with these Cluster B traits. When religious texts are used to sanctify the expression of the shadow, ordinary moral inhibitions collapse. The perpetrator no longer experiences himself as doing evil — he experiences himself as fulfilling a divine command. This is the psychological mechanism that allows the same pattern to repeat across centuries: from the early conquests, through the Ottoman harems, the mass rapes in Bangladesh in 1971, the organized grooming gangs in Britain, the ISIS slave markets, and the atrocities of October 7.
Jung would likely see this as an extreme form of possession by the collective shadow. When large numbers of men become identified with the same archetypal complex — the conquering warrior whose right to the spoils is divinely sanctioned — the individual conscience is overwhelmed by the group psyche. The result is what Jung called a mass psychosis, where the shadow is no longer an individual problem but a collective force that destroys everything in its path.