Originally posted by
Aragorn
That's how it is now, yes, but Islam hasn't always been like that, and it still isn't like that in many countries. Of course, the branches of Islam and the Muslims we here in the western world usually come into contact with ─ or that are depicted in the media ─ are usually far more conservative.
Most of the original Muslims here in Belgium came from very poor and under-educated regions, where religious fanaticism and dogma were the strongest because those people simply didn't know any better. These people were brought here by our government to do the dirty (and often dangerous) work that the native Belgian population didn't want to do anymore, such as working in the coal mines. And those Muslims ─ first a wave recruited from Morocco in the late 1950s, later a wave recruited from Turkey in the early-to-mid 1960s ─ were not the first immigrants brought in by the government either. Earlier, they had already recruited Italians for the same purposes.
Yet, back in the days that the Roman Catholic Empire ruled the western world with an iron fist, Muslim culture was internally a lot more liberal, and especially with regard to their treatment of and respect for women.
The horns were a metaphor for the scapegoat, itself a linguistic derivative of the passages in the Old Testament where the Israelites had to send a sacrificial goat out into the desert for Azazel, purportedly a fallen angel. Whenever the Israelites were going to bring a sacrifice to Yahweh, they also had to send a goat out into the desert for Azazel, as atonement for their sins. The goat supposedly carried their sins away from them.
This, in combination with the goat-face-like appearance of an upside-down pentagram, led to the cultural representation of the devil ─ or in Freemasonry, of Baphomet ─ as a being with goat legs, the curved horns of a billy goat or a ram, the face of a goat, and a body that was androgynous in appearance, i.e. with a male torso that had female breasts.
The androgyny of this being was also inspired by Catholicism, namely through the vilification of sexuality, which in and of itself was a direct consequence of the mandatory vow of celibacy for Catholic priests and monks. Sexuality was thus considered a temptation to the priests and monks, and was therefore considered evil, and taboo. The depiction of the devil as an androgynous being was as such meant to explicitly emphasize sexuality as being evil.
Likewise, for the same reason, angels were usually depicted as asexual, although it was often difficult for religious artists to depict an angel that way, which is why angels are usually depicted as babies or toddlers ─ e.g. the typical depiction of Cupid as a cherubim ─ or as flat-chested females wearing era-specific armor and carrying weaponry. In some later religious paintings, angels are depicted as anatomically completely female and without wearing any armor or carrying any weapons, but this was probably due to the painters using real women as models for their paintings.