Sex and the Citadel (10 page)

Kotb is in her forties; like many Egyptians of her generation, she became interested in Islam at university. “I started to be religious not very early in my life. I was brought up in a very liberal house; I was wearing a swimsuit until after I got married.” Her husband, whom she met at medical school, came from an even less observant background, but together, she said, “we decided to make ourselves and our future families better than our older families, so we started to read about religion, to study Qur’an, to get it by heart.” It was around this time that Kotb decided to put on hijab, much to her parents’ dismay—at the time, headscarves were something for servants, not aspiring surgeons.

Her career in sexology came later. An early opportunity passed her by when the only class on the subject in her entire course of studies at Cairo University Medical School was canceled because of freak bad weather. But a second chance appeared unexpectedly, after graduation. As a working mother, Kotb decided to forgo a career in surgery for something less time intensive: forensic medicine. She began working on the sexual abuse of children—both victims and perpetrators—and it was through this that she
developed her interest in sexuality. In the course of her research on sexual abuse, Kotb became one of Egypt’s first sex surfers. “I started reading about sexuality,” she recalled, “getting some books from abroad. Then the Internet was extremely fresh; it was [newly] wrapped. It was very hard to get a free line on the Internet, but my mother-in-law knew someone in the army, so I was going to a forbidden [classified] area to get onto the Net to get information about sexuality.” A doctorate from the United States on sexuality in Islam topped off her training, and in Cairo she began to build her patient roster, which now extends to several Gulf states, and a following among Muslims in Canada as well.

Kotb is obviously an inspiration to some; I’ve seen strangers come up to her in public to thank her for her show. How many of these fans are actually following her advice is another matter; many of the women I’ve asked have the same relationship to Kotb’s programs that I do to cooking shows—interesting in theory, but not something we could ever do in practice. “I like Heba Kotb,” one married woman in her early twenties in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo told me, “because she explains everything in a modest and useful way. I watch it always, but my mother does not like her. I heard from her [Kotb] that I need to ask for my sexual rights. But I cannot apply that because my husband will not agree or will feel that I am rude.”

To be sure, Kotb’s advice seems daring to many by today’s standards. Given recent fatwas forbidding oral sex or nudity between the conjugal sheets, her suggestions on how to spice up spousal relations have earned her conservative opponents. But on closer inspection, Kotb is hardly a radical—something that puts her in the crosshairs of other, more liberal sexologists across the region. She is, for example, an implacable opponent of premarital sex, on psychosexual as well as religious grounds. And for all her talk of women exerting their God-given sexual rights, it’s still men first in Kotb’s book. “For wives, I want to say that a man’s sexual needs are different than a woman’s. Instead of being a passive recipient of sex, try to be an active partner,” she advised. “He is exposed to many
temptations outside the home. Be available to please him and do not give him a reason to make a choice between you and hellfire.”
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The advice of Kotb and other Islamically inflected sex therapists pales in comparison with the full-blooded approach of the past. Take, for example, the
Encyclopedia of Pleasure
. We know little about its author, ‘Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib, other than where and when he wrote: Baghdad in the late tenth or early eleventh century. That’s a pity, because he sounds like just the sort of man I’d like to meet.

The
Encyclopedia
is truly breathtaking. Short of cybersex and porn videos, its forty-three chapters cover every conceivable sexual practice: heterosexual, homosexual (male and female), bisexual, animal, vegetable, and mineral—you name it, it’s all there. Section titles “On the Kinds and Techniques of Coition,” “On Jealousy,” “On the Advantages of a Nonvirgin over a Virgin,” “On Increasing the Sexual Pleasure of Man and Woman,” and “Description of the Nasty Way of Doing It and Lewd Sex” give you some idea of its vast scope. ‘Ali ibn Nasr’s message is clear: sex is God’s gift to mankind and we are meant to enjoy it. While the book’s intent is serious, its style is not only arousing but very often hilarious. I attracted plenty of dirty looks from fellow readers in the rare book room of one London library as I squirmed and guffawed my way through stories like this:

Hubba al Madaniyyah, for instance, said that one day she went out of the bath accompanied by a boy who had a puppy. It so happened that the puppy, seeing her vulva and vaginal lips, went between her legs and began to lick her organ. She lowered her body to give the animal a better chance of performing its job. However, when she had reached an orgasm, she fell down heavily upon it and could not raise herself until the helpless animal had died from heavy pressure.
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Much of the
Encyclopedia
is drawn from earlier writers, Arab and foreign, and it includes a liberal sprinkling of advice from female authorities.
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The
Encyclopedia
is full of women—concubines, slave girls, prostitutes and wives—with full-throttle sex drives. The sexual insatiability of women was a well-established
theme long before ‘Ali ibn Nasr came on the scene. The Qur’an tells the story of the wife of a Pharaonic court official, better known as Zuleika, who attempted to seduce the prophet Joseph, then a young and handsome slave. When he refused her advances, she claimed that he was the seducer, but her lie was exposed when people noticed that his shirt was torn from the back, proving that he had been fleeing her, not the other way around.
⁵⁴

Rather than try to curb female sexual drive, however, the
Encyclopedia
goes to great lengths to advise readers on how to fulfill it. It begins with unabashed romance—love letters “full of sweet words, nice poems,” not to mention patience, kindness, and tact, as well as the occasional gift. The book shows considerable insight into female character, offering the following counsel to bewildered lovers:

It should also be known that it is in a woman’s nature to get angry with a man without any reason whatsoever. When she does, the man should put up with her because she will return to her normal condition of her own accord. Moreover, a woman is of such a nature that she may be under the delusion that a man is guilty and so establishes his guilt without investigation. When the woman gets angry and treats the man unkindly as a result of her delusion, he should be wise enough to put up with her and not take her delusion seriously.
⁵⁵

The
Encyclopedia
also shows a fine appreciation of female physiology, giving detailed classifications of women’s libidos and types of orgasms. The ultimate prize, according to its author, is simultaneous orgasm, which will guarantee “everlasting” love, or so he assures readers, and the book is full of handy hints on how to reach this goal. French-kissing and cunnilingus are also on the to-do list, and as if this weren’t female-friendly enough, further recommendations include plenty of postcoital conversation and cuddling—the sign of civilized lovemaking, he says.

It is tempting to contrast Azza and her peers, with their sexual hang-ups, to the freewheeling, fun-loving women of the
Encyclopedia
. It is, however, important to remember that this is not some medieval Masters and Johnson; ‘Ali ibn Nasr is telling tales, not
taking a compass to female sexual response. His stories may be exaggerated, or even fabricated, but that’s not the point. What’s remarkable about his work, seen through twenty-first-century eyes, is not whether women actually behaved in this way in the eleventh century, but the fact that it was considered desirable that they should express their sexuality—at least in private—and that it was socially acceptable to write about it in such a free, frank, and detailed fashion.

SCENES OF A SEXUAL NATURE

This spirit lives on, at least in fiction. Some of the most sexually expressive writing in the Arab world these days is not just about women but by them as well. Across the region, female writers have been letting loose on paper for decades: Nawal El Saadawi, the famous Egyptian feminist now in her eighties and her literary daughters, novelists Hanan al-Shaykh from Lebanon and Ghada Samman from Syria, as well as younger women like Samar al-Muqrin, a Saudi writer, and Mona Prince, an Egyptian novelist, are just a few of those tackling both the pains and the pleasures of female sexuality.
⁵⁶

When it comes to pushing the boundaries of sexual expression, few revel in it as publicly as Joumana Haddad, a Beirut-based poet and writer, newspaper editor, and publisher. “When I’m excited, whether physically or intellectually, I always say I have an erection,” she told me matter-of-factly as we sat in her office at
An-Nahar
, one of Lebanon’s leading newspapers. “Writing is an orgasmic act of ejaculation. Although I have a female body, and I like it, I also have a lot of masculinity in me. And I also love it. We are all hybrids, a mixture of genders and races and nationalities and lands, it is too limiting and narrow-minded to stick to just one category.”

If you were to breathe life into an Arab man’s wildest dreams, and deepest fears, about female sexuality, you’d end up with something very close to Haddad. Physically, she’s the epitome of desirability through the ages: flashing black eyes, flowing locks, and promising
curves. ‘Umar Muhammad al-Nafzawi, the fifteenth-century Tunisian author of
The Perfumed Garden
, one of the best-known books of Arabic erotica, neatly summed up her appeal: “When she comes towards you, you are fascinated, when she walks away, she murders you [with desire].”
⁵⁷
Mind you, al-Nafzawi also thought the ideal woman should keep quiet, stay at home, and live for her husband as “her sole reliance,” a lingering stereotype Haddad rails against in her autobiography, subtitled
Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman
.

Al-Nafzawi’s belief in women’s powerful sexual drive is closer to the mark when it comes to Haddad. “It’s the way I conceive of the world, through sexuality,” says Haddad. “Even when I write, I always say I write with my body, with my fingernails. I’m not a sensual person; I’m a sexual person,” she explained. Haddad’s half a dozen books of Arabic poetry ooze this essence. Take
Lilith’s Return
, for example, a work that invokes the legendary first wife of Adam, famous for her ego and libido. Lilith and Haddad were made for each other, and the resulting verse is full-frontal: “From the flute of my two thighs my song rises. / Rivers stream out of my lust. / Why would the tide not rise high / when a smile glitters between my vertical lips?”
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Haddad wrote her first poem at eleven, and sexuality has been a long-running theme. “I have always been what you would call, whether sympathetically or disapprovingly, a ‘bad girl,’ ” she wrote in her autobiography. “I used to think that only two things were worth doing whenever I had the chance of being alone: reading and masturbating.”
⁵⁹
The first, at any rate, she indulged with adolescent expeditions into the far reaches of her family’s bookcase. “I was brought up in a conservative family,” she told me. “My father, who was a great intellectual but very traditional, used to hide all these dangerous books on the upper shelves. I always used to wait for them to go out, and I put a chair and I climbed, because that’s where all the interesting things are. I wanted to see
Histoire d’O, Emmanuelle
, Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller.”

For a long time, Haddad felt more comfortable reading, and writing, about these subjects in French or English. She only came to
them in Arabic in her twenties. It’s a familiar story among writers, academics, and activists, as Haddad explains: “There are things we can say in English or in French that if we hear them in Arabic, we go [gasp]. But there is this distance that the other language allows you, and it’s an escape. And I don’t want to escape; I want to face these words and confront them.”

Haddad took a very public stand in 2008 with the launch of
Jasad
. It’s a glossy quarterly magazine devoted to exactly what it says on the cover
—jasad
means “body” in Arabic. Its combination of essays, reportage, reviews, and art is not all about sex; topics ranging from addiction to tattoos also get a look. But sex forms a big part, from the logo, with its dangling handcuff, to the content: early issues included a special section on the penis, an essay in praise of masturbation, a dossier on sexual violence, and a gallery of sexually explicit artwork. Coverage is both regional (“Insight into Incest Cases in Syria”) and international (“This Is How They Fuck in China”). And there are regular columns—“My First Time” and “His Body, Her Body”—in which Arab writers bare all.

The women who contribute to
Jasad
are as outspoken as their male counterparts. “No, it’s definitely not easy to be a woman who writes without compromise in an Arab country,” Haddad noted. “And this is why every woman writer is swamped by a slew of patriarchal accusations. How many times, for example, have steamy sex scenes in a novel penned by a woman become an excuse for denigration and rumour about that woman writer’s sexual life and adventures?”
⁶⁰
She sees women speaking out on sex as an essential step toward their intellectual emancipation. “It might seem that I am putting subversive/erotic literature above all other genres, and that is definitely not my aim,” she points out. “But a woman writing erotic/explicit literature in the Arab world is claiming freedom as a vital necessity, as opposed to many Arabs who view it as a luxury.”
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