Sex and the Citadel (24 page)

IPH gets its marching orders from local film distributors and broadcasters, who are in turn influenced by a mix of official and self-imposed censorship. Some subscription-based satellite channels demand few cuts and little glossing over in translation; indeed, this is their unique selling point. But free-to-air channels, terrestrial or satellite, can be quite explicit in their requirements: “[The show] should be edited according to Dubai spec, bearing in mind the below,” instructed one Cairo-based company. “F-words are not acceptable. Too-passionate kissing is not acceptable. Sexual jokes and talks are not acceptable. Bikinis are okay.”

There is a trend on Arabic TV channels to dub, rather than subtitle, foreign movies and serials; this used to be common for Mexican or Brazilian, and more recently, Turkish soap operas but is now extending to blockbuster American productions as well. Egyptian Arabic dominated the airwaves when Cairo was the heart of film and TV production, but times are changing and new media centers have emerged. Most of these dubbed series use Syrian or Lebanese actors, which means their Arabic is getting a wider hearing and may well have a profound effect on the lingua franca of a new generation of viewers. But it also makes censorship easier, since the original sound track is translated. With subtitles, however euphemistic, at least the original language remains on record—though even that can be scrubbed by bleeping out expletives in English sound tracks, which a younger generation of viewers, my taxi driver among them, has come to recognize.

At IPH there are no written guidelines on how to edify sexual language. “We don’t have fixed rules, but it’s evident,” says Claude Karam, head of the subtitling division. “When you translate, you have to use the pattern in your own language. If we don’t know a word in English, we research it, and once we find it in Arabic, we judge if we can use it.” He gave me a few examples: “You can’t say, ‘I’m going to get laid tonight’; you can say, ‘I’m going to have fun.’ ” In the subtitlers’ lexicon, sex becomes “relations,” an erection is “excited,” a penis becomes a “member,” semen is “liquid,” and—my
favorite—“that deviant practice” for fellatio. “These people [colleagues] are not stupid,” says Karam. “They know the word. But they don’t want to be blamed for these words and putting them on-screen.”

Back in Cairo, Fawzi reckons the next few years will be tough for filmmakers inclined to push sexual boundaries. Financing is scarce, and some performers, wary of public opinion, are cagey about taking on risqué roles. Marwa, for example, who found herself banned from performing in the country after the uprising by the Egyptian Music Syndicate because of her saucy style, blamed Fawzi for luring her into compromising positions on-screen; “double-faced” is his verdict on the current state of affairs. From his initial optimism that a new era of freedom of expression was dawning as the sun set on the Mubarak regime, Fawzi now welcomes censorship for as long as Islamism holds sway. Better scenes fall on the cutting room floor, he says, than audiences start burning down cinemas.

CLASS ACTION

Whether the next generation of Egyptians will have the freedom to express themselves, and will allow others to do so, critically depends on education, at home and at school. As the country rebuilds its political foundations, all institutions are coming under scrutiny. Egypt has an opportunity to adopt creative new curricula across the board—including the facts of life. But its ability to actually deliver this sorely needed information is another matter altogether.

“You can’t have sex education here as in the West. There, there is freedom. Teenagers can decide to have sex, no problem,” declared one Ministry of Education official, overestimating, as I’ve found many Egyptians do, the extent of sexual freedom in the West. His preference, he told me, was to see sex education as an elective course at university, taught around the time young people are starting to think about getting married. But what about youth who are sexually active before then? “Here we have no practice [sexual
relations] before marriage,” he said. At my look of frank disbelief, he revised his opinion. “Well, yes, there is. But we will not condone it, because it is rejected. If I regularize it and put rules around it, the world will collapse on me. Society will refuse this. Nobody likes this talk.”

But it all depends on what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. As the official suggested, the least controversial form of sexual education in the Arab region is a just-in-time delivery of the essential facts to engaged couples before their wedding night. When my father was a young man, this “education” was, at best, a quiet word in the ear of the bride by an older relative; grooms were left to pick up details, factual and fantastical, as they went along. Today, however, things can get a little more elaborate.

“We have to understand erection.” I was sitting in a classroom with sixty or so young women, draped in black abayas, when a detailed anatomical drawing of the male reproductive system flashed up on the screen, larger than life. Shayla-covered heads, bowed as the women pored over mobile phones or chatted with their neighbors, suddenly snapped to attention. An outburst of giggling followed, but the instructor was undeterred. “There is no need for laughter,” she continued in a firm but pleasant voice. “We are discussing a scientific and religious topic, which is serious and not funny. We are trying to change your way of thinking about this subject.”

For Sahar Talaat, this is all in a day’s work. Since 2002, she’s been helping young Arabs come to grips with sex in an age of uncertainty. A pathologist by training, Talaat got her start as a confidante and counselor to female friends back in Cairo. It was her husband, she said, who encouraged her to take it up as a profession: “He said, ‘You are talented in managing marital life, and so you should exchange this experience with others.’ ” Talaat made her professional debut as a counselor on the health and social pages of Islam Online, a pioneering website offering information, advice, and fatwas on every conceivable aspect of modern life.

The giggling girls and I were in Doha, Qatar, where Talaat was a guest speaker at a course sponsored by Project Chaste, a Qatari initiative,
like its Emirati counterpart we saw earlier, to help get young people married. In the Doha classroom, Talaat was keen to get the young women talking about sex—in an Islamic context. “Always I said that Islam is not closed regarding this issue. The prohibited thing is to speak about the intimate relationship between these particular men and these particular women for no reason. But we can speak openly about the issue in general; we can learn.”

Aside from covering basic reproductive anatomy and physiology, much of the class was devoted to dispelling age-old fears. “You girls think that the pain on the day when [a woman] delivers a baby is the same as the pain on the first day of marriage. Please do not be afraid; it is different,” Talaat gently explained. Her key message is to get women to enjoy, not fear, sex as an integral part of marriage. “In this picture”—she pointed to an anatomical drawing on the screen—“we can see that this part of women below [the clitoris] is the source of enjoyment and so men should focus on that area and be patient with his wife until she is ready and relaxed. This part which woman delivers a baby from, you should know in order to help a man in the marriage and to avoid making any pain to you if he enters a wrong or haram place [anal sex].”

Male and female sexual response curves ebbed and flowed across the classroom blackboard as Talaat explained how to get the most out of sexual life. She is big on communication and feedback. “It is important to know how his performance was good or not; this advice makes the next relationship [interaction] more successful,” she counseled the students. “Sex includes practice and dialogue, so in the first day of marriage, do not expect that you will be so happy, because you need experience, which will happen after spending more time with your husband.”

The students were, on the whole, unflustered by the content. “Yeah, yeah, this information is important,” said Amal, a prospective bride in her early twenties. “We have some information before, but some mistakes. Our family tell us this is a very difficult process when you get married. And you get afraid you will get a lot of blood and very pain. And now it [sounds] very comfortable.” Alongside her was Basma, a university student newly married to her cousin;
she had missed the class before her own nuptials and was making up for lost time. “I think it’s very useful for girls. Yes,
dukhla
[defloration] is less scary. Very easy if we have this information before.” She, however, learned the hard way. “I am reading a lot from sites from [the] Internet, in English and Arabic. But the information is confusion,” she told me. “For the first days of the relationship with my husband, I have pain and get tired easily and I think I am pregnant. I am thinking, Oh my God, what’s happen[ing]? I am going to websites and they say maybe you have this disease or you have this one; you don’t get the right answer.”

In Egypt, Islamic conservatives prefer to see such questions, and answers, kept within the family, and they promote the idea of parent training programs to teach mothers and fathers how to broach these topics. Yet there is growing evidence that at least some Egyptian parents are open to having others help teach their kids the facts of life.
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As one middle-class, middle-aged mother of three in Cairo confided to me, “I married at eighteen, and my husband and I knew nothing. He bought a book on the day of our wedding, and was reading it until our marriage [ceremony], but he didn’t know what to do. We read it together, and it took us ten days to get it done. I don’t want my daughter to have this, so yes, in schools, it is a good idea when she is older; of course, only with other girls in the class.” Egypt already has a number of pilot projects to communicate adolescent “life skills,” among them sexual and reproductive health in after-school sessions across the country.
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But research from around the world shows that the most effective means of getting this information to young people in schools is to incorporate it into comprehensive curricula over a number of years.
¹⁹
When Egypt’s new order is ready to travel down this road, it should consider the trail blazed in the one place it is least likely to look: Israel.

Safa Tamish is a Palestinian who divides her time between Haifa, in Israel, and Ramallah, in the West Bank. She’s the founder of Muntada Jensaneya, known in English as the Arab Forum for Sexuality, Education and Health.
²⁰
In the Arab world, it’s a bold stroke to put “sexuality” on your letterhead, especially if you’re a woman. But Tamish is not easily fazed by convention. “I speak
loudly about sexual topics in a very open way that is really not used to the Arab ears,” she told me. “I am too much direct. Too much talking about things in their [rightful] name.”

The name of the game for Muntada is sexuality education—not just cut-and-dried reproduction but the messiness of love and intimacy, pleasure and protection, sexual diversity and development. “We’re not hiding and we’re not saying that it’s family education. It’s sex education. For the first time [people] can really discuss sexuality in a respect[ful], open manner. We are putting everything on the table,” says Tamish.
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Muntada’s approach to communication is as unconventional as its subject matter. Case in point is one of its main initiatives—getting sexuality education into Arab schools in Israel. Tamish, who has a degree in sexuality education from the United States, is skeptical that in her part of the world a standardized curriculum can work—and certainly not if it’s imported or directly modeled on one from the West. “What the Arab schools in Israel have is a translated version of the things they do for Israeli schools, for the Jewish schools, which are not sensitive to the Arab culture. For example, to make a choice to have sex or not to have sex. There is a whole unit on this issue.… I cannot put it in a curriculum, because no principal [of an Arab-Israeli school] will accept it: ‘What, are you giving them the choice to have sex or not? [In] grade nine or ten?’ ”

Muntada’s approach gets to the point, but in an indirect fashion. Two of the biggest hurdles to discussing sexuality in the classroom are parents and teachers. To deal with the first, Tamish and her colleagues go into schools with anonymous questionnaires to elicit students’ most pressing concerns. Their questions are carefully worded, without a hint of sex about them—“kosher” is how she describes them. The same, however, cannot be said of kids’ responses. “We say [in the questionnaire], for example, ‘What are the topics related to puberty that you would like to know more?’ All what you can dream of that is related to sexuality will be written to those questions—everything, everything. Contraceptives, masturbation, love, intercourse, pregnancy, changes among girls in puberty, boys kissing, French kissing—everything you can imagine,
they could write. We are not opening their minds; they know and they put these things.”

The next step is to help schools prepare for meeting the parents. When authorities mention that they are planning to introduce sexuality education, the parental response is predictable: if you open kids’ eyes to this subject, the next thing you know, they’ll be fornicating wildly. At this point, Tamish and her team intervene: “ ‘Well, we just wanted to share with you the information we collected from the kids,’ ” they say to parents. “And we put everything in a PowerPoint [presentation], and they get shocked. ‘What? Our kids, they wrote this?’ They make this shift from yes-no to ‘How are we going to do it?’ This is amazing.” In Tamish’s experience, the power of this homegrown evidence is so strong that parents actually want to pitch in. “This is not something I imported from the U.S.,” she says, “it is something happening in the Palestinian society, and it makes them feel responsible. And then they start to participate in the discussion. In most of the schools, the parents ask for at least four to five [training] sessions; they want to learn: ‘When the kids come back home and they ask us a question, we don’t want to be idiots.’ ”