Sex and the Citadel (25 page)

While parents are being primed, school staff members are also being groomed to develop their own curriculum and make them more comfortable with the subject matter, which in turn makes students less embarrassed. Nor are sexual matters confined to biology class; Tamish recalls how one literature teacher in a school in East Jerusalem used a lesson on
ghazal
—classical Arabic love poetry—to broach the phenomenon of
‘urfi
marriage between female students and sweet-talking taxi drivers looking for sex. “What is important is not the [classroom] activity,” says Tamish. “What is important is the attitude of the teacher when he or she goes into the class.… I believe from my experience the song does not really matter; it is the singer who matters.”

A decade ago, Muntada had difficulty convincing Arab schools in Israel to take on sexuality education; now there’s a waiting list of institutions wanting its assistance. This is a long way from where Tamish started. Her first job, as a nurse in a village school in Galilee,
in northern Israel, was a sudden plunge into the deep end of what would become her calling. “There was a girl who was twelve years old … and she was found pregnant in her eighth month. And from the investigation they found out that six kids from the same school raped her and convinced her they were playing and she shouldn’t say anything about it to anybody. That was in the year 1990. The whole village was in total shock,” she recalled. “I came to the school one or two days after this story came out. The principal did not allow any of the teachers to talk about the issue in the school. I opposed, and he said we are a conservative society. And I said, ‘A conservative society who have pregnant girls and rapists?’ ”

Tamish convinced school officials to meet with parents, and from this traumatic start came her approach to talking through tough sexual issues. Life is far from easy for Arabs living in Israel, but Tamish readily admits Muntada could not have started without the country’s institutional framework, which mandates sex education, among other sexual rights. “I don’t say it in a shy way. I left the West Bank because it was not institutionalized and priorities were different back then; on the other hand, there was a lot to do. In the West Bank when I trained counselors and the rates of reported sexual abuse among students were raised, they stopped the program. They said, ‘She [Tamish] is opening doors we cannot close,’ and they finished the whole project. In Israel, if you are a counselor and you are faced with a sexual abuse case and you don’t report it, you will be in prison. This [system] is something I use to the extreme.”

For many Muntada participants, the program is a life-changing experience. Parents describe their delight at getting closer to their kids as a result of their newfound ease with personal matters, and participants talk about how home life has been transformed by husbands and wives feeling comfortable enough to hug each other in front of the family. Simple information is itself powerful: for those brought up in the shadows of sex, a clear presentation of the facts of life is a real eye-opener. And not just for women either; although men have more freedom to talk about sex, they rarely do so in mixed company, which leaves them largely in the dark about female sexuality. Muntada’s training sessions, which put
men and women in the same room, are a revelation, according to male participants.

Language also makes a difference. Tamish insists that Muntada’s work be conducted in Arabic. For some Israeli Arabs, Hebrew or English is a much more comfortable language for discussing sexual matters. For example, new participants will use
min orali
(Hebrew for “oral sex”) and
orgazma
instead of the respective Arabic terms,
jins fammii
and
nashwa jinsiyya
. “When you say the word, to be able to say the word freely, it’s fifty percent of the work,” says one woman, a social worker from Haifa. “Why [do] I choose to speak about a dick in Hebrew not in Arabic? It must show something about my attitude toward things.”
²²

Some participants lack even this choice, because they simply do not know the Arabic for many of the topics under discussion. Part of Muntada’s name—Jensaneya, which translates to “sexuality”—is a relatively new coinage that is not widely used, or even understood, by Arabic speakers. Even more basic terminology is problematic; until attending Muntada’s training courses, some participants were simply unaware that there are, indeed, Arabic words for female genitalia, having been taught to consider such subjects shameful beyond discussion. Even for those who do know some terms in Arabic, it is often in language so crude as to be unusable off the street.

This is a far cry from the days of the
Encyclopedia of Pleasure
and the golden age of Arabic writing on sex. One tenth-century book,
The Language of Fucking
, for example, mentions more than a thousand verbs for having sex.
²³
Then there are the seemingly endless lexicons for sexual positions, responses, and organs of every size, shape, and distinguishing feature. That linguistic wealth is long gone. Part of Muntada’s mission is to give participants a new vocabulary with which to discuss sexuality openly, overcoming the double whammy of unease about the subject and embarrassment at the language. The fact that it’s Arabic is a boost to the cultural—and, some would argue, political—identity of what is a minority population in Israel.

Times are changing, and Muntada is now reaching out to neighboring
countries, where local groups are keen to learn from its experience, as well as working directly in the West Bank, providing sexuality education for social workers and other professionals. There, Tamish has seen a dramatic change in Muntada’s participants since the Arab uprisings, their reticence on sexuality suddenly melting away. “It’s as if each Arab person has so many layers of limitation and barriers that when you start to get rid of the external layers like the political, you feel the ventilation touches your deep soul,” she notes. “The political thing gave them the urge to talk about their sexual liberation.” And that, in turn, has reinforced their drive to tackle political concerns. “My sexual freedom begins with my family,” Tamish observes. “But if I don’t win the battle with my father, I cannot win it with Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas] and with the occupation.”

It’s this connection between the personal and the political that makes sexuality education more than just a sideshow to Egypt’s change in the coming decade. Suppressing facts and opinions in the classroom is a form of censorship, which the upheavals of 2011 vowed to fight in the political sphere to bring an end to secrecy and the control of information—although it is clear, in the ensuing order, that this change will be some time in coming. Freedom requires thinking, and that will take a different sort of teacher—one who is not afraid to share knowledge and answer tough questions. It also demands a different kind of student. Sexuality education that conveys accurate information, encourages personal responsibility, teaches reciprocity, promotes equality, respects diversity, and rewards the free expression of ideas is as good a training ground as any for both teachers and students alike.

There is nothing un-Islamic about teaching people about sex, including its pleasures; quite the contrary, in fact. Beyond questions of morality and hygiene, sexuality education is about trust—trusting young people with information, trusting them to make responsible decisions for themselves, trusting them to respect the rights and needs of others. If youth across the Arab world are mature enough to lead their societies into political revolt, and gain
their elders’ admiration for it, then surely they are ready for the unvarnished facts of life.

MISSED CONCEPTIONS

Information isn’t the only item in short supply. For youth who gravitate into the darker social orbits of sex outside marriage, protection is also a problem. Take contraception, for example. Like most medications in Egypt, the Pill is easy to buy—if you’re a young person bold enough to face down disapproving pharmacists. No doctor’s prescription required: just hand over the cash (around EGP 15, or USD 2.50) and walk away with a month’s worth of pills. One of my unmarried Egyptian friends gets her supply delivered to the door, like pizza, no questions asked. Unfortunately, easy availability is not matched by ready knowledge: my friend was ill the first time she took the Pill because she had no idea what kind to buy or how to use it.
²⁴

Questions of
zina
aside, contraception per se is not forbidden in Islam. The Qur’an makes no mention of it, so it was left to Islamic scholars to come up with the rules, based in large part on hadiths. Some of these dealt with
‘azl
, or coitus interruptus, a common method at the time of the Prophet and one he is said to have permitted. Some devout Muslims eschew contraception on the advice of their local shaykh, who might quote the following hadith: “Reproduce for I am going to boast about you among other nations on the Day of Judgment.” But plenty of religious scholars through the ages have questioned the authenticity of this particular hadith and of other sayings of the Prophet invoked to prohibit birth control, and have argued the contrary.
²⁵
And so contraception came to be permitted in the four main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence that emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries as well as the principal schools of Shi’i legal thought.
²⁶
Sterilization of healthy individuals, on the other hand, is a contentious issue in Islam. Some authorities allow it; others forbid it as a violation of shari’a, which
enjoins believers to preserve the self, religion, reason, property, and procreation. The upshot is that sterilization is extremely unpopular in Egypt: scarcely 1 percent of married women opt for it, and it is vanishingly rare among men.
²⁷

Although Islamic debates on contraception sprang up around the singularly male technique of withdrawal, the vast majority of lotions, potions, and other contraceptive methods developed through the ages, and discussed in such exhaustive detail in the likes of the
Encyclopedia of Pleasure
, are for women. Today, birth control is seen as a female responsibility, which is problematic for single women. Such is the stigma associated with women taking the plunge before marriage, let alone planning for it with adequate contraception, that few unmarried women use protection.
²⁸
While men have more scope for sex before tying the knot, this license does not translate into a greater willingness to step into the breach on contraception. Condoms (
al waqi al thakari
, literally “the male protective,” or
tops
, as they are called in Egypt) are spectacularly unpopular. Like their counterparts the world over, Egyptian men complain that condoms are uncomfortable and reduce sexual pleasure.

The bigger problem, though, is that condoms are associated with
zina
across the Arab world. In Egypt, for example, only 2 percent of married couples use them—and not so much for family planning, in my experience, as to deal with some of the complications associated with intercourse.
²⁹
Among them is a fear of coming into contact with menstrual blood, and the Islamic requirement that both partners wash after intercourse, making them popular with women who have spent hours at the beauty salon and don’t want to muss their hair and makeup with a postcoital shower.
³⁰

Conventional wisdom holds that if you’re buying condoms, you must be having sex outside of marriage, and that is haram—a further deterrent to purchasers. “Please, God, split the earth in two and drop me in and close it up right away,” one twentysomething Egyptian condom marketer laughed, recalling the first time he bought condoms in a Cairo pharmacy and met with the pharmacist’s withering glance. Ironically, most men don’t appear to be using condoms for
zina
either. Anywhere the question has
been asked—Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, for example—survey findings are much the same: Arab men (and presumably women too, despite their reticence) are having sex outside of marriage, and when they do, condoms are generally not part of the program.
³¹
The results can be seen in clinics across the Arab world. Sexually transmitted infections are a concern to public health experts in the region, and are in all likelihood more common than available statistics reflect, since few countries have systematic, nationwide surveillance. STIs and HIV are thought to be the second-leading cause of death from infectious disease in adults aged fifteen to forty-four in the region.
³²
And while the prevalence of HIV is still low in the general population, the Middle East and North Africa is among the few regions in the world where new infections, and deaths from AIDS-related causes, are still rising. Upward of half of HIV infections reported in the majority of Arab countries are the result of sexual transmission, a route which hits unsuspecting wives hard.
³³

In Egypt, there have been creative, albeit discreet, attempts to boost condom use. Some of the most innovative have come from DKT International, a leading supplier of subsidized family planning and HIV prevention tools in the developing world. DKT, which has been using social marketing to promote condoms in Egypt, sells brightly colored, sprightly flavored “luxury” sheaths at rock-bottom prices. It has also launched clever campaigns to decouple condoms from
zina
by pitching them to married folk, trying to shift responsibility for family planning from wives to husbands as part of the revolutionary we’re-all-one-Egypt zeitgeist, and to link condoms to notions of what it is to be a “real man.”