Sex and the Citadel Read Online Free
Author: Shereen El Feki
appearance and private reality.
In the West, there is—and I am, of course, generalizing here—a greater overlap between the public and private faces of sexual life than in Egypt and its neighbors. Indeed, you only have to watch reality TV, poke around on Facebook, or scan your incoming tweets to wonder if the distinction exists at all. There seems to be, in many quarters, a compulsion to broadcast one’s sexual self: far better to come out than be caught out. As Michel Foucault wrote in his famous history of Western sexuality: “Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex … an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about.” 3
Foucault theorized that sex, far from being repressed in the nineteenth century, was actually alive and kicking, channeled and proliferated in a medical and scientific discourse he called scientia sexualis . Central to the emergence of this new way of thinking and talking about sex, in his opinion, was an age-old institution: the confessional. Christian confession, an obligation of faith, always had a high sexual content, but around the sixteenth century, so Foucault argued, it gradually detached itself from the sacred and migrated into secular fields, like medicine and psychiatry. Foucault didn’t live to see Oprah or YouPorn, but it’s clear that the spirit of confession lives on in our world of 24/7 media.
Islam, however, lacks a culture of confession. Both the Qur’an and hadiths enjoin believers to mind their own business and keep quiet. Enshrining and enforcing the right to privacy is key to progress on human rights, particularly for those whose behaviors, including commercial sex work and same-sex relations, do not conform to social norms. As we’ve seen, Islam—with its emphasis on privacy—can provide a helping hand, and any future government that looks to Islam as a foundation of its constitutions and laws needs to be firmly reminded of this fact.
A respect for privacy, and an Islamic duty to protect the community from “wrong,” however defined, needs to be balanced with freedom of expression. As we’ve seen throughout these pages, there are certainly those across the region who are forging a path between silence and exposure. They have found what Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, whom we met in chapter 1, called a way of speaking about sex “in the propriety of the Qur’an”—or rather, rediscovered it. The long history of Arabic writing is a master class in the ease with which Arab culture once treated its sexual life.
Part of that comfort was the generation and communication of sexual knowledge. As we’ve seen, the study of sexuality—and sociology in general—has been hampered in Egypt and in much of the Arab region by both official and self-censorship. A clearer view of the sexual lives of Egyptians would ultimately benefit Egyptians themselves: those trying to understand and halt the spread of HIV or stem the tide of sexual violence; those advocating sexual education or a more liberal stance on abortion; those arguing for tolerance of same-sex relations. The precedent of the power of sexual information lies in the West: the landmark Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality in 1940s and ’50s, whose authority even the Islamic arch-conservative Sayyid Qutb scathingly acknowledged. These studies opened a statistical window on the very private lives of Americans in a way that transformed public understanding of sexual behavior. People could no longer argue that premarital sex, same-sex relations, and masturbation were deviations tucked away at the margins of society after Kinsey’s studies of thousands of their fellow citizens showed these to be mainstream pursuits.
Kinsey passionately believed that knowledge would liberate people from the guilt and unhappiness induced by what one of his contemporaries called the “hush and pretend” culture of American society. For all their methodological flaws, his studies allowed the public
In the West, there is—and I am, of course, generalizing here—a greater overlap between the public and private faces of sexual life than in Egypt and its neighbors. Indeed, you only have to watch reality TV, poke around on Facebook, or scan your incoming tweets to wonder if the distinction exists at all. There seems to be, in many quarters, a compulsion to broadcast one’s sexual self: far better to come out than be caught out. As Michel Foucault wrote in his famous history of Western sexuality: “Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the talking sex … an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about.” 3
Foucault theorized that sex, far from being repressed in the nineteenth century, was actually alive and kicking, channeled and proliferated in a medical and scientific discourse he called scientia sexualis . Central to the emergence of this new way of thinking and talking about sex, in his opinion, was an age-old institution: the confessional. Christian confession, an obligation of faith, always had a high sexual content, but around the sixteenth century, so Foucault argued, it gradually detached itself from the sacred and migrated into secular fields, like medicine and psychiatry. Foucault didn’t live to see Oprah or YouPorn, but it’s clear that the spirit of confession lives on in our world of 24/7 media.
Islam, however, lacks a culture of confession. Both the Qur’an and hadiths enjoin believers to mind their own business and keep quiet. Enshrining and enforcing the right to privacy is key to progress on human rights, particularly for those whose behaviors, including commercial sex work and same-sex relations, do not conform to social norms. As we’ve seen, Islam—with its emphasis on privacy—can provide a helping hand, and any future government that looks to Islam as a foundation of its constitutions and laws needs to be firmly reminded of this fact.
A respect for privacy, and an Islamic duty to protect the community from “wrong,” however defined, needs to be balanced with freedom of expression. As we’ve seen throughout these pages, there are certainly those across the region who are forging a path between silence and exposure. They have found what Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, whom we met in chapter 1, called a way of speaking about sex “in the propriety of the Qur’an”—or rather, rediscovered it. The long history of Arabic writing is a master class in the ease with which Arab culture once treated its sexual life.
Part of that comfort was the generation and communication of sexual knowledge. As we’ve seen, the study of sexuality—and sociology in general—has been hampered in Egypt and in much of the Arab region by both official and self-censorship. A clearer view of the sexual lives of Egyptians would ultimately benefit Egyptians themselves: those trying to understand and halt the spread of HIV or stem the tide of sexual violence; those advocating sexual education or a more liberal stance on abortion; those arguing for tolerance of same-sex relations. The precedent of the power of sexual information lies in the West: the landmark Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality in 1940s and ’50s, whose authority even the Islamic arch-conservative Sayyid Qutb scathingly acknowledged. These studies opened a statistical window on the very private lives of Americans in a way that transformed public understanding of sexual behavior. People could no longer argue that premarital sex, same-sex relations, and masturbation were deviations tucked away at the margins of society after Kinsey’s studies of thousands of their fellow citizens showed these to be mainstream pursuits.
Kinsey passionately believed that knowledge would liberate people from the guilt and unhappiness induced by what one of his contemporaries called the “hush and pretend” culture of American society. For all their methodological flaws, his studies allowed the public
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