Sex and the Citadel Read Online Free Page B

label that makes it look like a gift, not a burden.
    This is, I admit, a rosy view from a liberal Muslim woman’s perspective of how sexual life might develop in Egypt and the wider Arab region in the coming decades. There are those, I know,who fear that the unexpected upheaval in the political order and attendant rise of Islamism will move countries further away from freedom, accountability, openness, and equality and toward religiously sanctioned reaction, and that the socially imposed restrictions of recent decades—particularly on women and youth—will gain greater force as the formal law of the land. My sense, however, is that Egyptians, when given a free hand, will eventually make their way back to a more pragmatic, forgiving, and frankly joyful interpretation of their religion—be they Muslim or Christian. This homecoming was clear in the 2011 protests, where personal piety was clearly on display in the millions of protesters who bowed down in public prayer but whose uprising was essentially political, not religious.
    As the West urges Egypt and its neighbors toward democracy, it is tempting to project its own past onto the future of the Arab region and to see organized religion as an obstacle to sexual rights; after all, the rise of the sexual revolution in the West came as the sun set on the power of the church. This is not the situation in the Arab world. Even if the power of political Islam wanes, as it well may, after the coming trials and tribulations of trying to govern as complex a country as Egypt, faith will remain as strong—but more a matter of personal belief than public policy, I hope, and more about substance than appearance. Despite the concerns of sexual rights advocates who want to see religion out of the bedroom, I don’t believe that religious adherence is a form of regression. As I have argued, sexual rights can be realized, and exercised, in an Islamic framework, so long as individuals have the freedom to think, and act, for themselves.
    There are still plenty who strongly oppose these views, who say that to talk openly about sex, to frankly face its problems and extol its pleasures, to consider the inherent flexibility of marriage in Islam, to advocate a live-and-let-live approach to sexual diversity, is to sell out to the West. I disagree. For more than two centuries, from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt to the 1967 defeat by Israel to the war in Iraq, Egypt has been carrying a hefty grudge-cum-inferioritycomplex, which has allowed conservative forces to reject so-called Western social mores as a form of resistance. The irony is that so much of what they brand as dangerous foreign ideas were features of the Arab-Islamic world long before they were embraced by Western liberalism.
    I am hopeful that the uprisings that began this decade will eventually knock that chip off the Arab world’s shoulder. Those who rose up in the days of rage, whether or not they have yet succeeded in removing or reforming their sclerotic regimes, are rightly proud of their actions. The postupheaval paranoia and knee-jerk tendency to blame “suspicious foreign elements” for subsequent turmoil notwithstanding, this confidence will, in the long run, help to dispel some of that fear and suspicion of the West and allow people to appraise other ways of life with less prejudice. Young Egyptians, and their peers throughout the region, are aware of how Westerners lead their intimate lives; there are aspects they admire and aspire to and those they can do without. In a world of instant access, their choices are based on information, not ignorance—and it behooves outsiders, with grand visions of social, cultural, and sexual reform in the Arab region, to respect the different directions its people may choose to take.
    The world has turned since I set out, five years ago, to better understand the intimate lives of Egyptians, and in the process, better understand myself. My journey across the Arab region has certainly