Sex and the Citadel (4 page)

My Egyptian friends under forty are astonished by this history. Having been brought up on American movies, then music videos, and now the Internet—all post-sexual revolution—they simply cannot believe that Western society was once as conservative about sexual matters as theirs is now. The parallels are striking; taboos against premarital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, unwed motherhood, abortion, and a culture of censorship and silence, preached by religion and enforced by social convention, are as strong in today’s Arab world as they were in my mother’s youth.

But they are equally surprised when I tell them stories from my father’s youth in Cairo of the 1930s to ’50s or regale them with my Egyptian grandmother’s riper sayings—anecdotes and proverbs that weave through this book and reflect sexual attitudes and antics not far off Flaubert’s descriptions, however much anti-Orientalists might protest. “What is fascinating is that our Arab ancestors were not like us, and their attitude about sex was one full of freedom and openness,” wrote Salah al-Din al-Munajjid, one of the first modern Arab historians to take a good look at the region’s sexual heritage, comparing even my father’s day to ages past. “They were never
embarrassed when speaking about women and about sex or when writing about them. I believe that this great freedom of theirs is the cause of this strictness we find today.”
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DECLINE AND FALL

What accounts for this reaction? How did the Arab world get itself into such a twist over sex? In search of answers, I went to see the man who quite literally wrote the book on the subject. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisian sociologist, is best known for his 1975 work,
Sexuality in Islam
. There had certainly been books on the subject before, and there have been plenty since, but Bouhdiba’s work is arguably the most popular, translated into more than half a dozen languages.

Through his reading of the Qur’an and hadiths—accounts of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad—and other sources, Bouhdiba argued that matters of the flesh in general and sexuality in particular are not just compatible with Islam but essential elements of faith. “The exercise of sexuality was a prayer, a gift of oneself, an act of charity,” he wrote. “To rediscover the meaning of sexuality is to rediscover the meaning of God, and conversely.”
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But somewhere along the line, Arabs lost this spiritual dimension: “This open sexuality, practised in joy with a view to the fulfillment of being, gradually gave way to a close, morose, repressed sexuality.… Furtive, secretive, hypocritical behavior assumed an ever more exorbitant place.… All freshness, all spontaneity were eventually crushed as if by some steamroller.”
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To get back on track—politically, socially, economically, and spiritually, as well as sexually—Bouhdiba reckons a dramatic rethink is in order: “To emerge from this malaise we must at all costs rediscover the sense of sexuality, that is to say, the sense of the dialogue with the other partner, and the sense of the faith, that is to say, the sense of the dialogue with God.… For sexuality properly performed is tantamount to freedom assumed.”
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In his brown corduroy trousers and houndstooth jacket, with
a neatly knotted tie and clipped grizzled hair, Bouhdiba doesn’t come across as a sexual radical. He looks and sounds, with his carefully chosen words and thoughtful pauses, more like a university professor—which is exactly what he was before he retired. “I am not a man of provocation.… My style is restrained, a style in which I say shocking things, but with a lot of discretion,” he told me. It has proved a successful formula:
Sexuality in Islam
was well received, even in the Arab region. For all the book’s academic acclaim, Bouhdiba’s most gratifying review came from an unexpected quarter. “I was at Djerba [in southern Tunisia],” he recalled, “waiting to leave for Tripoli [in Libya] by boat. Someone said, ‘Bouhdiba? Author of
Sexuality in Islam
?’ and began to embrace me. He was a professor at the University of Sarajevo. He said he had translated my book by candlelight, with a rifle in one hand and a pen in the other. He sold two thousand copies in fifteen days. He said, ‘I found two things in the book: pride in our belonging to an open religion and a joie de vivre—two things we badly need today.’ ”

As Bouhdiba points out, both were in ample supply during the Abbasid Empire, whose golden age lasted from the eighth to the tenth centuries and whose power once stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to the borders of India. Baghdad, its capital, saw a flourishing of Arab thought and culture the likes of which the region has yet to see again. The city was home to Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), a famous library, and its scholars helped to rescue the classics of Greek and Persian thought from oblivion. The giants of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, and engineering of the age provided broad shoulders on which subsequent generations would stand. The Abbasid period was a time of lively religious debate, when several of the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence (
fiqh
), the foundation stones of law in the Arab world, were established and when independent religious interpretation (
ijtihad
) flourished. The arts blossomed—including works of a highly sexual nature.

There is a long and distinguished history of Arabic writing on sex—literature, poetry, medical treatises, self-help manuals—which has slipped out of sight in much of the Arab world. Many
of these great works were by religious figures who saw nothing incompatible between faith and sex. Indeed, it behooved these men of learning to have as full a knowledge of sexual practices and problems as they did of the intricacies of Islam. There is nothing academic about their writing: with surprising frankness, and often disarming humor, these works cover almost every sexual subject, and then some. There is precious little in
Playboy, Cosmopolitan, The Joy of Sex
, or any other taboo-busting work of the sexual revolution and beyond that this literature didn’t touch on over a millennium ago.

Bouhdiba sees this sexual open-mindedness as part and parcel of the intellectual blossoming of the age. At their zenith in the early Abbasid period, the Arabs were a confident and creative people, and open thinking on sexuality was a reflection of this. “It was not a coincidence that at the height of Islamic culture there was a flowering of sexuality,” Bouhdiba says. “It is a synthesis of all domains. The rehabilitation of sexuality is the rehabilitation of science within the rehabilitation of Islam.” Today, however, there is a deep vein of denial that these elements are connected, and plenty of people who want to pick and choose their history, taking what is now considered the respectable face of the Arab golden age—science and technology, for example—and leaving the rest behind. But Bouhdiba believes these facets are inseparable.

It’s easy to read too much into Arabic erotic literature. Did its openness really represent society at large, or just the notions of the sexually sophisticated elite? After all, many of the most famous books of Arabic erotica were written for rulers. Bouhdiba is convinced that these books say something more broadly about the spirit of the age. He invokes religion to illustrate his point: “These elites were never denounced by the masses; their societies accepted them more or less, maybe not actively but passively. It’s a little like Sufism, which represented an elite but was eventually accepted. Sometimes they were treated as heretics, sometimes they were whipped, but at the end of the day, they represented a deep current in society.” There’s no doubt in Bouhdiba’s mind that these works
were widely consumed: “These books were written for princes; they circulated among the people.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, such frank and often celebratory writing on sexuality had all but dried up. Bouhdiba believes this sexual hibernation is just one element of a broader intellectual decline that gained momentum during the colonial period: “Since Bonaparte, we’ve witnessed a negative evolution of Muslim societies. Especially over the past half century, since the collapse of Nasserism and nationalism [following the defeat of Arab forces in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel], our societies have been on the defensive, in the process of closing in on themselves,” he notes, especially so when it comes to the key elements of family, women, and home.

There’s an expression in Egypt that neatly sums up this state of affairs:
‘uqdit al-khawaga
, or foreigner complex. It’s a feeling of inferiority to the West, and it took off in 1798, when Napoleon invaded Egypt. In an operation reminiscent of the 2003 war in Iraq, Napoleon came to Egypt promising to liberate a people oppressed by a cruel and capricious military dictatorship—in this case, an imported military caste called the Mamluks. The Mamluks were supremely confident of victory over the French: after all, the last encounter they recalled with Europe—the Crusades—did not end well for the visiting team. This time around, however, the French, with their superior technology and tactics, crushed the Mamluks in what could best be described as “shock and awe.” Although things rapidly unraveled for Napoleon after that, this victory on Arab soil marked a new phase of engagement, in which the Arab world rapidly lost ground to the West, with waves of European colonial expansion that began with the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and washed over Egypt in 1882 with British occupation.

In asking themselves why Europe was in the ascendant, Arab thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to wonder if their proclivities—especially homosexuality—were connected to their descent. The Abbasid dynasty, once masters of the Islamic universe, lost their grip by the tenth century; while
some of these writers saw its sexual ease as a symptom of decline and fall, others considered it a direct cause.
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As Arab intellectuals came to see themselves through foreign eyes, some historians argue, they also started to rewrite their own sexual history according to a European script.
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This rewriting gained pace with the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism. The foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood—by Hassan al-Banna in 1920s Egypt—was, in large part, a response to colonial occupation, and again invoked sexual immorality as one of the reasons for the country’s slide. Al-Banna believed that Egypt had lost its independence because its people had lost their way from Islam and that the only way forward was a return to shari‘a, or Islamic law. Islamism, in its many modern strains, takes a hard line on sexuality, often framing it in opposition to the West. One man who helped to shape these views was Sayyid Qutb, a teacher and writer who joined the Brotherhood in the 1950s and quickly rose to prominence. He fell from grace, along with the rest of the Brotherhood, during the era of President Gamal Abdel Nasser; Qutb was imprisoned and eventually hanged in 1966.

While behind bars, Qutb wrote a number of books that became manifestos for some of the brands of red-hot Islamic fundamentalism to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. His ideas have traveled farther than his name. You may have never heard of Qutb, but you are probably familiar with his thinking, thanks to al-Qaeda; Ayman al-Zawahiri, éminence grise of the organization and successor to Osama bin Laden, was deeply influenced by Qutb’s work.

While Qutb’s views were forged in the crucible of Nasser’s prisons, they were informed by a trip to America in the late 1940s. As a staunch opponent of British rule in Egypt, Qutb was suspicious of Europeans and their influence on Egyptian culture and values long before he ever set foot in the West. His visit to America gave him a firsthand look at a Western society, and the more he saw of it, the more it confirmed his views. “America is not special, but a branch from the satanic tree and the corrupt plant,” he wrote to friends back in Egypt in 1949.
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In a blaze of fiery criticism that swept through letters, articles, and books, Qutb lambasted American “primitiveness”—a base, savage society devoid of any spiritual or moral foundation and obsessed with material gain. Qutb was appalled by the sexual freedom—“licentiousness,” as he called it—of Americans, which greeted him the moment he set sail. En route to New York, a beautiful, scantily clad, and highly intoxicated woman appeared at his cabin door looking for somewhere to spend the night. “Her bodily charms were very tempting,” said Qutb, but her invitation came hot on the heels of his shipboard embrace of greater Islamic devotion, so Qutb cast her aside.
³²

Such sexual adventures continued on land. Even in Greeley, Colorado, the small town he visited, young women had open ideas about sex, as one college student enlightened him: “The sex question is not a question of morals, it is only a biological question. And when we look at it from this angle, we discover that using words like sin and virtue, good and bad in describing this is putting it in the wrong place; and if you do that, it seems very amusing to us.”
³³
For his part, Qutb was more aghast than amused. Everywhere he turned, he saw bodies on display: men showing off their muscles, and women flaunting their assets. Even the churches, according to Qutb, were banking on sex. Pastors were keen on the regular attendance of pretty girls to bring in the boys and fill up the pews, and at church dances “arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.”
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Not only was such activity far from halal (that is, permitted under Islamic law) in Qutb’s opinion, the American approach to sex also stripped it of its moral and spiritual dimensions, reducing it to a physical sensation, like everything else in that material-mad society. The upshot of such debauchery, he predicted, was the “complete extinction” of America: families torn apart by divorce and the young addled by drugs, booze, and sexual “deviance,” leading to wholesale depopulation as reproduction ground to a halt. “I have seen films which talk about jungle life … the males jumping on the females and females jumping on the males, couple by couple, and group by group … this big sex-mad forest, these feverish
bodies and hungry looks, animal fun,” he wrote. “It is exactly here in America as in the jungle, except the jungle is not full of factories, labs, schools and bars.”
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