Sex and the Citadel (46 page)

Eventually, though, these uprisings may catalyze greater democratization of personal relationships—what one British sociologist famously called the “transformation of intimacy.”
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Free and equal relations among individuals are not only key to sexual rights but
are also the cornerstone of political democracy; by leveling hierarchies, accepting differences, and respecting individual choices in the one, you help to foster the same in the other.

Media—new and old—is one tool of this transformation. Much has been made of its power in catalyzing the Arab uprisings. As we’ve seen, long before the upheavals took place, the culture of disclosure and the discussion it fostered on sexual taboos—premarital sex, same-sex relations, sexual violence—became a comparatively safe space (safer, that is, than politics) for some to tilt against received wisdom and bring hidden lives to light. When mass revolt finally took hold, the Internet, satellite TV, and mobile telephones challenged—and eventually undermined—regimes’ attempts to keep a lock on information.

Today, as writers, filmmakers, and artists negotiate the possibilities of greater political freedom, including freedom of expression, they too are asking how far they can go in breaking taboos. Certainly people, myself included, feel much freer to speak their minds after the uprisings. The limits of such expression are not just a matter of what new laws may or may not allow but of what society will accept in the new climate—and of how fast years of self-censorship will fall away. How close can artists now hold the mirror to their country’s sexual life, and how might this public reflection influence private behaviors? This is more than a question of artistic freedom: it has real implications for the health and welfare of Arab societies. When it comes to sexually transmitted infections, or abortion, or sexual violence, finding a comfortable way to talk about sex—its problems and its pleasures—transcends popular notions of propriety or morality.

Traditionally, religion and culture have encouraged people in the region to keep private matters under wraps. “All my nation will be forgiven except those who boast about theirs sins,” the Prophet Muhammad observed in a well-known hadith. For those a little vague on this point, he offered clarification: “Included among the boasters is the man who does something at night, and in the morning, although he has been covered by God [from exposure] he says,
‘Hey, man, last night I did such and such.’ Although he slept, veiled by God, in the morning, he unveils God’s protection from himself.”
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Across the Arab world, there remains a sizable gulf between appearance and reality, between what is practiced in private and what is admitted to in public. Homes mirror lives: immaculate salons to impress the visitors, but far-from-sightly backrooms concealed from general view. There’s a word for this, doing one thing in private and another in public: “hypocrisy.” Men free to have sex before marriage, but women expected to be intact; virginity defined by anatomy, not chastity; sex tourism masquerading as marriage; travelers who make a great show of their piety at home, but who waste no time in breaking every rule once abroad and far from the eyes of their fellow countrymen; and many more instances of the gap between public 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.”
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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 discussion of sexuality to move to different ground, away from salaciousness and sermonizing to a sober discussion of scientific facts. Kinsey made talking about sex respectable. Although his findings and conclusions met with considerable resistance, his research paved the way for an eventual shift in attitudes. As one of his colleagues remarked, “The times were changing anyway, but I think he helped to change the times.”
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In Egypt today, there are plenty of researchers willing to catalyze such a shift. But it has been hard for them to find formal training and to get approval from universities or government departments to undertake large-scale studies; and even when they have the green light, results have often been hidden away. This culture of concealment—and not just on sexual matters—has been compounded by a reluctance of individuals and organizations to cooperate and collaborate, arguably a by-product of the general climate of suspicion and distrust and the every-family-for-itself mentality engendered by decades of political repression. As a result, researchers and activists are busy reinventing the wheel, unaware of the excellent work being done across the region, or even across town.

Promoting research, and the open exchange of information, is key to new thinking. It begins with words—reclaiming Arabic as a language of sexuality, as many of the writers and educators in this book are trying to do. It is not enough for Egypt and its Arab neighbors to walk out of U.N. meetings, or to rail against Western values or deny their problems back home. “Just say no” is not the way forward. What is desperately needed in the Arab region is a coherent, positive intellectual framework for sexuality. Arab thinkers once had a worldview of sex that accommodated both religion and science and that fit their age, but there is no going back; their twenty-first-century successors urgently need to develop their own, one that makes sense for our time.

Such a framework would allow a more systematic approach to addressing sexuality. At the moment, the only time sex gets a public hearing is when tragedy strikes or scandal unfolds. The medicalization of sex, through disease or dysfunction, is providing a respectable cover for public discussion, but it is also limiting, leaving out a vast range of issues and groups that a broader conception of sexuality would allow. The challenge here is to turn sex from a problem that needs to be solved to a source of pleasure and creativity.

Key to changing attitudes on gender and sexuality on the ground is a vibrant and independent civil society, with both the freedom to act and the support of government and communities. There are plenty of pioneering initiatives across the Arab region, a few of which are highlighted in these pages. The trouble is in scaling up these projects so they can have the impact they deserve. While better networking is important, steady and substantial funding is key. Times are tough, however: Western governments and philanthropic bodies are cutting back on funding in many fields—HIV and family planning, for instance—putting many excellent projects in the region at risk.

Matters have not been helped by aspects of so-called “aid conditionality,” in which donors, such as America and Britain, link their funding to domestic reform on policies or practices toward LGBT populations, and other sexual rights. Unfortunately, such a stance serves to reinforce the prejudice that these initiatives are foreign implants. New local sources of funding are desperately needed to sustain and expand the excellent work already under way. Wealthy Gulf states certainly have deep pockets, but they also have their own agendas. Getting them and others to fund programs in, say, sexuality may seem a little optimistic, but it is not inconceivable; as we’ve seen in the cases of sexual harassment and sexual education, for example, it is possible to package even the most awkward issue with a 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-inferiority
complex, 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.