Sex and the Citadel (5 page)

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Qutb’s framing of the West as a cesspit of sexual chaos and moral decay—a sort of reverse Orientalism—is echoed in the rhetoric of many Islamic conservatives today. To guard against such contamination, Qutb argued, Muslim societies must go back to the ways of the founding fathers of Islam, the
salaf—
or rather, an interpretation of the time of the Prophet.

Decades of dictatorship in Egypt have worked wonders to strengthen this conservative streak. People turned to Islam, and its social and political organizations, not only as a solace from the growing struggles of everyday life and a provider of the essential goods and services that the state singularly failed to supply, but also as a form of protest and an opportunity for civic engagement in a country whose political regime left little space for either. This culminated in the resounding victories of Islamist candidates in many of the region’s first elections after the uprisings, from parliaments to professional syndicates, in those countries that directly experienced insurrection—notably Egypt and Tunisia—as well as in some of those indirectly affected, including Morocco and Kuwait.

Understanding Islamism in its many forms is a science in itself. But in practical terms in post-Mubarak Egypt, it’s easiest to think of it in terms of strength and speed. The most obvious face is the extrastrong, ultrafast Salafi movement, which has been gaining ground in Egypt over the past few decades but officially “came out” after the 2011 uprising, beards and face veils flowing. These men and women are in a hurry to reshape Egypt according to their understanding of Islam, one heavily influenced by religious currents in the Gulf, and that includes a recasting of laws in line with their strict interpretation of shari‘a.

Sex is something of a preoccupation for Salafis. “I am afraid for the nation, that they go for lust and destroy themselves,” Mahmoud al-Masry warned me. Al-Masry is a celebrity Salafi, a smiling shaykh whose jolly face and cheerful manner can be seen on religious TV channels across Egypt and the wider Arab world. We were sitting in his expensive villa in a gated compound on the outskirts of Cairo—sugarcoated fire and brimstone having proved a lucrative line of business. Al-Masry takes a dim view of
ikhtilat
—that is, mixing of the sexes—to which he ascribes a host of ills, including adultery, disease, and sexual exploitation. But we managed to meet all the same because his wife, a sparky mass-communications graduate who works as his business manager, served as our chaperone.

“I believe that the woman is like a diamond, to be preserved. We do not suppress or oppress the woman—I want to protect her,” al-Masry said, his wife nodding vigorously. “If you leave her, she could be lost because she is simple and emotional; she could be hurt by anybody.” In al-Masry’s book, that means yes to veiling, if at all possible; yes to wives obeying their husbands in all worldly affairs; and no to women working unless strictly necessary, certainly not with men and definitely not in positions of authority. “A people will never succeed if they are led by a woman,” al-Masry told me, quoting a popular—and debatable—hadith. “The emotional part is affecting the very most of her, so if she is a judge or a ruler, at that time she will rule with her emotions and that would be unjust to the people.”

Al-Masry and his Salafi peers seem to have little faith in their fellow Muslims. From the way they talk, men and women are brimming with lust, due in no small part to globalization, that will spill into communal chaos unless the sources of temptation are removed. Indeed, the dust had barely settled on Tahrir Square before self-appointed Salafi God squads—modeled along the lines of Saudi Arabia’s infamous religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—were on the streets trying to close down hair salons, cover up statues, and terrorize hand-holding couples. Such antics variously amuse and enrage the
majority of Egyptians outside the Salafi movement. Should they ever get their act together, however, these ultraconservatives have the potential to be more than just a joke or an irritation, thanks to their newfound political presence in the post-Mubarak landscape.

How much political influence the Salafis will ultimately have depends on the real heavy hitters in the new order, the Muslim Brotherhood and their flagship political party, Freedom and Justice. “We are different to the Salafis only in the way we go about implementing [these ideas],” said Ali Fath al-Bab, a senior figure in the Brotherhood’s leadership and a longtime member of Parliament. “We have the same background and knowledge, but they do not have experience in political life.” The Brotherhood has plenty of that. Through four generations of persecution, through uprisings and crackdowns, the Muslim Brotherhood has been honing its skills, and now, after sweeping the first post-Mubarak elections, it sits at Egypt’s political center.

Given Fath al-Bab’s long-standing membership in the Brotherhood, I prepared for our meeting at one of Cairo’s trendy cafés carefully, interlacing my fingers as I saw him approach, the better to resist the impulse to shake his hand—a lesson I learned the hard way, having once sent an Egyptian imam into a temporary state of paralysis with just such a hearty greeting. I needn’t have bothered. Fath al-Bab enthusiastically took my hand, and the chair beside me, and by the time his latte arrived, he had spelled out much of the Brotherhood’s current thinking on pressing issues in gender and sexual rights.

Compared with the fast-track Salafis, Fath al-Bab and his like-minded colleagues see themselves as a slow-acting remedy for Egypt’s ills. For them, it is social change first—through education, economics, and other fundamental reforms—legal change second. This gradual approach, he said, comes with an impressive pedigree. “In the Prophet Muhammad’s day, there were many houses for prostitution. But he did not ban them immediately; he left them until they changed and they themselves stopped it.” Egypt’s Muslims are not yet ready for shari’a, Fath al-Bab said, and until that time, there’s no point in passing laws, as the Salafis urge, just for
them to be broken. But this softly-softly approach is at odds with the views of others in the Brotherhood who believe that Egypt is ripe for Islamic law. For all their internal differences, however, the bottom line is the same. “Freedom and equality are our principles, but within borders or limits set by Islam and society,” Fath al-Bab told me. “Freedom within a frame” is how many inside the Brotherhood and out describe their dream of Egypt’s new order. But I wonder which, in the end, will be cut to size: the canvas of people’s thoughts and actions or the frame that aims to contain it?

“SEXUAL MISERY OF THE MASSES”

“Shari‘a is a text that can be interpreted in the sense of sexual liberty or in the sense of repression. If the politicians decide on sexual liberty, then the Islamic scholars will find a way.” This is how Abdessamad Dialmy answers that question. He’s a Moroccan sociologist and one of the few in the Arab world to specialize in sexuality. Over the past four decades, Dialmy has explored the full spectrum of attitudes and activities in the region—from sex work to homosexuality to the role of sex in Islamic fundamentalism. There are easier ways to make a living, by his own admission: “The Arab researcher in this field gets little recognition for his hard work … suffering from loneliness, exclusion, intimidation and persecution.”
³⁶

As we sat on the terrace of a bustling café in the heart of Rabat’s Ville Nouvelle, in the shade of the chestnut trees, I asked Dialmy how he came by his unusual calling. “I read Wilhelm Reich in 1971. I was twenty-two years old, teaching at high school. I was already married, a petit bourgeois, with a house and dog,” he told me. “When I read this book, it shook me, it really shook me. Because of this book, I divorced my wife. I understood that marriage is really a prison.”

Wilhelm Reich was one of the most provocative, and eccentric, thinkers of the twentieth century. His seminal book,
The Sexual Revolution
, first published in German in 1936, was an indictment
of “bourgeois sexual morality” and the capitalist institutions that maintained it, including marriage. Dialmy responded to Reich’s “idea of revolution, attack on traditional morals, to be free, to live one’s sexuality,” as he put it, by leaving everything to his wife and heading to France to continue his studies—in and out of class. “Really, I lived. I practiced [sex] every day with different women. It was crazy,” he recalled.

When he returned to Morocco in the mid-1970s, Dialmy went on to complete a doctorate in women’s sexuality and continued his work as a sexual “militant.” “I lived that revolution in my personal life; it was possible at that time,” he said. Today, things are different, in Egypt as in Dialmy’s homeland. “In the seventies, we had liberal thought about sexuality in Morocco among intellectuals in the leftist parties. Their practices were not as liberal; their talk was ahead of their behavior. Now it is reversed. Now they [the people] have very liberal practices, but they are not as open in their thinking.”

Reich had a theory about that, one that goes some way to explaining the recent sexual history of Egypt and its neighbors. He began his career as a psychoanalyst in Vienna, alongside Sigmund Freud, and saw enough sexual unhappiness pass through the clinic to last a lifetime. What’s the point, Reich asked, in tackling such confusion one patient at a time when society was mass-producing these hang-ups faster than he could ever treat them? As a result, Reich started looking beyond his couch to broader social conditions. What he saw looked a lot like the sexual terrain of today’s Arab world: sex outside of marriage roundly condemned; young people, unable to get jobs, afford marriage, or find moments of privacy, reduced to furtive relations without adequate contraception or sufficient information, storing up sexual problems for later life; women whose sexual needs, beyond reproduction, were ignored or suppressed, held to double standards of virginity before marriage and chastity ever after, even in the face of miserable, unsatisfactory unions from which there was little escape, given the trouble and stigma of divorce. Abortion outlawed, masturbation condemned, sexual education suppressed—in short, “sexual misery of the masses.”
³⁷

Why do people put up with this? Reich asked. With not just sexual repression but economic and political subjugation as well? Instead of throwing off their shackles, why do they accept, and even embrace, authoritarian regimes? Reich thought he had an answer, one in which sex went hand in hand with politics and economics and with religion and tradition to keep the ruling class in power and the people in their place.

An authoritarian system needs submissive subjects, and Reich reckoned that the most efficient factory for the latter was the patriarchal family, in which power relations between the head of state and his people are mirrored in the ties between the head of the family and his dependents. “The authoritarian state has a representative in every family, the father; in this way he becomes the state’s most valuable tool,” Reich wrote. “He in turn reproduces submissiveness to authority in his children, especially his sons.”
³⁸
The most effective way for a father to keep his children in line, Reich argued, is by clamping down on their sexual urges from day one. The institutions of the authoritarian system give fathers a helping hand in constraining the sexual freedom of their charges: the emphasis on marriage, which keeps women in check; the church, which condemns nonprocreative and extramarital sex as a sin against God; and schools, which ram home the message of sexual abstinence for youth. The result, Reich concluded, is paralysis of “the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.”
³⁹

The repressive systems in Reich’s sights were capitalism and fascism, but he considered sexual suppression to be the hallmark of any dictatorship. The first step to wholesale social reform was to make people aware of their sexual subjugation, he believed, and with that consciousness would come action. His ideas are interesting in the context of Egypt and many of its Arab neighbors, because they might explain, at least in small part, why people tolerated lousy
government for so long. Sexual repression arguably played a role in keeping Egyptians at home for years, though sexual awareness—even in an era of mass media and instant communication—was not, in the end, what brought them into the streets. Anger at injustice, corruption, poverty, inequality, and many other failings of the old regimes was what drove these uprisings; sex was just one of frustration’s many channels.

Addressing society’s sexual dilemmas will be an important part of building a better order across the Arab region, according to Dialmy. “We need to talk about the right of the individual to a sexual life, to sexual pleasure,” he told me. “If we want to have a real democracy, these will be important.” Or, as his hero, Reich, put it: “No freedom program has any chance of success without an alteration of human sexual structure.”
⁴⁰
Reich cautioned would-be revolutionaries that the one does not inexorably follow the other. You can change the political system, but that doesn’t mean the sexual order changes with it. But if you don’t change the sexual order of things, freedom will never stick.

RACE TO THE POLE

In Egypt’s emerging new order, a liberal minority, whose thinking is along the lines of Dialmy’s, and a conservative majority, on the same page as Fath al-Bab, are fighting it out in all domains. This includes the vexed question of personal freedoms, especially as they relate to “morals”—whose definition has tended to be limited to women and sexuality, as opposed to broader questions of political, economic, and social justice. Sex is one of the easiest ways to discredit political opponents in the post-Mubarak period, accusing liberals of promoting “foreign”—that is, Western—ideas about sexual freedom, and Islamists of peccadilloes and perversions, from curb-crawling to necrophilia.