Sex and the Citadel (16 page)

Sabir herself married after a whirlwind romance of three months. She met her husband at the supermarket. “It was a love story like movie cinema. You feel that this is the one who is your soul mate. Everything is white and pink, and after that you get shocked.” Her lively voice sank. “I was in love with him so, so much. And after marriage, I suffer from him so much.” In Egypt, they have a saying: “Marriage is like a watermelon; you only know how it is inside once you cut into it.” So I asked if she thought the personal, and sexual, freedom of the West to engage in premarital relationships, giving partners a chance to get to know each other, might have saved her this pain. Sabir was skeptical that “open relationships,” as she calls them, before marriage might mitigate divorce thereafter: just look at Madonna and her many husbands, she told me. In her eyes, the benefit of a Western approach lies elsewhere. “It’s about the treatment after marriage.… Sure, in the West, it is more better than here in Arab society because the men [there] are scared to treat women in [the] wrong [way]. He grows up and his parents and his society teach him to respect the women. Here in Arab society, the things [do] not go in this way. Men grow up and the society and the family teach him you have to treat a woman in a bad way, and he start[s] with his sister, his mother, and then his wife.… I think there is some men, they have got the idea they are men, [and] the woman is some weak creature.”

Wisam is proving otherwise. When her husband refused to release her, she tried
khul’
, only to be told by lawyers that such cases had all but frozen in the courts. So Wisam opted for de facto
khul’
, paying off her husband and renouncing any claims to further support, in the hope of finally persuading him to divorce her. Though she will likely win her freedom, there is trouble ahead. Since 2005, divorced women in Egypt have been entitled to retain custody of their children until they are fifteen, at which time the court gives kids the choice of which parent to live with. When they no longer have custody, divorced women also lose the right
to live in the matrimonial home. But Islamic conservatives have long objected to this legal amendment and want to lower the age of custody.
¹¹⁶
If such a law were to pass, Wisam might end up paying for her freedom with her son.

As for Azza, the uprising had an unexpected impact on her marriage. Her husband, once so perfunctory in bed, became an attentive lover. Azza wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up—the attentiveness, that is—but she was happy while it lasted. “He changes a lot. He reads a lot on this topic, in an Islamic way, do this and do this and this, will make your wife happy.” Azza smiled. “Always he sends me articles about how I can satisfy my desire.” He also started to take better care of himself, struggling to spruce up his looks in line with the designer-stubbled, finely chiseled Arab man of a thousand fashion and grooming ads. Azza reckoned that her own greater knowledge of sex, sparked by years of discussing my work, had made a difference, along with her relative strength within their marriage. “After I met you, he tries to make it fun and happy with me. Maybe because I earn more than him, maybe I will leave him and go to another man. Maybe. He thinks that this is the way to attract me.”

Azza and her family and friends are just a drop in the sea of matrimony in Egypt and the Arab world. For all their conjugal woes, that’s not to say there aren’t happily married couples across the region—of course there are. But read any newspaper, flip through any women’s magazine, watch any talk show, or surf any website from the Arab region and you’ll find people talking about the trouble with marriage. It’s hard to see how democracy can flourish in a society if its constitutional and cultural cornerstone in the family is so undemocratic. Bringing the values of democracy to marriage, including equality of personal freedoms, will be the work of a generation at least. Changing laws, on paper and in practice, to put women on an even level with men is only part of it. Empowering women to realize these rights is important, but so too is working with men so that they not only accept but embrace equal opportunities within marriage as a reflection of their faith, not a violation of it. There is no shortage of worthy reports and laudable projects
on the ground to address gender inequality in the Arab region, but few have yet tackled the sexual confusion at the heart of many a marriage.

In the best-case scenario, a new climate of openness in Egypt and across the Arab region may prompt people to question accepted truths in personal as well as political life. Taking some of the heat off couples, through better economic prospects and less day-to-day oppression, may go some way to improving relations between husbands and wives. When men feel less threatened by the world outside, when they feel they have choices in life beyond the well-worn path of their fathers and their fathers before them, they may, perhaps, be more prepared to accept alternative roles for women in various domains, including the bedroom.

But all this will take time, and there are limits to how far the new order will reach. I don’t expect marriage to go out of fashion in Egypt or its Arab neighbors anytime soon. For the foreseeable future, matrimony will remain the only publicly accepted context for sexual activity, however troubling this may be for either party. Or as Abdessamad Dialmy, whom we met in the last chapter, neatly put it: “A driver’s license is permission to drive; in the Arab region, marriage is a license to fuck.” But what of the tens of millions of young people across the region who don’t, or can’t, pass that test? What’s a single Arab to do?

^*
The black cubic structure at the center of Masjid al-Haram, the great mosque in Mecca, and Islam’s holiest site, around which Muslims walk seven times as part of the ritual of pilgrimage.

^†
Chapter 12 of the Qur’an, featuring the story of Joseph and Zuleika.

^‡
Wahhabism is an ultraconservative interpretation of Sunni Islam that originated in what is now Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century; today it’s gone global, thanks to the Saudi powerhouse it helped to create.

3
Sex and the Single Arab

The honor of a girl is like a match; it only lights once
.

—Egyptian proverb

“To be, or not to be?”

I was standing in the middle of a
milyuniyya
—one of those mass protests in Tahrir Square that had become a regular feature of downtown life after the uprising. It was a dramatic departure from Cairo as I knew it, even a year before. Egypt is a country for old men, who call the shots in virtually all domains, from family matters to affairs of state. But in Tahrir Square, it was young people in charge: self-appointed guardians manning the barricades, checking IDs, and patting us down for weapons; medical students handing out surgical masks against the waves of tear gas; young men battling army and police in the side streets; and the thousands of teenagers and twentysomethings milling around in an atmosphere part rave, part political rally.

“To be, or not to be?” A woman, her hijab made out of an Egyptian flag with its eagle strategically centered on her forehead, emerged from the crowd and was at my elbow, repeating her question.

“What?” I asked, thrown off balance by the unexpected Shakespeare and the surrounding spectacle. Beside me, a couple of young men and a woman were sprawled on the pavement, smoking hashish. A young imam, dressed in traditional robes and a turban, stopped to tell them off, but they, in turn, told him to mind his own business. Just in front of me, a young woman was fielding a call from her mother, reassuring her that all was well and parrying her pleas to come straight home. Meanwhile, young couples were
strolling hand in hand, an intimacy that used to be confined to the shadows, not paraded in broad daylight.

Such public defiance was astounding in a culture driven by convention and conformity. Were these the stirrings of a social revolution?

“That is the question,” the woman answered to my silence, before melting back into the crowd.

I had come to the square to talk to young people about sex, how the fight for political freedoms might translate into their personal lives. Sally Al Haq, a teenage literature student and self-confessed “social rebel” from a provincial university, was all for change. “Yeah, sure, there are people in the square, they have their very free sexual life. It’s okay,” she said. “I agree with all of this and I respect this mentality.” Unlike many young Egyptians, Al Haq was a great reader, with a special interest in feminist literature, and a fan of French erotica. “I read about Paris ’68: ‘It is forbidden to forbid.’ ” She smiled as she quoted a slogan from those famous student uprisings. “These guys, like, really made a difference in their personal life and even in the society and in the political life. I wish we will have that here.”

As we wove through the crowds, Al Haq led me to the center of the square, across a tangle of guy wires and through a forest of makeshift tents, to meet Amr El Wakeal, a medical student and fellow member of a new youth political party. The two friends were from neighboring towns, and the same conservative background, but their views on sexual freedom were a world apart. “Sex is a bad topic. I give you an advice: for your safety, don’t speak here [about] this topic,” El Wakeal kindly warned me. I was a little surprised, given the reputation of the Tahrir campsite as something of a mini Woodstock, all sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. “I will not lie to you. You will find two tents in all these may have that. They will be very liberal, socialist, they can accept that, but their percentage is very few,” El Wakeal said. He pointed to his own tent, where a handful of men and women were seated on the ground, sheltering from the unseasonable cold, and to his fellow squatters beyond. “All these tents, they can’t do that. Most are from the countryside, and the
poor. If anyone finds that [men and women are having sex], it will be a big disaster.” He shook his head. “This not our manners, or our ethics. In Egypt, we are Arabs, we are conservative, we are religious, we believe in the marriage institution.” El Wakeal was aghast at the suggestion that the political liberation he and his colleagues were fighting—and, in recent days, dying—for might one day free Egyptians from all fetters, including sexual. “No one, no one will accept that. This is not the freedom we are aiming for. The political revolution will need a social revolution, but not a sexual [one].” He shook his head again. “No, no, no. Not in a hundred years.”

There are an estimated 100 million people across the Arab world between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine; they represent almost a third of the region’s population, making it home to one of the biggest youth bulges on the planet.
¹
The political and economic grievances of Arab youth are no secret, exploding in protests across the region since 2010. But their intimate lives and desires are still largely hidden from view. In Egypt, a minority of women and men in their teens and early twenties are (or have been) married; given the pressure on couples to reproduce, it’s safe to assume they’ve had sex. What the single ones, who constitute the vast majority of youth, are getting up to is more of a mystery, because asking detailed questions about the sex lives of the nation’s unmarried young people isn’t easy. I know because I’ve tried.

In 2009, the Population Council, an international research group, launched a survey in Egypt of more than fifteen thousand people aged ten to twenty-nine, going door to door to ask about their lives at school and home, work and play. Sex was one of the issues the council wanted to explore, so I joined a team crafting the questionnaire. Local experts dealing with young people gave us a long list of topics on which they were eager to see hard, nationally representative data. How many kids were masturbating regularly? How often were they cruising Internet sex sites? How many were engaging in phone sex? Did they know where to get reliable help and information on sexual health? How many were exchanging sex for gifts or money? And what about same-sex relations? Truly everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

We settled for an indirect approach: instead of asking kids about their own sexual experience, we included questions about their close friends, in the hope that this would at least open a statistical window on the scale of premarital relations. In the end, however, even that was too much; the government, which authorizes and administers household surveys, refused to give permission for questions on premarital sexual activity, except for one: “Have you heard of a girl/boy of your age having a relation with boys/girls?” Unfortunately, this phrasing was too vague to elicit particularly meaningful results.

Now why would officials bother to censor questions on youth sexual activity? At least two possible explanations come to mind. One is that premarital sex is forbidden in Islam. The Qur’an is clear on this point: “Those who are unable to marry should keep chaste until God gives them enough out of His bounty.”
²
The standard Islamic response to sexual privation is a spot of hunger to focus the mind and dampen the libido. Such guidance comes directly from a hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have advised: “O young men, those among you who can support a wife should marry, for it restrains eyes from casting [evil glances], and preserves one from immorality; but those who cannot should devote themselves to fasting for it is a means of controlling sexual desire.”
³
Given early marriage in ages past, the Prophet was talking about fasting for a couple of weeks, not well into your twenties and beyond. “[The] principles of Islamic shari’a are the main source of legislation,” according to the Egyptian constitution, which was suspended after the uprising—and political wrangling over a new one gave little chance of this provision softening, much to the disappointment of reformers looking for a fresh start in a secular state. While Egypt, unlike many of its Arab neighbors, has no explicit law against premarital sex, there are, on paper at least, other charges that can be brought against those who take the plunge before marriage.
⁴
So perhaps the government balked at asking questions about religiously impermissible and legally doubtful activity.