Sex and the Citadel (2 page)

As I started to ask questions, I began to tumble into the gap between public appearance, as reflected in official statistics, and private reality. While many people were busy reassuring me that HIV was not, and could never be, the problem in the Arab world that it was elsewhere, I was meeting whole families who were infected and was hearing the increasingly urgent pleas of those working quietly to stop the epidemic in its tracks. The more I looked, the more I realized that the main wedge between appearance and reality was sex: a collective unwillingness to face up to any behavior that fell short of a marital ideal, a resistance buttressed by religious interpretation and social convention.

In broad strokes, this sexual climate looks a lot like the West on the brink of the sexual revolution. And many of the same underlying forces that drove change in Europe and America are present in the modern Arab world, if only in embryo: struggles toward democracy and personal rights; the rapid growth of cities and a growing strain on family structures, loosening community controls on private behavior; a huge population of young people whose influences and attitudes diverge from those of their parents; the changing role of women; the transformation of sex into a consumer good through economic expansion and liberalization. Add to that greater exposure to the sexual mores of other parts of the world brought about through media and migration. All of which raises the question: As political upheaval convulses the region, is a sexual shake-up next in line?

Because of their essential differences in history, religion, and culture, the West is no guide to how change will play out in the Arab world. Development is a journey, not a race, and different societies take different paths. Some destinations are, however, more desirable than others. I believe that a society that allows people to make their own choices and to realize their sexual potential, that provides them with the education, tools, and opportunities to do so, and that respects the rights of others in the process is a better place for it. I do not believe this is fundamentally incompatible with social values in the Arab world, which was once more open to the full spectrum of human sexuality and could be so again. Nor need this irremediably clash with the region’s dominant faith: it is through their
interpretations
of Islam that many Muslims are boxing themselves and their religion in.

This book is the story of those who are trying to break free: researchers who dare to probe the very heart of sexual life; scholars who are reinterpreting traditional texts that currently constrain choices; lawyers who are fighting for more equitable legislation; doctors who are trying to relieve the physical and psychological fallout; religious leaders who are brave enough to preach tolerance where they once talked of damnation; activists who are on the streets trying to make sex safe; writers and filmmakers who are challenging the limits of sexual expression; bloggers who are forging a new space for public debate. And it is also the story of those who oppose them; the shifting political landscape of the Arab region, after decades of stasis, is opening new opportunities for both.

It took more than a thousand days to assemble these stories, and, like
One Thousand and One Nights
, these tales lead into each other in often unexpected ways. In
chapter 1
they help us to understand how sexual attitudes in the East and West have shifted over time. In
chapter 2
, they illuminate the trouble with marriage, in and out of the bedroom. In
chapter 3
they show us the sexual minefield of youth, and in
chapter 4
, they point to ways of navigating safe passage through it with sex education, contraception, and abortion—and what to do when the trigger is pressed, as in the case of unwed motherhood.
Chapter 5
examines the many shades of sex work in the region and the prospects for those involved. In
chapter 6
we look at those who break the heterosexual mold and how they themselves see the way forward. Finally,
chapter 7
takes a wide-angle view of the current state of affairs and considers how a fairer and more fulfilling sexual culture might develop in the coming decades. For all the predicaments these stories highlight, this isn’t another book about what’s wrong with the Arab region. It’s about what’s right: how people on the ground are solving their problems in ways that often look different from responses elsewhere in the world. This is not an academic tome, nor a slice of Arab exotica. It is, in the end, an album of snapshots from across the region taken by someone trying to better understand the region in order to better understand herself. Those looking for an encyclopedia, or a peep show, should search elsewhere.

So far, I have talked about the Arab world as a collective entity, as if one could generalize about twenty-two countries, three hundred fifty million people, three major religions, dozens of religious sects and ethnic groups. The term Middle East is even more of a geographical blender, mashing together not only the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the eastern Mediterranean but also non-Arab Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and occasionally Pakistan thrown in for good measure. While there are essential similarities in sexual attitudes and behaviors across Arab countries, there are also important differences in how societies are—or are not—tackling these challenges. Such distinctions transcend sexuality and are clearly reflected in the different trajectories of political change prompted by the popular uprisings of this decade.

So from now on, specifics. This book is centered on Egypt, and in particular Cairo, whose population represents the length of the country and the breadth of a vast social spectrum. Personal history aside, Egypt is a natural focus because it is the most populous country in the Arab region, because of its strategic geopolitical importance, and because it retains formidable political, economic, social, and cultural influence across the region. When I started my journey, few in the area—outside of Egypt, that is—agreed with me. Pivot of the Arab world for centuries, almost sixty years of post-World War II military dictatorship had sorely diminished Egypt, while its neighbors rose in economic, political, and cultural prominence. Egypt had been written off as a lost cause, a country plagued by poverty, narrow-minded Islamism, crumbling infrastructure, cultural decline, rampant corruption, and political sclerosis. Or, as my taxi driver in Rabat, Morocco’s capital, put it, with devastating simplicity: “Egyptians, so egotistical. And for what?”

Egypt, they said, had lost the plot. But once its millions rose up against the regime, the same voices heralded it as a beacon of transformation across the region. Farther afield, protesters from Wall Street to Sydney have tried to bring Egypt’s uprising home. Since 2011, worldwide solidarity protests, the nervousness in Western capitals, the anxiety of Arab leaders, and continuous global media coverage have amply demonstrated that what happens in Egypt still matters, not just for its own citizens but for the rest of the world as well. Egypt has rediscovered its geopolitical mojo, and in the process it has gained a long-term opportunity to reshape its society, including its sexual culture—shifts that its neighbors will be watching closely.

On many of the tough issues of sexuality, models for change lie close to home. This is a question of pragmatism, not chauvinism. While substantial progress on issues of sexuality has been made elsewhere in the Global South, and there are impressive lessons to learn, it is only natural that Egyptians should more readily appreciate, and adopt, change when they see it in a more easily identifiable package. And so I have looked to Morocco and Tunisia in the west and to Lebanon in the east, which offer models for Egypt in dealing with at least some of its collective sexual problems. I have also traveled through countries in the Gulf—United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, among them. This region has considerable influence on Egyptians through media, money, and migration and has powerfully shaped (or warped, some would argue) Egypt’s social and sexual attitudes over the past half century. And you will hear voices from other parts of the Arab region whose situations shed light on Egypt’s state of affairs.

“Excuse me if I sometimes do no more than hint at the names of the heroes of my anecdotes, and do not mention them more explicitly.… It is enough for me to name only those whom naming does not harm, and whose mention brings no opprobrium either upon ourselves or them; either because the affair is so notorious that concealment and the avoidance of clear specification will do the party concerned no good, or for the simple reason that the person being reported on is quite content that his story should be made public, and by no means disapproves of it being bandied about.”
³
This disclaimer comes from Ibn Hazm, a Muslim philosopher in Spain in the tenth and eleventh centuries, whose famous treatise,
The Ring of the Dove
, is a user’s guide to falling in, and out of, love. A millennium later, I have followed the same policy: if it’s first name only, then that name has been changed.

I was a scientist before I became a journalist, and this book reflects that training. Wherever possible, I have complemented personal stories with hard data; as vice-chair of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, a body established by the United Nations to advocate for legal reform, including laws regulating sexuality, around the world, I was given privileged access to both. Such information is difficult to come by in the Arab region because research on sexuality here is still scarce. Many pressing questions have yet to be addressed, and results have, as often as not, ended up in a locked drawer.

The goal of this book is to help change that, as part of what millions across the Arab world are hoping will be a new era of openness and intellectual freedom. To this end,
Sex and the Citadel
is accompanied by a website,
www.sexandthecitadel.com
, where you can find a wealth of additional facts, figures, and findings on the topics at hand, as indicated in the endnotes. I encourage readers not only to visit the site but also to contribute to it by posting related news, events, and research, in Arabic, English, or French. The site aims to be a clearinghouse for information on sexuality in the Arab region and, along with this book, a resource for all those who wish to understand the past, the present, and to collectively forge a better sexual future for coming generations.
Sex and the Citadel
is by no means the last word on sex in the Arab world, but it is an early step at a turning point in the region’s history, for others to take forward.

Cairo, November 2012

1
Shifting Positions

Whoever abandons his past is lost
.

—My grandmother, on remembering where you came from

Every journey across Cairo is a moving lesson in history. I’m not talking about its ancient monuments or medieval souk, its colonial villas or twenty-first-century skyscrapers. Nor even the extraordinary fashion plate of its twenty million-plus inhabitants: men in turbans and galabiyas (traditional robes) alongside boys in well-worn jeans and trendy T-shirts; women in abayas and niqabs (long cloaks and face veils), cultural imports from the Gulf and signs of a time of rising religiosity, shoulder to shoulder with girls in the latest Western fashions and freely flowing hairstyles.

What I focus on when I jostle through the city—aside, that is, from the treacherous sidewalks and mile-high curbs—is street signs. Not just because getting lost in Cairo can cost you hours, but because these dark blue plaques, with their splashes of white calligraphy, say so much about the country’s past. In a single stroll downtown, you can pass under the Sixth of October Bridge, commemorating Egypt’s face-saving attack on Israel in the 1973 war, to the glory of the pharaohs on Ramses Street, before turning the corner onto Twenty-Sixth of July Street, marking the overthrow of Egypt’s last monarch. Then it’s back to the Napoleonic invasion along Champollion Street, named after the man who deciphered the Rosetta stone, before hurtling into Tahrir (Liberation) Square, a souvenir of Egypt’s 1952 revolution against British occupation and autocratic rule.

Tahrir
is now doing overtime. In the winter of 2011, hundreds
of thousands of Egyptians converged on this otherwise traffic-gnarled, pollution-saturated pedestrian death trap in the heart of Cairo, demanding nothing less than national transformation. Tahrir Square was the epicenter of Egypt’s popular revolt against the thirty-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. While the uprising spread far and fast throughout the country, it was Tahrir Square that caught the world’s attention, the experiences of millions of protesters televised, tweeted, and blogged in real time. Tahrir Square turned into an eighteen-day revolutionary reality show as protesters dug in, camped out, and fought back against their own Big Brother, the Mubarak regime. “We are one Egypt,” the people shouted, as decades of frustration with business as usual brought rich and poor, Muslims and Christians, men and women, parents and children, together in a single, focused front. The achievement of Tahrir Square wasn’t just its grand political movement but the tiny personal battles fought and won against the frictions wearing down Egyptian society: between religions, classes, sexes, and generations.

In the years to come, the success of Egypt’s recent uprising will, in large part, be judged by how these millions of miniature victories are transplanted from the hothouse of Tahrir Square to the cold realities of everyday life. This is true of the rest of the Arab region as well, where nations are working their way through the political upheaval that began this decade. To fully appreciate whatever flowering may follow, we need to know the ground on which these gains take root. And one of the rockiest places to look is sexual life.

In today’s Arab world, the only widely accepted, socially acknowledged context for sex is state-registered, family-approved, religiously sanctioned matrimony. Anything else is
‘ayb
(shameful),
illit adab
(impolite), haram (forbidden)—a seemingly endless lexicon of reproof. That vast segments of the population in most countries in the region are having a hard time fitting this mold—young people who can’t afford to marry, career women who don’t conform to gender expectations, men and women who engage in same-sex relations, those who sell sex to make ends meet—is increasingly recognized, but there is widespread resistance to any alternative.
Even within the marriage bed, sex is something to do, not to discuss. Such collective unease with sex makes tackling the fallout—including violence, infection, exploitation, dysfunction, conjugal dissatisfaction, and profound ignorance—all the more difficult. “In the Arab world, sex is the opposite of sport,” one Egyptian gynecologist explained to me. “Everyone talks about football, but hardly anyone plays it. But sex—everyone is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it.”