Sex and the Citadel (6 page)

“In a world in which frustration, aggression and anxiety have become everyday conditions,” Bouhdiba observed, “hyper-sexuality
and religious Puritanism are certainly convenient ways of escaping our responsibilities and masking our failures.”
⁴¹
In his view, “when a society is confronted with difficulties, it returns to its origins, or it destroys them. The two great poles of political evolution [in the Middle East] are Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk] in Turkey, who wanted to break everything, and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud [the founder of Saudi Arabia], who wanted to return to his roots. These are the two poles between which Muslim societies now find themselves.”

Which pole they will gravitate to is the big question. Bouhdiba believes that in the end social change within the region will come not from a dramatic clash—burning bras and gay pride marches, for example—but rather through a long-running contest of ideas, which he calls societies of cultural competition, not cultural conflict. To those now in power tempted to sweep sex under the prayer rug, he says: “You are misreading the cultural and juridical history of our region. Lean on these elements in the quiet understanding that [in addressing these issues] you are not doing things against the religion.” But he also has words of caution for those who think the way forward is a trail blazed by the West: “We need to talk about AIDS, IVF, new sexual behavior, abortion. These are problems, but we need to talk about them in the propriety of the Qur’an. Unfortunately, the Western models [of sexual expression] don’t teach this, flaunting [sex] in the cinema, in the street.”

For Bouhdiba, the future of the Arab region, in and out of the bedroom, lies in fully comprehending its past. “Personally, I am a believer,” he says, “and it is because of that I think about my faith. Faith today is not the faith of yesterday. What does it mean to be a Muslim, what does it mean to be a believer, in sexuality, in charity, [in other elements of Islamic life]? To be a believer today is not to reproduce the old messages but to understand these messages and incorporate them into behavior that fits the demands of today. To redesign—that’s the big idea.”

The Arab region began this decade with a political big bang; how that will shape, and in turn be shaped by, sexual life is an open question. The intimate order of today’s Arab world is like our solar
system: marriage is the sun, whose gravitational pull holds the whole together; around it are planets in ever-distant orbits, from premarital sex to sex work to same-sex relations, the final frontier in the dark reaches of the cosmos. To understand this universe, we need to explore it. So let us begin at its fiery core: married life.

*
An old unit of currency, one-fortieth of a piastre, today the smallest denomination of Egyptian currency.

^†
A tip.

2
Desperate Housewives

A woman said to her daughter, “I am happy that you are now respectably married.” Her daughter replied, “I wish, Mother, that I could return to the days of living scandalously.”

—My grandmother, on marriage

When I moved to Cairo in 2008, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Azza, an Egyptian woman who offered to help me with my Arabic. For all her good humor and intellectual curiosity, Azza was, at first, a little surprised by the sort of vocabulary I was looking to learn; I’m sure I’d be equally suspicious if a student of mine showed such a marked interest in the English words for genitalia, or abortion, or sundry acts of sexual violence. Given what I knew about local sensibilities, I decided to say little about my research, thereby giving Azza the impression that my interests were purely recreational and reinforcing local notions of what happens when good Egyptian girls go West.

As we got to know each other, however, and I talked more about my work, Azza was intrigued. Although a little shy at first, she quickly started asking questions and talking about her own experiences. Soon I was being introduced to family and friends as “
Doctura
Shereen, the lady who studies reproductive health and marital relations”—polite longhand for “sex.” This turned out to be the ultimate calling card, an open sesame onto a treasure trove of sexual culture.

Each week brought new tales of sexual angst from Azza and her circle, like a modern-day
One Thousand and One Nights:
the neighbor who caught her husband, in their bedroom, having phone sex with her friend; the sister who found porn on her husband’s laptop
and, to his horror, turned the tables by uploading racy photos of herself; the older brother who divorced his wife by text message when she refused to put out and who has now taken another, sexier quasi-official wife; the younger brother who, when his bride showed some initiative on their wedding night, hauled her out of bed and made her swear on the Qur’an that she had no previous experience; the sister-in-law whose husband’s lovemaking is so brief and brutal as to almost constitute sexual assault.

Azza is one of eight siblings whose married lives mirror the changes that Egypt, along with many of its Arab neighbors, has experienced over the past half century and the tensions that exploded onto the streets in the uprisings of 2011. Now in her forties, Azza is a child of the
infitah
, the “open-door” policy introduced by President Anwar Sadat in the early 1970s. Under his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, much of Egypt’s economy was appropriated by the state in the name of national development. Sadat began rolling back this policy, opening Egypt’s economy to the global market, a process that accelerated under the three-decade rule of his successor, Hosni Mubarak.

Some people have become very rich as a result of the
infitah;
according to one estimate, 10 percent of the population controls almost 30 percent of the national income, while more than 20 percent live on less than two dollars a day.
¹
It was these superrich who found themselves in trouble during the uprising because of their tight ties to the Mubarak regime, and many in prison thereafter on corruption charges. Meanwhile, the poor are still with us, and there’s no quick fix to Egypt’s vast economic divide.

Azza and her family are somewhere in the struggling middle. They are, materially speaking, much better off than her grandparents, who started life in the family village, the
‘izba
, in the countryside west of Cairo; like almost half of Egypt’s population, most of Azza’s family now live in the city. They are also more educated: Azza and her siblings all attended university—the beneficiaries of Nasser’s policies opening higher education beyond the elite. Unfortunately, the supply of jobs has not kept pace with the surge in graduates, and their education has not kept up with the demands
of the market: while official statistics put unemployment in the low double digits, unofficial estimates suggest that the real figure is closer to double that, hitting university graduates hardest. Even Egyptians with jobs are finding it tough to make ends meet, what with annual inflation hovering in the double digits as well.

These seismic shifts in Egyptian society are rocking Azza’s marital bedroom, although the earth most certainly does not move when she and her husband make love. “He can have an erection, then two minutes later …” Azza pursed her lips, imitating a deflating tire. “Now he is afraid to come near me. We used to make love once every five days. Now it’s been more than a month.” Azza’s husband was eventually persuaded to see a doctor and came back with a clean bill of health. She wonders if their problems might be related to her work.

Like a quarter of Egyptian women her age, Azza has a job, in her case one that earns almost three times as much as her husband’s, since she is with a foreign firm, while he’s a midlevel employee in a sluggish state-owned company. She covers most of the household bills, and there are a lot of them. Azza and her family are caught up in Egypt’s burgeoning consumer culture; what with private school fees (something of a necessity, given the poor state of government schools), sporting club memberships (not exactly a luxury, with how little public space there is in Cairo to safely exercise), mobile phones, and new clothes for three kids, it takes at least two incomes just to keep up. The five of them live in a modest two-bedroom apartment in one of the high-rise eyesores that have sprung up over the past decade as Cairo has expanded into the desert. They’d like to move—sleeping arrangements aren’t doing much for Azza’s love life since she and her husband share a bedroom with their youngest child—but Cairo’s property prices have soared over the past decade, putting the next rung on the housing ladder all but out of reach.

Azza belongs to a generation, and a class, of women in a bind. On the one hand, she has benefited from Egypt’s push to educate women; more than 70 percent of Egyptian women are now literate—that’s tripled since Azza was born—and half have gone
on to secondary school and beyond.
²
She has more rights under the law—at least on paper—than her mother did when she was Azza’s age, and many more than are accorded to women in most of Egypt’s neighboring states: if Azza wants to travel, for example, she can get her own passport, without needing her husband’s permission, and she can pass her Egyptian citizenship to her children. But there are plenty of catches to these hard-won rights, and men still have much more scope than women when it comes to laws, on the books and in practice.
³

For all the gains made by Azza and her peers, there is a strong streak of patriarchy in Egypt, reinforced by the rise of Islamic conservatism since the 1970s, that has conspired to keep women in what is seen by many as their religiously sanctioned place. “[My husband] doesn’t like that I work with foreigners,” said Azza, “but he likes my money. He doesn’t like that I earn more than him, that I make most decisions about money or the kids.” He’s not alone: a recent national survey of Egyptian adults found that while around 60 percent are in favor of women working outside the home, more than three-quarters of those polled—including a majority of women—believe that when work is scarce, it’s men who should get the jobs. While almost half of those surveyed in an earlier poll agreed that the more satisfying marriage is one in which both husband and wife work and take care of the kids, in practice working women like Azza end up doing double duty, at home and on the job.
⁴

Traditionally, women have played an important role in decision making inside Egyptian homes; my grandmother, for example, was a force to be reckoned with on the domestic front (though, like many wives today, she made sure my grandfather was seen to have the final say).
⁵
No matter the balance of power behind closed doors, there is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a pronounced reluctance in many quarters to see women flex these muscles in public; more than half of those surveyed in yet another recent national poll rejected women working as judges, mayors, or the president.
⁶
And so, while Azza’s job is an economic necessity, her professional success is putting a strain on her marital relations—in and out of bed.

Meanwhile, Samar, Azza’s cousin, has troubles of her own. Her husband, a small-businessman, had just returned from a trip to Italy. When Azza was a child, Egyptians rarely traveled abroad; today that’s changed. Samar’s husband was full of praise for Italy, particularly its slim, elegant women, whom he has taken to comparing with his wife, to her face and not in her favor. Since then, Samar, a stay-at-home mom, has been trying to spruce herself up and shed some pounds, at considerable expense; Cairo is full of weight-loss clinics, gyms, and plastic surgery centers ready to nip and tuck bodies into shape—a shape now increasingly modeled on the honed curves of Lebanese bombshells like Haifa Wehbe, a pop singer and Pan-Arab pinup girl. But there’s only so much Samar can do with her naturally ample form. If that weren’t enough, her husband now complains that she is boring in bed. Samar is not sure what exactly that means; as far as she knows, there’s only one position—flat on your back, braced for action. She assumes, or rather hopes, he’s drawing his standards from porn DVDs and the Internet, rather than from real-life, real-time experience.

LAUNCHPAD FOR LIFE

Marriage is the bedrock of Egyptian, and Arab, society, considered the natural and desirable state by more than 90 percent of Egyptians, regardless of age, sex, or education.
⁷
The drive to wed is, in large part, propelled by family pressure and fueled by religion. The Qur’an is big on matrimony, exhorting believers to tie the knot as quickly and as simply as possible: “Marry off the single among you and those of your male and female slaves who are fit [for marriage]. If they are poor, God will provide for them from His bounty: God’s bounty is infinite and He is all knowing.”
⁸
The Prophet too encouraged Muslims to marry: “Whoever marries safeguards half of this faith; let him fear God for the second half” is one of many hadiths on the subject.
⁹

That being said, booty, as well as duty, comes into play. In Islam, sex is channeled into regulated structures, one of which is marriage.
This connection is enshrined in language. The same word in classical Arabic,
nikah
, applies to both marriage and sexual intercourse; in Egyptian street slang,
niik
, an abbreviated form, means “to fuck.” Sex outside these regulated contexts constitute
zina
, that is, illicit relations—an offense that crosses the line of acceptability (
hadd
) in Islam. In shari‘a, the penalty for
zina
is death by stoning for married partners and one hundred lashes for the unmarried—provided four eyewitnesses testify or there is an uncoerced confession. And so in Egypt—indeed, across the Arab world—marriage opens the door to a socially sanctioned (and therefore more regular) sexual and reproductive life. It is also the gateway to adulthood and a little more independence from your family. If finances permit, marriage gives you a free pass out of your parents’ home, and the green light to set up your own semiautonomous breakaway state.