Sex and the Citadel (12 page)

At first glance, these books seem to turn Orientalism on its head: the soft, pliant women of the harem, once the mainstay of male fantasies of the East, swapped for their hard, insatiable masters. But it’s the same old story of unfettered desire, no matter who’s penetrating whom. Today’s desert hero is an unvarnished sex object, his physique and technique described in luxuriant detail. Some critics argue that the genre’s enduring appeal simply perpetuates the notion of a submissive East, as Western heroines break their Arab seducers through the power of love, turning them into tidy, monogamous partners.
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(When I mentioned this theory to my parents, my mother nodded sagely. “Ah, yes, just like I did with your father”—to which my father simply snorted.)

Taming of the sheikh: that might be a Western woman’s fantasy, but is it really what Arab women want? I gave a few books to Azza and friends to find out. It took Azza several weeks to get through just under two hundred pages of
The Sheikh’s Defiant Bride;
secrecy, not fluency, was the stumbling block. “I couldn’t possibly let my husband, or my children, see me reading this.” She laughed.

“Oh my God, do they really think Arab men are like this?” was the unanimous reply. Some scoffed at descriptions of the hero’s beauty, “the magnificence of his honed, muscular body.” “I’ve been to the Gulf and I haven’t seen anyone like this,” one friend told me. “They are usually overweight. They eat junk; the only exercise they do is race their four-by-four cars.” Azza was surprised at the way these books describe the sexual prowess of the Arab hero, famous “for his ability to pleasure a woman until she could be pleasured no more. Then and only then would he take his own release.”
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Azza shook her head in disbelief: “Five minutes, and it’s only his pleasure.” Forget French-kissing, forget foreplay: “He kisses her et cetera? That’s not true—it’s one minute only. After kissing, it’s straight to sex, then he sleeps, then he watches TV.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper: “Men, in Egypt, in the Gulf, they always want to have sex in the wrong place.” It turned out Azza was talking anatomy, not geography—more specifically, anal sex. “They think after ten minutes, she is wider, so he’s not happy. That’s why he wants the other way. Women don’t get pleasure from this, only men.”

A SORE POINT

Heterosexual anal intercourse is generally considered haram by Sunni Muslims, while some Shi’i authorities allow it, albeit reluctantly. Its permissibility has been a matter of lively debate among religious authorities since the birth of Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, who had to grapple with this issue among his followers, is said to have been pretty clear on the subject: “Cursed is the one who has sex with a woman in her anus.”
⁷³
Nonetheless, anal sex continued in the Arab world, as is clear from the great works of erotica like the
Encyclopedia
, which quotes women on its manifest advantages: “Love is a lock and anal intercourse is the key to it.”
⁷⁴
Today, some Sunni scholars who condemn the practice invoke a verse from the Qur’an: “Your women are [like] your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like.”
⁷⁵
By analogy to planting a seed and watching it grow, they argue that non-procreative anal sex between husband and wife is therefore off-limits. On the other hand, those who seek to justify the practice—at least in their own minds—maintain that if this is the way a man wants to “go into his field,” so be it.

Just how common anal sex is among married couples is difficult to ascertain. The few studies to have probed this sensitive spot yield predictable results: wives say it is exceedingly rare, while a substantial proportion of husbands claim to have done it with their spouses.
⁷⁶
Somewhere between female modesty and male vanity lies the real figure. Back in Egypt, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that anal sex is an issue for married women. Even some of Azza’s country cousins, who still live in the ancestral village,
have been complaining about their husbands’ demands; their men never used to ask for anal sex, these women say, until they went to work in the Gulf.

If true, this is one of the more unusual exports from that part of the Arab region. Around two million Egyptians are working in the Gulf—more than half of them in Saudi Arabia.
⁷⁷
Over the past four decades, their numbers have soared as a growing supply—thanks to an expanding population and rising unemployment back home—has met the rising demand of Gulf economies. These workers are overwhelmingly male; less than 10 percent of Egyptian migrants to the Gulf are women, and even this minority is a source of considerable unease among Egyptians, who fear their countrywomen will be debauched by the locals. In 2007, for example, the Egyptian government temporarily stopped issuing permits to Egyptian women looking to work in Saudi Arabia as domestic help after reports surfaced of the sexual abuse of Asian and African workers.
⁷⁸

Migration to the Gulf is not a lifelong commitment; Egyptian workers stay, on average, five years. Aside from the billions of dollars these migrants send home annually, there are also “social remittances”—that is, attitudes and practices migrants have picked up abroad. Some experts argue that ideas about the role of women or domestic violence change little on migration to or return from the Gulf—those who are conservative have their ideas confirmed, and those who have a more liberal stance develop a greater appreciation of the relative social freedoms of home. But others see a definite change, among them Ayman Zohry, an expert on Egyptian migration. He comes from a village in Sohag, in Upper Egypt, where a large proportion of the men go to the Gulf for work. “When I was in the village thirty years ago, not all the women were covered. Today, even girls in school cover their hair, although this is not required by [religious] law,” he told me. “The people were very open. My aunts used to pray wearing a galabiya which only went to their knees; now they wear a Saudi abaya.” It’s not just dress that has changed. “Even twenty years ago, when I went back to the village to visit, my female relatives treated me as if we were Europeans,
hugging me; now they don’t. Many women won’t even shake hands with a man.”

Zohry reckons these changes are, at least in part, the result of migration and that this has, in turn, changed the way people in the village see Islam and, therefore, aspects of life governed by it. “They not only consider Saudi the Holy Land, but Saudi religious institutions have become their Al-Azhar,” he said, meaning that they seek religious guidance from voices that espouse a more conservative interpretation of Islam rather than from Egypt’s historic Islamic authority. To his mind, this brand of Islam has brought a “harem mentality,” as he calls it, to the village. “Everything is explained by sexual parts. The body of the woman is the main concern in Salafi [a conservative form of the religion]. But when you hide a part, you focus on the hidden part.”

Whether anal sex is one of these newfound parts, as Azza’s cousins attest, is hard to tell. There are plenty of sexual stereotypes across the Arab region, and one of them is that men in the Gulf are into each other, so to speak, and that sodomy is par for the course, no matter which sex is in the bed. Pinning down the ratio of fact to fiction in this particular stereotype isn’t easy. Over in Jeddah, I asked a few doctors if women there were also on the receiving end of husbands’ “misplaced” attentions. “We see anal [sex]. It is growing,” one gynecologist told me. “It’s there; we cannot do statistics, but it is obvious.” A telltale sign is women showing up at the clinic suffering from anal fissures—that is, tears due to excessive force. “Some of the ladies complain about the husband. Even in Islam it is not allowed; they are considered divorced if they do this,” the physician said. “They manage it with the fatwa of Shi’a. Some people say it is allowed during the period of menstruation. They try to manipulate this fatwa according to what they want.”

On this point—that is, sex during menstruation—the Qur’an clearly states that it is “a painful condition, so keep away from women during it. Do not approach them until they are cleansed; when they are cleansed, you may approach them as God has directed you.”
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This taboo has made its way into folklore: in Egypt,
for example, menstrual blood is considered impure, and men have traditionally stayed clear of vaginal sex during a woman’s period for fear that it would make its way inside their own bodies and cause damage.
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There are, however, plenty of other Islamically sanctioned ways to get it on during menstruation, as recommended by religious authorities through the ages.

As for anal sex among patients, the Saudi doctor pointed to other forces at work. “I think some of the males [with] young females, they are not allowed to touch her from the vagina, [so] they do it from the other side. They have girlfriends, and they do it from here. And when they go [get married], they maybe want to do it the same with the wife. They apply religion to bad actions.” This gynecologist put the blame firmly on the media: “Definitely, the sexual films, they change [things]. Even the young females, they are different now; they know everything about sex, in detail, better than my mother, and better than me, and I am a physician. Unfortunately, they get it from the wrong way. They take it from the films. Films, it doesn’t mean this is actual life.”

To shift the focus (or rather, locus) of sexual activity, Azza and her friends are prepared to try just about anything. A few have considered surgery to tighten up their vaginas, but at an estimated EGP 2,000 a procedure, it’s a squeeze on their household finances. There are, however, more economical alternatives.

Zizi is a sprightly woman in her midtwenties who owns a beauty parlor on a run-down side street in one of Cairo’s new suburbs. Her two-chair salon is a tidy, cheerful spot, the walls decorated with torn-out pages of magazines showing the latest hairstyles—tresses as long and glistening as her own. Zizi gets several dozen clients a week—all
muhajjabat
in this part of town—and there are always a couple looking for something a little special.

“A lot of women complain that their husbands want not-from-the-front [anal] sex and they do not want that. Nowadays, men want strange things and ask their wives to be ready the whole time to make sex,” she told me. Like the Saudi gynecologist, Zizi is clear, in her mind at least, where the source of the trouble lies: “Many things become strange now because of the Western [porn] clips,
like some men practice sex with two women in front of each other, and ask other men to do that with their wives if they have trouble performing.”

Zizi sees such sexual demands as a rising source of conflict, within spouses as well as between them. “Men watch Western songs and [video] clips, but at the same time they want their wives to be good mothers and care for kids. Many women come to my shop and say that they hate making oral sex.… Women think if they do that, they are impolite, and from here the problems start. Men think that if their wives refuse to do that, they are less than Western men in the videos, which pushes them to practice that with bad girls.”

Oral sex appears to have been practiced in
jahiliyya
, the period before the coming of Islam, in what is now western Saudi Arabia. And although not as prominent as other sexual practices, fellatio and cunnilingus also make an appearance in the great works of Arabic erotica. Today, however, thanks to foreign porn, oral sex is seen as a Western import. Although I have heard many women in Egypt talk with distaste about going down on their husbands, and vice versa, it has been endorsed as halal by one of Islam’s most prominent scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. “Muslim jurists are of the opinion that it is lawful for the husband to perform cunnilingus on his wife, or a wife to suck her husband’s penis [fellatio], and there is no wrong in doing so. But some say if sucking leads to releasing semen, then it is Makruh [blameworthy], but there is no decisive evidence [to forbid it],” he opined.
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In the meantime, all this female anxiety is good for business. Among Zizi’s specialties is a vaginal-tightening mixture, consisting of almond oil,
shabba
(alum, a well-known astringent that causes tissues to contract temporarily—hence the tightening effect), and warm water, which she recommends a client “put inside her down [there] to make it narrow.” This recipe has a long tradition. Most books from the golden age of Arabic erotica touch on the importance of well-honed genitalia, with a wide selection of remedies. “We should not feel embarrassed to talk about the enlargement of the penis, the narrowing of the vagina and increasing the pleasure
of coition, for such subjects are relative to reproduction,” advises one twelfth-century treatise,
A Jaunt in the Art of Coition
.
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“Many an ugly woman was preferred to a beautiful one only because the former had a narrow vagina and the latter had a wide one,” it counsels readers. “Therefore, the narrowing and warming of the vagina is necessary indeed.”

Such recipes are, however, the least of Zizi’s repertoire. She also does a brisk trade in
‘amal
, or magic. Magic has a long history in Egypt and across the Arab region. While Islam comes down hard on some kinds of magic (also known as
sihr
), “white” magic—the kind that Zizi practices—is an accepted part of popular religion. Even educated people like Azza and her circle firmly believe in its power: one of the reasons Zizi’s salon is so tidy is that clients—Azza included—insist on taking their cut hair with them just in case someone uses it as
‘atar
, a personal item on which
‘amal
is done.