by Ed Husain
A deeply harmful attitude to sexuality has emerged in today’s Arab world, and what festers in the Middle East slowly spreads to other parts of the Muslim world, with migrant labourers, imams trained in Gulf universities, and the religious rhetoric pumped out through satellite television and social media. From time to time this unhealthy approach to sex displays itself in public attitudes, questions and responses, sometimes in peculiar ways.
In 2007, for example, with sex segregation increasingly being imposed in public spaces for fear of encouraging sexual freedom, an Egyptian cleric issued a controversial ruling. Dr Izzat Atiya, a mufti (specialist in issuing religious edicts, fatwas), wanted to find a way to allow women to work with men and do so without feelings of religious guilt. In his view, that could be done if a woman fed her male colleague ‘directly from her breast’ at least five times – this would then establish a family bond between them, and they would be able to work together. He added: ‘A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.’
Bizarre fatwas of this kind are symptomatic of the widespread sexual dysfunction in large swathes of Arab and Muslim societies. Brave and exceptional Muslim women such as the Egyptian–American leading thinker Mona Eltahawy, author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, are highlighting this pervasive problem.
On the one hand, ‘protecting our morals’ from being corrupted by Hollywood and the West is the rallying cry in mosques and on Arabic satellite television channels. Yet on the other hand, rates of downloading pornography from the Internet are highest in the world per capita in Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. How can we explain this hypocrisy and tension between private behaviour and public posturing? Why is it so widespread? Why is the honour of a Muslim family bound up with its female members? And when that honour is deemed to be violated by a woman’s loss of virginity, or falling in love, why must her family kill her?
There have been better times in Islam’s history, and turning to earlier scholarship for inspiration on how to improve matters yields some interesting material. The Sufi scholar-poet Rumi, for example, has a theory:
A certain man had a jealous wife
and a very, very appealing maidservant.
The wife was careful not to leave them alone,
ever. For six years they were never left
in a room together.
But then one day
at the public bath the wife suddenly remembered
that she’d left her washbasin at home.
‘Please, go get the basin,’ she told her maid.
The girl jumped to the task, because she knew
that she would finally get to be alone
with the master. She ran joyfully.
She flew,
and desire took them both so quickly
that they didn’t even latch the door.
With great speed they joined each other.
When bodies blend in copulation,
spirits also merge.
Meanwhile, the wife back at the bathhouse,
washing her hair: ‘What have I done!
I’ve set the cotton wool on fire!
I’ve put the ram in the ewe!’
She washed the clay soap off her hair and ran,
fixing her chador about her as she went.
The maid ran for love. The wife ran out of fear
and jealousy. There is a great difference.
The mystic flies moment to moment.
The fearful ascetic drags along month to month.
But also the length of a ‘day’ to a lover
may be fifty thousand years!
You can’t understand this with your mind.
You must burst open!
Fear is nothing to a lover, a tiny piece of thread.
Love is a quality of God. Fear is an attribute
of those who think they serve God, but who are actually
preoccupied with penis and vagina.
You have read in the text where They love him
blends with He loves them.
Those joining loves
are both qualities of God. Fear is not.
What characteristics do God and human beings
have in common? What is the connection between
what lives in time and what lives in eternity?
If I kept talking about love,
a hundred new combinings would happen,
and still I would not say the mystery.
The fearful ascetic runs on foot, along the surface.
Lovers move like lightning and wind.
No contest.
Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble,
necessity and free will,
while lover and beloved pull themselves into each other.
The worried wife reaches the door
and opens it.
The maid, dishevelled, confused, flushed,
unable to speak.
The husband begins his five-times-a-day prayer.
The wife enters this agitated scene.
As though experimenting with clothes,
the husband holds up some flaps and edges.
She sees his testicles and penis so wet, semen
still dribbling out, spurts of jism and vaginal juices
drenching the thighs of the maid.
The wife slaps him
on the side of the head:
‘Is this the way
a man prays, with his balls?
Does your penis
long for union like this?
Is that why
her legs are covered with this stuff?’
These are good questions
she’s asking her ‘ascetic’ husband!
People who renounce desires
often turn, suddenly,
into hypocrites!1
This is a modern translation, but a great Muslim poet and philosopher crafted these words in the thirteenth century – a sign of openness and permissiveness that seems to have disappeared in the Muslim public space. For at least the past two hundred years, no major Muslim thinker has been so explicit in their public thinking and output, a reflection of the strange prudishness forcing sexuality underground in most parts of the Muslim world. This negating of the most powerful of human impulses, thanks to the rise of the new puritanism, now finds expression in a range of unhealthy, violent and ugly ways.
The Arab Spring uprisings have, rightly, been lionised as expressing people’s yearnings for freedom, social justice and dignity. But moments of liberty brought a repressed sexual culture violently to the fore. When Egyptians overthrew their dictator in 2011, one of the first celebratory acts in Tahrir Square included the gang beating and sexual assault of the American journalist Lara Logan. In 2013, a Dutch journalist was raped in the same square. Voluntary groups set up to keep women safe recorded forty-six cases of sexual assault and harassment against women on one Sunday night alone in 2013.
Victorian travel writers revelled in the sexual freedoms of the Orient. Richard Burton, famous for a written account of his 1853 pilgrimage to Mecca, also translated and published the Kama Sutra. Going further back, King Henry VIII caused scandal and ended up creating his own Church, breaking away from Rome, for lust and love of the women in his life. In contrast, Muslim monarchs of the time had entire quarters in their palaces, the harem, for their women. The Muslim world was renowned for being sexually liberated (at least compared with Victorian England), and the classic Arabian Nights was a product of this Muslim openness toward sex and the caliph’s harem. The candour was set from the top.
As the West became more secular and sexual in public, the Muslim world went in decidedly the opposite direction. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was once banned in Britain, but what did the book say that Rumi had not said centuries earlier? Today, however, while the West has grown freer and less censorious, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is banned in Saudi Arabia and other countries.
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nbsp; It is a historical fact that in the city of the Prophet, Medina, there were women walking around bare-breasted, though it is a matter of debate whether they were all slaves or whether some free women also (un)dressed in public in this way to assert their freedom. We know this because the Quran called on ‘believing women’ to cover their bosoms, but declared that the polytheists, pagans and others were free to do as they wished; the Prophet and his companions, even the early caliphs, were open to such a society. Muslim scripture confirms this, but very few Muslim scholars wish to face this historical reality. Instead, there has come to be a mass culture of frowning on sexuality, the consequences of which are still with us.
Muhammad Ibn Battuta (d. 1304), often referred to as the Marco Polo of the Muslim world, travelled far and wide and wrote about his observations. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca five times in his life, and visited frontier parts of the Muslim world to see the countries that the pilgrims came from. Once, when in Africa, he went to see the dancing of the local women by the fireside. Travelling Arab merchants came to know that the great Muslim scholar and writer Ibn Battuta was nearby, and so they sought him out. When they entered his encampment only to find him watching bare-breasted dancers by the fire, they protested that he was committing a sin. To which he responded: ‘You Arabs are oversexed. This is the local way of these people.’ He saw no sin in it, and instead showed openness of mind and acceptance of others.
The Arabs have a simple but profound saying that resonates more in Arabic than in English: ‘Mamnou‘ marghoub’, or ‘That which is forbidden is desired.’ The forbidding by clerics and governments of public expressions of sexuality has now led to mass suppressed desire. The UN report that found that over 99 per cent of women in Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country, had been sexually harassed is a worrying indicator. That in Saudi Arabia women cannot travel alone without permission from a male relative is based on the underlying premise that if left alone, women will be promiscuous or be raped by men.
Marriage has been built up as the only sexual outlet permitted by the sharia, and observant young Muslims are now being taught, based on sayings attributed to the Prophet, to venerate marriage as ‘half of faith’ – in other words, a substantial element in their religious life. But no marriage is perfect, and when the first opportunity to meet a woman or man comes about in the context not of friendship or dating, with the opportunity to try and fail, and learn from experience, but straightaway in marriage, then failure occurs all too often. If Twitter is any indicator of social norms, the proliferation of married couples opting for ‘open marriages’ in the Gulf is an instructive insight. Thousands of social media accounts have emerged in the past five years offering wife swaps and group sex.
This frustration has other, more worrying symptoms. Pent-up machismo is not directed toward women, love, lust and sexual release, but channelled into joining hard-line Islamist organisations with a global enemy that needs destroying: the West. As the West is in dar al-harb, the ‘abode of war’, non-Muslim women there are ‘allowed’ for the extremists. Jihadis in Iraq have been found to keep a heavy stash of Western pornography, as did Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad hideout in Pakistan.2
It follows from this broader context of failure to find sex by normal routes that creating sex slaves out of non-Muslims such as Yazidis was one of the first acts of ISIS after it seized territories in Iraq in 2014. When the wider culture elevates marriage to unrealistic levels of perfection, and young Muslims then fail to find a wife or husband to match up to these ideals, or, worse, cannot afford to get married because of onerous cultural and tribal expectations, they will sometimes find themselves open to persuasion to head out to join ISIS and find the perfect partner, the mujahid, or fighter for God.
While Western academics and government officials may not give this sexual repression much thought, their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Israel both recognise it as a factor helping to draw males into extremism and violence. To help deradicalise the most extreme Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters, Israel has ensured that they are married on release from prison. In Saudi Arabia, Salafi-jihadis on official counter-extremism programmes are often provided with more than one wife by the government, to provide terrorists with a new and more immediate outlet for their sexual frustrations.
The wider world is shocked to learn of Yazidi slave girls under ISIS command, but to the literalist Salafi there is little to be frowned on. For years now young men from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf have headed to the West for summer holidays filled with drink and prostitution. Those in any doubt need only walk around London’s Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Edgware Road during the summer months. Telephone booths are plastered with the calling cards of female escorts, who find lucrative business among the tens of thousands of young men who visit the British capital. The situation is so serious that for several years the imam of Mecca has felt compelled to address this issue of sex tourism in Friday sermons and forbid it.
Since the West is in dar al-harb, the abode of war, where sharia rules do not apply, literalist Salafi Muslims require some kind of rules for sex tourism. Some Gulf Arabs have created what they call misyaf, or ‘summer marriages’, whereby they can contract a two-month ‘marriage’ with a woman in Indonesia or Syria. They pay these ‘wives’ handsomely and then leave after the holidays, triggering divorce. Among the Shi‘a there is also the practice of mut‘a (literally ‘pleasure’), short-term marriages lasting anywhere from an hour to a year or longer, but on the understanding that the arrangement is temporary.
Whether in the West or in the Muslim world, with or without any rules, the search for sex abroad because it is forbidden at home lies at the crux of this widespread malaise.
The Quran does not forbid sex, but talks about it in a matter-of-fact way in the context of marital relations. All that is required for marriage is a mutual declaration before witnesses – without the vast expense and social pressure of an elaborate wedding, lavish gifts of cars and jewellery, setting up home together and being expected to have children immediately. A man is simply supposed to give his loved one what he can afford, and at the time of the Prophet those of his companions who had no money recited surahs of the Quran as wedding gifts to their brides, or brought them dates to eat.
The sexual malaise in Muslim-majority societies that leads to widespread pornography use, sex tourism and so-called temporary or summer marriages results from an inability to articulate human love and sexuality for fear of sinning, being judged, and then being an outcast in society. If today’s Muslims had the sexual candour of earlier writers like Hafez of Persia, with his stirring, life-affirming and unashamedly erotic – yet profoundly spiritual – poetry, our world might be a better place. With more of his spirit about, people might not feel the need to suppress human sexuality in Muslim societies around the world.
Hafez (1315–90) was a baker’s apprentice who knew very little about the world beyond the cultured, gardened city of Shiraz when, one day, the baker sent him, aged twenty-one, to deliver some bread to a wealthy customer. There, at the door, Hafez caught a glimpse of a stunningly beautiful woman inside the house. That one glance was enough to capture young Hafez’s pure, romantic heart, and he fell passionately in love with her. She, of course, barely noticed the poor baker’s assistant – short, physically nothing special, some say of dark complexion, in a society that valued fairness. How could an impoverished apprentice court a beautiful noblewoman of the great city of Shiraz?
As the months went by, Hafez’s love and lust increased, and he became completely besotted with her. He started to sing love songs and read poetry in celebration of her dazzling charms and expressing his yearning for her. Poetry is to Persians what opera is to Italians. Others heard Hafez and started to quote his emotionally powerful lines, and soon Hafez’s love poetry became popular across Shiraz.
Unaware of his growing fame, he turned to oracles and magicians for help to win the attention and heart of his beloved. He was advised to keep a night vigil at the to
mb of a particular saint for forty nights: it was believed that a lover who went without sleep for forty nights at this shrine would be granted his deepest desire. Willing to try anything, Hafez undertook the vigil. It is said that at dawn on the fortieth day, the archangel Gabriel appeared before Hafez and said: ‘What do you wish for, Hafez?’
Hafez, stunned by the beauty of the angel in front of his eyes, wondered: if God’s angel was so sublime and radiant, what could God himself be like? At that moment, a new kind of beauty entered his heart.
‘What do you want, Hafez?’ prompted the angel Gabriel.
Hafez kept wondering about the force that lay behind the beauty of the angel. He forgot about the elegant woman, his desires, everything. After forty sleepless nights, Hafez said: ‘I want God.’
Gabriel smiled. Hafez had already reached greater spiritual depths than could have been anticipated. The woman would have been a simpler choice. But Hafez had chosen the Eternal. His life was now set to unfold in new ways.
The path that he had chosen required a spiritual teacher, a Sufi. Gabriel directed Hafez to his new teacher, whom Hafez would serve unstintingly. That teacher was Mohamed Attar, a chemist in Shiraz. Just like the Taliban and others in our time, back then religious zealots sought to contain the expression of love and longing. To defy their writ, Attar kept a low profile, and taught only a select few students. Only a limited number of people knew of his spiritual mastery. The fact that Hafez was Attar’s disciple on a spiritual pathway was kept secret for the whole of both their lives.
Hafez served his guru for decades, seeking further enlightenment. Midway through his life, his desperate longing for God’s loving embrace, his sworn Sufi secrecy, and soon the death of his wife and son tormented his soul. Yet he had spiritual insights that he could not share with others. The people of Shiraz, where he was born and died, were only to discover the gem in their midst after his death. Yearning to share his thoughts while he was still alive, Hafez cried out: