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 i
t.”
Growing up in the Arab region, you are taught to steer clear of the “red lines”: taboos around politics, religion, and sex that are not to be challenged in word or deed. But these lines are not isolated strokes. They flow and mingle like calligraphy; if you efface some of the script, the meaning of the rest changes. The “Arab Awakening,” that began this decade took a chisel to the red line of politics and started the long process of chipping away at received wisdoms: that the people of the Arab region are, by their religion, culture, and tradition, ill suited to democracy; that they would never challenge authority; that their fear of instability trumps their desire for change and its attendant uncertainties; that they cannot handle freedom. Now that those fetters are breaking, it is only natural to ask if other taboos will follow.
Since the uprising, Cairo has become a vast billboard for human rights. “Freedom,” “justice,” and “dignity” are just a few of the catchwords in the graffiti wallpapering the city. But extending these same rights—as well as equality, privacy, autonomy, and integrity—to the sexual lives of all citizens is another matter entirely. In practical terms, “sexual rights” means the freedom to access sexual and reproductive health services and to generate, share, and consume ideas and information about sexuality. It is the right to choose your own partner and to be sexually active, or not, in consensual relations. It is the freedom to decide whether you want to have children, and when; it is the right to control your own body and the liberty to pursue a satisfying, safe, and pleasurable sexual life. And all this without coercion, discrimination, or violence—a tall order anywhere in the world.1
Sexual rights are integral human rights; they are not some lesser set of entitlements that you can take or leave and still claim to respect another’s freedom and humanity. The exercise of “sexual citizenship”—the power to make one’s own decisions and demand accountability from those in authority, irrespective of color, class, creed, gender, or sexual orientation—is more than a reflection of a democratic system. It is a means of building one, by anchoring these principles at the core of human existence, where they can, in turn, shape attitudes and actions in the other domains.
But “sexual rights” are a minefield in the Arab world; for many people, they are shorthand for a Western social agenda, meaning homosexuality, free love, prostitution, pornography, and the slippery slope toward undermining Islam and “traditional” Arab values. Such differences are reflected in World Values Surveys, which gauge attitudes on a wide range of issues in more than ninety countries. When two American academics, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, looked at the results from surveys conducted from 1995 to 2001, they found that the greatest difference of opinion between the Islamic countries polled (which included Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt) and the West (North America, Australasia, and Western Europe) was over not democratic values but rather gender roles and sexuality—the acceptability of abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, for example. There has been little change in these positions in subsequent waves of World Values Surveys.2 As the authors concluded, “The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos.”3
TRADING PLACES
Sex has long been a divide between the Arab world and the West. Today, the former seems busy denying the flesh, while the latter appears content to let it all hang out. What is often overlooked in these mutual recriminations, however, is that such positions are fluid; at other times in history, East and West traded places.4 Two journeys made in the first half of the nineteenth century—one by a Frenchman, the other by an Egyptian—illustrate this shift.
In 1849, Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and other classics, traveled the length of Egypt, from Alexandria south to Wadi Halfa in Sudan. Aside from Luxor’s ancient ruins, Flaubert wasn’t much impressed by monuments. (“Egyptian temples bore me profoundly,” he recorded in his diary in March 1850.)5 Nor was he particularly interested in his official mission: to collect information for France’s Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. (“Near me, about ten millimeters away, are my ministerial instructions, which seem to be waiting impatiently for the day I’ll use them as toilet paper,” he wrote to a friend back in France.)6
For a man of Flaubert’s romantic tendencies and wide appetites, commercial fact-finding was an unsatisfactory occupation. What really interested the budding author was people at their earthiest and most intimate. Luckily for Flaubert, Egypt gave him a “bellyful of colors” in this respect.7 But it was another part of his anatomy that did most of the touring. Fresh off the boat, Flaubert spent a night in a brothel with Turkish prostitutes whose “shaved cunts make a strange effect—the flesh is as hard as bronze, and my girl had a splendid arse,” as he reported home.8
Flaubert proceeded to fuck his way up the Nile. He wrote at length of the prostitutes in the southern village of Esna, and especially of his time with Kuchuk Hanem, “a tall, splendid creature, lighter in coloring than an Arab … her skin, particularly on her body, is slightly coffee-colored. When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges. Her eyes are dark and enormous … heavy shoulders, full, apple-shaped breasts.”9 Flaubert’s visit to Hanem’s house of pleasure featured music and striptease (a bare-all version of a traditional Egyptian dance called the bee) in addition to the business at hand: “I went down with Safia Zoughairah [one of Hanem’s colleagues]. She is very corrupt, writhing, full of pleasure, a little tigress. I stain the divan. [And then] the second bout with Kuchuk. I felt her necklace between my teeth as I clasped her shoulders. Her cunt corrupted me like rolls of velvet. I felt ferocious.”10
When Flaubert wasn’t having sex, he was observing it at almost every turn. Cairo’s bawdy street life caught his imagination: skits about whores and buggering donkeys; children playing, the girls “making imitation fart sounds with their hands”; a boy pimping his mother (“If you’ll give me five paras,* I’ll bring you my mother to fuck. I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick”).11 In addition to the common round of mosques and pyramids, Flaubert did some unusual sightseeing. In Kasr al-Ainy Hospital, where my own family still practices medicine, he toured the syphilis ward; on cue from the doctor, the male patients “stood up on their beds, undid their trouser belts (it was like army drill), and opened their anuses with their fingers to show their chancres.”12
Not that this deterred Flaubert from same-sex adventures. As he wrote to a friend: “Here it is quite accepted. One admits one’s sodomy, and it is spoken of at table in the hotel. Sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing. Travelling as we are for educational purposes, and charged with a mission by the government, we have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation. So far the occasion has not presented itself. We continue to seek it, however.”13 Flaubert’s research included taking in a performance of Cairo’s male prostitute-dancers (“charming in their corruption, in their obscene leerings and the femininity of their movements, dressed as women, their eyes painted with antimony”) and an interesting time at the hammam, where the masseur “lifted up my boules d’amour to clean them, then continuing to rub my chest with his left hand he began to pull with his right on my prick, and as he drew it up and down he leaned over my shoulder and said ‘baksheesh, baksheesh,’ ”† an opportunity Flaubert declined because the man wasn’t young or handsome enough for his tastes.14
Today, Flaubert and other nineteenth-century commentators on Arab sexual culture rank high on the Orientalist hit list. Orientalism, once a neutral term used to describe the study of the Arab region and parts farther east, became something of an insult after Edward Said published his book of the same title in the late 1970s. In it, he took generations of Western scholars to task for projecting the Arab region through their own prism of racial and religious prejudices and political interests, making Orientalism “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”15 The result, according to Said, was the transformation of the Orient into a “liv
ing tableau of queerness,” including its sexual mores, thereby asserting Western superiority and justifying Western hegemony over the region and its peoples. Said was particularly critical of Western commentators and their sexed-up accounts of Arab life, cruising the colonies for kicks they could not get in the straitlaced climate of home.
While Flaubert and his contemporaries found much to applaud in the apparent sexual ease of the East, some Arab visitors admired aspects of Europe’s sexual culture for the opposite reason. In 1826, Rifa‘a Raffi‘ al-Tahtawi, an Egyptian imam, arrived in Paris for the start of a five-year stay, part of a forty-strong delegation of Egyptian students sent to learn the language and pick up other useful knowledge. Al-Tahtawi was one of the more apt pupils, an accomplished writer and translator who would later be a leading light in educational reform back home. His record of this state-sponsored junket is part insightful observation, part Idiot’s Guide to Europe. Al-Tahtawi was enormously curious and wrote about everything from politics to restaurants, gala balls to slaughterhouses. There were aspects of French character he applauded (punctuality, honesty, and gratitude) and those he disdained (indulgence in personal pleasures, as well as a greater faith in philosophers than in prophets).
Al-Tahtawi generally took a dim view of relations between men and women in his home away from home. “Among French women there are those with great virtue and others who display quite the contrary. The latter are in the majority since the hearts of most people in France, whether male or female, are in thrall to the art of love.”16 Nor was he particularly impressed by their stand on premarital relations, which they considered “part of the [human] faults and vices rather than a mortal sin.”17 Nonetheless, al-Tahtawi seemed to have a soft spot for the ladies, those “paragons of beauty and charm,” and pinned much of the blame for their failings on the weakness of their men, who, in his opinion, gave them too much sway.18
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