Understanding Islamism in its many forms is a science in itself. But in practical terms in post-Mubarak Egypt, it’s easiest to think of it in terms of strength and speed. The most obvious face is the extrastrong, ultrafast Salafi movement, which has been gaining ground in Egypt over the past few decades but officially “came out” after the 2011 uprising, beards and face veils flowing. These men and women are in a hurry to reshape Egypt according to their understanding of Islam, one heavily influenced by religious currents in the Gulf, and that includes a recasting of laws in line with their strict interpretation of shari‘a.
Sex is something of a preoccupation for Salafis. “I am afraid for the nation, that they go for lust and destroy themselves,” Mahmoud al-Masry warned me. Al-Masry is a celebrity Salafi, a smiling shaykh whose jolly face and cheerful manner can be seen on religious TV channels across Egypt and the wider Arab world. We were sitting in his expensive villa in a gated compound on the outskirts of Cairo—sugarcoated fire and brimstone having proved a lucrative line of business. Al-Masry takes a dim view of ikhtilat—that is, mixing of the sexes—to which he ascribes a host of ills, including adultery, disease, and sexual exploitation. But we managed to meet all the same because his wife, a sparky mass-communications graduate who works as his business manager, served as our chaperone.
“I believe that the woman is like a diamond, to be preserved. We do not suppress or oppress the woman—I want to protect her,” al-Masry said, his wife nodding vigorously. “If you leave her, she could be lost because she is simple and emotional; she could be hurt by anybody.” In al-Masry’s book, that means yes to veiling, if at all possible; yes to wives obeying their husbands in all worldly affairs; and no to women working unless strictly necessary, certainly not with men and definitely not in positions of authority. “A people will never succeed if they are led by a woman,” al-Masry told me, quoting a popular—and debatable—hadith. “The emotional part is affecting the very most of her, so if she is a judge or a ruler, at that time she will rule with her emotions and that would be unjust to the people.”
Al-Masry and his Salafi peers seem to have little faith in their fellow Muslims. From the way they talk, men and women are brimming with lust, due in no small part to globalization, that will spill into communal chaos unless the sources of temptation are removed. Indeed, the dust had barely settled on Tahrir Square before self-appointed Salafi God squads—modeled along the lines of Saudi Arabia’s infamous religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—were on the streets trying to close down hair salons, cover up statues, and terrorize hand-holding couples. Such antics variously amuse and enrage the majority of Egyptians outside the Salafi movement. Should they ever get their act together, however, these ultraconservatives have the potential to be more than just a joke or an irritation, thanks to their newfound political presence in the post-Mubarak landscape.
How much political influence the Salafis will ultimately have depends on the real heavy hitters in the new order, the Muslim Brotherhood and their flagship political party, Freedom and Justice. “We are different to the Salafis only in the way we go about implementing [these ideas],” said Ali Fath al-Bab, a senior figure in the Brotherhood’s leadership and a longtime member of Parliament. “We have the same background and knowledge, but they do not have experience in political life.” The Brotherhood has plenty of that. Through four generations of persecution, through uprisings and crackdowns, the Muslim Brotherhood has been honing its skills, and now, after sweeping the first post-Mubarak elections, it sits at Egypt’s political center.
Given Fath al-Bab’s long-standing membership in the Brotherhood, I prepared for our meeting at one of Cairo’s trendy cafés carefully, interlacing my fingers as I saw him approach, the better to resist the impulse to shake his hand—a lesson I learned the hard way, having once sent an Egyptian imam into a temporary state of paralysis with just such a hearty greeting. I needn’t have bothered. Fath al-Bab enthusiastically took my hand, and the chair beside me, and by the time his latte arrived, he had spelled out much of the Brotherhood’s current thinking on pressing issues in gender and sexual rights.
Compared with the fast-track Salafis, Fath al-Bab and his like-minded colleagues see themselves as a slow-acting remedy for Egypt’s ills. For them, it is social change first—through education, economics, and other fundamental reforms—legal change second. This gradual approach, he said, comes with an impressive pedigree. “In the Prophet Muhammad’s day, there were many houses for prostitution. But he did not ban them immediately; he left them until they changed and they themselves stopped it.” Egypt’s Muslims are not yet ready for shari’a, Fath al-Bab said, and until that time, there’s no point in passing laws, as the Salafis urge, just for them to be broken. But this softly-softly approach is at odds with the views of others in the Brotherhood who believe that Egypt is ripe for Islamic law. For all their internal differences, however, the bottom line is the same. “Freedom and equality are our principles, but within borders or limits set by Islam and society,” Fath al-Bab told me. “Freedom within a frame” is how many inside the Brotherhood and out describe their dream of Egypt’s new order. But I wonder which, in the end, will be cut to size: the canvas of people’s thoughts and actions or the frame that aims to contain it?
“SEXUAL MISERY OF THE MASSES”
“Shari‘a is a text that can be interpreted in the sense of sexual liberty or in the sense of repression. If the politicians decide on sexual liberty, then the Islamic scholars will find a way.” This is how Abdessamad Dialmy answers that question. He’s a Moroccan sociologist and one of the few in the Arab world to specialize in sexuality. Over the past four decades, Dialmy has explored the full spectrum of attitudes and activities in the region—from sex work to homosexuality to the role of sex in Islamic fundamentalism. There are easier ways to make a living, by his own admission: “The Arab researcher in this field gets little recognition for his hard work … suffering from loneliness, exclusion, intimidation and persecution.”36
As we sat on the terrace of a bustling café in the heart of Rabat’s Ville Nouvelle, in the shade of the chestnut trees, I asked Dialmy how he came by his unusual calling. “I read Wilhelm Reich in 1971. I was twenty-two years old, teaching at high school. I was already married, a petit bourgeois, with a house and dog,” he told me. “When I read this book, it shook me, it really shook me. Because of this book, I divorced my wife. I understood that marriage is really a prison.”
Wilhelm Reich was one of the most provocative, and eccentric, thinkers of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Sexual Revolution, first published in German in 1936, was an indictment of “bourgeois sexual morality” and the capitalist institutions that maintained it, including marriage. Dialmy responded to Reich’s “idea of revolution, attack on traditional morals, to be free, to live one’s sexuality,” as he put it, by leaving everything to his wife and heading to France to continue his studies—in and out of class. “Really, I lived. I practiced [sex] every day with different women. It was crazy,” he recalled.
When he returned to Morocco in the mid-1970s, Dialmy went on to complete a doctorate in women’s sexuality and continued his work as a sexual “militant.” “I lived that revolution in my personal life; it was possible at that time,” he said. Today, things are different, in Egypt as in Dialmy’s homeland. “In the seventies, we had liberal thought about sexuality in Morocco among intellectuals in the leftist parties. Their practices were not as liberal; their talk was ahead of their behavior. Now it is reversed. Now they [the people] have very liberal practices, but they are not as open in their thinking.”
Reich had a theory about that, one that goes some way to explaining the recent sexual history of Egypt and its neighbors. He began his career as a psychoanalyst in Vienna, alongside Sigmund Freud, and saw enough sexual unhappiness pass through the clinic to last a lifetime. What’s the point, Reich asked, in tackling such confusion one patient at a time when society was mass-
producing these hang-ups faster than he could ever treat them? As a result, Reich started looking beyond his couch to broader social conditions. What he saw looked a lot like the sexual terrain of today’s Arab world: sex outside of marriage roundly condemned; young people, unable to get jobs, afford marriage, or find moments of privacy, reduced to furtive relations without adequate contraception or sufficient information, storing up sexual problems for later life; women whose sexual needs, beyond reproduction, were ignored or suppressed, held to double standards of virginity before marriage and chastity ever after, even in the face of miserable, unsatisfactory unions from which there was little escape, given the trouble and stigma of divorce. Abortion outlawed, masturbation condemned, sexual education suppressed—in short, “sexual misery of the masses.”37
Why do people put up with this? Reich asked. With not just sexual repression but economic and political subjugation as well? Instead of throwing off their shackles, why do they accept, and even embrace, authoritarian regimes? Reich thought he had an answer, one in which sex went hand in hand with politics and economics and with religion and tradition to keep the ruling class in power and the people in their place.
An authoritarian system needs submissive subjects, and Reich reckoned that the most efficient factory for the latter was the patriarchal family, in which power relations between the head of state and his people are mirrored in the ties between the head of the family and his dependents. “The authoritarian state has a representative in every family, the father; in this way he becomes the state’s most valuable tool,” Reich wrote. “He in turn reproduces submissiveness to authority in his children, especially his sons.”38 The most effective way for a father to keep his children in line, Reich argued, is by clamping down on their sexual urges from day one. The institutions of the authoritarian system give fathers a helping hand in constraining the sexual freedom of their charges: the emphasis on marriage, which keeps women in check; the church, which condemns nonprocreative and extramarital sex as a sin against God; and schools, which ram home the message of sexual abstinence for youth. The result, Reich concluded, is paralysis of “the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.”39
The repressive systems in Reich’s sights were capitalism and fascism, but he considered sexual suppression to be the hallmark of any dictatorship. The first step to wholesale social reform was to make people aware of their sexual subjugation, he believed, and with that consciousness would come action. His ideas are interesting in the context of Egypt and many of its Arab neighbors, because they might explain, at least in small part, why people tolerated lousy government for so long. Sexual repression arguably played a role in keeping Egyptians at home for years, though sexual awareness—even in an era of mass media and instant communication—was not, in the end, what brought them into the streets. Anger at injustice, corruption, poverty, inequality, and many other failings of the old regimes was what drove these uprisings; sex was just one of frustration’s many channels.
Addressing society’s sexual dilemmas will be an important part of building a better order across the Arab region, according to Dialmy. “We need to talk about the right of the individual to a sexual life, to sexual pleasure,” he told me. “If we want to have a real democracy, these will be important.” Or, as his hero, Reich, put it: “No freedom program has any chance of success without an alteration of human sexual structure.”40 Reich cautioned would-be revolutionaries that the one does not inexorably follow the other. You can change the political system, but that doesn’t mean the sexual order changes with it. But if you don’t change the sexual order of things, freedom will never stick.
RACE TO THE POLE
In Egypt’s emerging new order, a liberal minority, whose thinking is along the lines of Dialmy’s, and a conservative majority, on the same page as Fath al-Bab, are fighting it out in all domains. This includes the vexed question of personal freedoms, especially as they relate to “morals”—whose definition has tended to be limited to women and sexuality, as opposed to broader questions of political, economic, and social justice. Sex is one of the easiest ways to discredit political opponents in the post-Mubarak period, accusing liberals of promoting “foreign”—that is, Western—ideas about sexual freedom, and Islamists of peccadilloes and perversions, from curb-crawling to necrophilia.
“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.
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* An old unit of currency, one-fortieth of a piastre, today the smallest denomination of Egyptian currency.
† A tip.
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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 violenc
e. 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.
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