Aside from religious objections, criticism of ‘urfi marriages in Egypt also centers on their ambiguous legal status. Although they are not officially registered, courts have the power to grant women divorce from ‘urfi marriage so long as they can provide evidence (witnesses or a written contract) that the union existed—a paradoxical situation in which the state is essentially liberating women from something it doesn’t recognize in the first place. Women have no rights to financial support during or after ‘urfi marriages, including inheritance, and the children of such marriages can find themselves in an awkward position.42 As a result, ‘urfi marriages are generally presented as a raw deal for women.
But some women see ‘urfi marriage differently; Suhaila, a widow in her early thirties living in Cairo with a young daughter, is one of them. Suhaila seems to have it all: education, money, looks, and a bright personality. So it’s no wonder that one of Azza’s brothers, a married man with teenage kids, fell for her at first sight. To pursue their relationship, the couple entered into an ‘urfi marriage, at Suhaila’s request. For her, this arrangement offers the benefits of attractive male companionship, as well as the protection of a man about the house, without the material complications of an official marriage.
In Azza’s family, her brother’s ‘urfi marriage is anything but secret, having had a written contract, a lawyer, and two witnesses. But it’s the basis of seemingly endless discussion—or rather, dispute—among family members. Not surprisingly, Azza’s official sister-in-law is unhappy with the arrangement, but there’s not much she can do when her husband disappears to Suhaila’s apartment for much of the week. Most of his brothers and sisters are upset; to them, this is just thinly disguised adultery. And while Suhaila is holding most of the cards in this relationship, she’s not revealing her hand: her friends and daughter have been told this marriage is official.
Their union is closer to yet another Islamic spin on matrimony: zawaj misyar, or so-called ambulant marriage. These arrangements are creating quite a stir in the Arab region, particularly in Saudi Arabia. They are akin to official marriage in the sense that, in some countries, they are registered with the state with full documentation, as well as witnesses, and the wife and any children resulting from the marriage have the same rights of inheritance as they would in an official marriage. One key difference, however, is that during the union the husband does not necessarily have to financially support his misyar wife, who remains at her original home. In Egypt, misyar marriage has been endorsed by an edict from Dar alIfta, the government body that issues fatwas—that is, legal opinions from Islamic authorities—to the dismay of women’s rights groups, who consider it a lesser form of marriage that gives women few entitlements.43
At the end of the day, debates over informal marriage, in its evolving forms, are not really about haram or halal, or even legal rights. Informal marriages, particularly among young people, are widely seen as both a symptom and a cause of family breakdown. Because they usually take place without parental knowledge, let alone consent, they subvert social convention and circumvent family control. Therein lies a large part of the problem, because they challenge patriarchal authority—troubling to the family and, by extension, to the state as well. Some describe ‘urfi marriage as an innovative middle ground between the perceived sexual laxity of the West and traditional Islamic codes, offering women more latitude than conventional matrimony. But the majority of people appear—at least in public—to be less enthusiastic about alternative unions: in a national survey of Egyptian youth, for example, fewer than 10 percent of men and women under thirty thought ‘urfi a solution to Egypt’s marriage problems.44 Most people I know in such marriages regard them, at best, as a temporary fix until they can get the real thing; the day has not yet dawned when informal marriage is widely considered a lifestyle choice rather than a last resort.
PILLOW TALK
For all the effort Egyptians make to get married, all is not well in the conjugal bed. The pressure-cooker atmosphere of recent years—which blew in the protests of 2011—continues to build in married life. For Azza and her circle, this means less-than-steamy relations; what research there is on the sex lives of Egyptian couples and their counterparts across the region shows she and her friends are not alone.45
Lackluster lovemaking is positively un-Islamic. There are plenty of stories about the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad that extol the pleasures of sex for husbands and wives. “Let none of you come upon his wife like an animal, and let there be an emissary between them,” the Prophet is reported to have said. “What is this emissary, O Messenger of God?” a clueless believer asked. “The kiss and [sweet] words,” he replied.46 According to another account, the Prophet ranked peremptory foreplay and failure to sexually satisfy one’s partner among serious male deficiencies. Indeed, the Prophet’s regular advice on the nitty-gritty of sexual life featured prominently in medieval Christian attacks on the new faith, whose unabashed sensuality was seen as a cunning ploy to win converts and undermine Christianity’s more austere official line, which exalted virginity, chastity, and monogamy. “It is impossible that he who excites his people to sensual things rather than to spiritual ones would be a true messenger of God,” sniffed a thirteenth-century Spanish philosopher.47
One woman out to breathe that pioneering spirit back into marital relations is Heba Kotb, the Arab world’s best-known sex therapist. “You have just one life. We don’t have a lot of time in this world. And we practice sex, so let’s practice it in a good way,” she enthused. “Let’s transform it into the dynamo of our life and our happiness.” Kotb and I first met at her clinic in a trendy part of Cairo. “For now, I’m booked three months in advance. Daily, I see between ten and twenty [patients]. In the summer [when Egyptians living abroad, and Arabs from elsewhere in the region, visit Cairo], it’s usually a mess,” she told me. Her Egyptian patients come from all classes, locations, and age groups; although women are traditionally expected to head into sexual hibernation at menopause (sinn al-ya’s in Arabic, “age of despair”), Kotb’s clientele also includes a sprinkling of those well past retirement.
Patients were not always as forthcoming. When Kotb first set up shop in 2001, the few people bold enough to seek help were wary about putting in an appearance. “In the very first days of my practice, privacy was very important to them. The man would ask whether he would be seen in my office or not [and], if there’s another patient on the day, whether there would be a space so that they would not overlap. It was a very sensitive issue,” she recalled. “For now, no. They are waiting outside, ten to fifteen patients at the same time, and they have no problem to be seen by each other. Things change.”
This change is in part due to Kotb herself. In 2006, she burst into Arab households with Kalam Kabiir (Big Talk), a weekly TV series on sexual problems broadcast by one of Egypt’s private satellite channels. The show’s dozen or so episodes openly ventured into areas where other presenters had feared to tread—online porn, oral sex, and wedding night jitters, among them. For just under an hour, a soberly suited Kotb, her hair and neck fully covered by a hijab, dispensed advice on various topics, her lengthy monologues relieved by the occasional guest expert and an imam giving an Islamic take on the issue at hand, be it masturbation or voyeurism.
Kotb’s show mirrored her experience with patients. Back at the clinic, it’s clear that the region’s sexual dynamo is out of order. “Husbands and wives, they don’t know they should communicate about what they want sexually. They don’t know that sexuality is something we can discuss,” she observed. “They are full of the idea that this is an instinct. It’s an instinct only in animals, but we as people—praise be to God almighty—we need to communicate.”
Kotb described a typical consultation to me: “It’s a nice couple. They want the wife to be happier, [so] they come together. He says she is not interested in sex—she’s not spontaneous. Then they get into mutual accusations. [She says] all he wants is his pleasure and it’s over in f
ive minutes—he’s selfish.” Kotb spends a lot of time getting couples back to basics. “I teach them techniques, Masters and Johnson, Kinsey. Using pictures in a book or on the computer, I am showing them: here is something called the clitoris, here is the labia, try … this is sensitive to this and that … friction transverse, longitudinally, circular, et cetera.” Over the course of half a dozen sessions, Kotb encourages couples to explore their bodies. “Sometimes I give them exercises: go and get to know yourself and each other. Then come back and tell me. If they tell me it looks like this, I know they went and did it, they are not lying.” It’s not just anatomy and physiology on the syllabus; Kotb spends a lot of time with her clients working on psychology as well—getting men to understand the fine art of wooing their wives in and out of bed.
As for women, some cases require overtime. In her practice, Kotb sees a lot of vaginismus—three or four patients a day with a condition that makes them seize up during intercourse, rendering penetration painful if not impossible. There is plenty of research from Egypt to show that female sexual dysfunction is a common enough condition. One study of almost a thousand married women—mainly high-school-educated housewives—in a region north of Cairo found that nearly 70 percent had some sort of sexual dysfunction; of those, around half reported low desire and difficulties reaching orgasm, and roughly a third said they had trouble with arousal or pain on intercourse.48 A comparable study of women in southern Egypt found equally high rates of sexual dysfunction: over half of the women surveyed said they were sexually dissatisfied.49 But one woman’s disappointment can be another’s fulfillment. Other research in Egypt has shown that for some women, the fact that their husbands are enjoying themselves in bed is how they define their own sexual pleasure—for them, having their own orgasm simply doesn’t enter into the equation.50
Kotb, however, has noticed a change in the women turning up at her clinic over the years. Earlier it was mainly husbands dragging in their wives for consultation; after the uprising, she found the situation reversed. “Women are more courageous now to accuse their husbands of not being good [in bed]. It is the spirit of the revolution—I have to reject, I have to refuse, I have to say no [I am not the one to blame],” she told me. “Today I had a couple, he is not asking her for sex, only once a month. When he approaches, sometimes he loses his erection, so she is starting to talk: ‘I don’t accept this relation. We are like brother and sister living together here, and you have to do something about yourself.’ ”
Kotb’s advice to couples is shaped by her faith. “I love Islam,” she told me. “I admire the religion. In radical Christianity, sex is not a good thing, even within marriage. But this is not logic; people find themselves desiring something, and they couldn’t get attached to that religion, so they start to get out of that religion. In Islam, it’s the contrary: sex is something that is advised, that is pushed to [ward].… This makes people more religious and more loving to this religion, which is giving them all this space, which is giving them all this pleasure—and also the reward in this life and the hereafter.”
Kotb is in her forties; like many Egyptians of her generation, she became interested in Islam at university. “I started to be religious not very early in my life. I was brought up in a very liberal house; I was wearing a swimsuit until after I got married.” Her husband, whom she met at medical school, came from an even less observant background, but together, she said, “we decided to make ourselves and our future families better than our older families, so we started to read about religion, to study Qur’an, to get it by heart.” It was around this time that Kotb decided to put on hijab, much to her parents’ dismay—at the time, headscarves were something for servants, not aspiring surgeons.
Her career in sexology came later. An early opportunity passed her by when the only class on the subject in her entire course of studies at Cairo University Medical School was canceled because of freak bad weather. But a second chance appeared unexpectedly, after graduation. As a working mother, Kotb decided to forgo a career in surgery for something less time intensive: forensic medicine. She began working on the sexual abuse of children—both victims and perpetrators—and it was through this that she developed her interest in sexuality. In the course of her research on sexual abuse, Kotb became one of Egypt’s first sex surfers. “I started reading about sexuality,” she recalled, “getting some books from abroad. Then the Internet was extremely fresh; it was [newly] wrapped. It was very hard to get a free line on the Internet, but my mother-in-law knew someone in the army, so I was going to a forbidden [classified] area to get onto the Net to get information about sexuality.” A doctorate from the United States on sexuality in Islam topped off her training, and in Cairo she began to build her patient roster, which now extends to several Gulf states, and a following among Muslims in Canada as well.
Kotb is obviously an inspiration to some; I’ve seen strangers come up to her in public to thank her for her show. How many of these fans are actually following her advice is another matter; many of the women I’ve asked have the same relationship to Kotb’s programs that I do to cooking shows—interesting in theory, but not something we could ever do in practice. “I like Heba Kotb,” one married woman in her early twenties in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo told me, “because she explains everything in a modest and useful way. I watch it always, but my mother does not like her. I heard from her [Kotb] that I need to ask for my sexual rights. But I cannot apply that because my husband will not agree or will feel that I am rude.”
To be sure, Kotb’s advice seems daring to many by today’s standards. Given recent fatwas forbidding oral sex or nudity between the conjugal sheets, her suggestions on how to spice up spousal relations have earned her conservative opponents. But on closer inspection, Kotb is hardly a radical—something that puts her in the crosshairs of other, more liberal sexologists across the region. She is, for example, an implacable opponent of premarital sex, on psychosexual as well as religious grounds. And for all her talk of women exerting their God-given sexual rights, it’s still men first in Kotb’s book. “For wives, I want to say that a man’s sexual needs are different than a woman’s. Instead of being a passive recipient of sex, try to be an active partner,” she advised. “He is exposed to many temptations outside the home. Be available to please him and do not give him a reason to make a choice between you and hellfire.”51
The advice of Kotb and other Islamically inflected sex therapists pales in comparison with the full-blooded approach of the past. Take, for example, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure. We know little about its author, ‘Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib, other than where and when he wrote: Baghdad in the late tenth or early eleventh century. That’s a pity, because he sounds like just the sort of man I’d like to meet.
The Encyclopedia is truly breathtaking. Short of cybersex and porn videos, its forty-three chapters cover every conceivable sexual practice: heterosexual, homosexual (male and female), bisexual, animal, vegetable, and mineral—you name it, it’s all there. Section titles “On the Kinds and Techniques of Coition,” “On Jealousy,” “On the Advantages of a Nonvirgin over a Virgin,” “On Increasing the Sexual Pleasure of Man and Woman,” and “Description of the Nasty Way of Doing It and Lewd Sex” give you some idea of its vast scope. ‘Ali ibn Nasr’s message is clear: sex is God’s gift to mankind and we are meant to enjoy it. While the book’s intent is serious, its style is not only arousing but very often hilarious. I attracted plenty of dirty looks from fellow readers in the rare book room of one London library as I squirmed and guffawed my way through stories like this:
Hubba al Madaniyyah, for instance, said that one day she went out of the bath accompanied by a boy who had a puppy. It so happened that the puppy, seeing her vulva and vaginal lips, went between her legs and began to lick her organ. She lowered her body to give the animal a better chance of performing its job. However, when she had reached an orgasm, she fell down heavily upon it and could not raise herself until the helpless animal had died from heavy
pressure.52
Much of the Encyclopedia is drawn from earlier writers, Arab and foreign, and it includes a liberal sprinkling of advice from female authorities.53 The Encyclopedia is full of women—concubines, slave girls, prostitutes and wives—with full-throttle sex drives. The sexual insatiability of women was a well-established theme long before ‘Ali ibn Nasr came on the scene. The Qur’an tells the story of the wife of a Pharaonic court official, better known as Zuleika, who attempted to seduce the prophet Joseph, then a young and handsome slave. When he refused her advances, she claimed that he was the seducer, but her lie was exposed when people noticed that his shirt was torn from the back, proving that he had been fleeing her, not the other way around.54
Rather than try to curb female sexual drive, however, the Encyclopedia goes to great lengths to advise readers on how to fulfill it. It begins with unabashed romance—love letters “full of sweet words, nice poems,” not to mention patience, kindness, and tact, as well as the occasional gift. The book shows considerable insight into female character, offering the following counsel to bewildered lovers:
It should also be known that it is in a woman’s nature to get angry with a man without any reason whatsoever. When she does, the man should put up with her because she will return to her normal condition of her own accord. Moreover, a woman is of such a nature that she may be under the delusion that a man is guilty and so establishes his guilt without investigation. When the woman gets angry and treats the man unkindly as a result of her delusion, he should be wise enough to put up with her and not take her delusion seriously.55
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