For many Muntada participants, the program is a life-changing experience. Parents describe their delight at getting closer to their kids as a result of their newfound ease with personal matters, and participants talk about how home life has been transformed by husbands and wives feeling comfortable enough to hug each other in front of the family. Simple information is itself powerful: for those brought up in the shadows of sex, a clear presentation of the facts of life is a real eye-opener. And not just for women either; although men have more freedom to talk about sex, they rarely do so in mixed company, which leaves them largely in the dark about female sexuality. Muntada’s training sessions, which put men and women in the same room, are a revelation, according to male participants.
Language also makes a difference. Tamish insists that Muntada’s work be conducted in Arabic. For some Israeli Arabs, Hebrew or English is a much more comfortable language for discussing sexual matters. For example, new participants will use min orali (Hebrew for “oral sex”) and orgazma instead of the respective Arabic terms, jins fammii and nashwa jinsiyya. “When you say the word, to be able to say the word freely, it’s fifty percent of the work,” says one woman, a social worker from Haifa. “Why [do] I choose to speak about a dick in Hebrew not in Arabic? It must show something about my attitude toward things.”22
Some participants lack even this choice, because they simply do not know the Arabic for many of the topics under discussion. Part of Muntada’s name—Jensaneya, which translates to “sexuality”—is a relatively new coinage that is not widely used, or even understood, by Arabic speakers. Even more basic terminology is problematic; until attending Muntada’s training courses, some participants were simply unaware that there are, indeed, Arabic words for female genitalia, having been taught to consider such subjects shameful beyond discussion. Even for those who do know some terms in Arabic, it is often in language so crude as to be unusable off the street.
This is a far cry from the days of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure and the golden age of Arabic writing on sex. One tenth-century book, The Language of Fucking, for example, mentions more than a thousand verbs for having sex.23 Then there are the seemingly endless lexicons for sexual positions, responses, and organs of every size, shape, and distinguishing feature. That linguistic wealth is long gone. Part of Muntada’s mission is to give participants a new vocabulary with which to discuss sexuality openly, overcoming the double whammy of unease about the subject and embarrassment at the language. The fact that it’s Arabic is a boost to the cultural—and, some would argue, political—identity of what is a minority population in Israel.
Times are changing, and Muntada is now reaching out to neighboring countries, where local groups are keen to learn from its experience, as well as working directly in the West Bank, providing sexuality education for social workers and other professionals. There, Tamish has seen a dramatic change in Muntada’s participants since the Arab uprisings, their reticence on sexuality suddenly melting away. “It’s as if each Arab person has so many layers of limitation and barriers that when you start to get rid of the external layers like the political, you feel the ventilation touches your deep soul,” she notes. “The political thing gave them the urge to talk about their sexual liberation.” And that, in turn, has reinforced their drive to tackle political concerns. “My sexual freedom begins with my family,” Tamish observes. “But if I don’t win the battle with my father, I cannot win it with Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas] and with the occupation.”
It’s this connection between the personal and the political that makes sexuality education more than just a sideshow to Egypt’s change in the coming decade. Suppressing facts and opinions in the classroom is a form of censorship, which the upheavals of 2011 vowed to fight in the political sphere to bring an end to secrecy and the control of information—although it is clear, in the ensuing order, that this change will be some time in coming. Freedom requires thinking, and that will take a different sort of teacher—one who is not afraid to share knowledge and answer tough questions. It also demands a different kind of student. Sexuality education that conveys accurate information, encourages personal responsibility, teaches reciprocity, promotes equality, respects diversity, and rewards the free expression of ideas is as good a training ground as any for both teachers and students alike.
There is nothing un-Islamic about teaching people about sex, including its pleasures; quite the contrary, in fact. Beyond questions of morality and hygiene, sexuality education is about trust—trusting young people with information, trusting them to make responsible decisions for themselves, trusting them to respect the rights and needs of others. If youth across the Arab world are mature enough to lead their societies into political revolt, and gain their elders’ admiration for it, then surely they are ready for the unvarnished facts of life.
MISSED CONCEPTIONS
Information isn’t the only item in short supply. For youth who gravitate into the darker social orbits of sex outside marriage, protection is also a problem. Take contraception, for example. Like most medications in Egypt, the Pill is easy to buy—if you’re a young person bold enough to face down disapproving pharmacists. No doctor’s prescription required: just hand over the cash (around EGP 15, or USD 2.50) and walk away with a month’s worth of pills. One of my unmarried Egyptian friends gets her supply delivered to the door, like pizza, no questions asked. Unfortunately, easy availability is not matched by ready knowledge: my friend was ill the first time she took the Pill because she had no idea what kind to buy or how to use it.24
Questions of zina aside, contraception per se is not forbidden in Islam. The Qur’an makes no mention of it, so it was left to Islamic scholars to come up with the rules, based in large part on hadiths. Some of these dealt with ‘azl, or coitus interruptus, a common method at the time of the Prophet and one he is said to have permitted. Some devout Muslims eschew contraception on the advice of their local shaykh, who might quote the following hadith: “Reproduce for I am going to boast about you among other nations on the Day of Judgment.” But plenty of religious scholars through the ages have questioned the authenticity of this particular hadith and of other sayings of the Prophet invoked to prohibit birth control, and have argued the contrary.25 And so contraception came to be permitted in the four main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence that emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries as well as the principal schools of Shi’i legal thought.26 Sterilization of healthy individuals, on the other hand, is a contentious issue in Islam. Some authorities allow it; others forbid it as a violation of shari’a, which enjoins believers to preserve the self, religion, reason, property, and procreation. The upshot is that sterilization is extremely unpopular in Egypt: scarcely 1 percent of married women opt for it, and it is vanishingly rare among men.27
Although Islamic debates on contraception sprang up around the singularly male technique of withdrawal, the vast majority of lotions, potions, and other contraceptive methods developed through the ages, and discussed in such exhaustive detail in the likes of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, are for women. Today, birth control is seen as a female responsibility, which is problematic for single women. Such is the stigma associated with women taking the plunge before marriage, let alone planning for it with adequate contraception, that few unmarried women use protection.28 While men have more scope for sex before tying the knot, this license does not translate into a greater willingness to step into the breach on contraception. Condoms (al waqi al thakari, literally “the male protective,” or tops, as they are called in Egypt) are spectacularly unpopular. Like their counterparts the world over, Egyptian men complain that condoms are uncomfortable and reduce sexual pleasure.
The bigger problem, though, is that condoms are associated with zina across the Arab world. In Egypt, for example, only 2 percent of married couples use them—and not so much for family planning, in my experience, as to deal with some of the complications associated with intercourse. 29 Among them is a fear of coming into contac
t with menstrual blood, and the Islamic requirement that both partners wash after intercourse, making them popular with women who have spent hours at the beauty salon and don’t want to muss their hair and makeup with a postcoital shower.30
Conventional wisdom holds that if you’re buying condoms, you must be having sex outside of marriage, and that is haram—a further deterrent to purchasers. “Please, God, split the earth in two and drop me in and close it up right away,” one twentysomething Egyptian condom marketer laughed, recalling the first time he bought condoms in a Cairo pharmacy and met with the pharmacist’s withering glance. Ironically, most men don’t appear to be using condoms for zina either. Anywhere the question has been asked—Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, for example—survey findings are much the same: Arab men (and presumably women too, despite their reticence) are having sex outside of marriage, and when they do, condoms are generally not part of the program.31 The results can be seen in clinics across the Arab world. Sexually transmitted infections are a concern to public health experts in the region, and are in all likelihood more common than available statistics reflect, since few countries have systematic, nationwide surveillance. STIs and HIV are thought to be the second-leading cause of death from infectious disease in adults aged fifteen to forty-four in the region.32 And while the prevalence of HIV is still low in the general population, the Middle East and North Africa is among the few regions in the world where new infections, and deaths from AIDS-related causes, are still rising. Upward of half of HIV infections reported in the majority of Arab countries are the result of sexual transmission, a route which hits unsuspecting wives hard.33
In Egypt, there have been creative, albeit discreet, attempts to boost condom use. Some of the most innovative have come from DKT International, a leading supplier of subsidized family planning and HIV prevention tools in the developing world. DKT, which has been using social marketing to promote condoms in Egypt, sells brightly colored, sprightly flavored “luxury” sheaths at rock-bottom prices. It has also launched clever campaigns to decouple condoms from zina by pitching them to married folk, trying to shift responsibility for family planning from wives to husbands as part of the revolutionary we’re-all-one-Egypt zeitgeist, and to link condoms to notions of what it is to be a “real man.”
But it’s a tough sell. Egypt’s condom consumption is less than a third of the market potential, according to some estimates. DKT saw its sales plummet along with the rest of the economy in the post-uprising doldrums, and the company has little hope of them bouncing back anytime soon, given restrictions on condom advertising and new regulatory requirements that would limit new brands coming to the market. Although population control remains a pressing concern for Egypt, with the rise of Islamism some experts notice a subtle shift in official talk away from contraception and toward the less controversial notion of “birth spacing,” which does not bode well for condoms. “The government doesn’t like to encourage pleasure,” one DKT executive sighed.
Elsewhere in the Arab world, groups have been reaching out more directly to young people, condoms in hand. In Tunis, the capital of Tunisia—whose Jasmine Revolution catalyzed Egypt’s own uprising and subsequent political convulsions across the region—I caught up with some enthusiastic promoters on the back lot of a technical college. Four attractive young women in stylish black coats, formfitting jeans, and high-heeled boots were surrounded by a crowd of young men. One of the women tore open a packet and carefully removed a condom, holding it up for all to see. “We are going to begin with a demonstration of condoms,” another woman said into a microphone, her voice booming across campus. “It goes on top of the penis in erection. The reservoir goes on top. After relations, ejaculation, take it off carefully and then put it immediately in the bin.” A third woman was passing out condoms to the crowd.
In Egypt, a young woman with a condom in her hand is generally assumed to be holding a tool of her trade. But these women in Tunisia were professionals of a different sort: all medical students and volunteers associated with Y-Peer, an international program under the umbrella of the United Nations Population Fund to promote reproductive and sexual health for youth by youth. The surprising sight of four young women—angels, as they’re called—showing men how to use a condom (indeed, women showing men how to do anything in the Arab world is notable in its own right) was rendered all the more remarkable by the subsequent “condom race,” in which the women divided the men into two teams, lined them up, and had each open the condom he had been given, place it on the raised index and middle fingers of his neighbor, and then remove it without tearing it, in sequence all down the line.
The game is intended to both familiarize youth with condoms and get them to associate the product less with shady dealings and more with fun and games. I asked Meryam Guedouar, one of the angels, if embarrassment was ever an issue. “Yeah, a little,” she said. She herself was uncomfortable when she started with the project, but her confidence grew with time, as did that of her audience. “It takes charm. They learn better when it’s a woman. They imagine … but they learn.” She laughed.
Guedouar and her colleagues fielded questions from the audience. “Superficial relations? No, they don’t protect at all [against HIV and STIs]. Even without penetration,” she responded to one student’s query. Further advice included where to go for free and confidential HIV testing, what types of condoms were available and how much they cost, and how to read the expiration date on the packet. And they deftly handled what seemed to be one of the students’ most pressing concerns. “As for size, let us show you how big a condom can take,” said one of the angels, sticking her arm into a sheath. “XXL!”
While the college itself is mixed, the condom crowd was almost entirely male. A few female students, all muhajjabat, were hanging around the fringes but seemed reluctant to take part. “They didn’t dare approach us,” said an angel, who runs information sessions with young women. “It’s a pity, because they have questions you cannot imagine,” she continued. “The other time, one thought she could get pregnant by going to the public toilet, because there’s a risk that there was a man there before and he did, I don’t know what, ejaculate. In the family, they say, you could become pregnant, be careful.” Her colleague chimed in: “Yes, we do the [condom] contest with the girls, but the girls alone. Obviously, they need to know as well. But the problem is that they don’t dare to ask a boy to put on a condom. So we have to make her learn that this is her right to protect herself.”
That need is all the more pressing, said the angels, because there is a lot of premarital sex going down. “Ah, the men, yes, all of them,” one angel answered when I asked if relations before marriage were common. “No, not all of them,” her colleague piped up. “Some have entered into religion—you can’t forget them.” “But eighty percent or more,” the friend replied. There were no disagreements, however, when it came to women’s premarital activity. “The men, they brag; they are proud when they have sexual relations. But the woman can’t say it,” they said. “Young women, there are some who dare, but we never know because there is always the way society looks at you. You can’t just say, ‘I had relations.’ Even if she did, she wouldn’t say.”
This is at odds with Tunisia’s long-standing reputation as light on religion and loose on sexual morality. This stereotype has a history. After Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956, its president, Habib Bourguiba, was bent on developing the country—and that included women. Tunisia was an early mover in outlawing polygamy and wife repudiation, giving women access to divorce, among other rights. In the 1980s, the country banned hijabs in public offices and educational establishments, as President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali consolidated power in what would be his two decades plus rule by circumscribing the scope of political Islam. Hence Tunisia’s free-and-easy reputation in the Arab region.
The reality is rather different. Even before the rise to political power of Ennahda, its “moderate” Islamic party, and the more visi
ble presence of their Salafi cousins, Tunisia is still, by and large, a patriarchal society where women grapple with legal, economic, and social obstacles precisely because they are women—a persistent challenge as the country struggles to reshape itself. Tunisia’s open approach to reproductive health, for example, had more to do with a postindependence strategy of controlling fertility on the road to economic development than with sexual liberation: premarital sex, extramarital relations, and homosexuality were all illegal in Tunisia under Ben Ali, just as they are in its more ostensibly conservative Arab neighbors.
And so, in Tunisia, the region’s rules on female sexuality still apply. “The men don’t easily accept that women are not virgin. A minority is different, not very educated but open-minded. It’s not a question of education. The man, he has all the right to a sexual life, but the woman, she has to be a virgin. That’s why a lot of them resort to the [hymen repair] operation,” one angel remarked. There are alternative strategies too. “There is a lot, a lot of anal sex. Frankly, because the girls say it is another way to control virginity. The men want her to be a virgin, so she finds another solution. That’s why we raise awareness; when we talk about sexual relations, it includes anal as well,” her colleague observed.
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