Sex and the Citadel (3 page)

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.
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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.
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As the authors concluded, “The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West involves Eros far more than Demos.”
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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.
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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.)
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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,
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I’ll bring you my mother to fuck. I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick”).
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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.”
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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.”
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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,’ ”
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an opportunity Flaubert declined because the man wasn’t young or handsome enough for his tastes.
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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.”
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The result, according to Said, was the transformation of the Orient into a “living 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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While their relations with women might be questionable, al-Tahtawi had nothing but praise for Frenchmen’s strong stand on interactions with one another. “They do not have any propensity towards the love of boys or the celebration of its pursuit. This is a lost sentiment among them and one that is rejected by their nature and morals. Among the good qualities of their language and poetry is that they refuse to extol homosexual love. Indeed, in French it is highly inappropriate for a man to say, ‘I fell in love with a boy.’ This would be considered repugnant and troublesome.”
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Al-Tahtawi went on at length about French zero tolerance on this point. “The French consider homosexuality to be one of the most disgusting obscenities. As a result, they only very rarely mention it in their books, and when they do it is always in veiled terms. One will never hear people talking about this.”
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In his account, al-Tahtawi noted that the French aversion to homosexuality was the “one [thing] they truly have in common with the Arabs.”
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This is something of a whitewash, though, given how well documented same-sex relations were in nineteenth-century Cairo, not just by curious foreigners like Flaubert, but by local chroniclers as well.
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What’s interesting, in this ebb and flow of history, is how stereotypes have changed. The Arab world, once famous in the West for sexual license, envied by some but despised by others, is now widely criticized for sexual intolerance. It’s not just Western liberals who hold this view. It has also become a keynote in some of the “Islamophobic” discourse of conservatives in America and Europe, the self-proclaimed last stand in the battle between “Western” values and the depredations of “radical” Islam, particularly as they relate to the rights of women.
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And the West, once praised by some in the Arab world for its hard line on same-sex relations, is now seen by many as a radiating source of sexual debauchery from which the region must be shielded. Perceptions, however flawed, are shaped by position. Western views of Arab sexuality, and vice
versa, have shifted in part because attitudes within their respective societies have also changed.

What happened in the Western world is common knowledge. I am too young to have lived through the sexual revolution, but I understand how dramatic a break it was from the past through stories of my mother’s youth. When she was growing up in the 1930s to ’50s in rural Wales, sex was never discussed, but everyone knew that good girls waited until marriage. In an age before the Pill, in which contraception was hit-or-miss and abortion illegal and complicated to procure, this was as much a question of practicality as morality. When my mother was a teenager, contact with young men was strictly supervised, curfews were rigorously enforced, and chaperones were in full force at village dances. Homosexuality was a deep, dark secret and my mother, who was once propositioned by a female teacher, was all the more stunned because she had never heard of such behavior.
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