Many pressing questions have not been addressed yet, and results often end up locked away in a desk somewhere”.Postcard, circa 1910, 90 x 141 mm, note on front: “E. This gave me access to information that is hard to come by in the Arab world, because sex research is scarce. I’ve combined that research with advocacy on HIV/AIDS, serving as vice-chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the law ( which advocates legal reform around the world, including of laws regulating sexuality. In 2007, I started researching Sex and the Citadel. First, I went to work for Al Jazeera as a presenter. “After 9/11, I wanted to understand my Arab heritage better. Her Muslim roots fed her interest in the Arab world. For this reason, the book has a companion website ( which presents a lot of additional facts and figures on the topics at hand”.Įl Feki grew up in Canada, the daughter of an Egyptian father and a Welsh mother. My book does not seek to stigmatise today’s Arabs, but instead hands them some talking points, as a start to help change the region’s sexual politics. It would be utter nonsense to argue for a secular sexual revolution in the Arab world. My book argues for a change along those lines, but within an Islamic context. “As a Muslim who grew up in Canada, I prefer to think of religion and intimacy as private matters. “The reality today in the Arab world is far removed from that vision”, says El Feki. In the eyes of the 19th-century West, the Arab world conjured up highly eroticised visions of mystery and loose morals, sensuality and sex. Not that long ago, the perception was inverses. Sexual freedom still defines the West, as the Orient seems stuck in a state of sexual lockdown. In spite of this habitual reticence, El Feki was able to explore the substance of contemporary sex life in the Arab world, from Tunisia over Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Qatar.Īcross that vast region, the sexual experience is shifting, albeit at a tectonically slow pace. But sex - everyone is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it”.
Everyone talks about football, but hardly anyone plays it. Sex in the Arab world is an enigma, an Egyptian gynaecologist explains to El Feki: “It is the opposite of football. The result of El Feki’s quest is a must-read, a One Thousand and One Nights of hard data, polls and intimate testimonies, well-researched journalism and a personal memoir. Anything else is ayb (‘shameful’), illit adab (‘impolite’) or haram (‘forbidden’).
state-registered, family-approved, religiously sanctioned marriage.
The mediaeval Arab writer Umar Muhammad al-Nafzawi, who authored the sex manual The Perfumed Garden, would probably turn in his grave at the sexual mores of today’s Arabs.Įl Feki, a Canadian-Egyptian immunologist (University of Cambridge) and award-winning journalist for The Economist and Al Jazeera, spent the past five years taking the temperature in bedrooms across the Arab world - a region spanning 22 countries and numbering 350 million people, in which the only acceptable, socially acknowledged context for sex is marriage. Now it is a taboo, and it is problematised in the Arab media”. “For our ancestors, sex was a source of happiness, creativity and vitality.
Those who do not know about sex or make fun of it, are ignorant, stupid, small-minded”, says Dr. “I swear by God, there is a genuine need for knowledge on this subject.