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.
