Sex and the Citadel summary

For Westerners, it can be hard to imagine growing up in a culture that doesn’t talk about sex or offer sex education in schools.

But if you can picture this kind of repressive environment, then it shouldn’t seem surprising that Muslims tend to have unsatisfactory sex lives as a result.

Women in the Muslim world also face strict sexual expectations. While men simply have to show up on their wedding day, women are expected to be virgins and their bodies are closely inspected.

In fact, virginity testing is a booming business in Egypt, because young women are required to obtain a certificate to validate their worthiness as a bride. And it’s not uncommon for a Muslim gynecologist to be visited by desperate girls who have broken their hymen by accident.

For better or for worse, it’s not unusual to see images of naked men and women in the everyday advertisements of some Western cultures. And the sexuality on display in films can take it to a whole other level.

Such images are not on public display in Muslim cultures, though sexuality does get some lip service in Arab films.

Many cultures around the world still debate the morality of extramarital sex. In Muslim society, one solution to this issue was the creation of the temporary marriage. In Egypt, however, this has become a loophole that is often abused.

A temporary marriage, or zawaj misyaf, is a holdover from the era when Egyptian culture enjoyed sexual liberation. Nowadays, it allows a man, and only a man, to come to Cairo and spend a sex-fueled week with a prostitute.

One simple indicator of how taboo something is in a specific culture is if they don’t even have a word to describe it. This is more or less the case for homosexuality in today’s Muslim world.

While lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and many other terms have become commonplace in Western society, most of these words don’t translate in Arabic.

After reading these blinks, you might be wondering if a sexual revolution could happen in Muslim society and what role Western culture might be able to play.

One of the first steps should be to help support the Muslim organizations that are already working for sexual freedom.