Sexuality in Islam

by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba

  This picture, already dark enough and itself the result of a slow political, economic, social and cultural decline, was further complicated by the arrival of colonization. This violation of the collective personality, this seizure of the environment, of institutions and even of language, were to reinforce still more the tendency to closedness and sclerosis. Arab society was to set up structures of passive defence around zones rightly regarded as essential: the family, women, the home. The strategy invented by Arabo-Muslim collective experience was to limit the extent of the alienations of modern times, to limit the colonial impact to externals, while fiercely defending the essential values of private life.

  The response to colonization was to be significantly double: sexual and religious; indeed with each supporting the other. Colonization was to stop at the threshold of the Arab family, which it respected, with good or ill grace. By depreciating Arab morality, ethics, women and love, colonization did not realize that it was helping to maintain the collective personality. In a sense, it ceded almost involuntarily to a fierce wish on the part of the native community to limit foreign penetration to a merely geographical occupation of the territory and a merely economic exploitation of the country’s wealth. This was already enough in all conscience, but not enough to destroy the essentials. Whether or not it was ‘fanatical’ or ‘intolerant’, the Islamic faith was able to raise an effective barrier between itself and the new masters and to undermine any attempt at assimilation.

  This meant that Arab women were now promoted to the historical and unexpected role of guardians of tradition and of the collective identity; women had thus found a new function. Outside, men could compromise themselves with the new order of things as much as they wished. But, once he was at home, the Arab man rediscovered an atmosphere steeped in the past, one in which yesterday was an eternal beginning. In these circumstances it was inevitable that the procreative role of Muslim women should be stressed still further. Speaking of the Arab, J. Berque remarks that ‘the fecundity of his women, his sexual and familial morality have assisted in his emancipation: both through the pressure of the ever-increasing population and through youth which, constantly lowering the average age, gives added force to the desire for change and for a break with the past.’1 J. Berque is right when he speaks of the ‘contribution of the wife to national freedom’.2

  Occupied, denied and humiliated, the Arabo-Muslim societies were to discover, perhaps without always being sufficiently aware of it, that sexual divisions and the reduction of femininity to motherhood were weapons unrivalled in their effectiveness. Thus in indirect and unexpected ways Arab women rediscovered a strange redoubtable power. Recourse to the mother turned out to be the best defence against loss of identity. The sexual ethic of Islam and the role that it accords women have given the mother a very special function as refuge and shelter of the collective identity. The social has been able to use both the sacral and the sexual to ensure its own survival. So the conjunction of the sexual and the religious has spilled over from their own domains into matters of concern to society as a whole. Erecting themselves into total social phenomena, they have, depending on the social, cultural and political context, served as an alibi or as a refuge in the maintenance of social structures.

  This has become all the more apparent in that modernization takes the form of a formidable irruption of technology, which comes between self and nature and even between self and self. Of course the use of a machine extends my body, but, by the same token, it interrupts direct contact between my body and the world. In innumerable instances of everyday experience, change creates, often in quite imperceptible ways, a new apperception of the body.

  Sitting on the ground is not sitting on a bench or a seat. To drive in a car or to ride a bicycle is not the same thing as to walk. To eat with a fork also implies a quite different relationship with food, which one handles at a distance, than the direct relationship of a man who, face to face with his food, picks it up in his hand and takes possession of it through a very precise magico-religious ritual.

  Take a simple example: modernization is also the transition from the hammam to the bathroom. The functionalism of the latter involves a desacralization and trivialization of the rich oneiric experience of purity. One passes indeed from the ritual of ṭahāra to a technological view of physical hygiene.

  Let there be no mistake, entry into modernity means a radical change in the way in which one attends to one’s own person. How indeed could it be otherwise from the point of view that concerns us here when the technology of family planning becomes part of the thinking both of the elites and of the masses. It does not matter how it is done: the elite may act on individual initiative and the masses may follow official campaigns. For the 200,000 Tunisian women using official contraceptives or for the 100,000 others who use private medicine the effect is the same: physical love is no longer a direct, spontaneous thing, but a hormonal self-discipline, a conscious, organized modification of one’s own corporality.

  Indeed contraception is in itself merely one part of a wider, more complex programme for the trivialization of sex and the de-eroticization of sexuality. The abolition of the veil, the movements towards ever-increasing nakedness, promiscuity, the mixing of the sexes, dancing, the cinema, erotic advertising, prostitution on view at the street corner, all this feeds our fantasies in a quite different way and in any case changes the nature and signification of intersexual relations. Between sexual partners comes more and more the artifice of technology, which, considerably aided by the enchantments of the mass media, breaks that essential harmony without which love becomes degraded into physical manipulation and eroticism into pornography.

  So it is hardly surprising if the old dialectic of eroticism and sacrality is replaced by other processes that lead to the desacralization of Eros and to the de-eroticization of the sacred – and to a morose, joyless religiosity combined with a sad, trivial sexuality.

  The distortions of the unhappy history of .the Arabo-Muslim countries are not confined, then, to the political level. They are also to be found in a self-perception profoundly disturbed, in the body’s relations with nature and with others, by a terribly indiscreet technology.

  Of course we are just emerging from the colonial Middle Ages. But what effect can one, two, three or even four decades of independence have? And yet how much change has taken place in such a short time! Of course where modernity is concerned, sudden, brutal change cannot but prevail over the unchanging and the permanent. So for Arab women and for the young, modernity takes the form of a brutal, peremptory rejection. Modernization is felt not so much as the adoption of a new way of living and thinking as the rejection of the old. And what is still a problem, as far as the common consciousness is concerned, is the rejection of tradition much more than the acceptance of progress. The most conservative forces in our societies claim to be in favour of progress – but only of a progress that will not turn its back on the past. And it is around this distinction that for a century or more the battle has been waging between various forces. Tradition and progress are the two greatest enemies of our society. But what is striking is that in matters of sexual ethics, modernity can only be a matter of rejection: rejection of the negation of women, rejection of the various prohibitions that surround sexuality. It is no accident if modernity has, from the beginning, been synonymous with the emancipation of women and that today it has become synonymous with sexual emancipation. If women and sexuality have been the last refuge of a certain private, personal permanence, it was only to be expected that the work of renewal should begin there. But let us make no mistake, the ‘sexual crisis’ is merely the obverse of the religious crisis.

  This is not the place to recount the history of the emancipation of Arab women.3 It is as if Arab woman now refused to be the eternal sacrifical victim, as if she wanted at last to live, to take up Layla Ba‘alabakki’s cry of protest and affirmation in the anā aḥyā.4 A single cry of ‘live!’ marks the Arab woman’s rejection of her past cond
ition. To a far greater degree than men, Arab women are discovering the will to live. Curiously enough, in the Muslim context, where the lyrical vision of life is a fundamental presupposition, it is only quite recently that women seem to be rediscovering the attractions of life – a life assumed, demanded with all the energy generated by centuries of despair and frustration. So, by an apparent, but logical and rigorous paradox, the lyrical vision of life has become a lust to live. One should almost speak of sexual frenzy. In the Middle East and the Maghreb emancipation has come to mean enjoyment – enjoyment to the full. Following the latest fashion in clothes, extra-marital ‘affairs’, ‘pure romances’ or outrageous scandals are merely the setting against which the lust to live is expressed, whether through violence and tumult or gentleness and enchantment. Modern eroticism, imported from the west, is not merely an extension of traditional eroticism, created by men for men. Arab women no longer wish to live in perfumed gardens. What they are demanding is the right to take the initiative in love and fulfillment through the gift of oneself. Female emancipation is also a recovering of sexual initiative. The Arab male can put away his erotology.

  Hence the great problem of confronting public opinion, which has remained too often, too conveniendy, too piously conservative. For the Arab woman emancipation has always come up against social censure. The words ‘ār (opprobrium) and ‘aib (shame) recur like a leitmotif through Arab feminine and feminist literature. ‘It is ‘ār,’ cries Līna, the heroine of anā aḥyā, ‘if I weep; if I rebel, it is ‘ār; if I defend my ideas and my rights, it is ‘ār; ‘aib, ‘aib, ‘aib . . . because I’m a female and dare to sit at a café terrace!’5 The ‘agony columns’ of various Arab women’s magazines provide valuable information. Here is one case taken at random from dozens of others that have appeared in the Tunisian magazine Faiza. A nineteen-year-old girl dares to write in public that she has lost her virginity. ‘I stayed a virgin too long, but last January, we lost our heads and – catastrophe! – I lost my virginity. In short I am this man’s mistress. Though I regret my present situation, I cannot do without this forbidden love. He says my [future] husband won’t notice. . . .’ And the ‘innocent’ girl asks ‘whether the loss of virginity can destroy a girl’s life’! One can hardly believe it. But the magazine’s answer is even more remarkable: ‘Faiza neither approves nor condemns your conduct. Every day life shows that a girl with character succeeds better than one who gives in all the time. . . . I think that once one has transgressed the norms of society, one should have the courage to go further – beyond “right-minded” society. There are eternal values.’6 There is no shortage of ‘provocations’ of this kind in the Tunisian press. A ‘pretty, sensitive girl, with a good body’ advertises through the press for a husband. To make quite sure that the answers will not go astray, she gives her own complete address.7 Another girl, more demanding, but clearly in revolt against Tunisian males, specifies in her advertisement that ‘the husband must be of French or American nationality’.8 Tunisians in particular and Arabs and Muslims in general are thus being told through the press that they need not apply.

  The question of mixing the sexes has given rise to enormous discussion in the press. One local newspaper9 even organized a referendum, from which it emerged that 41% of the girls consulted were in favour of ‘flirtation’ and 71% for co-education and free mixing in public places. Some time later in the same newspaper10 there were demands that one should stop exalting ‘the primacy of virginity’. ‘A Tunisian woman,’ one reader wrote, ‘runs the risk of remaining an eternal minor. She enjoys the privilege of minors: protection in sexual matters. But in our cultural context, as in other conservative contexts, the sexual subordination of women is the basis for all forms of subordination.’

  ‘The right to flirtation’ is demanded by another reader of Faiza,11 who declares, also in the ‘agony column’, that it is the only way of freeing ‘those girls . . . tied, chained, frightened, practically incapable of doing anything at all without looking before and behind them. A single silent question occurs to them: what will people think?’

  How outmoded, timorous and lukewarm now seem the feminist campaign and the ‘sexual’ demands of thirty years ago! Let us compare the Tunisian women’s magazines of yesterday and today: how far away, how ‘archeological’ seem the preoccupations of even twenty years ago! A comparison of Faiza at the time of independence (1956) and Leila published between the wars is highly instructive. The struggle in Tunisia was then not about flirting, but about sending girls to school and the wearing of the veil!12 An article, revolutionary at the time, would make the young girls of today smile:

  The veil strikes a race at its most vulnerable, most vital point. It strikes its youth, depriving it of the essential means of all human activity, of all desire for progress, glory, conquest. Throughout the world young people know the freshness and purity of love at twenty. Only Muslim youth remains shrivelled up, sterile, frozen at the stage to which the evil veil has reduced it, for there is no love in present-day Islam.13

  Emancipation has changed its level and its meaning. Despite considerable differences between the various Arab countries demands have become more radical – and more activist too. And this takes place first of all on the biological level.

  Emancipation takes the form of active participation at the level of sexuality. The refusal expressed by Arab women is a refusal of sexual passivity. In Arab woman, a sexist subject is taking the place of a sexual object.

  The psycho-social approach is confirmed by valuable medical information. In a relatively recent clinical study of ‘hysteria among Tunisian girls and young women’,14 two Tunisian psychiatrists conclude that nearly 30% are suffering from conflictual themes predominantly if not exclusively of a sexual order (forced engagements, indefinite waiting for a husband, the departure of a husband on military service immediately after the wedding, etc.). In the same population ‘20% of the cases of sterility are associated with hysteria.’ The two doctors observed that ‘the cases of sterility appear predominantly among young married women’. But if compared with the situation prevailing in Tunisia before independence there has been a decline in hysteria:

  The more liberal attitude of families and a less strict upbringing of girls means that young women are less subject to coercive, ‘infantilizing’ structures. The very fact that there have been fewer orphans between 1957 and 1960 [the date of the investigation] might lead one to think that adolescents of the new generation are even more resistant on this matter.

  We should pay particular attention to the doctors’ conclusion:

  Where breakdowns and crises of an obviously sexual order are concerned they no longer have anything to do with the long-term immaturity once so common in an educational and familial context that today has become more and more a thing of the past.

  Yes, Arab women are certainly losing their morbid maternalism described in earlier chapters. Today they are discovering life at the full. This has brought us a women’s literature of great depth and expressiveness.

  A Jordanian woman, Fadoi Touquan, gives us a poetic account of what the hard apprenticeship of a Muslim woman’s determination to live meant for her. For it was in mental torment and physical imprisonment that she paid the price of life and freedom.15

  But Fadoi Touquan’s controlled rebellion explodes into a protest against injustice and waste, against ḍayā‘, as Ghālī Shukrī puts it so well.16 Her revolt takes the form of a dialectic of giving and receiving. ‘Ayda, the heroine of Lay la Ba’alabakki’s Metamorphosed Gods, brings this out in a highly significant way: ‘I admit that I have given to excess. But men always receive much more than they give. . . . Yes, man is a god. But I am only a servant girl enslaved by his two magic hands.’17 This is the central theme of the Metamorphosed Gods: Arab woman, eternally giving, demands at last reciprocity. She, too, wants to receive. Layla Ba’alabakki certainly puts her finger on an essential fact: female emancipation is the refusal to see herself reduced to a hollow sex.

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sp; ‘No,’ protests Līna, the heroine of Anā Aḥyā, ‘you will never be able to convince me that I am nothing, the mere form of a woman that you desire, that I’m just a cigarette-end between your fingers that you can throw away whenever you want, an insect on a chair. Dead. Am I dead?’18

  On the contrary, Līna puts herself at the very heart of the dialectic of life. ‘Do I love? No! I have a sense of what I am losing (aḥinnu ilā-l-ḍayā‘). I receive and I give. Life in all its splendour offers me a wealth of untold experience. I am she who possesses an immense, hidden gift.’19

  Arab woman erects herself, then, into an ability to give and Layla Ba’alabakki is right when she declares: ‘That is the great experience: I give, therefore I live.’20 It is this admirable dialectic of giving and receiving that Arab woman wants to take part in today. She intends to be no longer a hollow object.

  For the passively defined female condition reduces woman to a receptacle into which man strives to pour himself. Gérard Zwang, who writes some penetrating pages on this theme, concludes: