Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page

This book is one of the few attempts at dealing with the dimension of sexuality in the teachings of Islam and the way in which these teachings have become distorted by time and outside influences. The writer starts by putting forward the basic Islamic view of sexuality as seen through the revelations in the Qur'an and the hadiths of the Prophet. Sexuality, the Qur'an teaches, is a transcending of solitude. It is thus essentially social in concept and therefore demands to be regulated as far as its practice is concerned. Thus in Islam, unlike the attitude of Christianity towards marriage, the taking of a partner in life is a major canonical obligation; marriage, as a well-known hadith proclaims, is half of a man's religion. While sex and marriage are to be enjoyed, they are also a duty. Islam, however, emphasises that the pleasures of sex are to be had only in marriage and it has no room for 'Don Juanism,' neither does it propose celibacy as an alternative -- 'there is no monkery in Islam'. Marriage is described as a 'shield', the only way in which men and women can be protected from acting out their sexuality illicitly. Even in that Afterlife that both religions promise their followers, Christianity is explicit about having no place for the sexual, while Islam is equally explicit about it consisting, at least in part, of man's reward in the Hereafter.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that with Islam's full acceptance of sexuality the erotic has had its place in Arabic literature from earliest times. The poetry of Abu Nuwas and others and many of the stories that make up The Thousand and One Nights, also erotic books such as The Perfumed Garden, form the Arab contribution to this genre of writing. The present writer deals in full with such works. His Freudian analysis of some of the stories from The Thousand and One Nights is particularly interesting.

The books deals with such topics as the hammam, circumcision (both male and female), the cult of virginity in Islam and the role, in a society where the sexes are kept apart, of prostitution. It is, however, in the final chapter of the book, 'In the Kingdom of the Mothers', that the author is at his most controversial. Woman, he states, has become in the Muslim world a creature of the home and of the night; by confining woman to pleasure, she is turned into a plaything, a doll. Thus the wife is devalued: in the words of the writer, "there has been a progressive decline of the Muhammadan ethic of marital tenderness." The Arab man, he points out, will refer to his wife as 'Umm al-Awlad' (mother of the children), thus stressing the way in which he wishes her to be viewed. Professor Bouhdiba discusses at length 'the cult of the mother' in Islamic society. A woman, he argues, faced with the role which has been forced upon her, naturally transfers all her affection to her children and becomes unduly possessive, for it is they who constitute a system of insurance, financial and emotional, for her old age.

In his concluding chapter the author refers to a number of modern authors such as the Lebanese novelist and short story writer Layla Baalabaki, also to Naguib Mahfouz in his Trilogy in which the Egyptian writer shows the Arab man's obsession with what is termed 'the anti-wife': dancers, singers, film stars, even passing tourists. Professor Bouhdiba's thesis is that the teachings of Islam, which provide 'a lyrical view of life', have become marred in the past by many factors, as for instance the inhibiting presence of colonialism. While critical of the situation in the Arab-Muslim world he is aware that the West too is no less in crisis in the realm of sex.

The author is Tunisian and professor of Islamic Sociology at the University of Tunis. Many of the examples he gives in the later chapters of his book are taken from Tunisian society and do not necessarily apply to the rest of the Arab world. It should also be borne in mind that the book first appeared in French in 1975 and was only published in this English translation last year; nothing, it seems, has been added or changed in the intervening period to bring the work up to date. The translation reads well and the bibliography is useful though, of course, limited to works published prior to the original French edition.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

The Marriage Bed