ORAN, Algeria — AFTER Tahrir came Cologne. After the square came sex. The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms, especially the norms relating to sex. Revolution doesn’t mean modernity.

The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society. In response, some European countries have taken to producing guides of good conduct to refugees and migrants.

Sex is a complex taboo, arising, in places like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria or Yemen, out of the ambient conservatism’s patriarchal culture, the Islamists’ new, rigorist codes and the discreet puritanism of the region’s various socialisms. That makes a good combination for obstructing desire or guilt-tripping and marginalizing those who feel any. And it’s a far cry from the delicious licentiousness of the writings of the Muslim golden age, like Sheikh Nafzawi’s “The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight,” which tackled eroticism and the Kama Sutra without any hang-ups.

Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment. Although women are veiled, they are at the center of our connections, exchanges and concerns.


Women are a recurrent theme in daily discourse, because the stakes they personify — for manliness, honor, family values — are great. In some countries, they are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.

These contradictions create unbearable tensions. Desire has no outlet, no outcome; the couple is no longer a space of intimacy, but a concern of the whole group. The sexual misery that results can descend into absurdity and hysteria. Here, too, one hopes to experience love, but the mechanisms of love — encounters, seduction, flirting — are prevented: Women are watched, we obsess over their virginity, the morality police patrols. Some even pay surgeons to repair broken hymens.

In some of Allah’s lands, the war on women and on couples has the air of an inquisition. During the summer in Algeria, brigades of Salafists and local youths worked up by the speeches of radical imams and Islamist TV preachers go out to monitor female bodies, especially those of women bathers at the beach. The police hound couples, even married ones, in public spaces. Gardens are off-limits to strolling lovers. Benches are sawed in half to prevent people from sitting close together.

By

Kamel Daod
Contributing Op-ed writer.
New York Times
Feb 16, 2016

Ironically, by some me queer twist, it's actually easier to be gay in an Arab country. People would sooner raise their eyebrows at and question hetero couples for the possibility that they might be sinning/fornicating (I've seen people yell "*Haram, ya naas! Tahadur!" at random couples simply walking alongside each other on the street, that they chose to assume aren't married for whatever reason, only for the couple to have to validate themselves and their marriage to them), than so much as take a passing notice of grown same-sex couples engaging in obvious homosexual behavior; some of them being so bold as to finger the belt loops to one or the others pants in full view of everyone, or even outrightly necking (apparently, anywhere but fully on the lips is allowed) on the streets.

I'm not even exaggerating! That being said, when we first got there (Egypt) it felt as if we'd arrived at some sort of gay Mecca for Arabs, the San Fran of Africa, due to how touchy feely the men are with each other culturally. The irony of it all would put me in constant jaw dropping mode for months until I eventually got used to it, but even after that, you could point out the extras that were on each other like white on rice. They were homophobic, and yet somehow blindly oblivious of it at the same time. It was very strange, indeed.

*Oh, people, be careful. It's forbidden!

Thanks for sharing your experience. I appreciate it. I have lived with Arabs and they are not better than any other tribe when we talk about moral uprightness. They do things every other race does. But its important to note that when it comes to the issue of the opposite sex (females) they become too protective and too jealous. They can harass other Nationalities, take for example in the club, but you dare not go near their female folks. Thanks for your observation. Cheers!

EnlightenedSoul:
Ironically, by some me queer twist, it's actually easier to be gay in an Arab country. People would sooner raise their eyebrows at and question hetero couples for the possibility that they might be sinning/fornicating (I've seen people yell "*Haram, ya naas! Tahadur!" at random couples simply walking alongside each other on the street, that they chose to assume aren't married for whatever reason, only for the couple to have to validate themselves and their marriage to them), than so much as take a passing notice of grown same-sex couples engaging in obvious homosexual behavior; some of them being so bold as to finger the belt loops to one or the others pants in full view of everyone, or even outrightly necking (apparently, anywhere but fully on the lips is allowed) on the streets.

I'm not even exaggerating! That being said, when we first got there (Egypt) it felt as if we'd arrived at some sort of gay Mecca for Arabs, the San Fran of Africa, due to how touchy feely the men are with each other culturally. The irony of it all would put me in constant jaw dropping mode for months until I eventually got used to it, but even after that, you could point out the extras that were on each other like white on rice. They were homophobic, and yet somehow blindly oblivious of it at the same time. It was very strange, indeed.

*Oh, people, be careful. It's forbidden!