Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The sex life of Arabs is terra incognita for scientists and policy makers.
Shereen El Feki. El 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 million people, in which the only acceptable, socially acknowledged context for sex is marriage Everyone talks about football, but hardly anyone plays it. In spite of this habitual reticence, El Feki was able to explore the substance of contemporary sex life in the Arab world, from Tunisia over Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Qatar.
Across that vast region, the sexual experience is shifting, albeit at a tectonically slow pace. Sexual freedom still defines the West, as the Orient seems stuck in a state of sexual lockdown. Not that long ago, the perception was inverses. In the eyes of the 19th-century West, the Arab world conjured up highly eroticised visions of mystery and loose morals, sensuality and sex. My book argues for a change along those lines, but within an Islamic context.
It would be utter nonsense to argue for a secular sexual revolution in the Arab world. For this reason, the book has a companion website www. El Feki grew up in Canada, the daughter of an Egyptian father and a Welsh mother. Her Muslim roots fed her interest in the Arab world. First, I went to work for Al Jazeera as a presenter. In , I started researching Sex and the Citadel. This gave me access to information that is hard to come by in the Arab world, because sex research is scarce.
But the statistics are not really reliable. How often is infertility actually diagnosed? We do not know. It is hard to get any insight. Not only because of the taboos around sex, also because there is no culture of publishing or sharing info. There are hardly any journals writing about sex. Governments sit on the results of the surveys they ordered. There is no culture of transparency. The biggest pool of data about sex comes through HIV research. It was absolutely not easy to get hold of that information.
