5/26/2023 0 Comments Story of lutBut some common advice, such as calls for men to explore more foreplay and learn about female anatomy and orgasms, as well as the way that Islamic sexology views sex as a source of pleasure in its own right, diverse and open to exploration and experimentation, are as valuable now as ever. The way that Muslim writers across the ages talked about male anal penetration as inherently emasculating or pathological, not to mention a number of other common tropes about gender and sexuality, also certainly clash with modern secular, progressive values. Not all of the advice in Islamic sexology has aged well – like the insistence of Avicenna, the 11th-century Persian polymath and father of modern medicine and philosophy, that shoving a hot pepper up a woman’s vagina after unprotected intercourse was as reliable as any Plan B. ![]() As early as 962, the Christian writer Hrotswitha in Germany excoriated the recently deceased Caliph Abd al-Rahman III of Córdoba and his countrymen in The Passion of Saint Pelagius as ‘debauched by the sin of sodomy’ and ‘polluted with the lust of the flesh’. In fact, Islam was so open about sex that less open neighbouring Christian cultures often attempted to smear it as the faith of choice for sex-crazed deviants. From the birth of Islam until about 150 years ago, the Muslim world was a hotbed of explicit, freewheeling sexual advice and erotica that can feel as steamy now as ever – a common and visible oeuvre that I call Islamic sexology. Both she and the press ran with that notion, promoting her book as groundbreaking.īut the lack that Muladhat and her reviewers noted is actually a recent phenomenon. ![]() These friends told her that her sexual knowledge and openness was unique and valuable. Many more seemed to believe that devout faith mandated ‘dull sex lives and never ventur outside of the vanilla’. She had noticed Muslim youths complaining about their friends’ and families’ reluctance to talk about sex on religious grounds – about getting quick tutorials on sexual hydraulics, but never learning about the full spectrum of desire and sexual activity before getting hitched. This apparent lack motivated Muladhat to write The Muslimah Sex Manual. Observant educators, such as Mohammad Shahidul Islam and Mizanur Rahman of the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, have lamented that all of this leaves teachers trying to work from a Muslim perspective reliant on secular materials that might not speak to them or their communities when they try to create sex-ed programmes. The north African Muslim author of the erotic novel The Almond (2004) used the pseudonym Nedjma to minimise the impact of this type of blowback, and has openly criticised modern Muslim takes on sexual discourse as ‘disfigured’. In 2011, the Pakistani physician Mobin Akhtar tried to release the dryly medical Sex Education for Muslims only to get hauled in for questioning by a local governmental official, labelled a quack by his colleagues, and barraged with threats for supposedly fostering un-Islamic discourse. Many previous attempts to write about sex and intimacy from an Islamic perspective have failed in the face of censorship and criticism. Even relatively socially liberal Muslim-majority nations such as Lebanon and Tunisia struggle with sex talk: Lebanon launched the Arab world’s first modern public sex-ed programme in 1995, but had to junk it five years later due to religious pushback no other Arab nation tried to succeed where they failed until Tunisia, late last year. When sex does come up, it’s often in the context of sermonising on modesty and gender segregation, or private talks or marriage counselling on pure sexual mechanics, wrapped in heteronormative values. While the Muslim world is both widely dispersed and incredibly diverse, Muslim cultural critics and scholars have often noted a squeamish reticence to talk about sex, especially in the public sphere, in many Muslim-majority communities. This had little if anything to do with her insights, and almost everything to do with the perceived novelty of a Muslim woman writing openly about sex for Muslim readers. Yet within days of its release, Muladhat’s book drew a wave of attention from media outlets and bloggers worldwide. She promises readers to ‘take you down delightful rabbit hole of pleasure … teach you how to make your husband look at you with unbridled lust … transformed into a man who can’t keep his hands off of you and brims with jealousy when other men so much as glance at you.’ ![]() ![]() Even Muladhat’s prose feels ripped from the pages of Cosmopolitan and self-published erotica. The book offers no new spin on this tired advice, nor a real anchor to hold it all together. The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mind Blowing Sex, a slim volume self-published in 2017 by a Muslim woman using the pen name Umm Muladhat, is a compilation of well-worn sex tips.
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