How can we bridge this yawning chasm between the ideals we are conscious of and the realities that confront us?
GOATMILK continues its original and exclusive month long series entitled “Muslims Talking Sex”featuring diverse Muslim writers from around the world discussing a gamut of topics in their own unique, honest and eclectic voices.
Sex Education for Muslims
Sumbul Ali-Karamali
My 5th grade daughter just brought home from school the kind of form every parent, Muslim or not, dreads. Would I allow my daughter to attend multiple classes on “our growing and changing bodies?” Seeing my hesitation, my daughter widened her eyes and wailed, “You have to sign it or I’ll have to go sit outside or in the library or somewhere by myself and I’ll be the only one!”
I don’t see any sort of “Islamic” problem with the schools teaching the kids about puberty. I believe that keeping the lines of communication open with our children is crucial not only to family culture but to our societal culture, in which isolation can occur all too easily. I also think it’s important to teach children of both genders to respect each other and to consider personal comments about bodies unacceptable. Teachers are in a unique position to be able to do all these things.
My only hesitation about this particular form was about content, about which I have firm beliefs relating to age-appropriateness. For example, this wouldn’t be sex education, would it, in 5th grade? Do boys and girls sit in the room together while learning about this highly embarrassing subject? Why does the form include information about AIDS? Surely that’s not appropriate for 5th grade?
After engaging in a really forthright, slightly self-conscious, and faintly commiserating talk with my daughter’s teacher, I sent in the signed form. I felt confident that the classes would indeed not introduce sex in 5th grade (a time when most girls think boys have cooties), but would be limited to age-appropriate descriptions of going through puberty. Since then, my daughter has given me numerous reports on how the “body shop” classes are going.
“We dread them,” my daughter tells me. “Everybody dreads them. We giggle and don’t know where to look. The teacher tells us when to look down.”
At my puzzled expression, she explains, “When the teacher is going to say something really embarrassing, she warns us so that we can look down instead of at each other.”
I cannot help laughing, and I’m pleased with my decision. For us Muslim Americans, it’s important to be part of the fabric of American society. We don’t have to compromise our religious values to be Americans. And the more comfortable we are with that, the better.
Further, the writings by pediatricians and psychologists and the schools all seem to indicate that more information is better than less. I know that, especially in Muslim culture, sometimes parents feel that their children should not learn about the opposite sex, even in a clinical way at school. If they don’t know about it and don’t think about it, perhaps they won’t do it. Perhaps we can protect them. Right? But children find out anyway – and do we as parents want to be the ones to educate our kids about sex, or do we want their peers to impart their (often confused) versions instead?
It’s like drugs. Most people accept that parents should talk to their kids about resisting recreational drugs and those who might want to involve them in drug-related activities. Most of us don’t assume that talking to kids about drugs will cause them to go experiment. We’re making them aware of potential hazards.
My parents did tell me about sex in a very clinical manner that inspired disgust and disbelief and gave me absolutely no desire to further my knowledge. Besides, it was irrelevant to my life, since my parents told me that Muslim girls didn’t go alone with boys. This made sense to me, too, as they told me this restriction was for my protection.
By the time my tenth grade health class included sex education (another presentation of clinical, anatomical information that didn’t alter my previous views on sex), I was old enough to receive the information and disregard it as still irrelevant to where I was in life. Sex in Islam is reserved for marriage, and besides, it can ruin your life outside of marriage. Made sense to me.
But kids today face bigger challenges, I think. In our neighborhood middle school, parents have had to cope with incidents of oral sex in the parking lot at lunch time. (We’re talking 12-14 year olds, here.) Elementary-aged girls are reading the “Twilight” series, popular books written for young adults but too mature for prepubescent girls, given that the heroine wants to throw away her education, ambition, friends, and family for a vampire who loves her but wants to suck her blood (a common metaphor for sex and domestic violence). Prime-time television bursts with sexual innuendo in a way that it didn’t twenty-five years ago.
So how do we protect our kids from that kind of ubiquitous peer pressure? I want my daughter and son to follow Islamic dictates and refrain from physical intimacy before marriage. I don’t believe in double standards.
My parents told me, as well as my brother, that dating was against my religion. Perhaps it isn’t that clear-cut, as what exactly constitutes dating? Some parents might consider going out to dinner in a group to be dating, and some wouldn’t. Certainly, under Islamic guidelines, a man and woman should not go behind closed doors alone.
And of course, there’s the ban on physical contact. Again, Muslims might disagree on what exactly is prohibited. Everyone agrees that, in Islam, intercourse is absolutely forbidden outside of marriage. Certainly, not dating at all makes it considerably easier to resist the slippery slope of what’s allowable and what isn’t.
I want my kids to be aware of what happens in society, where the dangers lie, what we expect of them, what Islam expects of them, and the fact that other families (both Muslim and not) might have different rules. I understand that this might mean resisting peer pressure, but when has that been a bad thing? It builds character and strength. It will teach them to adhere to their principles while not judging others. As long as the channels of communication are open and my kids and I can have honest dialogue, then I think I’ll be doing my job.
All a parent can do is try to make the right choices. I hope I can give my kids a good foundation for Islamic behavior. But if they do go (in my view) astray, despite my efforts, I hope I’ll have the strength to resist judging them or tying my ego and sense of success and failure to their actions.
– Sumbul Ali-Karamali, a corporate lawyer with a graduate degree in Islamic Law, is the author of The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, an academically reliable, anecdote-filled introduction to Islam and Muslims (www.muslimnextdoor.com).
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
Wedad Lootah, who wears a full-length black niqab, has been a marital counselor in Dubai for eight yearsWEDAD LOOTAH does not look like a sexual activist. A Muslim and a native Emirati, she wears a full-length black niqab — with only her brown eyes showing through narrow slits — and sprinkles her conversation with quotes from the Koran.
Yet she is also the author of what for the Middle East is an amazingly frank new book of erotic advice in which she celebrates the female orgasm, confronts taboo topics like homosexuality and urges Arabs to transcend the backward traditions that limit their sexual happiness.
The book, “Top Secret: Sexual Guidance for Married Couples,” is packed with vivid anecdotes from Ms. Lootah’s eight years as a marital counselor in Dubai’s main courthouse. It became an instant scandal after it was published in Arabic in the Emirates in January, drawing praise from some liberals and death threats from conservatives, who say she is guilty of blasphemy or worse.
Ms. Lootah, a strong-willed and talkative 45-year-old, is one of a small but growing number of Arabs pushing for more openness and education about sex. Unlike earlier generations of women who often couched their criticism in a Western language of female emancipation, Ms. Lootah and her peers are hard to dismiss as outsiders because they tend to be religious Muslims who root their message in the Koran.
Ms. Lootah, for instance, studied Islamic jurisprudence in college, not Western psychology, and her book is studded with religious references. She submitted the text to the Mufti of Dubai before publishing it, and he gave his approval (though he warned her that Arab audiences might not be ready for such a book, especially by a woman).
“People have said I was crazy, that I was straying from Islam, that I should be killed,” Ms. Lootah said. “Even my family ask why I must talk about this. I say: ‘These problems happen every day and should not be ignored. This is the reality we are living.’ ”
She is not a liberal by Western standards. One of the themes of her book is the danger of anal sex and homosexuality generally, not because of AIDS but because they are banned by the Koran. But her openness about the issue was itself a shock to many here.
In Saudi Arabia and other countries where the genders are rigorously separated, many men have their first sexual experiences with other men, which affects their attitudes toward sex in marriage, Ms. Lootah said.
“Many men who had anal sex with men before marriage want the same thing with their wives, because they don’t know anything else,” Ms. Lootah said. “This is one reason we need sex education in our schools.”
She is also emphatic about the importance of female sexual pleasure, and the inequity of many Arab marriages in that respect. One of the cases that impelled her to write the book, she said, was a 52-year-old client who had grandchildren but had never known sexual pleasure with her husband.
“Finally, she discovered orgasm!” Ms. Lootah said. “Imagine, all that time she did not know.”
Another important theme of the book is infidelity. The prevalence of foreign women in Dubai and the ease of e-mail and text-message communication has made cheating easier (and easier to detect), Ms. Lootah said, helping push the divorce rate to 30 percent.
The Gulf’s oil-fueled modernization in recent decades has also shattered some old Arab social structures. At the same time, the rise of political Islam has undermined traditional authorities, leaving many Arabs confused about moral issues.
“Before, people lived in one place and the community was like one big family,” Ms. Lootah said. “Now, people have spread to different areas, everything’s mixed up and traditions have changed.”
ONE result is the Family Guidance section in the Dubai Courthouse, which opened in 2001 with Ms. Lootah as its first counselor (there are now six others, all men). Kuwait’s government has had a similar social-services wing since the 1990s, and other Persian Gulf countries are following suit. Private psychologists and marriage counselors also exist throughout the Arab world, though they are still rare.
“We’re making a lot of progress,” said Heba Kotb, who runs an Islam-oriented sex therapy clinic in Cairo, and ran a satellite television talk show on sexual and marital issues from 2006 until 2008. “Ten years ago we were unable to even mention the subject, and now people are getting used to hearing it.”
There are still formidable obstacles. In a region where “honor killings” of women who have sex outside marriage remain fairly common, sex education is widely viewed as a portal to sin. Genital cutting of women still takes place in Egypt, though it is now illegal. Arab writers and artists have begun to tackle these subjects.
Thirty years ago the Egyptian director Saleh Abu Seif wrote a screenplay called “Sex School,” but the censorship bureau had yet to approve it when he died in 1996. His son was finally allowed to direct a modified version of the film, about a sexually dissatisfied couple who go to see a therapist, and it was released in 2002 under the title “The Ostrich and the Peacock.”
Ms. Lootah never expected to become part of this debate. One of nine children born to an illiterate water-seller in Dubai, she married early and taught elementary school for years. Later, she took a job working for an Islamic endowment, where her efforts to introduce education and family-reunion days in prison earned her two government-service awards. When Dubai introduced the Family Guidance section of its courthouse, Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Muhammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, asked her to be the first counselor.
THE family guidance section was established in part to comply with Islamic precepts calling for couples who want a divorce to try to work out their problems first. In practice, it has become an all-purpose therapy destination for people with marital problems.
Ms. Lootah sees about seven cases a day, individuals and couples. Most of them are native Emiratis, but in the multicultural world of Dubai — where about 90 percent of the population is foreign — she has also counseled some Europeans and Asians. As in the criminal courts next door, a translator sits in on the session, and sometimes even offers advice to bridge cultural gaps.
“Some people are amazed I can work with people with only my eyes showing,” Ms. Lootah said, with a ripple of laughter. “Maybe it’s because of the way I move my hands! But I can tell you that people come here, and they speak very frankly with me.”
She reels off stories from her practice in rapid fire: the Emirati military officer whose wife had an affair because he was away from home too much; the woman who thought fellatio was against Islam (not true at all, Ms. Lootah notes); the wife who discovered her husband dressing up as a woman and going out to gay bars. She seems bent on showing that there is a whole world of sexual confusion that would benefit from open discussion.
Publishing the book, she notes, was a difficult choice. Her father supported her, but other family members sometimes wondered why she had to be so public about it all. After it was published a man called her office phone and threatened to kill her. Other threats appeared on the Internet.
She brushes them off, saying she has declined an offer of protection from the government. Besides, she adds, educating the public is worth the risk.
“A few days ago a woman came in and asked me if it is O.K. to kiss the man all over his body,” she said. “I told her, ‘Read my book!’ ”
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