Fresh Air: 'Sex And The Citadel' Peeks Inside Private Lives In The Arab World
"I know of young women who have been returned to their families by their husbands because, as you say, they did not bleed on defloweration," Shereen El Feki tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
El Feki, the author of the new book Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, spent five years traveling across the Arab region asking people about sex: what they do, what they don't, what they think and why.
Her ambition was to learn about the lives of young single people, married couples, gay people and sex workers, and how the sexual aspects of their lives reflect larger religious, cultural and political shifts.
What she learned, she says, is that "the patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world," and that women, too, "are some of the staunchest upholders of patriarchal attitudes."
Women, for example, decide whether or not to circumcise their daughters and granddaughters. Men are not traditionally part of the decision-making process when it comes to female genital mutilation (FGM).
"[Women] are making the decisions about their daughters' well-being and FGM, to cut or not to cut," El Feki says. "They are making these decisions based on faulty information, but the fact is, they have agency; and the key to moving forward is to recognize that power and to shift it to a decision which is recognizing and respecting their child's physical and mental rights."
Not everyone could get away with asking such intimate questions, but El Feki's prior work prepared her for the task. She's the former vice chair of the U.N.'s Global Commission on HIV and Law, and a former health care correspondent for The Economist.
El Feki grew up in Canada, the daughter of an Egyptian father and Welsh mother, who converted to Islam, the religion El Feki was raised in. El Feki moved to Cairo in 2008, and now divides her time between there and London.
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/20/174749890/sex-and-the-citadel-peeks-inside-private-lives-in-the-arab-world
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