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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.
