Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures by Aymon Kreil Lucia Sorbera Serena Tolino

Author:Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera, Serena Tolino [Aymon Kreil, Lucia Sorbera, Serena Tolino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Health & Well Being, Psychology, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, History
ISBN: 9781838604103
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

In lieu of a conclusion

Today, al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq is understood as a modern work, not least because of its associations with ars erotica. This has to do with developments of the last two decades, during which the relevant classics of Arabic ars erotica have been newly published in numerous editions in the Arab metropolises of Tunis, Beirut and Damascus, and systematic occupation with Arabic erotological literature has boomed – evidenced among other things by the appearance of a new Arabic sexual dictionary.41 Add to that contemporary Arabic literature, in which transgression of sexual and moral taboos is the rage, not least in women’s literature, as in the works of various female authors such as the Algerian Aḥlām al-Mustaghānamī or Rajāʾ al-Ṣāniʿ (Rajaa Alsanea: Girls of Riyadh) from Saudi Arabia. After the Nahḍa and its lingering effects, offensively libertine poetry and literature reappear first in the mid-twentieth century, after the representation of love, sexuality and the relationship of the sexes had been so long restricted to only non-physical aspects. But these no longer connect with the tradition and spectrum of Arabic ars erotica. This illustrates how profound the break with the pre-modern is. The novel Burhān al-ʿAsal (The Proof of the Honey, 2007)42 by Salwā al-Nuʿaymī excited so much attention not least for this reason, because it strikingly announced a new interest in classical erotic writing and connected a sexual revolution in the Arab world with its own tradition. That such a book touched a nerve not only in the Arab world is attested by the numerous translations. The prevailing stereotype about Arab sexuality is still determined by the veil and veil metaphors, which explains in reverse the European book market’s fascination with libertine Arabic literature. We can also observe this parallelism in the nineteenth-century European reception to ars erotica. In contrast to today, the Arabic nineteenth century marked the beginning of a period of upheaval and transfiguration. And as the beginning of repression of ars erotica as etiquette, an upheaval that, as this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, was much too complicated to be subsumed under the heading of Victorian prudery.

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