The Sweetness of (Written) Intercourse: MWU’s ‘Sex and the Umma’ Column and the Search for Modern Muslim Erotic Expression

Graphic by Saadi Al Kaabi (Iraq)

By Mohja Kahf

Sex column a Ramadan revelation: The idea for a sex column on MWU! came out of a meditation on the rigors of Ramadan by a fasting Muslim. There was a question I had explored for years with friends and family: Our hunger in Ramadan cultivates many fruits in us, spiritual and physical; what does the Ramadan daytime abstinence from sexual pleasure—from engaging in what the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, reportedly called ‘the sweetness of intercourse’—cultivate in the heart and body? What we reap from the sex-fast must be worth contemplating as much as the discipline of food-fasting, or God would not have prescribed it, I figured. Yet where is Muslim writing on Ramadan horniness, amid endless khutbahs on Ramadan hunger?

A few years back, I wrote this idea up—it was a draft of what became the ‘Halima Holiness Hennings’ khutba—and shared it with friends. It was a minor thing among numerous projects on my plate. When I began to be in touch with the MWU! website, I happened to mention the piece to the MWU! editor, and he liked the idea and took it further— ‘Hey, how ‘bout a regular column on sex?’

My sexually themed stories spring from my Islamic values and my particular experience of Arab culture. Far from being Western-inspired, my stories come from a sensibility that is aghast at the often casual, crass, and soulless attitudes toward sex portrayed in the mass media, including on the HBO program Sex and the City, whose name nevertheless helped name the column—and whose storylines I raptly watched, of course darling, with the prurient fascination of an amateur Occidentalist.

Islamic sex: My Islamic education included positive teachings about sex from the beginning. In junior high, my friend and I took weekly after-school hadith lessons from Forty Hadith Nawawi, at ISNA headquarters, taught by one of the staffers, a parent. We got to hadith #25 which includes the phrase ‘in the sexual act of each of you there is a sadaqa’ and we snickered, as kids do, and he said ‘Now listen, I am not going to skip this hadith, because I think you are old enough to know about these things—so act like it.’ We straightened up, impressed that a grown-up was treating us seriously. We also learned that a Muslim can talk about sex without shame, that sex can be a form of ibada (worship) like any other human act, and that sex is not tolerated just for the purpose of procreation the way it is in some other religions (or so we learned), but as a good and natural act that God made humans love to do.

As Islamists, my folks believe it is their duty to teach their children what they see as the authentic Islamic texts related to the body, purity, and sexual practice at an appropriate age, just as they believe we must seek direct knowledge from Islamic texts about every other subject. This sense of duty somewhat counterweights their modesty, so that they do not have the reticence that their conservative but non-Islamist, Muslim counterparts typically have about broaching this topic.

The Islamic teachings I learned also emphasized that human beings must channel sex into the set of social-legal regulations codified by male scholars in the early centuries of Islam, which are predominantly—yet, it is important to remember, not always—androcentric and sexist. As an adult, I began to question this whole edifice, which is considered by Muslim authorities to be part and parcel with Islam. It is composed of human ijtihaads, in the end. I don’t think the classical heritage should be dismissed lightly, or dismissed at all; despite the sexism and other failings, there is much wisdom in it which should stay with us and continue to inspire us. But I began more and more to see it as incidental to the religion of Islam and not a binding part of it. The spiritual-ethical values, rather than scholarship, are the essential core of the faith. These values include the idea that sex can and should be ibada (worship), an expression of our relationship to the Divine.

As I said, even the classical elaborations on the Quran sometimes do offer space for sexual expression, including women’s sexual expression. Refreshingly, the traditional edifice of Islam is not entirely sexist. My article “Braiding the Stories: Women’s Eloquence in the Early Islamic Era,” part of Gisela Webb, ed., Windows of Faith: Muslim Women’s Scholarship and Activism in North America (Syracuse, 2000), studies the words of early Muslim women. One place I focused is the Quranic response to a Medinan woman named Khawla, who, we learn in a long hadith from the ‘occasions of revelation’ literature about this sura, refused to be satisfied with the unhelpful answer the Prophet gave to a marital impasse she had reached with her husband because of a misogynistic Arab sexual custom, zihar. The Quran validates her stubborn questioning in Surat al-Mujadala, which opens, “God has indeed heard the utterance of she who argues with you concerning her husband and complains unto God, and God hears your exchange of debate…” The next ayas proceed to open up a way out of her impasse by changing the sexual custom.

I also discuss a story that Aisha, God bless her, narrates to her husband. It is an anecdote about eleven women who gathered to talk sex (this is in Sahih Muslim’s chapter on ‘The Merits of Aisha.’). Aisha rattles off the stories the eleven tell about their husbands. There is chuckling and empathy among the women at the disappointing husbands and more chuckling at the satisfying ones. It’s the early Islamic version of Desperate Housewives.

The eleventh woman pines for her magnificent first husband, an Abu Zare’, who left her for another woman, one with perky ‘breasts like pomegranates’—and, well, Um Zare’ is not pining after her first hubby for his emotional love alone, folks—her pleasure with him and her longing for him are hinted as sexual. Girlfriend, I wish I could have ‘im back, Chick #11 sighs—even though she has since married another. The Prophet listens avidly to all this from Aisha. He, peace and blessings, doesn’t stick his fingers in his ears and go, ‘La la la la la, I’m not listening to private marital sex secrets, haram haram haram.’

No, dears. Instead, the Prophet seems charmed by young vibrant Aisha’s vivid storytelling, because he then responds in a way that puts him into the story. He says to Aisha, ‘[Hey girl] I am to you what Abu Z was to Um Z.’ (Hey, if Yusuf Ali can put completely non-existent-in-the-original interpretive words into his Quran translation in brackets, to aid his readers’ understanding based on his sense of the meaning, I don’t see why I can’t do that with my translation of this hadith.)

We are not told if he whispered that to her romantically while nibbling her ear, or not. That would be a marital sex secret. Aisha may have blabbed the eleven women’s stories, but do you think she would blab her own? But his line sure sounds like a romantic overture to me, don’t you think? I find that endearing—it’s like he wanted to be reassured that she loved and desired him, that he was a good lov—husband in her eyes.

That these texts originating with women were preserved, even through the misogyny of the age of the hadith compilers, is remarkable, as Leila Ahmed notes in her history of the era (Women and Gender in Islam). This anecdote tells us more than that some of the later classical scholars respected the words of women. A narration having little to do with—well, with anything—why was it included and compiled? What on earth does it show of ‘the merits of Aisha?’ Scholar-dudes kept it ‘cause it a cool story ‘bout sex and the umma.

My study suggests that there is a whole genre in the early Islamic era expressing women’s gaze at men. A prime example: Um Ma’bad is a Meccan woman who gives us the best physical description we have of the Prophet. It is quite beautiful and evokes an image that is, to me as a woman, sensuous, and spiritually radiant at the same time. When Sayidna Ali is asked, how come Um Ma’bad’s description is so eloquent, he says, ‘Because women describe men with their desires.’ Hmm. Sounds like Ali, bless him, knew what’s what; sounds like he for one would not have been too terribly shocked by my ‘Lustrous Companions’ characters who sit around and enjoy their mubah first gazes at handsome men in their mosque and fantasize over coffee about male celebrities. Sounds like he’d expect them to have those desires and express them out loud. Wallahu alam, darling.

Much more that is marvelous relating to the erotic spirit can be found by sifting through the early and classical Islamic material. These early ‘sex and the umma’ stories are a dusty and forgotten part of our heritage. They have long been a rich ore for me.

Farting, milking, and family subcultures: It seems my family heritage is one of frank talk of the body—a sprawling clan at whose kitchen tables breasts are boobs, penises are dicks, the whole wonderful garden of female genitalia is pussy, and a fart is a fart. Mind you, the Kahfs ain’t Syro-trash, buster. They are a reputable Damascus family, hunh. Lots of families are this way in private—they put on company manners for company, as is fitting.

Now, my mother’s side of the family is a little more genteel and Islamically learned and, well, pinkie-raising. Still, the Mubaraks do not go fire-and-brimstone at the sort of humor that is habitual among the earthy Kahfs. They might roll their eyes—or withdraw—but they don’t get medieval on your ass.

I have a certain (Islamist) uncle who’d pluck a leatherbound volume of al-Uqd al-Farid (a huge anthology from the literature of al-Andalus given to me as a wedding gift), open it to the raunchiest anecdote in Arabic literature, definitely involving ‘dick,’ and read it aloud with glee to my husband and me and the other adults gathered around the hummos and olives. Five minutes later, you will find him discoursing gravely on the meaning of a Quranic phrase. Recently, I told this uncle that if I was criticized for my sex column, I was going to blame it all on him.

Another relative (yes, Islamist again) mentioned that he and his (jilbabed) wife knew their teenaged son was masturbating, or, in the charming Arabic idiom, ‘milking himself.’ There was no freak-out factor. The parents had what you might call a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ tolerance of the practice, typical of the Arab families I know.“We did make him get an after-school job, though,” he added. “Too much time on his hands.”

An elderly (high-spirited—she nearly eloped to marry her true love, and we’re talking back in the 1940s) aunt, may she rest in mercy, often came from Syria and visited me after I got married. She always wanted me to take her to the stores where they sold edible underwear, to stock up for her married daughters (one of them a jilbabed Islamist) back in Syria. She wanted them to have pleasure in their lives. “Take me to that place with the, the, whirly thingamabobs.” She twirled her fingers by the tips of her breasts to show me what she meant, a twinkle in her wrinkled eyes. “Oh, right, the nipple tassles. No problem, Auntie.”

I credit her Damascene women’s subculture with my sense of playfulness in speaking about sex. Women from urban Syria, in their private gatherings, have rich women’s spaces that include frank sex talk. I am sure there are parallels in other Muslim cultures; I am speaking of the culture most familiar to me. These single-sex gatherings are venues where people glean sexual knowledge—what positions and techniques work , what helps when your libido is low, and just general sensibilities about sex—through jokes, anecdotes, and stories. Much like Aisha and her eleven girlfriends

Arabic sex writing: Arabic literature is full of sexual treasure troves, books often gifted to the bride and groom (for foreplay?). Arabic classics include includes the racy, multi-cultural, secular Thousand and One Nights, in which respected historical figures such as the pious worshiper Hasan al-Basri and the learned Caliph Harun al-Rashid appear in compromising—fictional, people, fictional—positions. And the Nights’ Tale of the Three Ladies of Baghdad is kinkier than anything Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte ever came up with on Sex & the City. To claim that this column’s sexual thrust can only come from Western influence is bogus.

Today, in the course I teach on Love and Eros in Literature, I listed on the blackboard seven or eight Arabic treatises on erotic love from the ninth to the seventeenth century, many of them by religious scholars. Al-Shafii, after whom one of the four Sunni schools of fiqh is named, wrote a diwan on love—earthly, human love—, as did many of the classical fuqaha. In our rich heritage of Sufi poetry, the inseparability of eros and spirituality is inescapable. In modern Arabic literature, poet of erotic and political and aesthetic freedom Nizar Kabbani writes daringly of sex and soul. To name but one who does so. I bet there are parallels in Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and other Muslim literatures.

These are mostly secular Arabic texts, some might object. Some are, and some are not, but they are part of a culture steeped in Islamic sensibilities and deal with the erotic life under Muslim conditions, which is what the Sex and the Umma column sets out to do, but in English. There is a wealth of examples from other Islamic literatures—Persian and Turkish, for example, and far-flung Islamic cultures in which I am not versed.

Fuck-damn, cut the anti-profanity shit: There is a hadith in which the Prophet, peace and blessings, uses the word ‘fuck’ —certainly in the technical, utilitarian sense and not to cuss. The report says that a man was trying to confess adultery and was fudging on what he actually did. The Prophet, who at first tried to thwart the confession three times, did not use a euphemism for coitus. Seeking clarity, he used the most tangible word in the Arabic language for the act and asked, ‘Did you fuck her?’ (‘aniktaha?’). Look it up in Arabic (in the major hadith collections under ‘huddud’), because you sure won’t find it in the English translations done by modern Muslims who can’t accept the fact that this word has its uses even in the classical documents of our faith. The instances when Sayidna Omar and Sayidna Abu Bakr used profanity and explicit language—‘shit’ and ‘clit,’ respectively—are preserved in the classical archives as well. I want to know what Islamist, traditional, and conservative Muslims make of these hadiths. For Muslims who believe hadith non-binding, I would point out that hadith collections are nevertheless important historical documents and part of our heritage.

Foul language exists in the world for a reason. It is offensive when used excessively or inappropriately—meaning it has an appropriate place. Using profane language even sparingly and in appropriate context may not be the noblest character trait, but it is a rather minor failing. Where in Islam is it ranked as a sin? The decision to bring characters who use this type language to life in fiction, or to use profanity for narrative effect anywhere in the text, can be criticized as a mistake in the craft of storytelling, but it is not an offense against Islamic adab or morals. Wallahu alam.

Toward gynocentric sex-positive Muslim public discourse: I don’t see what I am doing in Sex and the Umma as pushing the envelope all that much, when all the smoke clears. My sexually themed writings challenge the traditional boundaries in two ways:

• One, sex is positively valued in Islamic classical texts most often in a male-centered, male-affirming way. I am expressing the same values but in a more woman-affirming way. I’m not saying a female-centered approach should replace the androcentric approach tit-for-tat (no…pun…never mind). Women’s experiences simply interest me and there are not as many models for that, so I like to delve into it, without excluding male perspectives which I also like to explore at times.

• The second thing is that among the general Muslim populace, frank sex talk is usually done in family settings or single-sex venues. I am making it public rather than private discourse, and of course readers are a mixed-gender community.

There are stories by other authors in the column that take on subjects I may not choose to write on myself. I support them because the whole spectrum of Muslim sexual life merits description and reflection. ‘The whole spectrum’ includes highly observant Muslims and totally irreligious Muslims, the stubbornly unassimilated and the comfortably assimilated, and everyone in between.

People often ask me where I would draw the line. I wouldn’t. There are things I think I personally won’t write. But maybe when I come to that place the best thing to do is to cross it, because those difficult places are often where the mohja (the heart’s blood) of the meaning lives. Anything, done with intelligence and excellence, may be turned into worthwhile writing. Another Nawawi hadith: ‘When you do a thing, do it excellently.’
I don’t believe it is useful to draw a circle a priori and say ‘this is off-limits, and that is taboo.’

Some Muslim writers forums have mission statements forbidding erotic or sexual writing, and blasphemy. But the creative process is—at least, at its best—part of the divine breath in us. We have to nourish it and for that you need freedom to write even what may offend people’s cherished beliefs. If someone writes a thing that is ugly or distasteful to me, such as parts of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, one response is to ignore it and hope that it dies of market disinterest, but I believe the best response is to engage in more of the sweet intercourse (writing; what did you think I meant?). Bump the offensive writing from its seat with ahsan—from husn, beautiful—writing.

Some progressive and secular Muslims see the ‘Sex and the Umma’ column as pretty tame. Their issues are not identical to mine. To them I say, ‘then contribute.’ Liberal Muslims have said, ‘Look, talking about sexuality and Islam is cool, but do we have to have it in that language? Must we have the graphic scenes?’ To them I say, ‘be my guest.’ Even to conservatives, the door is open. Now, progressives, don’t have a conniption. If a conservative Muslim writer writes a well-crafted, engaging story about sex and the Muslim experience, it means they will have worked their way out of a simplistic ‘halal writing vs haram writing’ mode. History shows that religious conservatives are as capable as freethinkers of rising above sentimentalism and heavy-handed didacticism to good, intelligent writing.

Adab too is a path to ilm: I don’t understand why some readers operate on the assumption that any practice mentioned in the column is being advocated by the columnists. It may be, or it may not be, whether the column is fiction or nonfiction. Either way, exploring it through writing is a good thing (sometimes even better than sex).
Why would someone who believes that premarital sex, for example, is morally wrong, see as immoral the writing or reading of a story or essay that describes premarital sex? If you disapprove, do you not still want to understand why it happens? How does it violate Islam to write in ways that give us insight—on, I think, anything? Reading well-crafted writing, whether fiction that entertains us or nonfiction that informs, is a sweet intercourse between hearts and minds that can yield knowledge (ilm) of the self and the world.

Adab, meaning ‘etiquette,’ or ‘polite behavior,’ is a value that some readers think this column, and my stories in particular, violate. Adab also means ‘literature.’ The two meanings are related: By reading adab, you increase in adab. By reading literature, by experiencing the pleasures and challenges of intercourse with other minds and hearts, you broaden your Self and increase (one hopes) in good behavior toward others. I have been shocked at the lack of adab given to adab by some of our adab-siz Muslim readers.

Muslim lives, Western forms: The column is written in English, a Western language, and grounded (so far) in the realities of Muslim authors living in the West. It uses English—but shapes the language around Muslim experience. Without mangling English to suit Muslim needs, how could anyone say, “It was the duha hour, long after fajr and too soon for dhuhr, and the Holy Sanctuary was the abode of sakina.” Who can even read that, without needing to know already or be willing to learn the language of Islam? To whom else but a readership versed in the Quran does a passage such as “Do we get dick in heaven? Men get pussy. Do we get dick?” make perfect sense? It’s not the English of Orientalists, nor the Arabic-accented English of stilted translations of Sahih al-Bukhari, nor the English of VH1. It is Muslim English.

Iranian philosopher Syed Hosein Nasr speaks of Islam as having evolved historically through six cultural manifestations: Arabic (including al-Andalus), Persian, African, Indian (in which he includes all of South Asia), Turkish (which he extends to eastern Europe), and Chinese. Each of these is a hybrid, merging Islamic faith with the local pre-Islamic culture. There is no ‘pure’ Islam stripped of any cultural context, I would add, not as a lived human reality—even the Prophet Muhammad and the Companions and the Tabiun had their particular culture, which did not evaporate or disappear around Islam. Whether or not I agree with Nasr’s six classifications, which I believe I heard him give in a lecture in the early 1990s, he goes on to make an important point with which I do agree. He suggests that perhaps a new manifestation of Islamic culture is emerging, a Western (European and American) Islamic form. This emerging ‘third space’ is where the Sex and the Umma column is located.

Column’s attackers are the bad Muslims: That the Sex and the Umma column has been reviled by self-appointed gatekeeping Muslims on the basis that it is somehow unIslamic is, to me, an indication of how impoverished our contemporary Islamic culture is, worldwide. The vision many ardent Muslims have of Islam has shrunk from what it was even a few decades ago to something very narrow and often politically motivated—motivated, in other words, by the desire for power, sultah, in the world. Even Islamist Muslims of a few decades ago seem to me, in my personal experience, to have been men and women who evinced a certain amount of Islamic broadmindedness about a wide range of human phenomena, grounded somewhat in a Sufi humility that has evaporated in today’s set.

When I reflect on the narrow consciousness of many young Islamic movement-influenced people I know today, who think they have encompassed all of Islam and know what is allowed and not allowed for all time and place, and who justify theft and incite violence based on their overweening knowledge, I shudder at the extremism into which the Islamic resurgence people have degenerated. Twentieth-century Islamic ‘revival’ started out in my grandfather’s time with a goal to expand Muslim consciousness out from under colonial domination and offer Muslim modernist alternatives to Western forms of modernism. Its tail end, as it plays its last energy out as a viable idea, is these Islamo-thugs.

Burning books—and its IT-age counterpart, hacking websites—is not a trait that honors the Islamic heritage, which gives great value to literacy, books, texts, the power of discourse. Throwing kufr accusations at Muslims is not an Islamic quality. Rejecting texts about the body is not an Islamic trait. Banning pleasure in sexual expression is not an Islamic quality.

I am the daughter of the House of Islam, mutarassikha in its values. The hackers and kufr-criers are the imposters, posing as the heirs. Thieves smashing the windows, thugs trying to burn the library. I speak the language of this Islamic heritage, not they; I carry its volumes inside me, like Abu Hanifa at the river, who wept when stripped of his books by an ignoramus robber who threw them in the Tigris—but all it did was make ole Bu H more determined to be his own inner library.

Joy of sex, Muslim-style: An elegant and refined, pleasure-loving Damascene woman of my acquaintance—a practicing, pious Muslim (though not a jilbab wearer)—once asked me in a small gathering of girlfriends, ‘Why do you suppose we have to make ghusl after sex? Do you suppose it’s to set a boundary around it, so it’s not just sort of open-ended—oops, no pun intended?’ We speculated. I don’t see literature out there exploring moments and questions like this—what sex looks like in Muslim lives, what comes up (whoops, no pun intended again) in Muslim experiences of sex, where the imagination can lead when sex and Islam are sweetly intertwined.

I like exploring these questions in writing. Just because. Same way that Aisha enjoyed telling her story of the eleven and the Prophet enjoyed listening to it. It’s not my only literary focus, or the most important one, but sure, it is one of my projects, and I believe it is a worthwhile one. I don’t even understand why I’m asked ‘Why (write about sex)?’ What does that ‘why?’ mean, imply, or reject? Why ‘why?’

I love that many of the stories have struck a chord with bezillions of Muslim readers. There are also readers who may not like the column, but still disagree with the column’s attackers. Looking beyond, I hope that future generation of Muslims, who will better ken the transitions of our day, will say that the Sex and the Umma column linked the writing that came before it to the writing that will come after it in the longstanding Islamic conversation on the spirituality of sex and the sex of spirituality.

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*I will now sit back and wait for my progressive friends to call me a liberal apologist, my conservative friends to call me a heretic, and my liberal friends to call me too-far-gone progressive. (Hey, at least they’ll call me.)