“If you really want to know people, start by looking in their bedrooms,” says Shereen El Feki, author of the new book, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World.
El Feki, who was raised in Canada and is a practicing Muslim, is the former vice chair of the U.N.‘s Global Commission on HIV and Law. Born to an Egyptian father and Welsh mother, she was motivated by September 11th to seek a better understanding of her Arab and Islamic heritage.
El Feki found that demonstrators for political freedom in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution had little interest in also promoting sexual freedom. That’s because most Arabs derive their sexual mores from their religious beliefs. The only way to bring more sexual freedom to the Arab world, she argues, is through Islam, which was far more tolerant of the needs of the flesh a thousand years ago than it is today.
On March 13, 2013, El Feki joined novelist and former sex worker Tracy Quan for “Sex and the Citadel: Does the Arab Spring need a Summer of Love?,” an event hosted by the Reason Foundation at New York City’s Museum of Sex.
