No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and anal sex, is not a task many writers would relish. Sex and the Citadel is a bold, meticulously researched mini Kinsey Report, rich in anecdote and statistics.
El Feki’s father is Egyptian and a devout Muslim, her mother a Welsh Baptist, who converted early to Islam. An only child, with fair northern features, she grew up in Canada and was raised as a Muslim. Having done a doctorate in molecular immunology and served as a member of the UN Global Commission on HIV, written for the Huffington Post and been a presenter for the English- language Al-Jazeera, she decided to explore the sexual mores of an Arab world she knew largely as a visitor.
It was not by accident that she chose sex as her starting point: as a medical journalist, she had been struck by the low incidence of Aids among Arabs. Armed with far from perfect Arabic but a remarkable lack of inhibition, she decided to take Egypt as her focus, on account of its geopolitical influence and size, but she also dropped in on Lebanon, Tunisia and Qatar.
When Flaubert visited Egypt in 1849 for the French Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, he professed himself profoundly bored by the temples, but much taken with the ‘splendid arse’ and ‘full, apple-shaped breasts’ of the prostitutes, whose ‘flesh rippled into bronze ridges’. When not obliged to look at pyramids and mosques, he dropped in on syphilis wards and male brothels, proceeding, as El Feki puts it, to ‘fuck his way up the Nile’.
He was not the only European traveller to do so, nor to regard the East, as Edward Said wrote, as a ‘living tableau of queerness’.
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