William Leith16 January 2014
An Egyptian gynaecologist, the author says, told her that “in the Arab world, sex is the opposite of sport. Everyone talks about football but hardly anyone plays it. But sex — everyone is doing it but nobody wants to talk about it.” This is a brilliant study of sex in the Arab world — which is, of course, changing fast. There’s a sense in which the Arab world is sexually intolerant and quite opposed to Western sexual licence. But it used to be the other way around — when Flaubert went to Egypt the century before last, what he reported to his prim Western readers were stories of Eastern licence. El Feki unravels the history extremely well.
