Sheima Benembarek - Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America

by Mona Eltahawy

In 2015, I was on tour in the U.K. for my first book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, when a woman approached me at the signing table. She knelt so that we were at eye level when she spoke. I, too, am fed up with waiting to have sex, she said.

At the bookshop that day, I had described myself as a cisgender Egyptian woman of Muslim descent who was taught to abstain from sex until marriage. I told the audience that I was sad for my younger self, sad that Id waited so long to experience something that now gives me so much pleasure. I had accepted what I was taught, but I hadnt found anyone I wanted to marry, and then I got fed up waiting.

The woman kneeling before me came from a British Muslim family of Arab origin. Im thirty-two, and theres no one I want to marry, she explained. How do I get over the fear that God will hate me if I have sex before marriage?

It wasnt until the age of twenty-eight that I becamefinallysexually intimate with a person other than myself. I couldnt exactly say I lost my virginity (I lost nothingit was fucking wonderful) or that I had sex for the first time (I enjoyed the orgasms Id been giving myself since I was eleven). At the time, I had no one to share this news with. My guilt was exacerbated by secrecy, and for years I spoke about sex only with non-Muslim female friends. Once, at a Muslim womens conference, I shared how difficult it had been to overcome the guilt of premarital sex, and another Muslim woman bluntly told me that the Quran clearly stated that fornicators were for fornicators, so there was a fornicator out there for me somewhere.

Im glad I didnt let her deter me. I resolved to shed both the guilt and the secrecy. The former was easy: I fucked it out of my system. The latter required more patience, boldness, and a thicker skin, but it eventually rewarded me on a night in Amsterdam spent with fellow Muslim women around a table filled with laughter and dessert.

When I first had sex, it was as if my mother, my father, my grandparents, the entire neighbourhood, God, and all the angels were there watching, a Dutch Moroccan woman said.

We convulsed in hysterics because we knew exactly what she meant. It was a relief to talk to women who still understood the burden of virginity and the guilt involved in leaving it behind as much as it was to exchange such tales without fear of judgment.

Halal Sex took me back to that night in Amsterdam. Reading Sheimas story, and the others she has so lovingly collected, was a reminder of the gift of story, both to the teller and the listener. To be seen and acknowledged is to be given a map that leads you away from loneliness and toward solidaritytoward home. To be heard is especially important for Muslim women, who are so often asked for little more than their position on the hijab, and for gender-expansive people, whose very existence is routinely denied. I know that had this book been available to me when I was younger, I would have felt far less alone.

For the longest time, I couldnt say that I desired both men and women. I couldnt say that I found monogamy suffocating. I didnt know what desire looked like liberated from the pressure of heteronormativity and enforced monogamy. I was not raised to be queer or polyamorous; I arrived at both through a reckoning with myself that loosened my lived reality from the grip of expectation.

Revolutions are too often thought of as things that happen out there, when instead they must begin in here, in our social circles and in our homes. In her 1969 essay On the Issue of Roles, Toni Cade Bambara, a Black American author, documentary filmmaker, and social activist, writes, Revolution begins with the self, in the self. Wed better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. If your house aint in order, you aint in order. It is so much easier out there than right here. The revolution aint out there. Yet. But it is here. The revolution is incomplete if it focuses on our autonomy only from the state, because the state isnt the only entity that exercises power over us, particularly those of us who do not identify as cisgender men. Its women and LGBTQ+ folks who suffer most when we shroud sexuality in silence. And so whenever I speak publicly, I shake desire free of taboos and proclaim the liberatory force of owning it. When I share, others are empowered to do the same.

In many non-Western countries and contexts, speaking on these topics is scorned as white or Western behaviour. Ive been accused of being obsessed with sex because I insist on talking openly about it. But when we allow others to determine who we can desire and how we express that desire, we allow them to control our bodies, our futures, our place in the world. Which is to say, our freedom. So we are free when we give voice to our desire without fear or penalty. It is how we defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy. I am the owner of my body. Not the state, not the street, not the home. Not the temple, not the church, not the mosque. It is my right to have sex whenever I choose and with whomever I chooseman, woman, cis, trans, gender-fluid, nonbinaryas long as I have their consent. To desire and be desired is political. How we fuck and who we fuck is political. Always the goal: to be free.

Sexuality and desire are not merely white or Western concerns. They belong to us all. Muslim women and gender-expansive Muslims are much more than our headscarves and our hymens. As the poignant and subversive tales within these pages attest, we are complicated, we are queer, and we have stories to tell. And together, our stories are more powerful than any amount of shame and silence.