Women and Islam: Erotic Novel Breaks Muslim Taboos – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Women and Islam: Erotic Novel Breaks Muslim Taboos – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Erotic Novel Breaks Muslim Taboos
By Romain Leick
A Muslim woman breaks the taboos of her culture: using a pseudonym, she publishes an erotic tale divulging the secret sexual lives and cravings of Muslim women. The book was a phenomenon in France, but conservative Muslims have attacked it as trash. If her identity were revealed, she fears she would be stoned in her native Morocco.
You have to like her writing (for me it is a little bit to vulgar sometimes) but:
Nedjma wants to shock the world. Using an odd coupling of semon and prayer, she breaks the traditional wall of silence behind which Islamic women live and behind which their sex lives are obscured.
Although the muslim world has a rich erotic culture there is certainly some taboo on it as well :
Anger, says enigmatic author Nedjma, was probably the main motivation that propelled her book. Anger over the backwardness, the fanaticism, the delusion, the ignorance, and violence in the Arab world. Sexuality, pleasure in her own body, the separation of love and sin showed her the way to freedom. All the evils of an Islamic society that feels itself threatened by the West, and therefore constantly tempted to close itself in cultural autism, are mirrored in the oppression of women.
