If you really want to know a people...

...start by looking inside their bedrooms

When I first read these lines, T sprang to my mind. for this could have very well have come from T and others who believe that to understand social mores one has to do a deep study of a society's sexual mores.

But these are the words of Shereen El Feki, the author of Sex and the Citadel

The daughter of an Egyptian father and Welsh mother, Cambridge-educated immunologist, former science-writer for the Economist, and the current Vice Chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and Law, El Feki has " spent the past five years traveling across the Arab region asking people about sex; what they do, what they don't, what they think and why." 

The result is this vibrant and bouncy accounting of sex in a changing Arab world.

El Feki says she wrote the book as a response to the following:

The Arab world [...] once famous in the West for sexual license envied by some but despised by others, is now widely criticized for sexual intolerance. ... And the West, once praised by some in the Arab world for its hard line on same-sex relations, is now seen by many as a radiating source of sexual debauchery from which the region must be shielded.

El Feki is not simply interested in chronicling the reversal in Arab attitude toward sexuality, but she also forecasts a change--not the advent of an "Arab Spring" in the culture's sexual sphere, but a gradual moving away from the "intimate order" of the Arab world, an order deeply entrenched in accepting marriage as the sun of a sexual cosmology. 

Change is coming to Egypt [...] not a sexual revolution, I think, but a sexual re-evaluation, in which people will one day have the education, the inclination, and the freedom to take an unblinkered view of what they were, how they came to be what they are, and what they could be in the years to come. The confidence and creativity of Arab civilization was once reflected in its sexual life. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance to see this again—not by gazing at our past, but by looking to our future.

A review of the book can be found here.