Across the border, in Jordan, these questions of language and identity strike a chord with Khalid Abdel-Hadi.He’s one of the few openly gay fasilitas personalities in the Middle East, and the founder of My Kali, an online magazine tackling everything from gender reassignment surgery to “honour”-related violence.When Safa talks about identity, Khalid is on the same page. He set up My Kali as a teenager more than a decade ago, to try to assert his individuality in a collective culture.
“Here in the Arab region we all refer to ourselves within communities, so it was difficult for me to express my own voice within this larger voice,” he says.
This is true for young people across the region: it is hard to strike out on your own when you can’t find a job, move out of your parents’ place or rely on the state to guarantee your personal freedoms, let alone sexual rights.
Over in Lebanon, straight talk on sex is all in a day’s work for Sandrine Atallah, one of Lebanon’s best-known sex therapists.
In addition to her Beirut-based clinic, Sandrine is one of the stars of Al Hubb Thaqafa (Love is Culture), a social fasilitas platform based in Cairo.
Sandrine and her fellow “sexplainers” are following a long tradition. For much of our history, Arab cultures were famous, not for sexual reticence and intolerance as they are today, but quite the opposite.
Take, for example, The Encyclopaedia of Pleasure, written in 10-11th Century Baghdad. Its 43 chapters cover almost every sexual sexual practice and preference .
The Encyclopaedia’s message is clear – sex is God’s gift to mankind and we are meant to santai it.
Online backlash
These great works of Arabic erotica have slipped out of sight in much of the region, and with them, a frankness and freedom in talking about sex – not just its problems but also its pleasures, and not just for men but also for women.
Safa, Khalid and Sandrine are reformers, not radicals. While they question the sexual standing quo, they are also trying to work along the grain of culture and tradition.
Their challenge is to move beyond the small, aman spaces that they have created to society at large.
Indeed, an online backlash to films about their work, shown on BBC Arabic’s YouTube Channel, and the personal threats that these women and men have faced as a result, is a sobering reminder of just how hard it is to tackle such taboos.
In a region where conflict and corruption are never far away, tens of millions of people are out of work or displaced, more fulfilled sexual lives might seem the least of our problems.