Muslim Sex Shop

“Muslim theologians could not prevent this first wave of women ‘feminists’ from subverting the law because they had three assetts which gave them incredible power over the qadis and caliphs in charge of enforcing law and order. The three assets were beauty, intelligence, and aristocracy.  This combination was enough to justify a woman’s claim to nushuz-rebellion against the prevailing models of femininity.

The conditions Sakina put in her marriage act with one of her husbands, Zayd, made of her a celebrity and a nashiz, a rebellious wife. She stipulated that he would have no right to another wife, that he could never prevent her from acting according to her own will, that he would let her elect to live near her woman friend, Ummu Manshuz, and that he would never try to go against her desires (Agani XIV, pp. 168, 169. Mada’ini, Kitab al-muraddafat, p. 66).  When the husband once decided to go against Sakina’s will and went one weekend to his concubines, she took him to court, and in front of the Medina judge she shouted at him, ‘Look as much as you can at me today, because you will never see me again!” (Agani XVI, p. 155).”

- Women’s Rebellin & Islamic Memory, by Fatima Mernissi

In the same way that one is allowed to look at the cornfield or a flower-bed, enjoying its green and breathing in its various odors so long as he does not stretch out his hand for it, but is not allowed to stretch out his hand for a single grain of mustard seed without right to it, as he is not allowed to eat something that is forbidden, so is one allowed to talk to the singing girls, to joke, flirt, and shake hands with them, and to touch them in order to turn them around as long as nothing illicit is involved in it.  Did not Allah himself except al-lamam, ‘the lesser offenses,’ when he said: “Those who avoid the heinous things and indecencies, save lesser offenses-surely thy lord is wide in his forgiveness” (Sura 53:32, Arberry’s translation).

Jahiz then puts forward a number of interpretations of what lamam may mean, including kissing or, If I may use the expression, “petting.“

- Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, P. 103

“In fine literature, though, old fragile men still engaged in erotic affairs are sometimes made the target of mockery.  Of a senile wooer unable to consummate the marriage, the great Sa’di says:

‘That old man who cannot rise without a stick,
How should his stick rise?’”

Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, P. 90

(photo courtesy of yaznotjaz)

“Suffice it to say that the view of Galen and other Greek physicians was that a man’s abstinence from sexual intercourse as a rule results in his becoming melancholic, as soon as the putrid matter of the retained semen reaches his head.  This was then the medical explanation of why so many great lovers went insane, though it accounts only for the male. Rumi alludes to it in a great poem on the benefits of motion and on the damage of the lack of it, making use of the double meaning of hawa, air and concupiscence, in the following verse:

‘The air becomes putrified if closed up in a pit,
Look at separation, what damage the dirang-i hawa,
it caused by protraction of carnal desire!’”

- Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam edited by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, p. 89