The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mind Blowing Sex is praised for empowering women
By Alia Waheed
[I]t was a confession by a newlywed friend about her disastrous sex life that gave Umm Muladhat an idea for a groundbreaking book.
Published last week, The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mind Blowing Sex is the first such guide written by a Muslim woman. The author has chosen to stay anonymous, using an alias.
Candid advice is offered on everything from kissing to cowgirl positions – with the core message being that Muslim women can and should enjoy a varied sex life and take the lead in physical relationships.
While some critics have accused the author of fetishising Muslim women and encouraging promiscuity, the book has been welcomed by readers who have lauded her as a Muslim Belle De Jour, bringing a taboo subject into the open. “I’ve received encouraging feedback, but also a significant number of demeaning and disgusting messages,” said Muladhat. “One woman said it’s not needed, they learn everything from their mothers. I doubt any mother speaks in as explicit detail as I have.
“I put an emphasis on having sex only with your spouse, but having the full range of sexual experiences with that spouse. Islamically, there’s an emphasis on enjoying physical relationships within the context of marriage, not just for procreation. It is the wife’s right that her husband satisfy her sexually.”
Muslim women’s organisations have praised her, saying the book will empower Muslim women and protect them from entering into sexually abusive relationships. Shaista Gohir, chair of the Muslim Women’s Network UK which runs the Muslim Women’s Helpline, said: “I’m all for women talking about sex. Why shouldn’t they? Talking about sex in Islam is not new, and past scholars highlighted the importance of sexual pleasure for women, which included advice for men to ensure this happens.
“However, in practice, sex seems to all be about men’s pleasure. Cases often come up on our helpline where women’s complaints range from being forced into participating in unwanted sexual acts, rape, to being treated like a piece of meat with zero effort made to ensure the woman has an orgasm. I suspect the problem is much bigger, as most would feel too embarrassed to talk about it.”
Muladhat said she felt compelled to write the book after she discovered women were entering into a lifelong commitment with little knowledge about sex other than snippets gleaned from the back of guides to marriage, with an emphasis on what was forbidden, rather than what was allowed, and with little from the perspective of women.
“I saw many Muslim women were getting married with no real avenue for learning about sex,” she said. “Couples knew ‘penis into vagina’, but little on how to spice up their sex life. Different positions, different things to try in bed – it’s all absent in contemporary Islamic literature. For those in the west, certain things permeate through osmosis, so women have heard about BDSM and doggy style, but only in a vague sense.”
Many misconceptions that the book deals with stem from cultural attitudes that decent women don’t enjoy sex and should “lie back and think of morning prayers”. Gohir said: “Guilt associated with sex is drummed into women from childhood. It’s portrayed as something dirty where women’s sexuality is often controlled. This does result in women going into marriages not having the confidence to say ‘I am not enjoying this’ or ‘I want this’. It’s time this topic is spoken about more openly.”
Muladhat also found that confusion about what sex acts were permissible in Islam was inhibiting women from experimenting in the bedroom. “Outside the house, culture varies a lot. Inside the bedroom, the concerns and desires of Muslim women from around the world were strikingly similar,” she said.
After holding informal workshops, she set up a website to ascertain interest in a book. Such was the response, that Muladhat is already considering a follow-up, after being inundated with emails from men also looking for advice. “I didn’t find any guides to sex aimed at Muslims, women or otherwise. There are plenty of books already on marriage, but spicing up a Muslim’s sex life while staying halal? There’s nothing.
“I’ve received dozens of emails from men asking if I had any plans to write a companion book to teach them how to please their wives in bed. I’ve taken that into consideration and plan to write a follow-up if this book is successful.”
The author chose to stay anonymous, partly for fear of a backlash but also because she didn’t want to be known in her tight-knit community as the “sex book aunty”. “Initially, I thought my real name would add credibility, but it’s a sensitive topic,” said Muladhat. “Whether it’s ethnicity, socioeconomic status or religiosity, people who want to attack the book will invariably do so by attacking the author. By separating my real self from the book, people are forced to deal with the content.”
What she will reveal, though, is that she is an American-born psychology graduate and much of the book is based on her personal experience of keeping the spark alive within her own marriage, along with tips picked up from friends and old copies of Cosmopolitan.
“My biggest qualification is the knowledge which comes only with experience. A doctor can explain the biology, but if you want an attractive physique you’re better off learning from a bodybuilder than an overweight doctor.”
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1. Sexual play doesn’t have to end in orgasm to be satisfying. Yes, we like climaxing. And we expect to get there most of the time. But we don’t experience what guys refer to as “blue balls”—we don’t have nuts that can be brought to the brink of busting and then abruptly deprived of fulfilling their orgasmic destiny—so there’s no reason to feel bad or subhuman or inadequate if you get off before we do. Don’t expect us to beg you to finish us off like you might want to be in the same situation. We’re just fine curling up and falling asleep, or getting on with our day.
2. If you whine too much about your inability to make us orgasm once in a while even after we explain that sex can be pleasurable regardless, we are bound to start faking orgasms regularly. Faking an orgasm is called for on occasion, but we like to think of it as a last resort since it’s counterproductive to achieving future gratification by way of rewarding ineffective tactics. We don’t want to fake it more than we absolutely have to (for your good, and ours), so don’t make us.
3. We respect and appreciate your willingness to service us 99.9% of the time we want to get busy, but you can’t expect the same from us. We’re biologically programmed and societally conditioned to be more cautious about sex in general because we bear 100% of the physiological burden of getting pregnant and we’re the ones dealing with all the slut shaming. Please do not cite your “accommodating nature” as the reason why you should be able to select from a menu of on-demand sexual services at any time. If you avoid making this argument, we’re far more likely to have sex with you even when we don’t want to.
4. You might think we’re in the mood a lot less often than you are, but the fact is that we function differently. For a lot of women, desire doesn’t necessarily precede arousal. We need to be touched, caressed, and loved in order to crave sex. So instead of whining about how horny you are and how unlikely it seems that you’ll get laid that night because we’re a bit mopey or whatever, sneak up behind us and start rubbing our shoulders and work your way down to our waist, or go in for a boob grab. The key is physical contact, so touch us!
4. Foreplay doesn’t start twenty minutes before penetration. It is an all-day, every day phenomenon. If you want to increase the chances that we’ll mount you on any given night, tell us we’re sexy in the morning as we’re getting ready for work, or send us a text midday just to say you’re thinking about the way our ass looks when we shake it for you.
5. Tell us we’re beautiful without exaggerating. We know we don’t look like Gisele naked, so don’t make outrageous claims about how hot we are. Ridiculous compliments come across as insincere, so they’re ineffectual. We’d rather be appreciated for the way we look, flaws and all. Tell us what turns you on about us specifically, whether it’s something we’ve done or something we’re wearing, and avoid comparing us to other women at all costs. Start with “I love the way your…” or “I love it when you…”
6. We want to get weird with you. Don’t assume you’re special for having so many depraved thoughts. We can get there too, so clue us in to your innermost desires. The more comfortable you are with your sexual aspirations and the more you communicate them openly and honestly, the more likely we are to accompany you on your dirty journey.
7. We won’t necessarily think you’re a misogynistic prick if you want to objectify us in bed. Some of us actually want to be overpowered and/or objectified—as long as the bedroom objectification doesn’t seep into other aspects of our lives together. One of the staunchest feminists I know loves shouting, “I’m a cock hungry slut!” during sex. We’re totally capable of separating what happens during sex from the rest of our waking lives, so give us some credit and tell us what you want before dismissing the possibilities out there.
8. We want you to worship our vaginas just as much as you ache for us to build penis shrines. When you act like you’re eager to go down on us it means a lot, and your visible enthusiasm makes us a lot more psyched to reciprocate the favor. While you’re down there, tell us you love the way our vagina looks, smells, and tastes.
10. We’re aware that the reptilian part of your brain leads you to picture most of the hot young women you encounter naked. Keep this to yourself, no matter how much we claim to trust that you won’t act on those urges, or how often we assure you that we can handle hearing about them. We don’t need to be reminded that your natural instinct is to try to impregnate every hot breathing biped of the opposite sex. It does not make us feel great, plain and simple.
11. At a certain point, every woman realizes that there’s a serious downside to sleeping with hot guys, so stop feeling intimidated by them. The men who’ve gotten laid all their lives without putting much effort into luring a lady into bed pale in comparison to those who’ve had to work for it over the years. We would much rather have sex with a man who knows what he’s doing than an inexperienced Lothario who thinks a clitoris and a g-spot are synonymous.
12. Good-looking guys are nice to look at, but good looks won’t hold our interest for more than a few minutes, anyway. Your face and body are side dishes. The main course is how well you’re able to engage us—to make us feel like we’re the center of your universe, if only for a short stint—which requires self-awareness and self-confidence. We’ll swoon over how you hold yourself, walk, and talk—not how closely you resemble Brad Pitt.
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