Shereen El Feki > Quotes

“Sexual attitudes and behaviors are intimately bound up in religion, tradition, culture, politics, and economics.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World

“Moreover, for women in Egypt and its Arab neighbors, having a husband is key: a woman’s social value is still tied to her status as a wife and mother, no matter how accomplished or professionally successful she might be. In recent years, the phenomenon of ‘unusa—spinsterhood—has become the stuff of Facebook groups, blogs, best-selling books, and TV series. As they say in Egypt, “The shade of a man is better than the shade of a wall.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World

“he predicted, was the “complete extinction” of America: families torn apart by divorce and the young addled by drugs, booze, and sexual “deviance,” leading to wholesale depopulation as reproduction ground to a halt.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World

“social remittances”—that is, attitudes and practices migrants have picked up abroad.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World

“The achievement of Tahrir Square wasn’t just its grand political movement but the tiny personal battles fought and won against the frictions wearing down Egyptian society: between religions, classes, sexes, and generations.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World

“While I’ve often heard Egyptians say their fellow countrymen spend 99.9 percent of their time thinking about sex, in the heady days of early 2011, making love appeared, for once, to be the last thing on people’s minds.”
― Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World