Done right, sex is an Islamic blessing. “A man’s sexual play with his partner, when accompanied by sincere intent, causes him to be rewarded by Allah,” wrote the sixteenth-century hadith scholar Ali Muttaqi. “As the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘Allah is pleased with a man’s playing with his wife, and records a reward for him and makes a worthy provision in the world for him because of it.’” Christianity links sex to sin, but the Cambridge theologian Tim Winter notes that Islam casts it as “a glimpse of transcendence.” Islam doesn’t endorse celibacy and has no mainstream traditions of
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