Behind the Veil of Vice Quotes

“However, “with the right intentions,” she has said, “misyar can serve the noble purpose of helping divorced and widowed women financially.”58 Zeinab Shahine, a professor of sociology at Egypt’s Ain Shams University, agrees. According to Al-Ahram Weekly, there are certain conditions, Shahine believes, when”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“There are too many such comments to cite, invariably from these leaders of women’s organizations who, given the endemic nepotism in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are usually the wives of wealthy and influential public figures, often of a half-understood Westernized bent—meaning slightly to the right of Fox News on family matters—and almost always on the wrong side of menopause. They are never from rural backgrounds, they are never and were never poor, they are never young, and they are usually talking through their metaphorical hat.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Nothing gives your average bored Sunni bigot surfing the web more instant gratification than zooming in on sigeh to condemn the Shia as debauched heretics, but there could be few more vulnerable moral high grounds where he might pitch his flag of religious superiority than this particular spot in cyberspace. The Sunnis, after all, have their own versions of this arrangement, called in Saudi Arabia a misyar (or visitor’s marriage) and in Egypt an urfi (or customary marriage). It is true that both misyar and urfi differ from sigeh, primarily in that they are not supposed to last for a predetermined period of time (which in most cases they nevertheless do);35 and, again unlike sigeh, they are theoretically required to satisfy all four main conditions for marriage of the Sunni canon: mutual consent, two male witnesses (or two female and one male), some form of public announcement, and the payment of a dowry (although the latter can be symbolic and thus”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Clerics and senior government officials are promoting temporary marriage as a way to deal with the undeniable realities and to stem the social chaos they fear if fornication were to go totally unregulated. None other than former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often portrayed as a “pragmatic conservative,” first broached the matter in a sermon in 1990, eleven years after the revolution. “Don’t be promiscuous like the Westerners,” he told his flock, and then, in one of the familiar somersaults of the pious, he recommended sigeh as the solution.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“While a man is limited to four wives under a full marriage contract, there is no limit to how many temporary wives he may have, though, as ever, the unmarried women allowed to enter into sigeh partnerships are limited to one temporary husband at a time. The man can also divorce his temporary wife at any time during the contract, whereas the woman cannot.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“That constriction of discourse cannot be unconditionally accepted, but the problem in condemning it at the present time is that the group most determined to bring about change is also the one it is most difficult to have any sympathy with: the Islamists.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“The situation is complicated, though, in a country like Tunisia, where sudden and dramatic change in favor of Western-style democracy at this juncture does still risk undoing what good work has been done. Freer and fairer elections risk bringing to power a small band of rabid Islamists who can be guaranteed to whip up populist campaigns against Western influence, women’s liberation, alcohol, and prostitution. As we shall see, that is what has happened in countries like Bahrain, Yemen, and Morocco, where a push toward democracy has brought radical Islamists to power.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Gradual change is in principle, of course, a good idea, certainly in countries where a blatant disregard for civil liberties go hand in hand with outright brutality and a plundering of the nation’s resources. In such instances—and in the Arab world Egypt is an obvious example—any long reign of extreme censorship especially tends to hamper not only cultural expression, but the capacity for it as well. The most extreme example, Saudi Arabia, is a country now devoid of art or culture of any value whatsoever, Islamic or otherwise, official or clandestine. Under such circumstances, censorship, like any prohibition, strangles the soul, not only of the censored but of the censor, too, so that over time the authorities find themselves turning in an ever tighter circle as the perimeter of the permissible draws in.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Unlike in Tunis, prostitutes can be found in all middle-class districts of Cairo, but especially those that are home to the Egyptian elite and holidaying Gulf Arabs, and I know from my years of living in Egypt that they are given to wearing the niqab (a garment covering the whole face with two eyeholes and severely discouraged in Tunisia).”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“While Tunisian women basically walk the streets free of hassle, Egyptian women suffer more abuse and harassment than women in any other Arab country, indeed, perhaps in the world. According to the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, in 2009 some 98 percent of foreign women, and 83 percent of Egyptian women, said they had experienced sexual harassment.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Egypt nevertheless remained socially liberal until the 1970s, when Nasser’s successor, Anwar Al-Sadat, brought the rank-and-file of the Muslim Brotherhood back from exile (they had mostly decamped to Saudi Arabia) and used them to counter the influence of the leftists, who had organized in protest at Nasser’s increasingly despotic rule. During that decade, and throughout the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism therefore grew in influence in Egypt, and “belly-dancing nightclubs were torched and dancers were barred from television.”36 Today, dancers are free to perform in Cairo’s city center, but they must cover their navels or risk fines or arrest.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Life expectancy in Tunisia is above seventy-four years, schooling and health care are free, the poverty rate is less than 4 percent, and high literacy rates have helped a third of Tunisian youths to enter university, where women make up 60 percent of the students.19 Since The Change, as the transition of power in 1987 from Bourguiba to the current head of state Ben Ali is known, per capita income has increased more than five-fold, from $725 to $3,800.20 The Wall Street Journal further reported on how evidence for the campaign which led to the reduced birth rate “is everywhere.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“A secularist but not an atheist, he used the example of the Prophet, who according to tradition did not fast in Ramadan during wartime, to argue against fasting during Ramadan any time the Tunisian people were engaged in the new collective jihad against economic stagnation, because fasting hindered performance. This led to one of the most extraordinary, but little-known, moments of Arab political theater. In a live television interview aired during the Ramadan fasting hours, Bourguiba paused, turned to the camera, and took a long, symbolic swig from a glass of orange juice. There was, however, nothing symbolic in his promotion of secular virtues. He replaced the sharia legal system with civil courts, abolished the independent system of Islamic charity called the waqf, brought the mosques and their imams under state control and had their doors locked outside of prayer times, outlawed proselytizing, and in 1981 officially banned the wearing of the veil (he famously called it an “odious rag”) in schools and in government institutions in an attempt to phase it out of Tunisian society completely.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Tunisia settled into its modern, secular identity in the 1990s under Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. Appalled by Bourguiba’s decision to execute a group of Islamist rebels, he had ousted the by then senile leader in 1987 in a nonviolent coup. Ben Ali thus kept Tunisia free of bloodshed (the rebels were not in the end executed), something the country had managed to do since independence from France was achieved through negotiations, and therefore bloodlessly as well. He”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Syria, there are clear red lines when it comes to politics and religion, but people’s personal habits are not considered part of the state’s domain. However, that still leaves the women vulnerable, because if they report any crimes committed against them, they are also confessing to having broken the law.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“The irony lost on all, though, is that the Syrian regime is quietly keeping alive the traditions that Moubayed lamented had vanished, if not through his preferred method of legalization, then at least by refraining from interfering in the private daily conduct and morality of its citizens. Moubayed told me that the regime, despite the furor caused by his article, had not reacted to it at all, either positively or negatively.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Indeed, if they had read Moubayed’s article, what might have struck them most is that they appeared only as a supporting cast, their safety and well-being hardly given a nod to. The thrust of the argument was that prostitution should be accepted because it benefits men. Nor was Moubayed’s flip remark to me about the material obsessions of “nagging” women an Oscar-winning moment.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“After all, there is in more stable, developed countries like the United States and Britain a quantifiably more vicious culture of child abuse. A report released in January 2010 by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics made clear that sexual abuse in juvenile detention is a national crisis. Some 12.1 percent of 26,550 children represented in the survey by a sample of 9,000 who were interviewed said they had been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year,”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“However, since the Syrian regime is even less transparent than the NGOs, we have no way of knowing that, either.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“The local men who cruise with other men told me that everyone understood they were free to do whatever they liked, and without hassle from the authorities, if under-eighteens were not involved, to the extent that those who preferred adolescent rent boys are known to travel to Beirut or Istanbul, where word on the street is that they are available in abundance (for the right price).”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Few of the women I saw on the streets of Damascus wore head scarves, and the men were as open-minded, at least in their conversations with me, as any I would find in London or New York.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Not that anyone needs much of an excuse to stay away from Cairo, with its chronic traffic congestion, choking pollution, and legions of touts who have a very well-earned reputation for ripping off all and sundry, but especially Gulf Arabs.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“despite having a thriving gay prostitution scene, Damascus is unlike just about every other Middle Eastern city I have visited in not having any adolescent rent boys.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Something Arabs and Westerners certainly do is what one might have thought someone like Amis, considering the kind of fictional world he creates, would take a greater interest in, namely, that they live under rulers who, under different pretexts and with varying degrees of severity, seek to curb the unruly sex urge as a way of maintaining social control. What people in the West and the Middle East have in common, that is to say, is the gap between propaganda and reality, the vast gulf between public and private morality. In other words: hypocrisy.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“Given that there is no factual evidence to support the neo-Patais’ argument that sexual deprivation causes terrorism, it might be more useful to look at what Arabs and Westerners have in common, rather than what sets them apart.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that the sex instinct, more than any other, must be repressed if ruling elites are to maintain control over the masses. Sexual desire is the most basic manifestation of individualism. In societies where ruling elites maintain as tight a hold over both the public and private lives of their populations as political systems and civil societies allow, sexual repression, and the importance of maintaining the façade of sexual normality (however culturally defined), remain insidious forms of repression. However, Orwell further noted: “What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.”13”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East

“For starters, there is the orgy of violence that the United States and its allies unleashed in Iraq in 2003, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the sexual torture of Abu Ghraib. Also, the majority of suicide bombings during the twentieth century were not carried out by Muslims but by non-Muslims, and the majority of those carried out by Muslims targeted not Westerners but their fellow Muslims. Robert Pape, the world’s foremost researcher into suicide bombings, has shown that the overwhelming majority have been carried out by non-Muslims.”
― John R. Bradley, Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East