Find The Boots

No, silly, this isn't a joke post about goats, it's from a fascinating CNN article:

Egypt's 'Dr. Ruth': Let's talk sex in the Arab world

Essentially the story is about a female Doc in Egypt that, after three years of negotiation, has been allowed to have a one hour TV show saying that wives and husbands should have more sex. It's not quite the Playboy Channel, I guess.

There a ton of great quotes, but I think this passage may well sum up so many things about the Muslim world:

The passage reads: "Your wives are as a tilth [land or soil to be cultivated] unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will; but do some good act for your souls beforehand; and fear Allah."

That verse, she says, makes it known that sex shouldn't just happen when the husband wants but that the wives have rights too.

"I was so proud of my religion when I saw that. My religion was advanced enough to talk about women's rights in sexuality how many years before modern science did?"

First of all, women's rights are not part of science, secondly this section, unless you twist it like a Jesuit at a sock hop, is pretty much old testament 'woman as seed bearer.'

My third, and irrelevant, question is: which wife?

I mean, good on ya if you can twist that into foreplay, but if you're gonna work on the Quaran, why not start with something more interesting, like draping your women in restrictive Hijabs, restricting education for females, abuse, stoning, female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, and the list goes on.

I'm not saying that the Quaran says to do all that, just that all that regularly happens in countries where the Quaran holds sway. It's not that FGM doesn't happen in some African countries where, er, Muslimity is the rule, it's that the vast preponderance of these things happen in Muslim countries.

So, Dr. Kotb, if you'll take my advice (like that's gonna happen), why not try to affect some real change?