Meet the woman calling for an Arab sexual revolution...

Shereen El Feki, reluctant revolutionary in the disguise of a polite Egyptian-Canadian, is explaining the class distinctions of Cairo’s gay scene to the packed upstairs room of a London bar.

Petite with a pixie haircut, El Feki's audience of mostly young women has its fair share of middle-aged gentlemen too, eager to hear her speak about what could be the most revealing take on Arab sexuality in 1,000 years in Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World, an eye-popping audit of the frustrations Arab men and women face in the pursuit of sexual relationships.

Sensuality in Islamic literature has a long, though uneven, history, and one that El Feki thinks the Middle East has a unique opportunity to rediscover in the aftermath of the uprisings that began in late in 2010, as she tells me the next day.

 El Feki describes her upbringing in Waterloo, a town near Toronto, as "very civilised," spent largely in "academic surroundings" with her Cairo-born neurosurgeon father and her mother, a schoolteacher from Wales. "There was a Muslim community there, but being Muslim in the West was not an issue when I was growing up," she says. Full story...

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