No religion can stand against things that have been instinctively instilled in mankind, no matter if it was celestial, postural, jurisprudence or a postural law? Everything that is against instinct cannot come from heaven as the sexual process is one of the instincts that God created people with, as well as all other living species.
Today, parents in developed countries are subject to sexual education courses. Specialized social media conduct awareness and rationalization programs for the purpose of this education so that diseases resulting from sexual relationships can be avoided. There are scientific educational programs in schools to educate students. For example, in both America and Canada, sex education is a basic subject in the educational curriculum for the preparatory and secondary levels, and is included in the school program such as biology, health, and physical education. The focus in this subject is educating on safe sex and the sexual behavior during it, in addition to the sexual ethics. Sexuality has then become an integrated science in this field.
Today’s social psychology stresses on regulating and controlling our sexual life, as it is one of the features that distinguishes mankind from other living creatures for its role in psychological, health, social and even cultural stability. It also gives the person cultural protection, especially since some porn sites present it in an animalistic style.
The United Nations, through UNESCO, has taken great care in this aspect thereby it has provided international technical guidance on sexual education and distributed it to its member countries. In addition, it has held scientific symposia in multiple countries and published research on this education, including the book “International technical guidance on sexuality education “, which is a scientific approach with scientific evidence for sex education trainers in two separate parts.
Sex Education in Arab societies?
Our Arab societies and educational institutions do not uphold this important education and consider it an insult to modesty. Some of them even went on to explain their approval on prohibiting this education by fearing its content! Our societies are closed and conservative, they suffer a lot as a result of neglecting this issue of mental health, whether before or after marriage.
In an exploratory investigation on the subject, it has been said that some of the reasons Islamic societies reject the idea of including sex education in the teaching curricula, or their reluctance to deal with it in open dialogues, are the fear of content, the way they are presented and the consequences thereof, as well as the extreme embarrassment when bringing up this topic, presenting it and discussing it openly. To include it, some stipulated staying away from sensuality in the way it is presented while others went to keep the matter confined to the parents! Specialists, on the other hand, went to the need to make sexual education one of the basics in our countries and to rationalize it properly.
Religious Scholars Prevent Sex Education!
Islamic awakening scholars and the guardians of contemporary Salafism have expanded in the prohibition circle. They have been greatly embarrassed by the scientific and technological progress of our time. So, they used the fundamentalist source called “Sadd al-dhari’ah,” which we see is not very different from the emergency law of authoritarian regimes. To prevent and prohibit contemporary things for fear that, the user will be conveyed to what is morally prohibited in our societies, they made sexual education a taboo because it arouses lust, and they considered it one of the houses’ secrets. As a result, the society got into with labyrinths that resulted in psychological diseases and led to a kind of sexual repression!
In order to make up for this educational deficiency in this worldly life, they have talked about paradise as a reward for the Muslim, and in doing so, they abused this divine reward making it a kind of sexual compensation for this world, and there is where they went wrong. It is as if they were saying, “The reward for your belief in God is the nymphs and continuous sex.” It is depicted as if a person only enters Islam in order to have mermaids and have sex with them! This is an ugly distortion of the concept of faith and heaven and its reward.
Talking about sexual culture expands and narrows according to the awareness and openness of society. As for the prohibition of talking about it, sexual repression is generated, which leads to immoral behavior. This kind of behaviors has become obscene through the phenomena of harassment and perversions that very few talks about, honor crimes and others in our societies.
This closeness corresponds to a severe exaggeration in talking about women as sedition and in intimidating the society from them. They have also been promoting an intense masculinity, as if women were nothing but sexual containers, not partners and matches to men as presented by the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet. So, they prohibited all social relations in which men mix with women under the pretext of falling into the forbidden. This corresponds to an extensive hadith about sexual relations in paradise, to the extent that one of these guardians asserted that the task of a Muslim in paradise is to unburden the virginity of nymphs.
As a result of the prohibition fatwas, sex has become a preoccupation of the Muslim mentality. The relationship between a man and a woman has turned into a purely sexual process. Perhaps this is one of the secrets of the failure of married life and the widening divorce issues in our societies. These fatwas are all doctrinal assumptions that are refuted by the facts of the Prophetic Sunnah and Islamic heritage.
Sex Education in the Islamic heritage
The Islamic heritage was replete with books of sex education, which numbered more than (100) books. These books gave details that the largest institutions specialized in this matter have not reached, including but not limited to “Kitāb al-Hayawān” by Al-Jahiz written in the second century, “Kitab al-Aghani” by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani written in the same century, “The unique necklace” by Ibn Abd Rabbih Al-Andalusi in the fourth century, “The Ring of the Dove” a treatise on love, its manifestations, causes and sex written in the fifth century by Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi. There is also the famous book “Tohfat al-arous wa nuzhat al-nufus” by Ibn Ahmad Al-Tijani in the twelfth century.
The book “Nawader Alayek Fi Maarefat Alnaik” by the polymath Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti in the tenth century remains one of the most important books on sex education. Through his books, Jalal al-Din transformed the talk about sex into a public culture and succeeded, particularly when he made it available to everyone and let this culture emerge from the realm of modesty, taboos and narrow family conversations. He made sex education an independent science itself. In Nawader Alayek, he even talks about sexual positions, reaching the number of 150! He also explains unhealthy sexual practices and elaborates on the genitals’ names and their synonyms in the Arabic language. Furthermore, he singles out a section on sexual tonics from foods and drinks, and expounds the importance of sex in human life and its role in the psychological health of couples.
In conclusion, the prohibiting and depriving fatwas on topics that have become today an important and influential science in mental and physical health have nothing to do with our time being and represent a miserable state of scientific backwardness. They are also against Islam’s teachings and the Sunnah of its Noble Prophet, the guidance of the Companions and the path of previous scholars.
