Sex, Soul and Islam

A husband-and-wife writing team from a minority Muslim community in cosmopolitan Singapore have condensed their decades of experience as sex educators and marital counsellors into a book called Sex, Soul and Islam.

Osman Sidek and Enon Mansor’s experiences expose them to a confluence of perceptions and opinions from beyond and within the community regarding Muslim sexual norms, values and practices. As a teacher of new and non-Muslims on Islam, he was exposed to raw outsider misperceptions of Islamic sexual teachings betrayed in their questions and remarks in class. Yet, as a marital counsellor, she also witnessed the same misperceptions manifested by ill-informed Muslim couples in their marital relationship and found it hard to deny that Muslim sexual shenanigans are largely to blame for these misperceptions.

Cokkectively, their concern is that the true Islamic sexual teaching gets a fair hearing and they wish to contribute to current efforts by many websites and books addressing misconceptions and queries on Islamic sexual laws, rulings, dos-and-don’ts and the likes. However, they noted one perspective is missing amidst the currently prevalent approach of correcting and rebutting specific misconceptions on sex in Islam, namely, the holistic perspective.

So, they developed a book idea to situate sex viz-a-viz the totality of the Islamic message itself: Is the sexual phenomenon tangential or central to the story of human existence as Islam has it? This investigation is possible because the totality of the Islamic message is self-defined by Islam itself through the triangular framework of "aqidah, sharia, akhlaq" of Islamic knowledge which address the mind, body and soul of mankind towards the attainment of "iman, amal and ihsan". What this investigation reveals is the inter-connections between the three aspects of Islamic development and the sexual phenomenon.

Using that triangular framework, the book starts by expounding the Quranic ideals behind the Divine Creation of sex and moves on to show the gap between this ideal and the reality in many Musim marriages as they see it in their own counselling cases, sociological studies and global headline stories, before identifying the root cause of this mismatch and proposing a remedy. It culminates in an illustration of the Prophet’s sunnah on lovemaking meant for Muslims to observe from the first night though mid-marriage and meno-andropausal days.

Claritas Books has taken up the challenge to advance this potentially controversial view on a definitely controversial subject from a relatively unknown writing team to the English-speaking Muslim world. It believes readers would find the writers’ approach of integrating traditional Islamic, modern scientific and sociological branches of knowledge into one grand Islamic perspective concerning sex, refreshing.

Contact:

Wali-ur Rahman
wali@claritasbooks.com

For more information on Sex, Soul and Islam, please visit: https://wholesale.claritasbooks....

For a recent interview with Osman Sidek and Enon Mansor on literature, Osman and Enon talk to Sujimy Mohamed about normalising healthy, serious discussion around sex, please visit: Interviews