These days it’s not that hard to do websites in Arabic, but six years ago, it was a real puzzle. I couldn’t find any Arabic language plug-ins for DreamWeaver or FrontPage, so as I cut and pasted the Arabic text into the HTML programs, it wouldn’t display the Arabic properly, so it was really hard to do the links on specific words. The Arabic phrase for emergency contraception, which looks like this in Arabic:

منع الحمل الطارئ

looks like this in HTML code:

منع الحمل الطارئ

So I just had to muck around, highlighting different phrases, counting off letters or doing searches for strings of HTML code like that above, putting in links and then seeing where the links showed up in the Arabic texts, and then shifting the links around accordingly. It was a stupidly slow process. There was probably a better way to do it, but I wasn’t able to figure it out, so I slogged through the slow way.

Translation vs adaptation
I’m getting off the topic. Angel had decided that we couldn’t simply translate the existing website into Arabic. It had to be adapted to fit the social and cultural context of the Arabic speaking world and meet users’ needs. So, for example, she decided to include specific questions in the FAQs section on the interpretation and acceptability of EC in Orthodox Christianity and in Islamic jurisprudence. We hunted around for any fatwas on EC, both in published compendia of fatawa as well as in online databases, but we couldn’t find any. In fact, in the past 5 years, I have only found 1 fatwa on EC in an one of the many online fatwa databases.

That’s where interest in this Egypt research project came from. What did it mean that there were no fatwas on EC? Either it meant that EC wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen and was so totally unknown that nobody was asking about its status in Islam – hard to believe since there were dedicated products available in several Middle Eastern countries (including Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon) – OR it meant that EC was just wholly uncontroversial and subsumed under jurisprudential discussions about pre-coital hormonal contraceptives.

Well I thought that was a really interesting possibility, considering how in the U.S., as I previously described, EC’s status as a contraceptive vs. abortifacient has been contested, and debate often hinges on the mechanism of action.

Angel and I developed a working hypothesis, which we published in a little paper for Harvard Health Policy Review along with colleagues James Trussell and Aida Rouhana: that debate over EC in the Arab world was likely to hinge around the social and moral contexts of the sex that precedes EC use, rather than focusing on mechanism of action. We hypothesized this partly based on existing debates in Islamic jurisprudence about contraception, but also based on interpretations of abortion in Islamic law, where the acceptability of abortion is partly considered in light of when life begins. (Also considered is the relative value of the mother’s life versus the life of a fetus: in contrast to some extreme Christian interpretations, in Islamic law the woman’s life is always considered more valuable than the fetus’s life, because the woman is already embedded within existing kinship networks of sociality and obligation, whereas the fetus is not.)

In most of the interpretations of the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, ensoulment, the joining of the soul with the developing fetus, is not believed to occur right at the moment of fertilization or implantation. Some jurists think ensoulment occurs at 40 days, while others opine that it does not occur until 4 months, the time when the pregnant woman can usually start to feel the movements on the fetus inside her. This, we speculated, would predict a lack of debate about EC’s mechanism of action in the Muslim world.

By the way, I’ve repeatedly submitted questions to several online fatwa websites, requesting a fatwa on EC. Nobody has ever responded! Next year we plan to submit a request directly to Dar al-Ifta in Egypt (the main body for issuing fatawa in Egypt) to get a formal ruling. But my colleague, Dr Hosam Moustafa, has carefully searched the Dar al-Ifta archives and not found a single existing ruling.

Egyptian archetypes of EC users
I’ve described the archetypes of EC users that appeared in US debates. What archetypes are there in Egypt? First, I should note that there really hasn’t been much public debate about the topic. A dedicated product is available in Egypt and since most non-narcotic pharmaceutical products are, in practice, available from pharmacists without prescription, there was no situation where Egyptians publicly debated the appropriateness of EC being available without the mediation of a physician, as there was in the U.S. and many other countries.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a widespread assumption that emergency contraception will be used by women who are engaging in illicit, premarital sex. In short, EC has “the reputation of being used by teenagers and prostitutes,” as one informant put it. Why? As the same informant said,

“Pregnancy? Is this emergency? It is just a normal result. When will it be an emergency? When it is really negative with the sexual relation. This happens only when the sexual relation is not an accepted one, I mean haram [i.e. forbidden, illicit].”

The assumption is also that people who are having sex within a proper marital relationship will be able to plan their contraceptive use properly, so there won’t be accidents and emergencies – and if they accidentally get pregnant, well then that’s a gift from God, not a disaster.

The advertising used to promote Contraplan II (the dedicated brand of EC available in Egypt) works hard to dispel this association between EC use and illicit sex. The promotional materials published in major Egyptian newspapers in the last year suggests a list of likely EC users:

- People who are regularly using contraceptives but they missed a dose, a condom tore, or they had a problem with their IUD;
- People who had sexual intercourse without protection and the husband and wife don’t currently want to get pregnant;
- The husband suddenly returns from travel or from work abroad and there was no time to get started on a regular contraceptive method before they had sex; and finally,
- In case of rape.

The language makes it clear that most users will be married couples, with the rare exception of sexual assault.

But the marketing strategy of the company belies this portrait of the respectable married EC user. The radio ads promoting the product aired on Nogoom FM (“Stars FM”), a radio station that is directed towards teens and young adults – who are not likely to be married. The strategy seems to be to publicly put a respectable face on EC use, but to simultaneously make sure that info circulates amongst the community where need for EC is most acute: unmarried people who have sex.

OK that’s enough info on EC in Egypt. Next up, Viagra soup – but I’ll come back to EC in a later post when I write about our methods and the different kinds of info that a team of a female American anthropologist and a male Egyptian small-town physician are able to get…

References:

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Disseminating on-line reproductive health information in Arabic: Results from a survey of users of an emergency contraception website. CyberOrient: Online journal of the virtual Middle East. April 2006

Wynn L, Foster A, Rouhana A, Trussell J. The politics of emergency contraception in the Arab world: Reflections on Western assumptions and the potential influence of religious and social factors. Harvard Health Policy Review. Spring 2005; 6(1):38-47.

Foster A, Wynn L, Rouhana A, Polis C, Trussell J. Reproductive health, the Arab world and the internet: usage patterns of an Arabic-language emergency contraception website. Contraception. Spring 2005; 72;130-137.

When I got to the store I was a little surprised to see how the market in scented men’s deodorant had changed since the last time I had purchased a shrink-wrapped twelve pack at Costco: all of the edgy body sprays with the “buy and wear this product and women will want you to rape them” ad campaigns had gained a scary amount of market share. They were also incredibly expensive. Since I was not looking to spend a lot of money to reinforce my sense of my sexual potency I gave them a pass.

The other options were what got me. Marketers have, somewhere, somehow, decided what men want to smell like. That smell, apparently, is ‘arctic’. There were various scents ranging from ‘artic blast’ to ‘avalanche’ to ‘blizzard’ — all having to do with unstoppable, low-temperature movement.

But that’s not all. The toothbrushes were also divided along gendered lines, with various pink and pastel colors for women and for men a variety of light blues. Was this the typical pink-blue gendering of infants expanded to oral hygeine? No, the packaging around the toothbrush informed me, it was not a powder-blue toothbrush, it was an _arctic_ toothbrush.

Clearly we are dealing with specific system of meaning that comprehends the visible spectrum, gender performances, and scent. The system is clearly arbitrary and conventional: how did that chemical deodorant smell come to be associated with a geographical area? And how can a toothbrush, which has little to no scent, be ‘arctic’ at all? Is this simply the pink-blue distinction updated and reframed to be acceptably masculine? Is there something about nurturance/hygiene that goes back to the American male childhood which is still coded blue? I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about this.

The impact of Muslim science and culture, and especially of the Al-Andalusian culture that dominated the Iberian peninsula between the 8th and 12th centuries, on the development of Western culture is little known and even less talked about. The treatment of Muslim Spain in Western Civ books tends to consist solely of the Song of Roland and, centuries later, the defeat of Granada and subsequent expulsion of Muslims (and Jews) from Spain. In between, a mighty civilization emerged, flourished, and ultimately declined — one that I am beginning to think contributed more to “Western culture” than the Romans ever did. Besides creating a stewpot of cultural and scholastic achievement in its own right, Muslim Spain served as a conduit for the teachings of the Muslim world at a time when Muslim learning was at its peak. For instance, the Catholic Church was utterly transformed by the study of Aristotle in Arabic translation; likewise, the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping by Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli relied on the introduction of negative numbers by Muslims (who themselves had learned from Hindu mathematicians centuries earlier) and the al-jabr (“algebra”) of Al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we also get the word “algorithm”). The work of Ibn Rashid (Averroës) — who also gave us Aristotle — and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) form the foundation of Western medical knowledge; the poetry and dialogues of and about Muslim philosophers and warriors (and non-Muslims deeply embedded in Andalusian culture, such as El Cid, from the Arabic el Sayyid, “leader” or “chief”) laid the groundwork for the birth of the novel (in Spain, of course!); and the pointed arch essential to Gothic monumental architecture was adopted from Muslim architects.

These and other contributions of the Muslim world are detailed in an exhibition currently touring Britain, 1001 Inventions. The Independent has drawn up a list of their “Top 20″ most influential Muslim inventions and discoveries (paid access only; full text available here), including Ibn al-Haitham’s discovery of the workings of the eye (and subsequent invention of the Camera Obscura; the word “camera” derives from the arabic qamara, “a dark or private room”); the perfection of soap (and their not-so-subtle suggestion that non-bathing Europeans look into it, for which we can all be thankful); Jabir ibn Hayyan’s invention of distillation, which helped transform alchemy into chemistry (and wine into liquor); and the development of Chinese ornamental flashpowder into weapons-grade gunpowder (always with the weapons of mass destruction, the Muslims, eh? I’ll leave as an open question why they didn’t put their guns, germs, and steel to better use over the last half of the second millenium).

We tend to think about the history of “the West” as a singular thing, a tree with one root (ancient Greece, or maybe ancient Mesopotamia, before it went all goofy with the Islam) and one trunk (the Catholic Church) and only a couple of branches (the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the French and American Revolutions). Anything outside of this singular narrative is thought of as outside of European history — discoveries and inventions to be assimilated by the West, outside influences “brought in”. So, for instance, after 2,000 years of shared history, Marx could still describe Jews as living in the interstices of European society, rather than as an integral part of it. Likewise for our Muslim heritage; the scholarship on the West’s Muslim past treats it as a marginal history, something that Christendom suddenly encountered with the Crusades. Yet from Charlemagne on, a constant flow of Christians, Jews, and Muslims moved between Andalusian Spain and the rest of Europe, and Christian Spain’s later political dominance in Europe was grounded in its Muslim past.

What would it mean to re-think Western culture as encompassing the Muslim world? To think of Western history as taking place in Hindu India, Umayyad Damascus, Abassid Baghdad, Fatimid North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire in addition to Renaissance Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and Tudor England? To think of colonialism, at least in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, not so much as the imposition of the West on non-Westerners but as an internal shift of political and economic power — more Reconstruction-era South than Conquest of America? And, finally, to think of the current waves of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe not as the invasion of the West by cultural Others but as the return of “cultural cousins” after a long absence?