Original edition: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Saqi Books (paperback), London England, 1998. By the author: "This book is an attempt to think through the mutual relationship of the sexual and the sacral within the Arabo-Muslim socieits." Chapters 1: The Quran and the question of sexuality. 2: Sexual prohibitions in Islam. "Islam offers the widest possible view of incest." 3: The eternal and Islamic feminine. "Male supremacy is fundamental in Islam." 4: The frontier of the sexes. "Islam remains violently hostile to all other ways of realizing sexual desire...the divine curse embraces both the boyish woman and the effeminate man, male and female homophilia, auto-eroticism, zoophilia, etc." ...Sexual deviation is a revolt against God." "Indeed five things are defined as 'natural' (mianl fitra): circumcision, mourning, shaving of the armpits, cutting of the fingernails and wearing a beard....There is...a canonical duty to wear a beard. It must be worn long, but trimmed, brushed, combed and smoothed down....It is recommended to scent it." (33-34) 5: Purity lost, purity regained. Details various cleansing techniques; the "ethics of the sphincters." (46) 6: Commerce with the invisible. Details the powers of the devil. 7: The infinite orgasm. "paradise is a place of sexual pleasure." Discusses the eight gates leading to the eight heavens. Discusses a man's life with the houri. "[T}he Christian will be a-sexual in paradise, whereas the Muslim will experience infinite orgasm."(80) 8: The sexual and the sacral. Details the sexual obligations between husband and wife. "One cannot deny the fundamental 'hedonism' of the Quran, of tradition and of the fiqh."(90) 9: Sexuality and sociality. "It is precisely in terms of specific social contexts that we must understand why quranic equivocity ceased to be a harmony and became a matter of tensions, conflicts and contradictions."(115) 10: Variations on eroticism: misogyny, mysticism and 'mujun.' 11: Erotology. 12: Certain practices: the hammam, circumcision, prostitution & folklore. 12: In the kingdom of the mothers. "And although the fiqh speaks of bimorphism, the spontaneous structures were to set up a de facto sexual bimorphism even more rigid and even more serious for the evolution of the Arabo-Muslim societies."(213). Conclusion: "Everything in Islam revolves around the question of meaning, perceived both as an urge towards the erotic and as spiritual inspiration. This meaning, to be found in the lyrical vision of life and the search for a transcending of self through marital affection, seems to be on the decline today. It is precisely that meaning that we must rediscover."