Is oral sex lawful in Islam? (I)

I guess no apology is here desirable for posing this question at a time when extremely conflicting and engaging issues keep occupying the front burners of our national discourse. Yes. I had concluded plans to explore some other topics today. I had thought of reminding us of the imminence of the month of Ramadan and how best to prepare for it. If you are reading this and you still have some outstanding fasts to offer from last year’s Ramadan, then you are not preparing well for the forthcoming holy month.

I had equally thought of engaging Reverend Mathew Hassan Kukah on his post the other week in a national tabloid that the demand for and application of the Shariah in parts of northern Nigeria was nothing but political. Only couple of days ago, the much-talked-about jazz or musical concert, the first of its kind in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, actually took place. Images and sounds from the event were sent to me by brethren who could still not bring themselves round to the reality that ‘change’ has come into the “Kingdom” in line with the vision of the authority in power. In fact, every passing moments of our lives are full of cues and stimuli that are capable of sending the contemplative minds of the thinker into the thinking mill all of the time.

As if all of the above were not enough, what followed equally happened and demanded our contemplation. A revered Shaykh and scholar in the city of Accra, Ghana, Shaykh Musa Abdul Qadir, lost his friend and an old acquaintance, (Shaykh Shuayb Abubakr) about a month ago. Last week, Shaykh Musa was invited as an examiner in the doctoral examination of a student whose thesis centred around the contributions of Shaykh Shuayb to Islam in Ghana. Early in the morning of Tuesday, i.e four days ago, Shaykh Musa bid the world bye- he answered the divine call and was buried around Asr of Tuesday this week!!! I got to the office early this morning while still trying to make sense of these conflicting stimuli only to receive a message from a sister who wanted to know whether Islam approves of oral sex. She told me it was her friend whose husband constantly demands that from her and she wanted to know exactly what Islam says about the practice! I took a deep breath. What a life ours is as humans. No tragedy is strong enough to prevent the phallus from experiencing turgidity; as soon as it rains, moments of grief and happiness are washed away. The wheel of life continues to roll towards eternity.

Before answering the sister, I wanted to know why people indulge in oral sex in the first instance. Again before engaging the question, my training and exposure to Arab-Islamic culture in general and the Arabs erotological practices during the pre-Islam Arabia shows that sex occupied an important position in Arabs life during the classical period. In fact historiographers have argued that Arabs are extremely instinctual subjects who have achieved renown for extremism in love and hatred. Three entities in nature were dearer to the Arabs more than anything else: camels, horses and women. The first and second provided a platform upon which their instinct for wars, hunting and invasion could be realized; the third, namely women, served as an avenue for the satisfaction of their sexual urge. In fact the pursuit of sexual gratifications in women often took place legally through marriage (al-Nikāh al-Shar’ī); at other times, in open tents which could be described as the precursor to prostitution and sex-trade. Women who engaged in the latter were known as Şāḩibat Ra’yāt- they used to put flags on their doorsteps as indicators for their profession.

Thus sexual practices during the classical period were divested of all sacred norms and values. The Arab society of the era had no inhibition nor did it anathemize a situation where a man would send his wife or wives to others that have achieved renown in the society for copulation in the hope that she or they would, through the latter, become pregnant and bear a son or sons worthy of his own name. Sexual practices during the period also featured what Arab erotologists would refer to as Nikāḩul-Badal and Nikāḩ al-Shigar- the first relates to mutual exchange of wives between two men while the later refers to the exchange of daughters. Before Islam, nothing could stop an Arab from marrying two women of same parents together even as a man could insist on inheriting the widow of his father after his passage. Popular during the period is the notion that the female body is the ultimate locale of sensual pleasure; the quintessential female anatomy is that “which when it is held it awakens and satisfies passion”. In the opinion of Taraf ibn Al-Abd, one of the greatest laureates of the era, only two pleasures were capable of keeping men in life – “sexual pleasure in women and sweet drinks”. The period equally featured the prevalence of oral sex (Maṣ al-Baḑr). Before Islam, sexual practices in Arabia consisted only of three possibilities. In line with al-Ahwaṣ, it is either the sexual subject, no matter its gender, is nākiḩan (sexually-active), mankūḩan (sexually receptive) or zāniyan (sexually promiscuous).