Arab author tackles the last taboo - a Muslim woman writes a bestselling e

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Arab author tackles the last taboo - a Muslim woman writes a bestselling erotic epic

Jon Henley in Paris
Tuesday June 21, 2005
The Guardian


It passed almost unnoticed when it was published in France last year, but L'amande or The Almond, a slim brown volume billed as the "first erotic account written by an Arab woman", has now sold rights in 17 countries, including Britain, where it is to be published next month.

The book is explicit enough to have prompted comparisons with the sex films of Catherine Breillat, whose preferred actor is the porn star Rocco "the Italian Stallion" Siffredi, and with Catherine Millet, the intellectual art critic whose sex-stuffed but strangely unerotic confessions, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, recounted a life of staggering promiscuity.

But the difference is that Nedjma, the 40-something North African woman who wrote The Almond and who wants, not surprisingly, to remain anonymous, sets out not only to celebrate the sensuality of the female body but to strike a real moral blow against Islam's longstanding repression of women.

"In these lines where sperm and poetry mingle," she writes in the preface, "my ambition is to give women back the speech that has been confiscated by their fathers, brothers and husbands. I lift these words, as one lifts a glass, to the health of Arab women."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1510851,00.html