From Foreign Policy
by Katelynn Fossett
Responding to apparent pent-up demand for tacky bachelorette parties, the 38-year old Turkish entrepreneur Haluk Murat Demirel has opened the country’s first halal (permissible in Islam) sex shoponline. It’s not the first such enterprise in the world — successful predecessors can be found in such varied locales as Bahrain, the Netherlands, and Atlanta, Ga. — but the existence of such a market still raises some interesting questions. For instance, what makes a sex shop halal? And what’s behind their spread?
According to Hamza Yusuf, an American Islamic scholar and co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., the trend is, if anything, reflective of the adaptive qualities of capitalism — not any trend in the Muslim world, where items like herbal aphrodisiacs have been commonplace but under the radar for centuries.
“Muslim countries have all of these but they don’t advertise them,” he told Foreign Policy by phone. “It all goes back to the monetization of religion.”
But if halal sex shop owners are motivated by profit, Islam itself has laid the groundwork for the business opportunity. While rigid rules govern pre-marital sexual relations in Muslim culture, the Quran and hadith(a record of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions) make clear that sex within the confines of marriage is not purely for procreation, as it is in some Christian denominations. Muhammadtold men not to leave their wives for more than six months so as to avoid sexual neglect, and there are even some well-known references to foreplay in the hadith. As Yusuf explains, “It’s not a prudish culture … but decorum is still very important.” For married Muslim couples, specific etiquette governs proper sexual relations, separating haram (forbidden) from halal.
