A Conservative Muslim’s Experience With Sexuality

Straight / Male / 25–29 / South Asia / Single
I’m 29, have never kissed a woman, and am quite fine with it. I live in a Muslim majority South Asian country. I grew up in a very conservative household in a rural area with no sexuality education at all.
In my childhood I was the traditional figure of a good boy, meaning someone who restrains from porn and making sexual advances. My friends envied me and their parents would use me as an example when talking about a good kid that they should aspire to become.
Until I was in high-school, I used to think that if you sleep in the same bed with a girl, you will produce kids. Simply lying together and being close to each other in the same bed was enough to create children. As a result, I would refuse to sleep in the same bed as my female cousins during family trips out of the fear that we would have babies together.
My friends at school watched porn and looked at sexual magazines together. They invited me to join them many times but I didn’t want anything to do with it. They even tried with physical force to get me to look at those magazine’s but I would close my eyes because I wanted to be a good guy.

When my friends and I were 14, they were busy talking about masturbation and their interest in girls, while I was busy still peeing the bed. I had enough challenges to deal with at the time, so I had no desire to talk about sexuality related topics with my friends. Sometimes I would rub my penis in bed and it would give me pleasurable sensations but I didn’t ejaculate for the first time until I was 15, shortly after I conquered my struggle with wetting the bed. After ejaculating, I would notice that I became weak and tired. After a little while, I learned that what I was doing was called masturbation. Every time I masturbated I promised myself I would never do it again. To this day I still have this feeling of regret when I do it because I know that masturbation is a sin. I have read lots of religious texts where this was clearly explained to me.
Even though I wasn’t watching porn or reading the magazines, I had actually seen naked women by this time. I grew up in a very rural area and the bathrooms at the time did not have doors, as a result, basically everyone, women included, would bath in open. And even though I was trying to be a ‘good boy’, I did enjoy seeing their bodies. Secretly watching women bathing became a favorite pastime during my teenage days. I had no idea about intercourse, I simply enjoyed watching them.

At the time, I hardly talked to women outside my family. I am a very shy person and the only time I would talk to any of my female classmates or friends would be to help them with their studies. For me, it was the only reason and opportunity to connect with opposite gender.
The first time I had internet and mobile phone access was when I went to university. This was also the first time I watched porn. It seemed so artificial to me. It looked like women were having so much pain during intercourse. This couldn’t be normal. I asked one of my friends about it and she told me it was normal. She said it is a kind of painful pleasure, which turns out to be an expectation that women where I’m from are supposed to uphold. They’re supposed to pretend that they are hurting while having sex. I still didn’t know much about sex. Case in point, at this time I thought that if your penis enters a vagina once, sex is done.
During this time I started having text and phone conversations with women about sex. These women were a mix of female friends, mostly school and college friends, and random numbers I just dialed on my phone. I didn’t have a romantic partner at the time and did not know what else to talk about besides general greetings. One of the girls I found while dialing random numbers dragged me into phone sex conversations. She said things like “kiss my vagina” and we would continue from there. After a few days of this type of discussion, we actually became friends. However, I was so overwhelmed with feelings of guilt that I deleted and blocked her number and never communicated with her again after that.

I was also afraid of meeting up with women alone. When any of my female friends would invite me to hang out, I would always bring along a male accomplice. I do not know why I was so afraid of hanging out alone when it wasn’t about school related work. This also happened with the phone contacts. I did not have the courage to meet them in person, so they would eventually stop talking to me. One time this female engineering student in a different university, came to town to meet me spontaneously without warning. I refused. This woman and I had lots of nice phone conversations but when I did not agree to meet her in person, we stopped talking. Another instance occurred when I was 23 and already working. One of my friends from another city invited me to her hotel room. I took one of my colleagues to accompany me and of course she reacted very badly to this and never met me again.
I was afraid these women wouldn’t talk to me anymore after seeing me face-to-face because I grew up as an obese kid and have a physical chest deficiency, or in the less politically correct terms, man boobs. On top of that, one of my breasts is ‘abnormal’ because I had surgery on it as a child. I have seen doctors at home and abroad about fixing my man boobs. They told me I could have plastic surgery but it would fix itself if I simply lost weight.
I always assumed that I would have an arranged marriage and will marry the girl that my parents find for me. And that when I would touch this woman, it would be for the very first time anyone has ever touched her. Right after graduation my father asked me If I had had an affair with anyone. Of course I hadn’t and told him so. So he was making all the preparations to arrange my marriage for me but unfortunately he passed away that same month.

So I was left alone to find a bride for myself. I now had to meet a woman on my own and convince her to marry me.
After graduating from university, I finally had the courage to meet girls. I was becoming more social and was even hosting dinners. It felt like everyone would respond well to me. I assume this was because I was always behaving as the good guy and felt safe to be around. There were some women who I would often spend time with but when they would try to touch my hand or kiss me, I would stop and ask them to marry me. Usually they would laugh and not say anything. So I would cut off communication with them after that. I still can’t understand why they reacted so badly. I think they wanted to get to know me more and be more involved with me before bringing up the topic of marriage.
Around this time, there was one female friend who I learned most of my sexual knowledge from. We never had sex, in fact we never met in person and but she taught me a lot. I met her online after I poked her on facebook. We started with a brief internet chat, then she asked for my number and called me. She was 36 and married with three kids. I was 23. We talked a lot about sexuality and her not-so-happy marriage, I felt very guilty about these conversations. In the end, we stopped having the sexuality related conversations and became very good friends over the years. The last time I talked to her she said she was happy in her marriage and has become very religious.

Having no real career or money made it feel impossible for me to approach any of my crushes. I knew no parents would marry their daughter to an unemployed guy with no cash. These are typical Asian customs. Also nobody likes a fat guy (me) unless he has a lot of money, even I do not like fat girls. I reached out to my high-school and college crushes about five years after I finished my studies. All of them were in serious relationships by then. One of them became a doctor, she is still a good friend of mine and taught me about sexuality from a medical and biological point of view.
I have had the occasional opportunities to have sex in my adult life. I have hung out with lots of women, both at home and abroad. A few times women would try to have conversations that would lead to sex. Once one of them grabbed me by the shoulders to try and make the first move. In all cases I refused politely, saying that it is an incredibly punishable crime in my religion to have sex before marriage.
I did, however, have thoughts of having sex with them, but when the opportunity came I could not do it. Back at my hotel room, alone, I would then masturbate, even though I knew masturbating was a sin. During my late teens and early twenties I always showered right after I masturbated to wash the sin away and promised myself I would never do that again. To this day, I still have a shower every time I touch myself.
Once, I fasted six months to stop myself from masturbation. Islam suggests that if you cannot control your carnal desires: fast. Islamic fasting means eating before dawn and after dusk. You are not allowed to think or do anything related to sexuality during the fasting period. If you do, you break the fast. After dusk, I was so tired that I did not even have time to think about masturbation.

My behaviors around sex are shaped by my belief in the Core Islamic religion. Core Islam say’s if an unmarried man has sex with an unmarried women once, the punishment is flogging each of them with a hundred stripes publicly. This is called Zina. There is, however, a twist in the law: you need to have four eyewitnesses of the sex act, and no one has sex with eyewitnesses. In the case that there are no witnesses, Islam says, if you ask forgiveness to the Almighty he may forgive. Having unmarried sex more than once has a more extreme punishment.
The punishment for a married person having sex with someone outside their marriage is very extreme, this punishment is called Rajm. Rajm says you have to bury the person who committed the crime in sand up to their chest and throw stones at them until they are dead. There is a twist in this law too where you need to also have eye witnesses.
Core Islam says, even if you masturbate or think about having sex you are committing a sin. You need to guard your eyes while walking outside, so that your eyes do not fall upon a woman all of a sudden. If, on accident, your eyes fall upon a woman, you have to move your eyes after realizing that you were looking at her.
Islam also advocates early marriage to help shed your carnal needs. I support early marriage as well and think you should marry by the age of 18–20. And if a couple later on decides to separate, that’s fine too, in my opinion. That’s why it is possible to get divorced later on. Marrying early is something I will promote with my children, if they are open to it. I think it is much better than remaining sexually deprived or sleeping around. And sleeping around is extremely punishable in Islam.

I am 29 now and have had lots of discussions about marriage with women ages 23–29. Most of them have been sexually active already, however, in public they would never admit that. In our conservative society no girl will find a groom if she openly admits that she had sex before marriage. For women it is highly disrespectful to have sex before being marriage. Guys can find out about whether a women is sexually active by inquiring with her friends from school or work.
I try to openly talk to girls when discussing marriage. I am a religious man and believe in abstinence before marriage as well as being monogamous with one partner for life. I feel that it is a fundamental right to know about your spouses sexual history.
As my generation is exposed to sexuality at an early age, traditionally conservative guys, like me, either marry very early or marry someone much younger than them. Usually their bride would be younger than 20 years old. For me, being true to your religious beliefs is what matters. If you are a believer, you have to be a true believer. If you are not, then do whatever your heart desires.
In the last year I almost married a woman who has been sleeping with a married man for eight years. She also slept with her subsequent boyfriends. I was in a vulnerable spot, I was dealing with a number of problems and thought that getting together with her would solve a lot of them and put me in a happier place. So I decided to marry her. Before going through with it, I realized I cannot compromise on my conservative values. Additionally, spending my lifetime with someone like this would create lots of disagreements and fights. Her past behaviors would bubble up as issues for me. This realization brought me closer to my faith and as a result I didn’t even masturbate for few months after that.

These days I have a solid income and have recently started a new job. I think a strong economic base is important for marriage. Now I am receiving a number of marriage proposals. In the end, I think I will marry one of my friends’ sisters. It is a much safer option than marrying someone from a background completely unknown to me. I will start interviewing candidates as soon as I am a little bit more secure in this new job. The ranking of my priorities for finding a wife are (from more important to less important): virtue, beauty, education, family, and wealth.
There is a campaign going on now by core fundamentalists to support early marriage. I hope in the near future it will be acceptable in the Islamic society to marry later in life. I mean, everyone wants their groom well established, with a good degree, and a lot of money. To achieve those things, they would need to study and then work at least five to six years to create a solid financial safety net. By then they would be 27 or 28 years old. I think both sex deprivation and pre-marital sex will continue to thrive in Islamic societies and early marriage does address that. But all my close friends who are religious didn’t have sex before marriage and those who did started in their teens.
In the end, I think the divine forces will dictate what happens for me. I can’t fully control whom I will end up with. But I want her to follow the same principles I follow. Over many generations we survived with having what seemed to be only one sexual partner for lifetime. I think we still need to uphold those values and that way of living going forward.
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