Throughout our own fourteen centuries of tradition and history, there have been many books written to help .couples find more meaningful relationships and increase sexual pleasure within marriage.
These works are many times quite explicit, but hardly ever crude or vulgar. And I believe that we can learn much from their Language and style. One of the more interesting examples of this is one that the famous Imam al-Qurtubi (d. 671AH) mentions in his Tafsir. In reference to the verse of women being one's '... cultivation', (Q2 [al-Baqara]: 223)
he mentions that the Maliki jurist Ibn ai-Arabi (d. 543)narrates that his own teacher, who was the most respected and esteemed scholar of Andalus of his era, went into some detail describing the female organ to his students, so that they would be better aware of what to do and not to do, Says the teacher to his resumably unmarried male student body,
"And the closest image that I can give to you of the female organ is [the number] thirty-five ... " so saying, he holds his finger and thumb together, and sticks out the other three fingers above it. "Now" he continues, "... the zero (meaning the place between the finger and thumb) is the actual vagina, and this is where the male organ goes. My finger above it is where the urethra is - this is where the female urinates from, and this is a different place than the actual vagina... "One can only imagine how eagerly these young men must have been paying attention to their teacher's fingers and 'schematic diagram' that he attempted to demonstrate!
What is of interest to us here is the fact that great scholars like al-Qurtubi and Ibn ai-Arabi saw no problem in relaying these experiences in their standard and famous works (on Tafsir no less!).The lesson that we learn from this is that basic human' anatomy is a necessary requirement for understanding such issues, and as long as permissible means are used to convey the information, there is nothing wrong with studying such information!
(This piece is a continuation of the seminar in family intimacy by Yasir Qadhi)
This article was culled from the publications of Deen Communication Limited