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Jewish law and custom also concur with the likes of Desmond Morris over the special status of face-to-face intercourse as a passion enhancer: ‘In no other sexual position do we see a meeting of mouths accompanied by a full integration of all the limbs,' says Boteach. ‘Not only are husband and wife locked together in the genital region, but they coalesce in their totality so that even in appearance they become as one. The missionary position allows us to experience something which is quintessentially human.' According to the rabbi's research, Jewish custom that denounces cunnilingus as ‘lewd' and fellatio a sinful waste of seed is ‘a travesty of the truth' and runs counter to true rabbinic learning.

Although he professes himself anti-feminist, Rabbi Boteach finds for his theory that Judaism is an inherently sexy religion an unexpected ally in the writer Naomi Wolf. Wolf agrees that cultivating female satisfaction within marriage in the observant Jewish community was always considered – and still is -a primary family value. And, like the Taoists later in China, the Jewish mystics the Kabbalists believed that sexual satisfaction given by men to women pleases the Maker, and creates balance, order and harmony on a cosmic scale

‘Even within the Judaeo-Christian tradition there are systems of belief in which female desire is valued more highly than we can imagine,' Wolf notes in her book
Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desires
. ‘The
Zohar
, the Jewish European mystical tradition, charges that, “When the wife is purified [that is, after her ritual bath when menstruation is finished], the man is in duty bound to rejoice her, in the joyful fulfilment of a religious obligation … It is his duty, once back
home [from a journey], to give his wife pleasure … A man should please his wife because “this pleasure is a religious one, giving joy also to the Divine Presence, and it is an instrument for peace in the world”.' Islam, similarly, Wolf emphasises, has a tradition of treasuring female sexual desire.

Geraldine Brooks, an American expert on Islam, points out in a study of women in the Islamic world,
Nine Parts of Desire
, that: ‘the lessening of women's sexual pleasure directly contradicts the teachings of Mohamed'. In isolated parts of the world, Islam, it seems, has been hijacked latterly by prudes and misogynists, just as its equally sexy rival religion Judaism has. But according to Brooks, in a truer reading of Islamic scripture and tradition: ‘Almighty God created sexual desires in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.' And just as the Talmud, read intelligently, comes out strongly in favour of equality of sexual desire, a large body of commentary on the Koran holds identically that Mohammed and his disciples were in favour of female sexuality and women's sexual pleasures within marriage. Mohammed actually encouraged husbands to be attentive in bed: ‘When any one of you has sex with his wife, then he should not go to her like birds; instead you should be slow and delaying,' he said. Elsewhere, he refers to sex without lengthy foreplay as cruelty, and chastises a husband for being ‘too busy' to make love to his wife.

Just as many Ancient Judaic sexual taboos (and tips, too) were echoed in the later sect of Christianity, the sexual pleasure principles established in Islam by the Prophet and his followers have continued for thousands of years to inform a raft of sexual traditions across a slew of Middle Eastern cultures broadly in the Islamic crescent of influence, but including the Hindu and other worlds, too. The origin of belly dancing was to help bring impotent males to orgasm. Avicenna, the Arabic philosopher and physician of the eleventh century, more properly known as Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, of Uzbekistan, Central Asia, maintained that women had sperm, and that this provoked ‘a specific sexual itch … in the male's
spermatic vessels and in the mouth of the womb … which is relieved only by the chafing of intercourse or its equivalent'. It was impossible, Avicenna maintained, to suppress female desire and if it was not sated in some way, then women would resort to ‘rubbing, with other women, in order to achieve amongst themselves the fullness of their pleasures'.

Female circumcision, or Female Genital Mutilation as it is known today, is the (supposedly) Islamic sexual tradition Westerners struggle with the most. Originating in the Nile Valley it has for some 5,000 years been regarded by many in that area as distinguishing ‘decent' women from prostitutes and slaves, the main measure of a family's honour being the sexual purity of its women. Strabo, a first-century BC Greek geographer, first recorded the custom while travelling up the Nile. Instances have been recorded of it in Malaysia and South America, but it has remained almost exclusively the custom of North and Central Africa. In Sudan to this day a girl cannot marry if she is not circumcised – even though circumcision has been officially illegal since 1956.

FGM involves two procedures: clitoridectomy, the excision of all or part of the clitoris, and infibulation (aka ‘Pharaonic circumcision'), the sewing together of the labia majora with thread, catgut or thorns. Moreover, women will have the trauma of their original circumcision repeated when they begin to have sex and during childbirth. Husbands are usually required to ‘cut open' women before intercourse can take place. Women are usually ‘re-sewn' after they give birth. Unsurprisingly, FGM is extremely dangerous, with a variety of long- and short-term side effects, some of which are often fatal.

Sorting out what this brutal practice actually is from what it is not is obviously a prerequisite in a study of the orgasm, principally because the practice is such corroborative evidence of the female orgasm's existence and importance in antiquity.

The first thing that needs to be said about FGM is that there is nothing Islamic about it. It is practised by African followers of all religions including Catholics, Protestants and Copts
(Egyptian Christians), and is tolerated by many male religious leaders. Not that local varieties of Islam are blameless. Many Muslim sheiks and leaders preach that female circumcision is a religious requirement. But it is fair to say that Islam has borne the brunt of Western criticism, partly because most of the lobbying against FGM has come from US feminists who are arguably less fastidious about taking on Islam than are African or European women. (They have duly been accused, especially by Africans, of cultural imperialism for campaigning against FGM.) Naomi Wolf, for instance, has been prepared to name and shame: ‘Today, of course,' she comments, ‘the Koran and its commentaries, the
Shari'a
, are used to condone the most egregious abuses of women, from murder of teenage girls who lose their virginity before marriage and married women accused of adultery, to clitoridectomy and infibulation. The widespread practice of clitoridectomy in some Muslim countries is performed on the basis of the belief that “without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, she would end up a prostitute”.'

The public relations problem for Islam with FGM is that although the faith in no way condones the practice, a large majority of its adherents
profess
to be devout followers of Islam. It is also unfortunate for mainstream Muslims that FGM's inherent misogyny is not entirely alien to the more fundamental forms of Islam.

In reality, local economics and beliefs about women's health, combined with lack of education for women, are as much to blame for FGM as hardline religious rules, hatred of women or fear of their ravenous appetite for orgasm. It is practically impossible for fathers in the isolated areas where circumcision is rife to marry off their daughters uncircumcised, and a large amount of a family's income comes from its daughters' dowries. Girls as a consequence are sometimes circumcised as infants to let there be no doubt among the local community that a family's females are of the required standard. A small number of Islamic villages across wide stretches of Africa also
harbour a witch doctor as the local circumciser, usually female, who is a respected and revered figure, charges a high price for the operation – and whom it is socially unwise to offend. Additionally, any woman of a mind to make her own inquiries in the holy scriptures as to the practice's validity may be doubly frustrated; women in remote rural areas where circumcision persists (usually against the will of national governments) can rarely read, and even if they can, are never allowed access to the Koran.

The troublesome cult of FGM was always, its practitioners say, a way of protecting women's health, which, due to their sexually voracious nature, would suffer from too many orgasms. The practice has attracted unexpected admirers in the West, most notably the Victorian Arabist and erotic pioneer Richard F. Burton, who translated the
Kamasutra
. Burton also made known to the modern world the continuing practice of clitoridectomy, but saw merit in it. In his 1865
Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London
, he wrote: ‘The reason for such mutilation is evident. Removal of the prepuce blunts the sensitiveness of the glans penis, and protracts the art of Venus, which Africans and Asiatics ever strive, even by charms and medicines, to lengthen.' The idea of the sexually insatiable woman who, by having her orgasmic desire ‘damped down' somehow raises the erotic temperature for both a husband and his wife, manifestly remains a popular contention in parts of the African world today; 90 per cent of young women interviewed recently by the Cairo Family Planning Association had had some part of the clitoris and labia removed, which would suggest that their fathers, at the very least, thought it a good idea.

There are, it has to be said, some curious side issues to FGM when it comes to sexual pleasure. An American social psychologist and leading campaigner against FGM, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, has looked specifically at the question of sexual pleasure as experienced by circumcised women in Sudan, and reported her rather extraordinary findings in the
Journal of Sex Research
.

Circumcision, Lightfoot-Klein found, is universal even among educated people. Far from being a furtive activity, it is celebrated with family festivities, a woman's circumcision day being more important than her wedding. It is seen not only as healthily dampening a young girl's sex drive (overt sexual enjoyment in women is regarded as disgusting and animallike), but as a precaution additionally against the belief, held even among middle-class people, that if the clitoris is not cropped, it will grow to dangle between a woman's legs like a penis.

Against such a background, Lightfoot-Klein's discoveries in Sudan are all the more surprising, and throw a fascinating new light – if they are taken at face value – on our Western belief in the primacy of the clitoris in orgasm. For a larger proportion of circumcised Sudanese women – allegedly as great as 90 per cent – claim enthusiastically in interview with female researchers they enjoy sex
and
frequently or always have orgasms – even though for them to react outwardly to sex in any way other than by remaining totally inert is a strict taboo, for which their husbands could divorce them summarily. The minority who attest to not enjoying sex, according to Lightfoot-Klein, are those who still suffer intractable pain from their circumcision – or are in unhappy marriages.

‘Some women,' Lightfoot-Klein found, ‘said that they had intense, prolonged orgasms, and this was verified by their happy and highly animated demeanour as they described it.' A smaller study in Egypt in 1982 by Marie Assaad, a Cairo-based social reformer and campaigner against circumcision, also found a surprising level of perceived or claimed sexual enjoyment. Assaad revealed that 94 per cent of 54 circumcised women interviewed enjoyed sex and were happy with their husband.

‘How is orgasm possible at all under such conditions?' Lightfoot-Klein asks reasonably. She draws on a number of sexual theorists who before her work in Sudan had suggested that while the clitoris may be the most erotically sensitive
organ in uncircumcised women, in clitoridectomised females, other sensitive parts of the body, from the labia minora, to the cervix, breasts, anus and lips, plus the psychic factors of emotional involvement and spiritual connection, come into play in the clitoris' stead.

Clitoridectomised Sudanese women's descriptions of orgasm – and Lightfoot-Klein does not believe they lied – suggest as cogently as can be imagined that the modern, Western, mechanised view of female orgasm as a simple stimulus-response effect, by which orgasm happens as and when the clitoris is stimulated, is something of an over-simplification. It also seems to be almost
prima facie
evidence that, nerveless and inert as the vagina may be, there is still a distinct vaginal orgasm – not, as Freud and his acolytes, imagined a distinct and
superior
orgasm, but an orgasm all the same, and one that, surprisingly, can be experienced in the absence of a clitoris.

When women were questioned by Lightfoot-Klein, they never spontaneously mentioned their genitalia. ‘Women tended to name their lips, neck, breasts, bellies, thighs or hips … This is due, at least in part, to the fact that a virtuous and modest Sudanese woman is required to never speak of that part of her body. When the genitalia were addressed directly by the question, “What about the area of your scar?” and following that, “What about inside?” erogeneity of one or the other (or of both areas) was admitted, or even glowingly described by many women.'

Circumcised women's recorded responses to the question of whether and how often they experience orgasm were remarkable. ‘We have intercourse every two or three days. I never have orgasm during the first time, even though my husband maintains an erection for 45 minutes or an hour. When we have intercourse a second time, about an hour later, I am able to reach orgasm,' was one such.

Among the others: ‘With my first husband, I almost never had any pleasure, and I had orgasm only a handful of times over the years. It was an arranged marriage, and although he
was a kind man and good to me, I did not have any passion for him. My second marriage is a love match and I always have strong orgasm with him, except on rare occasions, when I am too tired or one of the children is sick.'