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Now let us descend from our minaret balcony to the Moski, a vast market where devout Muslims come to shop after noontime prayers. Dodging water-sellers and small boys carrying trays of sweet Arabic coffee, groups of veiled women browse among baskets of spices, bolts of cloth and gold jewelry for dowries.

The women pause before a pushcart bearing a mountain of colored silk and nylon. What's that woman holding up? Why, a G-string and a black-lace teddy.

That's right, an open-air sexy underwear souk thrives in the heart of Islamic Cairo, a few brazen footsteps from the Sayyidna al-Hussein Mosque. The mosque is home to the largest congregation in Egypt and a shrine where a head, believed to be that of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, Hussein, is interred. To a Western eye, the contrast seems shocking, as if Frederick's of Hollywood had opened an outlet right next to the Vatican.

Jumbled on pushcarts or hanging from shop fronts is enough lingerie to dress a millennium's worth of Playboy centerfolds or, given the prevalence of size XXXL, the entire buxom oeuvre of film director Russ Meyer. We're talking bras with silver nipple tassles, plunging bustlines and feather boas. We're talking see-through bathrobes, skimpy nighties and fire-engine-red panties with thigh slits up to here.

Book your flight to Cairo right here!

The vixens shopping for these alluring undergarments prefer a more conservative façade: even in 95-degree heat they're wearing shapeless floor-length dresses, tightly fitting headscarves, long sleeves and even gloves. More than a fashion statement, this is a dress code: no exposed flesh, no uncovered hair.

The West generally associates the veil with fundamentalism and repression, with the public morality police in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Talaban-run Afghanistan. But for veiled Egyptian women, it seems there's no contradiction between public decorum and private eroticism.

And why should there be? Classical Arabic has more than 60 words for love, connoting all the pleasures and pangs of its experience, from longing and insomnia to raw passion and quenched desire, from galantry and seduction to nostalgia and regret. Medieval Arabic literature is full of erotic verses, such as this one from the "Tales of the Thousand and One Nights": "She wavered her garments, exuding saffron, amber, musk and sandal ... he took her feet and kissed them and, finding them like fresh cream, pressed his face on them."

Nineteenth century Europeans lapped up all this voluptuous exoticism and regarded the veil as the talisman of a hidden and powerful sexuality. This impression was no doubt aided by the enthusiastic accounts of French author Gustave Flaubert, who arrived in Cairo in November 1849, and immediately went trolling for prostitutes, and by the works of British explorer and Arabist Sir Richard Burton, who entertained a generation of sex-starved Victorians with annotated translations of Oriental sex manuals, including a 15th century Arabic handbook, "The Perfumed Garden."

Isabelle Burton considered "The Perfumed Garden" particularly pornographic. Upon her husband's death she cloistered herself in his room and burned his master copy, along with three decades' worth of notebooks and private journals. This massive act of censorship took her 16 days and superceded the actual funeral arrangements. She apparently found Burton's unexpurgated translation of "The Thousand and One Nights" less objectionable. Despite detailed accounts of copulation, this six-volume work survives, along with innumerable ribald passages, such as "He sheathed his steel rod in her scabbard ... whilst she with him ceased not from inclination and prostration and rising up and sitting down, while accompanying her ejaculations of praise and of 'Glory to Allah!' with passionate movements and wrigglings and claspings of his member ..."

Next page | Sex as a duty and an act of faith