A few days ago, I happened to get my hands on a text—perhaps the only one—by a certain Muhammad Al-Nafzawi, a 15th-century Tunisian who had the wonderful idea of writing a sort of Arabic Kama Sutra. Well, I managed to get a copy of that book because I’ve always been drawn not so much to sex itself (that’s obvious and natural enough), but to the way a specific culture, in a given era, contemplates and reflects on something so common—much like food, friendship, or family, just to give an example.

First of all, I can say that it is a rather varied text, because alongside a series of essays focused on outlining the moral and aesthetic standards of men and women, it also offers the reader interesting erotic fables with a rather moralizing yet colorful atmosphere.

On the other hand, anyone with some familiarity with Islam will be surprised by the fact that—much like God’s 99 names and attributes—sex is treated in this book with the exact same attention, boasting a series of names that define the attributes of both the male and female organs based on their intrinsic qualities. For instance, in the case of the penis, we find terms like "the striker" (al-habbāt) and "the outer one" (ad-dahhāl), while for the vulva, we have "the silent one" (as-sakkūt) and "the deep one" (al-magūr).

What particularly struck me was one of these names in particular: ad-dakar, meaning "the man" or "the virile member," whose root—following the usual consonant extraction scheme (dh-k-r)—would appear to be the word dhikr, which literally means "remembrance," "memory," or "keeping in mind." We are therefore looking at an original Arabic word whose root is semantically connected to a rather interesting correlation of things: memory and the male organ.

It seems this is due to the fact that memory also refers to the continuity of descent, which was precisely made possible through the male—that is, the bearer of the clan's name and lineage in the ancient, tribal world in which this society was formed.

The association between the phallus and memory definitely caught me off guard, so much so that at first I found myself wandering down philosophical and metaphysical paths of unfathomable mystery. But in the end, it all quickly boiled down to the clear, wise realization of the very obvious practicality of this brilliant semantic intersection that I hadn't known at all.