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.

I read this book thoroughly, and I have to say I found some pretty interesting stuff in it. First of all, it's quite a varied text: besides offering a series of essays focused on outlining the moral and aesthetic standards for men and women, it also provides the reader with intriguing erotic fables that carry a rather moralizing yet colorful tone.

Anyone with a bit of familiarity with Islam will be surprised by the fact that, much like the 99 names or attributes of God, sex in this book is treated with the very same care. It features a detailed list of names defining the attributes of both the male and female organs based on their inherent qualities: for example, being "the striker" (al-habbāt) and "the intruder" (ad-dahhāl) for the penis, or being "the silent one" (as-sakkūt) and "the deep one" (al-magūr) for the vulva.

What particularly struck me was one of these names in particular: ad-dakar, meaning "man" or "virile member." According to the standard method of extracting consonants (dh-k-r), its root seems to be linked to the word dhikr, which literally means "remembrance," "memory," or "keeping in mind." We are thus looking at an original Arabic word whose root connects memory and the virile member in a rather fascinating semantic correlation. This appears to stem from the fact that memory also referred to the continuity of the lineage, which was made possible precisely through the male—the bearer of the clan’s name and lineage in the ancient, tribal world where this society took shape.

This association between the phallus and memory took me completely by surprise, so much so that I initially lost myself in particularly beautiful philosophical and metaphysical tangents. But in the end, it all quickly boiled down to a clear, wise realization of the very obvious practicality behind this brilliant semantic overlap.