A reminder that courtly love came from the Arab world

Yamina Benguigui has made a career out of debunking French prejudices against Arabs. The 43-year-old film-maker's latest documentary, The Perfumed Garden, about North African Arabs, love and sex, will be broadcast on the Franco-German channel Arte tomorrow evening.

Benguigui, whose parents are Algerian, shows a generation of Moroccans and Algerians on both sides of the Mediterranean caught between tradition and their own desires. "We're taught that every sexual act has something to do with the Koran," a young Moroccan tells her. A man who deflowers a girl in Morocco must either marry her or spend five years in prison.

Female virginity is all-important. Mothers engage in superstitious rituals such as the Tqaf, where a small piece of woven cloth is symbolically passed between a daughter's legs to close her hymen until marriage. In another custom intended to guarantee purity, a casserole of hot lead is held over a young woman's head. "A girl who loses her virginity is rejected as if she had AIDS," a Moroccan woman says. "For my mother, a good woman is one who has no pleasure," her friend adds.

Even the Maghrebin dialect seems to conspire against romance. "If I want to tell a girl I love her, I use the French `je t'aime'," a Moroccan youth says. The North African Arabic equivalent, "kan bgkik", is inadequate. How can one use the same verb to say he likes coffee and to declare passion? It was not always thus, Benguigui says. "There were 60 words for love in Arabic until the 18th century. With India, ours was the society which had the most ways of saying `I love you'. And we ended up with this skimpy little `kan bgkik'!"

The title of Benguigui's film is that of an erotic handbook written by the 15th-century imam Sheikh Nefzaoui at the request of the temporal bey and vizir. Although the cleric's book begins by praising Allah, it contains explicit descriptions of pleasure.

"Everyone has forgotten that courtly love comes from the Arab-Muslim world," Benguigui says. "The story of Tristan and Isolde is that of Qais and Leila. The crusaders brought it back, along with the idea of troubadours singing under windows, of dying for a woman."

But when the Arabs lost Andalusia in the 16th century, their romanticism went with it. The rise of fundamentalism over the past 30 years has made even the sensual Egyptian films of the 1940s and 1950s unthinkable.

Sexual taboos are especially strong within France's North African minority, where mothers and brothers watch over young women's virtue. It is a community that Benguigui knows well. She spent three years in the mid1990s making the monumental documentary Memoires d'immigres. The film has won 15 awards and is mandatory viewing for civil servants at the French justice and education ministries.

"There are five million Muslims in France," Benguigui explains, most of them North African Arabs. "How did we get here? No one ever talked about it. Our parents were invisible in French society - you only saw the children."

She has not spoken to her own father since leaving home at the age of 18, but she understands him better for having interviewed hundreds like him. "The suffering, the contempt; the French treated them like sub-humans. They were crushed and humiliated. When I won an award in the US, the person who gave me the prize compared it to slavery in America.

"It's incredible that such a thing happened in Europe, that France colonised Algeria and didn't give them their rights. They rounded up men in the towns and sent them to work here. But they were not allowed to take their wives and children. We are the children of those men. We were born in this society, even if it's the one that killed our parents. And when we choose to live in French society, it's betrayal."

Back in 1981, the children of North African immigrants staged protest marches to draw attention to discrimination against them. They called themselves "beurs", which is pig-Latin for "Arabs". The name stuck and many elements of North African food, language and music have entered French culture.

Stylish women's magazines regularly publish features on the red plant dye, henna, and hammams (steam baths). A poll this week shows that the football star Zinedine Zidane - like Benguigui, the child of Algerian immigrants - is the most popular man in France.

Yet Benguigui says it will take a long time. "I don't talk about `integration' but `taking root'," she says. "We are only beginning to take root." For her, the ultimate proof will be "when we can bury our parents here as Muslims." Most French Muslims still send their dead `home' to North Africa.

In all of France, Benguigui says, there is only one Muslim cemetery, and at most 60 Muslim plots within Christian cemeteries. "If you ask local officials for 10 graves in their cemetery, they say, `Watch out, there are fundamentalists in the area'."