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Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one "whose back one never sees," is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die - in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously - the dead women become men!
     In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. The first approach to the sakina, that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman's breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals- and suddenly all of them masculine- into abysses inhabited by souls "obedient to God."

Assia Djebar 
So Vast the Prison