She is also emphatic about the importance of female sexual pleasure, and the inequity of many Arab marriages in that respect. One of the cases that impelled her to write the book, she said, was a 52-year-old client who had grandchildren but had never known sexual pleasure with her husband.

“Finally, she discovered orgasm!” Ms. Lootah said. “Imagine, all that time she did not know.”

Another important theme of the book is infidelity. The prevalence of foreign women in Dubai and the ease of e-mail and text-message communication has made cheating easier (and easier to detect), Ms. Lootah said, helping push the divorce rate to 30 percent.

The Gulf’s oil-fueled modernization in recent decades has also shattered some old Arab social structures. At the same time, the rise of political Islam has undermined traditional authorities, leaving many Arabs confused about moral issues.

“Before, people lived in one place and the community was like one big family,” Ms. Lootah said. “Now, people have spread to different areas, everything’s mixed up and traditions have changed.”

ONE result is the Family Guidance section in the Dubai Courthouse, which opened in 2001 with Ms. Lootah as its first counselor (there are now six others, all men). Kuwait’s government has had a similar social-services wing since the 1990s, and other Persian Gulf countries are following suit. Private psychologists and marriage counselors also exist throughout the Arab world, though they are still rare.

“We’re making a lot of progress,” said Heba Kotb, who runs an Islam-oriented sex therapy clinic in Cairo, and ran a satellite television talk show on sexual and marital issues from 2006 until 2008. “Ten years ago we were unable to even mention the subject, and now people are getting used to hearing it.”

There are still formidable obstacles. In a region where “honor killings” of women who have sex outside marriage remain fairly common, sex education is widely viewed as a portal to sin. Genital cutting of women still takes place in Egypt, though it is now illegal. Arab writers and artists have begun to tackle these subjects.