… he writes the books with her academic direction, critical input, and clinical insights …

We are a husband and wife writing team. We met in university, got married after graduation and soon after, we both got involved as trainers in marriage preparation courses conducted by the Muslim Converts’ Association Singapore (MCAS), the Islamic Religious Council Singapore (MUIS) and Singapore’s then Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) in the 1990s. In 1998 we co-wrote, with another activist Ms Fatimah Eunos, “Tranquil Hearts – A Guide to Marriage” which was co-published by MCAS and MUIS, which is still being used until today as the text-book for the marriage preparation programme in MCAS. In year 2011, we collaborated with an ustaz and another social worker to design and conduct sexual enrichment workshops for married couples in Malay called Suara Kekasih. In 2021 they conducted an online Sex, Soul and Islam seminar organised by Islamic Institute of Development and Research, UK (IIDR) attended by about 300 participants worldwide.

Enon Mansor has an honours bachelor degree for sociology (1988), a bachelor (1987) and master degrees for social work (2003) from National University of Singapore (NUS) – giving her a strong academic foundation in studying marriage as a sociological phenomenon. After the publication of Tranquil Hearts, she was actively involved in the standardization of marriage preparation courses syllabi in Singapore, undertaken by MCAS for Muslim converts and MUIS for the general Muslim public. All in all, she has more than 30 years of professional experience as researcher, writer, social worker, and marital counsellor – giving her a fair share of pleasures and disappointments helping couples reconcile, rejuvenate, or strengthen their marriages; as well as separate harmoniously.

Osman Sidek worked as a professional architect after graduating with a bachelor’s degree for architecture from NUS in 1989. At the same time, for more than a decade since graduation, he taught introductory Islamic knowledge and marriage preparation to new and non-Muslims as an activist. This exposure honed his skills in presenting Islam and marriage to a discerning adult audience from diverse cultural backgrounds. As an offshoot of the Suara Kekasih sexual enrichment program mentioned above, he wrote about 10 articles for Sutra magazine (Singapore) on sexual issues and co-counselled with Enon a number of sex-related marital dysfunction cases for the Syariah Court’s Marriage Counselling Program.

“Sex, Soul, and Islam” and “Tranquillity, Love, Mercy” are chiefly researched and written by Osman with academic direction, critical input and clinical insights from Enon. All case examples mentioned in the books are real. But for brevity and flow, as well as client-privacy, the cases have been summarised into broad strokes of relevant key-points. The great majority of them are from Enon’s professional counselling experience. Osman’s para-counselling experience are by far lesser and always done under professional supervision. In the books however, we simply refer to them collectively as ours for brevity sake.