> The book The Arab Mind is one of the examples that Edward Said used to
> critique "Orientalism Now." See Said's Orientalism (NY: Vintage,
> 1978): pp. 308-9, 311, 312, 349. If the photographs of sexual torture
> at Abu Ghraib had been indeed used as a tool of blackmail, based on
> the orientalist conception of "the Arab Mind" that authors such as
> Patai expounded, the blackmail evidently failed to work, as Hersh
> notes. The failure, I submit, is not only evidence of torture's
> uselessness as an instrument of gathering information from the
> tortured that Darius Rejali documents but also proof that orientalism
> says more about phantasmagoric images of the "Western Self" and the
> "Oriental Other" that orientalists create as statically diametrical
> opposites than about objective and subjective lives of the Arabs and
> other so-called orientals which are as variegated as objective and
> subjective lives of any people anywhere else -- a confirmation of
> Edward Said's thesis.
That seems a reasonable statement. Perhaps one could explain this failure of the blackmail tool to work as follows: these days, the impulse to resist and drive out the U.S. occupation is trumping the feelings of shame among Iraqis. A few ex-prisoners have been interviewed in the NY Times and elsewhere saying that they were indeed ashamed by their treatment in the prison, but once it becomes clear that many prisoners received this treatment, it simply adds to the solidarity of the resistance.
Still, there could very well be differences between the general Western and Arab attitudes about sexuality. As others have mentioned, the veiling of women seems to indicate this. I'm still looking for a reasonably scientific (psychological, sociological, etc.) discussion of this topic which isn't completely permeated by political preconceptions (orientalism, occidentalism, etc.). Perhaps there is no such thing, after all -- whenever human beings in one culture look at those in another, they drop their scientific attitude which works so well with electrons, microbes, and quasars and succumb to their political passions.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)