Throughout his account, AbuKhalil refers to "homosexuals," "gays," "heterosexuals," and "homophobia" as transhistorical identities and phenomena and anachronistically identifies people and practices with them. For example, he cites medieval Arabic books that "contain collections of poetry and anecdotes by and about gay men and women" (33). Unlike the ahistoricists, however, AbuKhalil believes that changes have occurred in the Arab world, but they do not concern identities, which he sees as transhistorically present, but rather "homophobia," which he believes is historically contingent: "The advent of westernization in the Middle East brought with it various elements of western ideologies of hostility, like . . . homophobia. This is not to say that there were not anti-homosexual . . . elements in Arab/Islamic history, but these elements never constituted an ideology of hostility as such" (34). Indeed AbuKhalil's misreading of the evidence extends to the European scene, which he mentions for contrast, arriving at unsubstantiated conclusions: "The professed homosexual identity among Arabs allowed homosexuals historically a degree of tolerance that was denied for centuries to homosexuals in the West. When homosexuals were hunted down as criminals in much of medieval Europe, homosexuals were rulers and ministers in Islamic countries" (33). This identitarian essentialism characterizes AbuKhalil's entire approach.
Bruce Dunne participates in this academic discourse with his essay "Power and Sexuality in the Middle East." 27 He asserts that "sexual relations in Middle Eastern societies have historically articulated social hierarchies, that is, dominant and subordinate social positions: adult men on top; women, boys and slaves below" (8). Presumably, in non-Middle Eastern societies such hierarchies did not "historically" exist except in the celebrated cases of "Greek and late Roman antiquity," (9) but certainly not in the medieval, let alone the modern, "West." The "Middle Eastern" case is contrasted with the West; according to Dunne, the "distinction made by modern Western 'sexuality' between sexual and gender identity, that is, between kinds of sexual predilections and degrees of masculinity and femininity, has until recently, had little resonance in the Middle East" (8). 28 This [End Page 369] judgment is further illustrated by quotes from the two Egyptian native informants whom Dunne cites. The conclusion is inescapable: "Western notions of sexuality offer little insight into our contemporary young Egyptian's apparent understanding that sexual behavior conforms to a particular concept of gender" (9). Dunne's approach is to demonstrate that in "Middle Eastern" society, unlike Western society, non-"egalitarian sexual relations" predominate and sexuality is seen as gender determined. For this reason, he says, citing IGLHRC, "many homosexuals in Middle Eastern countries have sought asylum in the West as refugees from official persecution" (11). Dunne's work exemplifies a type of anthropology that fails to problematize its own mythical idealized self, that continues to view the other as all that the self does not contain or condone, namely, nonegalitarian sexual relations, the oppressive rule of men, gender-based sexuality, patriarchy, and so forth. An anthropology that cannot abandon the mythological West as a reference point will continue to use it as the organizing principle for all of its arguments.
A more recent addition to this growing body of literature is Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe's Islamic Homosexualities, a title indicative of their limited knowledge of Muslim societies: as Islamic is an adjective referring to the religion Islam while Muslim refers to people who adhere to it, it is unclear how Islam, the religion, can have a homosexuality let alone homosexualities. 29 Murray rejects Schmitt's claim that Arabs have no conceptions of homosexual persons because (according to Schmitt) "Arabic synonyms for 'to fuck' have no form of reciprocity." 30 Murray writes: "I do not know of such a verb in English or any other language. To fuck and be fucked requires more than two persons, or sequential acts, or use of a dildo: human anatomy precludes A's penis being in B's anus while B's penis is in A's." 31 In fact, contra Murray and Schmitt, modern Arabic has the verb tanayaka, which does indicate reciprocity: to say that two people yatanayakan is to say that they are fucking each other. 32 The language-based errors and mistakes in both Schmitt's and Roscoe and Murray's books are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that this is the ground on which the fight to represent the so-called [End Page 370] real Arab or Muslim position on male-male sexuality is being staged. Moreover, Roscoe and Murray--like so many others discussed here--are not terribly concerned with historical specificity. After a range of quotes
from sources or stories dating back to the classical period of Muslim civilization and to contemporary oral reports by Arab native informants, including one "Omar, a cosmopolitan Saudi studying in the United States," Murray concludes that "with females segregated and tightly controlled, young and/or effeminate males available for sexual penetration are tacitly accepted--and very carefully ignored in Muslim societies, past and present." 33 Indeed, time in the context of the Arab world and Islam is not an agent of change but rather the proof of its lack.
Incitement to Discourse
The advent of colonialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds, its sponsorship of what came to be known as "modernization" projects, as well as the proliferation and hegemony of Western cultural products have indeed had their effects. Basim Musallam has shown how such contact has influenced attitudes toward contraception and abortion: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most schools of Islamic jurisprudence--previously supportive of women's rights to birth control and abortion--adopted stances on these issues that were more in line with the Christian Western position (both Catholic and Protestant). 34 Indeed as Western cultural encroachment continued, its hegemonic impact was also felt at the level of language. For example, the Arabic word for sex, jins, appeared sometime in the early twentieth century carrying with it not only its new meanings of biological sex and national origin but also its old meanings of type and kind and ethnolinguistic origin, among others. The word in the sense of type and kind has existed in Arabic since time immemorial and is derived
from the Greek genus. As late as 1870, its connotation of sex had not yet come into usage. 35 An unspecific word for sexuality, jinsiyyah--which also means nationality and citizenship--was coined in the 1950s by translators of the works of Freud (such as Mustafa Safwan, a [End Page 371] major psychoanalytic scholar based in France, and Jurj Tarabishi, the most prominent Arab literary critic writing in Arabic today). 36 More recently Muta' al-Safadi, translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, has introduced the more specific term, jinsaniyyah. 37 This new term, however, is understood by only a few, even among the literati. Words for homo- or heterosexuality were also invented recently as direct translations of the Latin original: mithliyyah (sameness) in reference to homosexuality, and ghayriyyah (differentness) in reference to heterosexuality. Arab translators of psychology books 38 as well as Arab behavioral psychologists adopted the European expression sexual deviance in the mid-1950s, translating it literally as al-shudhudh al-jinsi, a coinage commonly used in the media and in polite company to refer to the Western concept of homosexuality. 39
Although the advent of colonialism and Western capital in the Arab world has transformed most aspects of daily life, efforts to impose a European heterosexual regime on Arab men have succeeded among only the upper classes and the increasingly Westernized middle classes. It is among members of these wealthier segments of society that the Gay International has found native informants. 40 [End Page 372] Although members of these classes who engage in same-sex relations have more recently adopted a Western identity (as part of a more general, classwide adoption of everything Western), they remain a minuscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as "gay" or express a need for gay politics. (The literature of the Gay International points to examples of same-sex contact as proof of cross-cultural, cross-class gay identity, but in reality there is no evidence of gay movements anywhere in the Arab world or even of gay group identity outside of the small groups of men in metropolitan areas such as Cairo and Beirut.)
It is this minority and its diaspora members who staff groups such as the U.S.-based Gay and Lesbian Arabic [sic] Society (GLAS), founded in 1989 by a Palestinian in Washington, D.C. Indeed, as members of the Gay International, this minority is one of the main poles of the campaign to incite discourse on homosexuality in the Arab world. GLAS defines itself as "a networking organization for Gays and Lesbians of Arab descent or those living in Arab countries. We aim to promote positive images of Gays and Lesbians in Arab communities worldwide. We also provide a support network for our members while fighting for our human rights wherever they are oppressed. We are part of the global Gay and Lesbian movement seeking an end to injustice and discrimination based on sexual orientation." 41 GLAS's newsletter Ahbab declares that "since we started this site, we have witnessed the development of a global family of Gay/Lesbian Arabs and friends." 42 According to the founder of GLAS and its current outreach director, Ramzi Zakharia, "since the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in the Arab world, being 'Gay' is still considered to be sexual behavior. . . . Just because you sleep with a member of the same sex does not mean that you are Gay . . . it means that you are engaging in homosexual activity. Once a relationship develops beyond sex (i.e., love) this is when the term gay applies" (emphasis added). 43 Indeed for Zakharia, the issue of time is crucial. In the Arab world, [End Page 373] being gay is "still" considered sexual behavior. The implicit statement is that the Arab world has not yet caught up with the liberatory Western model of gayness--and this is the transformation that GLAS seeks to expedite. GLAS's Western sexual epistemology is clearest in its claim to represent those Arab men who practice same-sex contact but do not identify as gay or seek to be involved in gay politics through GLAS or any other organization. 44
The Gay International and this small minority of Arab same-sex practitioners who adopt its epistemology have embarked on a project that can best be described as incitement to discourse. 45 As same-sex contact between men has not been a topic of government or journalistic discourse in the Arab world of the last two centuries, the Gay International's campaign since the early 1980s to universalize itself has incited such discourse. The fact that the incited discourse is characterized by negativity toward the mission of the Gay International is immaterial. By inciting discourse on homosexual and gay and lesbian rights and identities, the very ontology of gayness is instituted in a discourse that could have only two reactions to the claims of universal gayness: support them or oppose them without ever questioning their epistemological underpinnings. Indeed it is exactly these reactions that anchor and strengthen and drive the Gay International's universal agenda. In a world where no one questions the identification of gayness, gay epistemology and ontology can institute themselves safely. The Gay International's fight is therefore not an epistemological one but rather a simple political struggle where the world is divided between the supporters and opponents of gay rights.
The Gay International is aided by two other phenomena accompanying its infiltration into the international public sphere: the spread of AIDS on an international scale, with the Western homophobic identification of it as the "gay" disease, and the rise of Islamism in the Arab and Muslim worlds, with its stricter [End Page 374] sexual mores. The Gay International has succeeded in inciting discourse by attracting antigay Islamist and nationalist reactions to its efforts. 46 -- Michael Pugliese