<http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm? newsid=18814930&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=568864&rfi=8>
Distorting Desire By: BRIAN WHITAKER 09/13/2007
DESIRING ARABS By Joseph Massad University of Chicago Press 444 pp., $35
Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University, is a controversial figure. As a protégé of the late Edward Said, who is also of Palestinian-Christian descent, his views on Zionism have made him a target of the Israel lobby, while others have defended him in the name of academic freedom.
In 2002 he plunged into a different controversy with a paper entitled "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World" which sought to marshal a case against gay rights from a nationalist and secular standpoint -- one not based explicitly on a moral judgment of homosexuality itself.
The central thesis of his 25-page polemic was that promotion of gay rights in the Middle East is a conspiracy led by Western orientalists and colonialists that "produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." After several years' gestation he has now produced a book, "Desiring Arabs," which elaborates on this.
Though Massad's views might appear idiosyncratic, there is a commonly held notion among Islamists and Arab nationalists that Western political machinations in the Middle East have parallels in the social and cultural sphere -- not only in relation to homosexuality but toward sexual rights more generally.
In 2007, for example, when Jordan finally ratified the international Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women - 15 years after originally signing it - the Islamic Action Front denounced the move as an "American and Zionist" attempt to strip the nation of its "identity and values," to steer people away from religion, and to destroy "the Muslim family."
While that might be dismissed as crude, populist rhetoric, Massad's book - ostensibly a serious study published by the University of Chicago Press and with several academic endorsements -- reflects essentially the same idea, even if it is couched in more sophisticated language: "Western social Darwinists, who include modernization and development theorists and their kindred spirits (UN agencies, human rights organizations and activists, [non-profit organizations known as nongovernmental organizations, or] NGOs, the IMF, the World Bank, the US State Department, etc) would see the possible 'advance' of the Arab world (as well as the rest of the 'underdeveloped' world) toward a Western-defined and sponsored modernity as part of a historical teleology wherein non-Europeans who are still at the stage of European childhood will eventually replicate European 'progress' toward modern forms of organization, sociality, economics, politics and sexual desires.
"What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the Third) World is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these Western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by Third World elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible" (pp. 49-50).
Relating this to gay rights activism in Chapter 3 of "Desiring Arabs," essentially an expanded version of his earlier paper, Massad talks of a "missionary" campaign orchestrated by what he calls the "Gay International." Its inspiration, he writes, came partly from "the white Western women's movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movements in the non-Western world," but he also links its origins to the Carter administration's use of human rights to "campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies."
Massad writes, "Like the major US- and European-based human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white Western women's organizations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community" (p. 161).
Oddly, since this is central to his argument, Massad offers no evidence to substantiate his claim.
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A look at the activities of the main human rights organizations involved in global LGBT work suggests they do not, in fact, focus excessively or unfairly on Muslim countries.
Human Rights Watch, for instance, has more than 140 press releases on the LGBT section of its Web site, dating back to 1994. Among these, the country most targeted by the organization's "orientalists" is actually the United States -- the subject of 27 press releases. The US is followed by Egypt, Iran, Jamaica, and Russia (10 each), Nepal (8), Nigeria and Poland (6), the Netherlands (5), Australia, Moldova, and South Africa (4), Latvia, the Philippines, and Uganda (3), Guatemala, India, Japan, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe (2), while Bangladesh, Botswana, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Fiji, Lebanon, Namibia, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Zambia have one each.
The five people named in Human Rights Watch's most recent homophobia "hall of shame" also range across the world --Pope Benedict XVI, President George W. Bush, Roman Giertych, the Polish minister of education, Bienvenido Abante, a member of the Philippines parliament, and the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Meanwhile, a search of Amnesty International's online library, under the subject category "sexual orientation" reveals more than 190 items -- again, covering a broad range of countries with no obvious signs of a "special place" reserved for Muslims.
It is a similar picture on the Web sites of two other organizations targeted by Massad -- the International Lesbian and Gay Association and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
The credibility of Massad's argument also hinges on the idea that the "Gay International" is responsible, apparently almost single- handedly, for bringing debate about homosexuality to developing countries -- a phenomenon he terms "incitement to discourse" -- and is also responsible (pp. 188-189) for any backlash that may occur.
This is plainly ridiculous.
Contrary to the impression given by Massad, "the West" does not speak with a unified voice on matters of LGBT rights. While focusing on gay activists, he ignores the well-funded and often-strenuous campaigns by Western "pro-family" organizations to resist progressive legislation and, if possible, turn back the clock.
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When it comes to opposing gay rights, socially conservative Muslims and Christians seem happy to bury their theological and cultural differences. IslamOnline, one of the most popular Muslim Web sites, has a series of articles discussing homosexuality in "an Islamic and a scientific light," but the articles rely, almost entirely, on material from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a religious-based fringe psychiatric organization in the US which promotes "reparative therapy" for gay people.
In various international forums, Western evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons have forged alliances with Muslims to defend "the family." One such event was the conference held in Doha in 2004 under the auspices of the UN's Year of the Family. Hosted by the Qatari government and organized by the Mormons, it brought together some of the world's most reactionary forces, including Colombia's Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo, who campaigns against condoms on behalf of the Catholic Church, and Mahathir Mohamad, the dictatorial former prime minister of Malaysia who sacked and jailed his deputy for alleged homosexuality.
In the United States, "pro-family" organizations are among the Bush administration's core supporters, so whatever other "Western" ideas the US may seek to foist upon the Middle East, gay rights is not one of them.
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Perhaps the biggest flaw in Massad's argument is that his preoccupation with "orientalism," "social Darwinism," gay "missionaries," their "native informants," and the "imposition" of "Western modes" blinds him to more obvious developments on the ground in Islamic nations. The last decade has brought growing awareness of gay rights in many parts of the world, much of it involving local activists.
According to Scott Long, who heads the LGBT desk at Human Rights Watch, gay activism is growing in both Latin America and Africa.
"It's still relative, but 10 years ago, outside South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, there were no groups anywhere in Africa," he said. "Now, most Anglophone countries and an increasing number of West African countries have at least small organizations that are trying to do something.
"In Latin America there's a really vibrant movement that has connected with the left, and particularly in countries like Argentina and Chile there's a completely different atmosphere now. These issues have become respectable in a lot of places."
Among the more obvious factors is the growth of international communications -- satellite television, foreign travel, and the Internet. Massad does mention sex tourism, but only in the context of Western men; it seems not to have occurred to him that Arab men might do the same.
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The real issue is not the source of such concepts as "gay" and "sexual orientation" but whether they serve a useful purpose. For a small but growing number of Arabs who seek to understand their sexual feelings the answer seems to be yes.
And far from viewing these concepts as an imposition, they are eagerly grabbing at them.
For Massad, this is not a natural development but something being imposed on people -- to their detriment.
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According to Massad, "It is the very discourse of the Gay International which produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist" (pp. 162-3). In saying this, he revives an old and largely specious argument as to whether such people exist, and have existed, at all times and in all societies.
Denying their existence is a familiar practice in the Arab countries, and in other places where their rights are also denied, and it serves a political purpose -- if they do not exist, there is no need for any action to protect them.
The argument though, to the extent it has any substance, is more about terminology than anything else. International LGBT organizations, at least, those with even a modicum of expertise, recognize that same-sex emotions and activities do not necessarily come with an identity attached. Massad himself quotes Robert Bray, an officer of the International Lesbian and Gay Association, as saying, "Cultural differences make the definition and the shading of homosexuality different among peoples... But I see the real question as one of sexual freedom; and sexual freedom transcends cultures" (p. 162).
While it may be interesting to consider how far modern Western constructs of sexual identity have been adopted -- or not -- by various cultures, in terms of sexual rights the question is largely irrelevant. It is the behavior that is liable to be penalized, regardless of how people describe themselves.
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However, it is disingenuous to claim that most Arabs who engage in same-sex relations do not express a need for gay politics. Given the local conditions, they could scarcely do otherwise. Gay rights groups cannot operate freely, as Massad ought to know -- in most Arab countries, non-governmental organizations require approval from the authorities and their activities are closely monitored. The only openly functioning LGBT organizations in the Middle East are Helem in Beirut -- the least restrictive of the Arab capitals -- and Aswat, the Palestinian lesbian group based across the Green Line in Israel.
The result is that much Arab activism -- of all kinds regarding human rights-- is organized from abroad.
[...]