Is Joseph Massad's message, and Michel Foucault's and others' queer theory it draws upon, the same as opposition to those who "steer people away from religion, and to destroy 'the Muslim family'"? Only the theoretically illiterate or politically disingenuous would say that. :-0
On the contrary, Massad's book criticizes not only Orientalism of the "Gay International" but also secular Arab nationalist and Islamist discourses that seek to make pre-modern sexual discourses obsolete, pursuing the ideology of "progress" and adopting "a Victorian sexual ethic." The Financial Times reviewer -- either because he is smarter than Whitaker, Proyect, and Henwood or because, unlike them, he has no chip on his shoulder -- understands that.
BTW, see also Lenin's Tomb and As'ad AbuKhalil (who has a book on the topic at hand -- one with whose theory Massad takes issue) on Massad's work.
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d69aa534-4ed3-11dc-85e7-0000779fd2ac.html> Arabian rights
Review by John R. Bradley
Published: August 25 2007 01:35 | Last updated: August 25 2007 01:35
Desiring Arabs By Joseph A. Massad University of Chicago Press £22.50, 448 pages FT bookshop price: £18
Three decades after it first appeared, Edward Said's Orientalism continues to dominate discussion of the west's historic response to the Middle East. In Desiring Arabs, Said's disciple Joseph A. Massad largely corroborates his mentor's thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanising. Said came up short, argues Massad, only in not recognising how far that stereotype-laden discourse in the west also helped to shape Arab intellectual writing itself, especially on Arab sexual identities.
The work of the 8th-century Arab poet, Abu Nawas, lover of boys and wine, permeates Desiring Arabs as a marker of changing attitudes. Drawing on a vast array of Arabic sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries, Massad charts an increasingly shy and troubled discussion of Nawas's licentiousness. This, he shows, was often in the context of the adoption by local writers of western conceptions of "civilisation" and "progress".
"In the course of writing classical and medieval Arab history," Massad writes, "these modern historians encountered an ancient Arab society with different sexual mores and practices that were difficult to assimilate into a modern Arab nationalist project informed by European notions of progress and modernisation and a Victorian sexual ethic."
Imported western concepts such as "decadence" and "degeneration" further helped bury the reputation of Nawas – and, by extension, the relatively diverse, artistic and fun-loving period of Islamic history his poetry symbolised. By the early 20th century, his poetry had been censored from Arabic-language schoolbooks, and mentioned only to condemn him. As one Egyptian commentator put it, "boy love" was now considered a "disgrace" to Arab literature.
In an unlikely alliance, both Arab nationalists and increasingly bold Islamist thinkers and activists were eager to purge their history of boy-love sentiment. For the nationalists, the "dubious" ancestry of poets such as Nawas (of both Arab and Persian extraction) pointed to corrupting historical foreign influences. Islamists, meanwhile, presented the "decadent" Abbasid and Ummayad periods of Islamic history as a failure to emulate the life of the Prophet.
If Massad, a controversial professor at Columbia University, had stopped his intellectual inquiries at this point, this would still have been an extraordinary book. Massad brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalised, orientalist discourse right up to the present.
For example, in 1973 Raphael Patai published his infamous book The Arab Mind, which taught that Arabs are repressed and especially susceptible to sexual torture. Massad presents this as a kind of "how-to" manual by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
It is fitting that the statue of Nawas, in the street named after him in Baghdad, should provide the book's only illustration. Wine glass in hand, he towers over the chaos of occupation and the debates about the future of his monument – perhaps proving that great poetry stands the ravages of time.
John R. Bradley is author of 'Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis' (Palgrave Macmillan).
<http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2007/06/when-his-enemies-were-busy-vilifying.html> Wednesday, June 20, 2007
When his enemies were busy vilifying him and spreading lies about him, my dear comrade and friend, Joseph Massad was working on this book. Go buy it NOW. This may be the final word on the subject of sexuality in the Middle East (although he does not have a chapter on shoes in Arab culture). You can't teach on gender and sexuality in the Middle East without this book. Now, I can tell readers to skip chapter 3 in which the author subjects me (ME, the all-knowing one), to "hard-hitting criticisms" as he said in the acknowledgment, but this is a brilliant chapter that can't be ignored even if you disagree with the author. But don't worry: for that chapter, I will now always throw sharp metal objects at Joseph whenever I see him--as a punishment (don't worry: throwing sharp metal objects (not shoes) at somebody is not considered offensive in Arab culture.)
<http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/08/tehran-terror-and-colonial-mystique.html> Wednesday, August 01, 2007 Tehran, terror and colonial mystique. posted by lenin
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Old habits die hard. Islam still confounds the Orientalists, and they still pull their hair out over the unique eschatology of the Republic and the President's correspondence with the Hidden Imam. What does he wants those nuclear power stations for? (They might also ask for what secret end the Iranian regime is harnessing windpower? <http://pepei.pennnet.com/display_article/294265/89/ARTCL/none/none/Winds-of-change/>) Isn't he a mad man? As Joseph Massad points out in 'Desiring Arabs', this Orientalism has been smuggled into human rights and gay liberation discourse by those who ought to know better: the certainty that there is something unique about Islam that proscribes and punishes homosexuality went alongside propagandistic claims by the ILGA and others about the "mass execution" of homosexuals in Iran. There is today a bitter argument among human rights activists, Iranian diasporists, gay rights activists and so on about the extent of repression of gays in Iran. (See this angry debate, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlDFDEvm1FI> for example). As Rostam Pourzal <http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/pourzal220507.html> points out, a number of gay rights organisations have pointedly shunned the claims being made in some quarters about an anti-gay "pogrom" in Iran. The Iranian government is repressive of all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage, but I suspect that the claims now being made by a few individuals - often transmitted through Peter Tatchell who is totally unreliable these days - reflect the state of Western liberalism, and not the state of Iran. They reflect the obsession of liberals with Islam and questions of identity, and they also provide, whether they mean to or not, one plank in a propaganda campaign against a country that Washington is currently targeting. -- Yoshie