Desiring ArabsSexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 Anxiety in Civilization | 51 |
2 Remembrances of Desires Past | 99 |
The Gay International and the Arab World | 160 |
Taxonomies of Desires Present | 191 |
5 Deviant Fictions | 269 |
6 The Truth of Fictional Desires | 335 |
Conclusion | 415 |
Works Cited | 419 |
Name Index | 443 |
Subject Index | 449 |
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Common terms and phrases
Abbas Abbasid Abbasid period Abduh Abu Nuwas Abu Nuwas's Afsah Ahmad al-Adab al-Barr al-Din Al-Hayah al-Hilal Al-Hubb al-Jinsiyyah al-Munajjid al-Nashr al-Nuwayhi al-Tahtawi Amin Arab civilization Arab intellectuals Arab world Arabi Arabiyyah Bakr Beirut Bouhdiba Butrus al-Bustani Cairo caliphs century cited civilizational colonial concubines contemporary Arab crimes culture debates decadence degeneration Dik al-Jinn discourse disease edition Egypt Egyptian epistemology European Gay International ghazal Hatim homosexuality human rights Ibid Ibrahim insisted Islam Islamist jahiliyyah Khuri Lebanese Lesbian liberation literary literature lived Mahmud Maktabat male medieval Arab Midaq Alley modern Arab moral Muhammad Mursi Muslim nationalist novel Orientalist pleasure poet poetry political Press published Qur'an Qutb rape repression Riyad al-Rayyis Salamah Musa same-sex sapphism Sayyid Qutb sexual desires sexual deviance sexual practices Shukri social sodomy story Suha Taha Husayn Tarabishi tion transformation translated turath University Wannus Western woman women writings young youthful boys Zaydan
Popular passages
Page 111 - We are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has 196 its emergent, connecting and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies.
Page 21 - And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement— and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society— it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.
Page 8 - Europe - were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the Orient in the period after...
Page 191 - To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Page 8 - Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate, (p.
Page 9 - Within the Sotadic Zone, the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo...
Page 264 - ... made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of 'perversity'; but it also made possible the formation of a reverse discourse: homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.
Page 111 - We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a "structure": as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.
Page 8 - We may as well recognize that for nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as 'free' sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions - quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe - were useful as places to...
Page 433 - Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din 'al-Afghani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).