Joseph Massad’s new book, “Desiring Arabs”, is basically a modern Arab intellectual history, but with many a groundbreaking and provocative twist.

In a sense, it takes up where Edward Said left off, expanding the analysis of Orientalism into new, uncharted and previously concealed territory to reveal its influence “in shaping the Arabs’ own perception of themselves and each other”.

(p. 48)

From the start, Massad warns that words are never neutral. One is forced to rethink many commonly used terms and concepts, from culture and civilisation to sexuality and deviance. Since the currently accepted definitions of terms such as culture and civilisation arose in the age of colonialism, they reflect Eurocentric value judgements.

What is new (and perhaps controversial to some) is Massad’s documentation of the extent to which Arab intellectuals internalised these norms. This began with the Arab renaissance, when they sought to carve out Arab culture and identity in opposition to their Ottoman rulers and, in the process, echoed the European designation of the Ottomans as decadent.

“In adopting this Weltanschauung, Arab intellectuals also internalised the epistemology by which Europeans came to judge civilisations and cultures along the vector of something called ‘sex’, as well as its later derivative, ‘sexuality’, and the overall systematisation of culture through the statistical concept of ‘norms’, often corresponding to the ‘natural’ and its ‘deviant’ opposite.” (p. 6)

Western presumptions about Arabs’ sexuality are not without practical effects. Massad gives startling examples of their repercussions, from the torture methods used by the British colonial army against Palestinian revolutionaries in the 1930s to the US army’s scandalous abuse at Abu Ghraib, and the persecution of allegedly gay males in Egypt.

In short, what is civilised or normal depends on who is crafting the definitions and, ultimately, on who wields power. This realisation has broad implications in the fields of history, anthropology and other social sciences, and is no less true in today’s increasingly globalised discourse.

As Massad shows, human rights and development advocates continue to be steered by Western-derived definitions of human behaviour and progress, which ignore the self-perceptions of the group or country targeted for study or intervention. This makes their role comparable to the missionaries of old, often with counterproductive or outright deleterious effects, regardless of their intentions.

The substance of “Desiring Arabs” is a detailed examination of how modern Arab scholars and fiction writers have represented Arab sexual desires over the years. The material reviewed by Massad is amazingly comprehensive, covering a time span of over a century and all major schools of thought from Arab nationalist to Marxist to Islamic. Their writings come in many forms and genres - academic, literary, journalistic and theological - and touch on many subjects related to sexuality, such as heritage, women’s status, health issues and how state policy has dealt with “deviance”.

The chapter on literature, stretching from Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz and Ghalib Halasa to very current writers like Hanan Al Sheikh, Sunallah Ibrahim and Alaa Al Aswany, is especially fascinating, not least because Massad also critiques the films made of their novels. But the real importance of literature for the book’s analysis is that, unlike non-fiction, novels attempt to “represent how desire, deviant or normative, is lived in contemporary Arab societies”. Still, as Massad notes, these novels “reveal more about the reigning ideas in society than they do about the actual reality they purport to depict”. (p. 272)

Like Massad’s two previous books, “Desiring Arabs” is meticulously researched and documented, using a broad spectrum of Arabic, English and French sources. Touching on so many disciplines as it does, the book inspires - or provokes - a radically new way of looking at human identity, culture and social behaviour, in part based on a more objective assessment of the past. That is also the author’s intent.

As he says: “I have not merely been interested in recording important debates and representations in modern Arab intellectual history, but also in gesturing towards their importance for an undetermined future yet to come, indeed to resist the attempts by a number of forces to determine and script that future a priori.” (p. 417)

Massad is in effect calling for a new Arab renaissance, but he probably wouldn’t use that term.

This book can be found at Boustan Bookstore.

Sally Bland