A (Mostly Homo) History of Arab Sexuality
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In tracing the origins of the book, Massad explains how what was supposed to be an intellectual history of Arab treatises on sexual desire became entangled with his anger against the application of Western sexual identity around the world. Consequently, Desiring Arabs reads like two books by two different authors fused uneasily together and sometimes undermining each other’s arguments. One project is a meticulous academic study bridging intellectual history and literary criticism by examining how Arab intellectuals and belletrists have dealt with sexuality. The other is a fuming diatribe against the Gay International’s attempts to apply gay identity politics to the Arab world.

The latter point is not novel. Many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians (including myself) have been engaged in the “essentialism vs. constructionism” debate for over three decades. It was the topic of a recent special issue of this Review. There are many variations of essentialism and constructionism, but the basic issue is whether same-sex attraction and sexual behavior are fundamentally the same phenomenon in all times and cultures (potentially for biological reasons) or whether they are quite different (even if they have a shared biological cause). While biological essentialism has great appeal (especially in the U.S.) and evidence for the biology of homosexuality—if it were robust—would seem to prove the essentialist case, this is not necessarily so. As an analogy, consider “adolescence.” When does it start, and when does it end? We could define it by certain changes in hormone levels, neurological changes, or somatic developments. However, that span of life is substantially different from one culture to another: in some it is time to work and get married, in others it is an extension of childhood. Similarly, same-sex sexuality can be defined in objective terms (as with the Kinsey scale) and may have an underlying biological etiology, yet be vastly different phenomena depending on the historical and cultural setting.

Massad’s first project is notable for his scholarly exploration of nonfiction works by Arab intellectuals since the late 19th century dealing with sexuality. Although Massad repeatedly claims to be examining sexual desire broadly, his primary focus is same-sex activity, particularly the love of youthful boys. Heterosexual desire and female sexuality are mentioned only sporadically. His theoretical touchstones throughout are Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and Edward Said’s influential analysis of Orientalism, which claimed that Western colonizers, scholars, and artists have exoticized or demonized Asia and the Middle East for centuries. For example, 19th-century French tourists to North Africa marveled or recoiled at what they perceived as unbridled sensuality and the sexual availability of young men. Not only has Orientalism justified imperialism as a “civilizing mission,” Said argued, but it has permeated the mindset of Arab elites who side with the West. (An aside: Massad broadly refers to the “Arab world”—meaning not just Arabic-speaking countries but also a larger Islamic circle including Persians.) Massad’s analysis continues this line of criticism, arguing that even those Arab writers who were self-consciously anti-Orientalist were engaged in a project to re-valorize the classical Arab and Islamic culture as a legitimate civilization according to Western metrics.

Perhaps the most challenging stumbling block in this Arab Renaissance project was boy love—the object of gushing poetic production in the early Islamic period. The primary figure here, and the most frequently cited by Massad, is Abu Nuwas (ca. 747–ca. 815). Abu Nuwas is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in classical Arabic. He was half Persian and lived most of his life in Baghdad—where his statue stood on a street that bore his name until 2003. Abu Nuwas is best known for his drinking songs and love poems dedicated to youthful boys. Both alcohol and homosexual acts are forbidden in Islam; yet, Abu Nuwas was brazenly cynical and hedonistic. He openly rejected pietism, the imams, and the Qur’an, as when he addresses a young boy: “When we meet, I delight in what the Book forbids.” Not surprisingly, Abu Nuwas was met with praise or persecution by the Abbassid rulers of the time, depending on their own politics and penchants towards boys and wine.

Although Massad liberally quotes from modern novels and plays, he provides not a single verse from Abu Nuwas, who sings the erotic joys of bathhouses and boasts of forcibly seducing young males. But most often he is lyrical and tender, as in the following (my transliteration from a French translation: Abu Nuwas’ Le vin, le vent, la vie, trans. Vincent-Mansour Monteil, 1979):

I die of love for him, in every way perfect,
Lost listening to music.
My eyes fix upon his delightful physique
While I cannot cease to marvel at his beauty.

Abu Nuwas is a real problem for Arab critics trying to demonstrate the greatness of Arab-Islamic civilization. Some simply overlook the poems to boys. Some claim he never really loved boys, or that the poems were commissioned for a girl seeking to woo a young man. Some critics blame his “debauchery” and this “deviant” lifestyle on the fact that he was Persian—voicing longstanding Arab enmity towards Persians that persists in contemporary Middle East politics. Some critics deflected their censure by analogizing boy love to the sodomy and licentiousness prevalent among the European aristocracy. Rare are the historians who praise Abu Nuwas’ rebellion against societal norms in order to argue for greater liberalism in modern Arab society. Massad’s point throughout this section is that these histories of medieval sexuality are histories of the present, reflecting the religious and political views of intellectuals. Their work is partly a criticism of 19th-century European Orientalism and partly an intervention into contemporaneous Arab politics. An analysis of Abu Nuwas and the 19th-century political uses of his poetry and legend would have been a fascinating account in its own right. However, Massad has another axe to grind: the Gay International.

The Androphile Project, a Web-based “world history of male love” seeks to excavate a global and eternal history of love between men. The site (www.androphile.org) proudly declares Abu Nuwas as “the first and foremost Islamic gay poet.” Although Massad does not mention the website in his book, this is just the sort of gay universalizing that seems to drive him mad. He is not alone in this. Again, this is the core of the social scientists’ “essentialism vs. constructionism” debate. As a scholastic, nominalist question, is it historically or anthropologically correct to apply the 20th-century label “gay” to same-sex behavior in other times and cultures that had their own terms for the behavior? I and others have argued that, among other things, such a move helps promote an imagined filiation of gays and lubricates global gay sex tourism. The globalization of gay identity, therefore, has repeatedly been criticized as another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism and paternalism: “backward” and “repressed” societies that closet or imprison people for homosexual acts need help from Western academics and activists to “catch up” to American standards of gay liberation. Of course, there is something slightly hypocritical about this global liberatory agenda, considering that the U.S. as a whole is not even close to being a paradise of sexual freedom: witness the ever-inflammatory issues of gay marriage, abortion rights, or gays in the military.

These gay academic and political issues have been bandied about for several decades. Massad has a more provocative argument: that the global gay agenda is actively harmful to same-sex lovers in the Arab world. Ultimately, he presents gay rights activists as gay jihadists whose intervention in the private business of sexuality in the Arab world only leads to unwelcome attention and reactionary persecution. He equates this process to the harsh condemnation of “sodomites” and “perverts” by radical Islamists. His evidence to support this attack against the “Gay International” is passionate but tenuous, or worse, internally contradictory. The first part of the book amply documents that, for a century before Stonewall activism, Arab writers were condemning same-sex acts with whatever terms or euphemisms they could find aside from “gay.”

Massad’s primary historical evidence is the Queen Boat case in Cairo. The case is extremely complex with multiple political underpinnings: briefly, the Cairo Vice Squad raided a floating nightclub in May 2001, detaining many men and eventually charging 52 men and one boy with “habitual practice of debauchery.” They were beaten and sexually abused in custody. Many were subjected to rectal electromyographic probes to determine if they were habitual passive sodomites—a pseudo-scientific test based on completely discredited 19th-century French forensic procedures. They were derided in the press and accused of being Satanists as well as “passive men.” The public humiliation crushed them and their families. As the case became more widely known, there was an outcry from human rights groups, notably Scott Long of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Long later published a detailed account of the case under the auspices of Human Rights Watch (“In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct,” 2004).

Massad argues that this Western intervention (by the “Gay International”) labeled the defendants as “gay,” leading to a media backlash against foreigners meddling in Egyptian cultural affairs as well as against the defendants themselves. While the press certainly did react to the foreign attention, the defendants had been vilified and abused long before Western groups intervened. Furthermore, as Massad notes, upper-class, Westernized Egyptians already self-identified as “gay.” More broadly, individuals around the world have adopted a gay identity and pushed for gay and lesbian community organizing and civil rights even prior to direct involvement by American gay activists. Massad is quick to dismiss these people and movements as unwitting agents of gay imperialism. Massad clearly has a very personal vendetta against Scott Long and other members of the “Gay International.” Many pages dealing with the topic are predominantly minuscule footnotes fulminating against gay rights activists, pro-Israel Jewish activists, and anti-Palestinians—including congressman Barney Frank. Massad’s ire sometimes leads to confounding leaps of logic in his attempts to conflate gay rights activists and Islamic jihadists.

It is hard to identify a constructive political agenda in Massad’s work. He is aware that same-sex activity is sometimes punished severely in the Arab world and is vocally condemned by Islamists. He does not sketch an idyllic Arab world of same-sex activity flourishing unchecked prior to meddling by the “Gay International.” To do so would ironically echo the Orientalizing accounts of 19th-century European travelers who indulged in the same-sex activities they discovered were so accessible in North Africa. However, the Euro-American model of gay sexuality (and sexuality more broadly) fits uneasily with many cultures—including rural Christian America. I am left wondering if Massad’s position is like that of an older generation of homophiles and homosexuals who, while not idealizing life before Stonewall, are nostalgic about the thrill of a discreet sexual life lived in the shadowy margins. George Chauncey’s Gay New York also describes the diversity of same-sex activities and identities that thrived on the fringes of town before the widespread publicity of gay identity politics made nominally heterosexual men fearful of indulging in sex with men. The film Brokeback Mountain also dramatized the freedom and suffering of rural American same-sex activity far from the constraints of bourgeois, urban gay identity. Alternatively (although Massad might balk at the suggestion) Arab same-sex activity could be interpreted as truly queer: not the “queer” that has been reified into a hipper label for young gays, but the “queer” of the late 1980’s that was about rejecting labels and resisting the politics of normalization and integration. Massad’s examples from Arab literature and cinema finely illuminate a plethora of same-sex desires and relationships that do not fit the Western gay model yet thrive (albeit sometimes in turmoil) in the ferment of Arab culture.

Sexuality does not come in just two flavors: homo- and heterosexual. It is a historically novel dichotomy in the West and, even then, it best describes urban, middle- and upper-class populations. Massad’s conspiratorial fulminations against the “Gay International” may obscure this broader point for some readers. In any case, his monograph is built on a tremendous amount of historical and literary scholarship and offers a provocative foray into same-sex sexuality in the Arab world.

Vernon Rosario, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is the author of Science and Homosexuality: A Guide to the Debates.