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Gay
International is a crack troops of imperialism:
Fathers of men
Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs,
University of Chicago Press, 2007
reviewed by Eric Walberg
The Western "civilising" project in its many guises
has given rise to strange bedfellows. Not only do Christian and Islamic
fundamentalists -- officially enemies of each other -- find common cause in
demanding more public displays of religiosity and less liberal social policies
regarding sex. In fact, as Joseph Massad shows in his new book, Desiring
Arabs, both parties -- again, paradoxically, as enemies of the international
gay movement -- actually work in tandem with that very movement, aiding in the
process of defining people according to the Western paradigm of hetero-homo
sexual categories, which, prior to the 19th century, did not even exist.
This is the central thesis in Massad's controversial
study, which surveys Arab social history as constructed by Arab scholars and
writers themselves from the 19th century on, heavily influenced by Western
thought and research methods.
Since the French and British invasions of the Arab
world in the 19th century, Western methodology has been adopted by Muslim
scholars analysing their own history (in Western terminology, "heritage"),
producing the paradigm of the decadent, backward, unreformed past, which
required an "Arab renaissance" (a project which dates from the late
19th century) and the adoption of the so-called Western civilising mission of
modernity -- the separation of the state and the religious establishment,
electoral democracy, industrialisation, "emancipation" of women, now including
the codification of people according to some essentialist sex drive.
Western studies of the Middle East from the
19th century on developed into a school widely called Orientalism, which
recognises Islam as a variant of Christianity but still defines it as
"un-culture". The missionary aim was not so much Christianisation as
modernisation. Missionaries from the start saw Islam as some form of Christian
heresy, realising that Muslims understood their creed as God's final correction
of the monotheistic faith which encompasses Judaism and Christianity, but which
in these versions had been corrupted by adherents, making reversion to
Christianity apostasy. Religion remains embedded in the lives of Muslims in way
it is not for Christians or Jews, and "reforming" this seems to be the focus of
the civilising mission today.
The same essentially missionary aim of the West took
a very different path in non-literate Africa, where animistic religions could
adapt and absorb Christianity relatively easily.
Whereas in the Middle Ages the West viewed the Muslim
world as licentious, permitting perversions such as sodomy, by the 19th century,
the tables were turned, with the Muslim world viewing the West as licentious,
the intervening development being the rise of capitalism in the West and the
degeneration of morals in cities. The rising middle class developed the
proverbial Victorian prudishness, which became the template for a reactive
Muslim morality, condemning what came to be known as homosexuality (a medical
term first coined in Europe in the 19th century). Over the next century and a
half, manifestations of this "disease" were considered a direct consequence of
Western interference in the Islamic world, the sense behind Iranian President
Ahmedinejad's insistence that "There is no such thing as homosexuality in
Iran."
Along with this new Victorian prudery came a yet
another reaction: the "gay liberation" movement. Both trends presuppose that
people can be catalogued according to some innate sexual preference. While the
conservatives deplore these defective souls, gay lib has lauded them as unjustly
oppressed and demanded equal rights with heterosexuals (another newly coined
medical term). This Manichean worldview is still the dominant framework for both
pro and anti parties, the latter now including religious fundamentalists of all
faiths.
The Western mission picked up steam in the late
1960s, with feminism and gay lib in the West and the failure of Nasserist
socialism and Arab nationalism. The latter were of course defeated by that other
"civilising" mission of the West: Zionism. With the Arab world weak and divided,
its intellectual arm became even more captive to the Orientalist post-colonial
agenda, backed by the West's imposing economic might. The socialist bloc's
influence continued to weaken, and today virtually all intellectual life is
dominated by Western concepts and categories, including sexual ones. 1967 was a
turning point for the Arab world, not only politically, but in all aspects of
life, and only Islam could provide an alternative worldview, though one which
already severely crippled by Western cultural hegemony, comprador regimes and,
when these fail, overt aggression.
Whatever their intent, international gay activists
have ended up replicating and even strengthening in other cultures the very
situation of repression they set out to challenge in their own countries. Massad
writes, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be
universalised by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the
rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is
to defend the very people their intervention is creating."
The advocates of this paradigm advocate what looks
like a scientific, essentialist programme that the entire world should adopt.
What it is, however, is a kind of Western secular nativism seeking to replace
what it sees as backward nativisms everywhere, forcing one and all to choose
their slot. Woe to those who reject their paradigm, for the comprador elites and
religious establishment have already been forced to fight the battle on the
West's terms, implicitly accepting the Western paradigm as their own.
Practitioners of msm (men having sexual relations with men) who reject the gay
slot created for them by Western activists are catalogued as "self-hating" and
guilty of "homosexual homophobia".
***
But could it be that the entire Orientalist
framework, now including gay and lesbian "human rights", is a complete scam?
While there are indeed sexual acts between men or between women, these acts must
always be considered in their social setting. Msm occurs in varying degrees in
all societies but in radically different ways, just as it does in nature. Even
for biological oddities such as hermaphroditism, however, it is contrary to
nature to divide people up merely according to their acts. Msm increases in
certain social settings, such as urbanisation, segregation, commodification,
war, social trauma, repressive upbringing and others, which can be explored by
social scientists. But in non-literate societies, while rare instances of
crossdressing and role reversal have happened, most msm takes place without much
notice, and is more or less widespread depending on the social setting in which
the acts are embedded.
The difference between East and West in this respect,
as Massad suggests, lies in the fact that the entire so-called civilising
mission has not been completed in the Arab world. The struggle over "gay rights"
is merely one, albeit an increasingly important arena for this struggle. I would
add that the real difference is the relative lack of objectification in the
Muslim world prior to the invasions of the colonial era and the imposition of
Western capitalism and science.
The supposedly scandalous verses of the medieval poet
Abu Nuwas were more of a problem to the prudish Victorians than they ever were
to Arabs or Muslims. Even Mahfouz's 1947 Midaq Alley shows the main
character Kirshah infatuated with a young man, which only becomes a scandal when
he fails to keep his liaison discrete and his headstrong (and jealous) wife
finds out. His 1957 Sugar Street, by contrast, portrays a very different
scenario, with the now Western homosexual stereotype embodied in the thoroughly
Westernised upper class Pasha and his protege Radwan, whose desires constitute
an identitarian self-questioning, spurning women, diseased, not fitting into
society, identifying with the colonial mentality which the ruling elite now
embraces. Significantly, Radwan is condemned not by his Islamist cousin, but by
his communist one.
Traditional Islamic society operated on the principle
of social order, tolerating sins such as fornication and msm so long as they are
sufficiently discrete. It defined man as a social being with social obligations,
not an isolated ego pursuing his individual desires. Though communism is in
other respects the logical conclusion of the civilising mission, in practice
communist regimes tolerated discrete msm much like traditional Muslim societies,
not attempting to colonise desire to the same extent that capitalism does.
Today the civilising mission of the "Gay
International" (as Massad provocatively puts it) is to pluck individuals out of
their social setting, forcing them to define their very essence according to
certain acts, and then endow them with universal personal rights to perform
these acts and encourage others to perform these acts wherever they like, be it
in Teheran, Mecca or New York. In pursuing this invasive policy, it continues
the work of Christian missionaries, paving the way for the economic system that
imperialism seeks to spread across the world, giving Western forces more room to
incorporate other societies into its domain, and in the process, rewriting
history.
This vital and obvious point escapes even the
venerated iconoclast Michel Foucault, author of the monumental History of
Sexuality, who omits the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions
and constructions of sexuality, implicitly endorsing the universalist agenda.
Foucault lists the objects of discourse on sexuality from the 19th century as
"the masturbating child, the `hysterical woman', the Malthusian couple, and the
perverse adult", but critic Ann Stoler argues that Foucault ignores that all
four imply "a racially erotic counterpoint", "the libidinal energies of the
savage, the primitive, the colonised".
Not all Westerners are caught up in this Orientalist
subterfuge. Some Western novelists have shown an appreciation of the value of
social mores that the civilising mission is intent on destroying, much as
Western ecologists struggle to save endangered species such as whales or apes.
Edward Said argues that André Gide, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, E M
Forster, Paul Bowles and others saw in the colonial setting "a different type of
sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt-ridden", and cherished it
in the face of Victorian repression and objectification. But this anti-modern
trend in thinking still has no articulate spokesman other than Said and Massad.
Massad's frontal assault on the gay lib crusade aimed
at the Muslim world is a defiant call to resist the Orientalist project. Massad
in effect describes a litmus test for anyone, Western or Eastern, as to whether
they understand the Arab world: whether or not s/he resists the slick campaign
to divide people according to their sexual acts, a false duality. The fact that
the battleground is the Middle East is no coincidence. The litmus test for the
other Western "civilising" project here is of course whether s/he resists the
project to divide people according to a false concept of race. Ironically, it is
Muslims who stand in the way of both.
Massad hints that overcoming the capitalist and
colonial mindset in both centre and periphery will require bringing the sacred
back into sexuality; in fact, rediscovering the sacred, which Western
secularised society has lost. It is the West that must learn from the East, not
vice versa. This was recognised long ago by Muslims visiting Europe. The imam
Rifaah Al-Tahtawi visited Paris in 1834 and noted "the dearth of chastity among
many of their women, and the lack of jealousy among their men... how... adultery
for them is a vice and a shame but not a primary sin... [Paris] is charged with
abominations, innovations, and perdition, although the city of Paris is the
wisest city of the entire world and the home of world-based science." The
contradiction between this admiration for the secular achievements of the West
and disgust with the social mores would remain the dominant theme for East-West
relations over subsequent centuries.
One generalisation of the Orientalists that rings
true is that Western societies suffer from guilt (they argue this is because
only Westerners have a conscience), while Arab societies suffer mainly from
shame. Rather than a more elevated conscience in Westerners, in fact, evidence
points towards a less destructive and freer conscience in non-Western societies.
Errant or questionable behaviour from society's point of view is tolerated as
long as it is discrete, governed by the individual's sense of obligation to the
community, which is also that individual's conscience.
Why is guilt "better" than shame, or more
conscionable? A society less addicted to guilt is by no means less developed,
and in fact most likely provides greater positive emotional orientation than one
steeped in guilt, as indeed Christian society has been. The Western secular aim
to do away with guilt, to embrace acts which were formerly considered
antisocial, such as fornication and msm, has hardly created a social paradise,
considering the malaise of Western society, not to mention its wars. Where is
the accounting for the sins of US leaders who condoned widespread torture,
including sexual torture? Where is the guilt in such figures as Bush or Cheney?
The rise of gay lib in the West resulted from a
complexity of factors, including the relatively repressive nature of
Christianity/Judaism, the rise of capitalism, and urbanisation. The
imposition of this paradigm on the Muslim world is more than an affront. It has
produced both greater official repression of any social deviance and, at the
same time, a proliferation of sexual tourism, with Western gays finding the less
rigid sexuality of the Muslim world liberating despite official opprobrium. This
is a dilemma for Western-oriented Arab regimes, which want to benefit
financially from tourism but are ultimately the protectors of their societies,
undermining their legitimacy.
***
Arab intellectuals have for the most part gone along
with the Western universalist agenda, leaving the field bereft of any
substantive critique prior to Massad's. For instance, Lebanese writer Rayyan Al-Shawaf
criticises "Massad's relativism -- stemming from his accurate observation that
`homosexuality' is alien to Arab same-gender sexual traditions," which
implicitly rejects any "call for universal freedom of sexual identity." Al-Shawaf
argues that, "in postulating the inevitability of (heterosexual) Arab violence
wherever there is gay and lesbian assertiveness, Massad pre-emptively exonerates
the perpetrators -- whether individuals or the state -- of any wrongdoing.
However regrettable their behaviour, those Arabs who react violently to the gay
rights campaign are not perceived by Massad as responsible for their actions,
but as caught up in a broader struggle against `imperialism', to which the
gay rights movement is wedded."
It is hardly fair to put such words into Massad's
mouth. However, his call for historicising and socialising sexual relations does
challenge and even threatens the entire Arab intellectual world, including Al-Shawaf.
Rather, Massad points to the direction that further intellectual reflection
should take. Frequent attempts to waylay medieval and other authors writing in
Arabic into the gay lib camp are exposed as fraudulent, as is the mistake of
projecting current Western analytical categories onto other cultures and other
eras. The only universal here is the eternal gap between labels on the one hand
and the polymorphous, elusive, mysterious nature of sexual desire on the other.
When it comes to sex, so to speak, nothing is black-and-white.
Just as the West's "civilising" missions in Iraq and
Afghanistan are grimly moving forward, despite the horror they are inflicting on
all who come in contact with them, the Disneyfication of social life throughout
the Arab world grinds on, however entertaining and superficially comforting it
may be to those Arabs literate enough to read subtitles. But both missions are
in trouble, faced with committed Islamic and other opposition (the socialist and
nationalist forces are not completely defeated, despite being heavily
compromised).
Of course, the entire arsenal of the West is hard at
work supporting the mission. Take, for instance, "honour" crimes in Muslim
countries, which are loudly and incessantly condemned in the Western media,
having been taken entirely out of context. While any murder is heinous, the
context here is that Muslim countries actually have far lower murder rates than
Western countries, and in fact one third of all women murdered in the US are
murdered by boyfriends or husbands. Rare floggings and hangings for sexual
crimes in the Muslim world (sometimes captured on a mobile phone and broadcast
around the world) contrast with the daily nightmare of US prisons, where rape
and drug addiction are endemic, or the brutality of Western police in
intimidating the brave souls who dare protest the outrages of Western
imperialism.
The true success of modernity can perhaps best be
judged by the fact that the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the
world.
There is a need for a discourse that "can invoke
older forms, identities, and practices in the service of a future that is not
just social reproduction or degeneration," i.e., not just reproducing
the existing reactive impasse, not caving in to the Western imperial agenda. The
first step is to make clear that Orientalism's cultural framework is at the
heart of the problem, a task which Massad fulfils admirably. The place of sexual
desire in the discourses and practices of modernity must be opened up, freed of
the phoney universalising agenda. "It is at these rarer moments when the
imposition and seduction of Western norms fail that the possibility of different
conceptions of desires, politics, and subjectivities emerges."
As Sultan, the hero of Youssef Edriss's last short
story, Abu Al-Rigal (Father of Men) shows, the crisis in male identity in
the Arab world is partially self-induced (failure, cowardice), keeping in mind
that the pressure of capitalism and the West remains the overriding force, the
overriding engine of perversion.
***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You
can reach him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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