Sunday, July 21, 2019

There is no HOMO-Sexuality

There is no Sexuality between men (nor between women).
The word "Sexuality" was coined in contradistintion from A-Sexuality.
That "sexuality" got a new meaning about a hundred years later,
is irrelevant.
It's just stupid to give a VERY different meaning to a well established word,
when there are already many words for that (eros, lust, arousal, foreplay, afterplay, sensuality ...)

Just like "radical" means "to the roots, from the roots" and not "extremist",
just like "inter-ntional" means not "foreign" nor "cosmopolitan" nor "un-american" nor global,
(there is trade between nations, there are flights between nations, but people can not be between nations.)
"sexuality" does not means "eroticsm", nor "sensuality",
sexuality only exists between two sexes!

Saturday, July 20, 2019

German or not German?

Essentialists say that Madeleine Albright is and always was Jewish, that Catherine the Great and Handel were German.There is a History of Germans in Russia
Although each German state had its own laws, Germans jurists had a jurists association, including the Austrian jurists. There is "Anglo-Saxon", "North-American", "U.S.ian", "British," but in 1880 "German" could still mean German including Austrians, just as Mozart and Beet­hoven were Germans (living in Vienna). Now he have "German-speaking countries" which includes German-speaking Switzer­land and Lichten­stein. "Germans" still includes Frenchman in Elass and in parts of Lorraine, in Luxemburg, Belgium, Italia and Rumania, Namibia and Brasil.
Napoleon was told, that some of his generals were speaking German among themselves. He answered: As long as they win battles for France, I don't cake what they speak.
German can refer to state, nation ((I know that in the U.S.A. these are almost the same, but that is not so in most languages)), language, culture, people ...
"Homosexual" can refer to a prefered object choice, to a loving relation, to dirty sex, to just sex, to many kinds of relationships.
Some people honestly believe that the qurʾān does say nothing on homosexual acts, because the word does not occur and because the story of the Cities of the Plain is not about gay marriage.
Yes, it is not about loving relations between two men.
It is about sex between men.
That it is about sex in which the pleasure of one party is important while pleasure/ lust/ initiative of the other party is irrelevant, does not make it non-homosexual.
Once you work with that category, there is no way out: the qurʾān say something about it.
Yes: a man can have sex with a man, without being a "homosexual".
And you can declare: There is no homosexuality, nowhere, never! It is a stupid category.
But to say: Homosexuality exists, and: Bible and Qurʾān say nothing about it
makes no sense.

real changes

As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist who lives and teaches in the United States, affirms that "homo­sexual" iden­tities and what he calls "pure homo­sexuals" have existed in Arab/Islamic civi­li­za­tion. AbuKhalil confidently asserts that the "idea that there were no self-declared lesbians (suha­qiy­yat) or gay men is false" ... AbuKhalil refers to "homo­sexuals," "gays," "hetero­sexuals," and "homo­phobia" as trans­historical identities and phenomena and ana­chronis­tically identifies people and practices with them. For example, he cites medieval Arabic books that "contain collections of poetry and anecdotes by and about gay men and women" ... "When homo­sexuals were hunted down as criminals in much of medieval Europe, homosexuals were rulers and ministers in Islamic countries". This identitarian essentialism characterizes AbuKhalil's entire approach.

Muslim rule did not bring big economic changes, the currencies stayed the same. It just stimulated trade by doing away with the Byzantium-Persia border. Neither in the cities nor on the countryside the mode of production changed; slave plantations and state-run manufactories were marginal. Agriculture followed natural conditions. Craftsmen and traders were the backbones of the urban economy. The legal form of the land rent changed, but its level stayed more or less the same.

Society used to be patriarchal, was patriarchal, stayed patriarchal. In the public sphere, men stayed among themselves. Marriages were contracted between men to make alliances between families and to guarantee procreation. Normally wives were younger, less educated and from the same (or a lower) social stratum. Men were not excepted to love their wives; for that, they had horses, falcons, young slaves (of both sexes), friends, sons.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Orientalism, the book

There are two sides to Edward Said's Orientalism. It's seminal: many prints, many translations, many articles about it, generator of Post­colonial Studies. But weak on facts, selective focus (in spite of general claims), a complete failure.
Its thesis: the West dominates the East because Western scholars master Eastern subjects. The premises: from Homer to Kissinger the world is divided between a rational Occident and an irrational Orient — at the same time, Said writes: The Orient is a creation of Western scholars = the Orient is not real, hence there can be no fact chequing, because there can be no adequatio rei et intellectus, between the orient of things and the Orient in books, because there is no real orient. When several writers agree on a subject, according to Said, they copied from each other; that they agree with observable facts is out of the question.
Orientalism is not about "truth" (p 21), it's about internal con­sistency (p 22).
So Said dispensed himself from studying the East before writing about it (before writing about French intellectuals he studied their writings; but the orien­talist Orient he wrote about he studied second hand, the orient not at all). But — to his ever­lasting shame — sometimes he could not resist. Edward, the son of a Presbyterian American, thinks he knows enough of things Middle Eastern, because of Arab blood running through his veins — his family is neither Muslim nor Oriental Christan (Copts, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian), nor half Oriental (like Maronites or Greek Orthodox) but Anglo-Protestant, he has never been to an Arab school, he does not read Arabic.

Said: „Bethlehem, whose etymological meaning Chateaubriand got completely wrong“ (p. 172) » Bethléhem signifie la Maison de Pain. « (Œuvres complètes de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand, Paris: Garnier, 1861 V 281) — correct! And "etymological" is out of place. Köln and Augsburg go back to Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium resp. Aelia Augusta, but Neapoli (Greek: New City), Bethlehem (Hebrew: House of Bread) have a meaning, no need for "etymology"; Said has to show off — like by "an etymological, dynastic notion of linguistic filiation" (p. 135).

When you read Orientalism carefully you will often cry or laugh — or just wonder:
How can Said transform "[to an ordinary Muslim] religion meant everything." (H A R Gibb) to "Islam is or means everything" (and its opposite)?
I propone that Said knows near to nothing on Islam. "it is time to mention Gibb's ... assertion that the Islamic master science is law ... not theology. The curious thing about [this] is that the assertion [is] made ... not on the basis of evidence internal to islam, but rather on the basis of a logic delibe­rately outside Islam." (p. 280) Rubbish. Take any sample of 1000 ʿUlema at any place and time, you will find 100 jurists for each theo­logian, take any 1000 Arabic Muslim books, you will find many more on law, than of the nature of God. Compared to Gibb Said knows nothing about Islam.
And I go further. I will argue with him on a point, where he is not the only ignoramus, but has many on his side: "Now it is time to mention Gibb's preference for the word Mohammedanism over Islam (since he says that Islam is really based upon an idea of apostolic succession culminating in Mohammed)" (p. 280) When Khomeini declared Salman Rushdi an outlaw, many Islamologist wrote that he was condemned for blasphemy. Annemarie Schimmel was the only one, who knew at once, that his crime was sabb an-nabī; she knew that in India there are millions of Muslim declaring their love for Muhammad, that in Arabia hundred thousands chant of al-nûr al-Muḥammadī, that in Turkey pious Muslims have a Hilye, a description of the beauty of Muhammad on their reception room wall. In Islam there is no blasphemy, just the crime "denigration of the Messenger"! God is so exhalted, he is in no need, he does not care what humans do to his honour.
Wahhabis and Ed Said get angry, they claim that calling islam "Muhammadism" makes Muhammad into a God. Does Ed think "Jainismus" makes Jina to God, "Zoroastrianism" Zoroaster to God, "Manichaeism" Mani to God, "Buddhism" Buddha to God? Jews call their religion "Mosaic" promoting Moses to God? One can study the religious practice of Muslims and find "Muhammedanism" a proper name, it does not show that you had a "preconception". You can call someone "Mormon" instead of "Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", and you can call Edward "an arse­hole" although he himself doesn't find that appropriate. Islam is "submission (to God's will)", so Adam is muslim, Jesus is Muslim, and Abraham is the most muslim of all, ready to sacrifice his only legitimate son. If Islam is the religion of all prophets, the religion reinvigorated by Muhammad needs a name of its own! Take that, you idiot Anglican Protes­tant American Professor! Playing Wagner on the piano doesn't teach you enough to pontificate to Gibb on Muhammedanism!

"First Persia, Syria, and Egypt, then Turkey, then North Africa fell to the Muslim armies" (p 59) Turkey was conquered more than 400 years after North Africa (even if we do not count Egypt which certainly is part of North Africa). "By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Islam ruled as far east ... Indonesia, and China." (p 59) Tiny parts of (modern) Indonesia had to wait till the 16th century, the rest much longer, and China is still waiting to be ruled by Islam.

The next quote shows, that his Greek is not as good as he thinks it is:
"Mohammed's punishment is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante's verse at this point spares the reader none of the eschatological (sic) detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Mohammed's entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy." (p. 68) Lyer! Dante speaks neither of cask and staves, not does he describe Muhammad's solid metabolic waste in "detail ... with unflinching accuracy."
canto XXVIII
Un diavolo è qua dietro che n’accisma
sì crudelmente, al taglio de la spada
rimettendo ciascun di questa risma,

quand’avem volta la dolente strada;
però che le ferite son richiuse
prima ch’altri dinanzi li rivada.

    Look at how mangled is Mohammed here!
    In front of me, Ali treks onward, weeping,
    His face cleft from his chin to his forelock.

    And all the others whom you see down here
    Were sowers of scandal and schism while
    They lived, and for this they are rent in two.

    A devil goes in back here who dresses us
    So cruelly by trimming each one of the pack
    With the fine cutting edge of his sharp sword

    Whenever we come round this forlorn road:
    Because by then our old wounds have closed up
    Before we pass once more for the next blow.
Or does he have an other Italian text?

Let's have a look at Said specimen of Orientalists. He focuses on French and English, which is fine, but his "reasons" are dishonest: When the connection between scholarship, belle-lettre and empire are the main interest, where is Portugal, where are the Netherlands? Maybe because Said does not read Portuguese, nor Dutch? Maybe because they had no colonies near Palestine? He discards Germans, Russian. Fine, but why does he count the Hungarian Jew Ignaz Goldziher as German? ((This is the only point not taken from my 35 years old notes; this article gives my fresh impression after reading Orientalism soon after it was published, with just al-ʿAẓm's and Parker's reviews taken in. At the time I did not know that Goldziher had written a lot in Hungarian.)) When he counts Burkhardt as Swiss although he does not write in Swiss, Goldziher can not be among the Germans.
His pioneers, d'Herbelot and de Sacy, are well taken, but both unfairly criticized, not because Said is an unfair polemicist (which he is), but because he does not know a thing about oriental literatures. He castigates d'Herbelot for „a triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the Orient and making it systematically, even alphabetically, knowable by Western laymen “ (p. 65), „the dangers of free-wheeling heresy are removed when it is transformed into ideologically explicit matter for an alphabetical item.“ (p. 66). Said does not know that the Bibliothèque oriental is based on Ottoman Kaššaf al-Zunûn by Ḥāǧǧī Ḫalīfa, which is alphabetical (!), nor that it was 1835 published in an Arabic&Latin edition in London.
Silvestre de Sacy is accused of working with fragments, of atomizing Arab poems; again Said ignores that Arabs (a) decreed that poems should be like a necklace of pearls (= each line should stand on its own, a perfect pearl); this is called by Th. Kowalski 'molecular structure' (Cf. Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung , pp. 20-31; van Gelder, Beyond the Line 14-22. (b) that Arabs published anthologies of parts of poems, (c) that Arab poets liked to make poems that started (or ended) with a line from a known poem by someone else — the device is called taḍmīm, (4) that Arab prose books were interspersed with poetic "fragments".

Nerval, Chateaubriand, Flaubert are prominent in his book because Said knows them well. I doubt that Renan is an Orientalist scholar, rather a public intellectual, a stylist, a narcissistic player with words (less than content), a Said if his time.
What Said writes about Goethe and Marx is non-sense. "Goethe's West-Östlicher Diwan ... was based on a Rhine journey" (p. 19) It's based on translations by Hammer-Purgstall and William Jones, he never made a Rhine journey, but a journey to his home town, Frankfurt on the Main, from where he made a short trip to the Rhine. Both al-ʿAẓm and Parker were appaled by what Said wrote on Marx, so am I.
His liking for Massignon, tormented by homosexual desire, uncontrollable by crazy mysticism, looks odd to me. That he treats Bernard Lewis endlessly without paying much attention to Lewis's main subject (Turkey) strikes me as strange: but Said mentions the Ottoman Empire only in passing — for him Empires must be European to deserve attention.

I did not need to read the books by Ibn Warraq and Daniel M Varisco to know that Ed Said's book is just hot air — I had read Maxime Rodinson's book on Oriental studies; so I saw the deficiencies and mistakes for myself. I read the reviews by Sadik Jalal al-Azm and by J S F Parker. I think Irfan Khawaja is giving to much weight to the book by exposing its poor logic. Ed has had no interest in reasoning. He wanted to convince Washington that their investment in Israel as unsinkable aircraft carrier was stupid, that Palestine was a much better bridgehead in the oil-rich Arab world, that the friend of the Soviets, Yassir Arafat, was not the only Palestinian to negotiate with. He hoped to become the Palestinian Chaim Weitzman: Like the Zionist socialists had needed someone in London, who knew the manners and customs of Westminster, he offered to be the PLO's interpreter in Washington — to be rewarded by becoming the figurehead president of the future state. That was the agenda behind the triptych of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. Today most observers are to young to remember what Saids aim was, and to see that it was a complete failure.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

JSF Parker: From Aeschylus to Kissinger

Orientalism by
Edward W Said; Routledge and Kegan Paul (London),
1978, xi+ 368pp, index, £8.95 and £3.95

In classifying and castigating Western attitudes towards ‘the Orient’ over many centuries, this book takes aim at a large number of targets, as a glance through the excellent index will show. Its main thrust, how­­ever, is delivered by the analysis of Orientalists' pre­con­ceptions, methods, and conclusions in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centu­ries, the period during which, as the author sees it, their work was both deeply coloured by the increasing Anglo-French mastery over the Middle-East (and by extensions of European imperial control further afield in Asia) and, more significantly, went a long way towards ‘enabling’ – inspiring, rationalizing, justifying – that mastery. Scholar­ly Orienta­lism, as well as the romantic-literary varieties which the book considers, was admirably adapted to this political role because behind it there stretched out a very long, and quite unquestioned, tradition asserting that Oriental societies were in essence both different and inferior - barbarous and at times vaguely menacing, irrational, cruel, licentious, and thus in urgent need of European rationality, discipline, and government. Orientalism in its widest sense is thus to be soon as an aspect of cultu­ral hegemony, and this book is about intel­lec­tual power: to borrow two more of the author’s formulas, it deals with the ‘technology of power’ and how this became ‘actual scholarly rule’. The central theme is made explicit in many re-statements; here is one of the starkest, and (save for the odd use of ‘elided’ which may serve to characterize the occasional opacities besetting the writer's style) one of the clearest:

My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. (p 204)

The final section examines the significance of this background to the Middle East situation today, when the USA has taken over the Angle-French role of embodying Western power in and for the Orient. So far as the shaping assumptions and derived attitudes of scholarly and sub-scholarly discourse are concerned, the author finds that the old recei­ved text, gaudily re-illustrated but essentially unemended, still enjoys the widest currency, though its soundness has recently begun to be questioned by a few critics.

Orientalism is a scathing book, sometimes a bitter one. Professor Said, who occupies a chair of English and Comparative Literature at Colum­bia and has published two formidably methodical books in those fields, is a Palestinian, and plainly feels very deeply about the arrogant injustice perpetrated in his country by British imperial interests, British power, and British illiberal remissness, backed up and prolonged by European and American ignorance and prejudice. He sees in this an extreme but not untypical instance of how Orientalism, in both its scholarly and wider guises, has worked to dehumanize the objects of its scrutiny. ‘To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental’s human or even social reality … is to look in vain’ (p. 176) – the specific reference is to Lane and Chateaubriand, but the sweep of the arraignment extends from Aeschylus to Kissinger. His charges are backed up by an anthology of examples highlighting what he sees as Orientalism’s governing preoccupations, extracted from an extremely hetero­geneous assortment of European and American witnesses.

Said has elsewhere discussed the literary problem of where and how to begin:[1] he starts here with a Commons speech by Balfour in June 1910, made in the course of an Egyptian debate inflamed by argument about the assassination of Butros Ghali, the prime minister, in Cairo six months before, and by Theodore Roosevelt’s more recent ‘govern or get out’ speech in London. Some might consider it was loading the dice to base one’s exordium on such a classic statement of what used to be called ‘Egyptophobia’: seeing that Balfour was enunciating, from a considerable intellectual altitude, the accepted platitudes of scholarship – filtered-through-expertise,[2] it seems to me wholly justified. We are at once confronted with that strange penumbra of secondary meanings and insinuations that clustered around the word 1 oriental' (especially when used as a noun) during the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier.[3]

Anyone who has done much reading in the older literature about Bri­tish India or the Near East could compile a private thesaurus to illustrate the point.[4] What makes Balfour’s remarks such an admirable introduction is his explicit claim that ‘we’ (presumably educated Britons) know the history of Oriental nations very thoroughly and that in the classified facts of that history lies the justification for ‘our’ rule over them. Here at once is the paradigm of intellectual power. ‘An unbroken arc of know­ledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists’ (p 104).

If the argument of the whole book is to cohere, however, the author needs to convince the reader that Balfour’s words, admirably expres­sing the received wisdom behind a British imperial confidence that was by now being edged onto the defensive,[5] are in their ruling arrogance also an epitome of Orientalist convictions and aspirations over a much longer period; and that information about the Orient had always been filtered through a grid of prejudice and misconception that directed it towards the Orient’s need of control and domination by the West. Do the examples in the book, or a sufficient number of them, really establish this satisfactorily? The question can only be answered, I think, by closely scrutinizing a sample of them, and the uses to which they are put by the author. Before that, however, I should like to say something about the historical framework of Orientalism; and this involves looking at two or three of Said’s favourite techniques: all of which, taken together, leaves me with considerable reservations about his book’s ability to convince.

Orientalism allows or induces the reader to form in his mind the picture of an age-old relationship between ‘East and West’ wherein the latter has nearly always, and certainly characteristically, been the ag­gressive, self-confident party, and usually the stronger, controlling one. In fact, of course, this Western control was only exercised for a comparatively short period; as regards the Middle East, with its long succession of empires, a very short period indeed. Said several times admits that the East, in the shape of Islam, menaced the frontiers of Christendom (and, one might add, permanently or temporarily occupied and culturally transformed extensive regions that were of deep concern to many Chris­tians) over a far longer period.[6] But somehow this admission is not allowed to affect the proportions of the overall picture, and this technique of quietly making a large qualification and then leaving it to lie on the table is the first to which I would call atten­tion. (Instances of its use may be found on p 67, where severe strictures about Orientalism’s ‘moral and epistemological rigour’ in imposing ‘learned grids and codes’ on the Orient are followed by the concession that ‘all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, chang­ing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge’; on p 224, where we are told that ‘human societies, at least the more advan­ced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperi­alism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultu­res’; and in several other places.) The Ottoman Empire is kept well out of the limelight. The reader is nowhere encouraged to consider how its proximity and aggressive power, and the later problems of its degeneration, may have affected European attitudes (by no means always in a derogatory sense) towards the ‘Orient’ over a span of five centuries. This is surprising, since for most of that long period the Empire really was Islam for Europe, and this easy identification greatly influenced thought and emotion at every level from scholarship to popular mythology.[7]

Said’s historical frame, then, seems oddly designed, and the picture within it contains some curious details. The statement (p 17) that ‘Bri­tain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on’ may be a slip for ‘eighteenth’: but can he suppose there was in the 1880s ‘an unbroken patch (sic) of British-held territory from the Mediterranean to India’ (p 169)? In what sense did Austria-Hungary move into the Orient (p 191)? What is the justification for saying, of a time when France held Tunis, Al geria, and Morocco, that ‘so far as the actual space of the Orient was concerned, however, England was really there, France was not’ (p 211: and the same tendency to equate ‘the Orient’ with Egypt on the following page)? Oddest of all, perhaps, is the obiter dictum, referring to the present, that ‘anticolonialism sweeps and indeed unifies the entire Oriental world’ (p 108, italics mine).[8]

The second device calling for comment is one which, on the analogy of Tolstoy’s artifice of ‘making itstrange’, I am tempted to call ‘mak­ing it sinister’. By this, scholarly procedures which one might have supposed to be innocuous or ethically neutral, and certainly not restricted to Orientalists, are made to seem somehow maleficent, actually or potentially manipulative and repressive. Perhaps the best example of this is the treatment given to Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale published in 1697, which is said to demonstrate ‘a triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the Orient and making it systematically, even alphabetically, knowable by Western laymen’ (p 65).

The placing (italics his) of Muhammad within this ‘rational Oriental panorama’ becomes a characteristic manifestation of that intellectual power which the book is all about; ‘the dangers of free-wheeling heresy[9] are removed when it is transformed into ideologically expli­cit matter for an alphabetical item.’ D’Herbelot ‘imposes a disciplinary order upon the material he has worked on; in addition, he wants it made clear to the reader that what the printed page delivers is an ordered, disciplined judgement of the material’ (p 66). Surely these are essential procedures in any scholarly enterprise? The reader may reflect that the genre of encyclopaedic compilation was not exactly unknown in Islamic societies, and wonder why d’Herbelot should be a more portentous figure than his Ottoman near-contemporary Haci Halife.

There are many other instances of the employment of this device; and critical terms of art, such as text, discourse, archive, above all represent, seem to be endowed with a potency that will puzzle many readers. An explanation is partly to be found in the author’s conviction that European thinking about the Orient early became stylized and codified into a sort of Newspeak, in which it was impossible to express any notions that went against the sanctified and repressive dogmas of the Orientalists. Is this true, to anything like the degree alle­g­ed? Can we really accept Said’s picture of a discipline wherein all the usual impulses of young scholars to show their independence, to make a name for them­selves by bold originality, have been successfully drug­g­ed? (To be fair, it should be stressed again that he does allow that a handful of contem­porary scholars, by largely abandoning the old categories of ‘Oriental’, ‘Islamic’, etc have shown the way out of the closed system he depicts, and in paying tribute to them he fully acknowledges his debt to their work.)[10]

The third device is perhaps so closely related to the second that they mer­ge into one. This is the implicit identification of a scholar’s control

over the components of his discourse with control over the real  ‘exis­tential’ entities that the discourse is about. Weighted phraseology, such as ‘imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena’ (p 145), may help con­dition the reader’s mind for the semantic slide. I can best illustrate by reproducing in their entirety four consecutive sentences about Burton, a traveller-scholar whose writing, by ‘radiating a sense of assertion and domination over all the complexities of Oriental life’, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule over the Orient.’

The double-pronged intention of Burton’ s work is at the same time to use his Oriental residence for scientific observation and not easily to sacrifice his individuality to that end. The second of these two inten­tions leads him inevitably to submit to the first because, as will appear increasingly obvious, he is a European for whom such know­ledge of Oriental society as he has is possible only for a European, with a European’s self-awareness of society as a collection of rules and practices. In other words, to be a European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgeably, one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe. Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with Euro­pean domination of the Orient, and this domination effectively overrules even the eccentricities of Burton’s personal style. (p 197)

As Mrs Wilcox said to Margaret Schlegel, ‘these are indeed “other words”. I must confess myself completely unable to follow the sequence of thought here. The same equation, which is tacitly or explicitly made many times, is updated, to suit the contemporary American-dominated phase of Orientalism, and with particular reference to Israel, on p 307:

For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality[11] of the myths that Orientalism propagates. This system now culminates in the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.

This is perhaps the point at which to emphasize, what my quotations have probably made clear, that Orientalism draws quite heavily on the language and concepts of linguistics and the arcaner reaches of contemporary lite­rary criticism.[12] A lay reviewer can only run the risk of offering his excuses if certain methodological subtleties that are plain sailing for the initiated have eluded his protracted attempts at comprehension.

Since so much of the indictment is sustained by textual reference and citation, any adequate evaluation of Said’s book must look at the use he has made of his writers. In the cases I have followed up it seems to me that a few, notably Chateaubriand and Renan, illustrate very adequately his thesis of a ‘specially legitimated antipathy’ felt by Orientalists towards the Orient.[13] But some of the evidence for the millennial Europe-Orient polarity seems to me so bizarre as to demand brief discussion.

‘The demarcation between Orient and West’, we are told on p 56, ‘already seems bold by the time of the Iliad’, and Homer is elsewhere associated with ‘writers on the Orient.’ But surely not even the most casual reader of the Iliad can fail to be struck by the virtual identity, certainly in any morally evaluative terms, of the two warring societies? To quote M I Finley: (the Trojans) ‘are quite without distinguishing characteristics. They are as Greek and as heroic as their opponents in every respect’ (The World of Odysseus, Penguin ed, p 50). The point would hardly be worth making were the author not a Professor of Com­parative Literature; but it does seem a pity to have missed the chance of showing that the earliest monument of European literature is strikingly untainted by that millennial manipulative ideology he is writing about.

Next, Dante – and, inevitably, the figures of Muhammad and Ali in Bolgia IX of the Inferno, as well as Avicenna, Averroes, and Saladin in Limbo. Said is convinced that in both instances Dante is making state­ments about Islam, reiterating, all Orientalist-like, the already consecrated libels and idées reçues. Like d’Herbelot some three and a half centuries later, the poet is trying 1 to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage’ (p 71). Now apart from the fact that in canto 28 there is nothing whatever to locate Muhammad and Ali in any sort of Oriental frame of reference, and everything to put them (together with an enormous company, five named representatives of whom are all Western, and include Dante’s own cousin) in the category of schismatics and sowers of dissension in the body politic,[14] how can this episode, and the poet’s very different handling of the three eminent Muslims located in the honoured company of Limbo (not ‘for not having had the benefit of Christian revelation’ but, as Dante expressly states, for not having received baptism, a very different matter) both be evidence for one and the same ‘poetic grasp of Islam’? Were Dante in any sense writing about Islam one in­stance would surely contradict the other.[15]

After Dante, Goethe. Here the point at issue is Marx’ s quotation of

the ending of the little song to Zuleika, from the West-östlicher Diwan, to clinch his argument about the ultimately beneficial effect, in terms of Marxist theory, of clumsy and heartless British policies that were brea­k­­­ing up the village com­munities of India, Said’s analysis of Marx’ sinner juggling with alternative emotions seems to me acute and sensitive, and might be taken as one of the book’ s most detailed and convincing dis­sec­tions of the way Orientalist-Newspeak functi­on­ed, could one accept his view that Marx was here ‘scurrying back to Goe­the’ as a source of Orientalist wisdom (p 155); or, even subconsciously, expressing any sort of received views about the Orient, But re­ference to the full text of the poem will, I think, convince anyone who reads German that all Marx is saying, albeit in a rather elephantine fashion, is that you can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs – or rather, attar without killing rosebuds.[16]

It would be easy to cite some other cases where texts have been used in an arbitrary, sometimes inexplicable, fashion.[17] Perhaps the most astonishing is the author’s elucidation of remarks by Bernard Lewis on the meanings of the word thawra (pp 314-6). This must be read in full to be appreciated; all I would suggest is that if Lewis really inten­ded any­thing like the extraordinary sub-text, full of crude sexual innuendo, that Said has brought to light, it seems strange that when his original article on Islamic Concepts of Revolution was reprinted a year later (in Islam and History, pp 253-63) he should, by inserting just at the crucial point a fairly long passage tracing the respectable medieval political usage of thawra, have gone far towards neutralizing the alleged satirical force of his 1962 text. An old German academic joke used to run: ‘Other scholars can hear the grass grow, but X can hear the hay grow’, and I really think that in the last twenty-five pages or so of Orientalism, and more especial­ly when he is dealing with Lewis, Said’s exegetical elan soars into realms of fantasy. His vigour in bending texts to his purposes can best be studied on p 236, where he prints an extract from Robertson Smith’s Lectures and Essays with his own elucidations below. Robertson Smith states, inter alia:

It would be a mistake to suppose that genuine religious feeling is at the bottom of everything that justifies itself by taking a religious shape.

In context, this generalization is very probably - though not self-evi­dent­ly – being given a specifically Islamic reference, since Islamic so­ciety is the topic under discussion. But it would seem to be a harmless semi-platitude, capable of wide application, without giving offen­ce, in many societies. One can imagine it being used of British legal formalities, church parades, or some popular superstitions. Said glosses it thus:

religion is only a cover used by Muslims (in other words, all Muslims are hypocrites essentially).

It is time to sum up, and that is not easy. After dwelling so much on what seem to me the eccentricities and shortcomings of the book it may seem strange to say that I found it immensely stimulating, repaying much close study and following-up; but that is certainly the truth. It seems to me to be often unfair, tendentiously selective,[18] and very over-simplified in its conclusions – I am tempted to add, often rather over-complicated in its procedures. Said’s representation of Orientalism is quite as ‘essentialist’ and immutable as the Orient he accuses it of having imagined, constructed, and dominated.[19] The best things seem to me the treatment of Renan (a reviewer whose previous acquaintance was limited to the Life of Jesus feels gratitude for having been directed into some fascinating country), of Seven Pillars, and the attack on the preconceptions and methodologies of modern Islamic scholarship; the respectful but reproachful discussion of Gibb’s and Massignon’s work makes some very subtle points, which probably only a professional Islamic scholar can adequately assess.[20] It is likewise for academic Orientalists to answer the charge that their system of ideas has remained unchanged since Renan’s time (p 6), and for students of Islam and the Arabs to accept or reject the four principal dogmas of modern Orientalism attributed to them on pp 300-301.

It seems to me that the book quite often seeks out unnecessarily subtle explanations for what is essentially unmysterious. The hostile and un­sa­tis­factory attitudes complained of can nearly all be adequately accounted for by the survival, into modern times, of the older religious pre­judices (a point that the author does not overlook), together with Europe’s long experience, not necessarily at first hand, of the apparent non-reformability of the Ottoman Empire in its decline. This last consideration did not only shape thinking about the Turks: in the Great War period British ‘experts’ attributed the political ‘ backwardness’ of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, etc to ‘centuries of Ottoman misrule’ quite as often as to some innate Oriental or Islamic incapacity. More prominence given to the Ottoman Empire might also have allowed Said to do justice to the occasions when the conquering Turk and his institutions were held up for European emulation. It would not greatly have weakened the force of his indictment to have looked briefly at the handful of Orientalists who seem to be obvious exceptions to his rules - Browne, Leone Caetani and, on a different level, Blunt and Philby. Since British theory and practice loom so large it would have been appropriate to make some reference to James Mill’s detailed analysis of the differences between Hindu and Muslim civilization in The History of British India – a very influential text which surely goes some way towards controverting a number of Orientalism’s assertions. On a more trivial level, Said ignores the fact that 1 the Changing East’ has been almost as popular a cliché, during the last seventy years or more, as its dialectical progenitor - perhaps its popularity is really only testimony to the continuing strength of the original platitude, but the point would have been worth brief discussion. All of which is to suggest that the lasting utility of his book, as distinct from its immediate impact, would not have been lessened by a much more frequent use of qualified statement.

At the end, the reader is left with something of a puzzle. How was it that such a shallow, narrow-minded, deliberately imperceptive ideology, and one, furthermore, that was so untrue to reality (for Said makes it plain that in his opinion Orientalism 1 s arrogant categorizations were not merely dehumanizing and insulting, but objectively inaccurate) could be so effective in helping to establish and administer vast empires, even if those empires, with the arguable exception of British India, lasted for such a short time? But it is a virtue of this book, I think, to suggest many more questions than it answers. That they are not always the ques­tions formulated by the author does not diminish its power to provoke and stimulate. I hope it will be widely read and discussed; it would provide an excellent focus for a seminar series. (Those who have struggled with Beginnings may be assured that the subject-matter, manner of proceed­ing, and style are all much easier going in Orientalism.)

There are a number of places where the text has gone awry, which should be attended to. A sentence has slipped out of Cromer’s paragraph on p 37; ‘minimized’ on p 276 seems a mistake for ‘overstated’; ‘really’ on p 317 for ‘rarely’; ‘natural’ near the bottom of p 19 for ‘unnatural’; and on p 68 ‘scatological’ rather than ‘eschatological’ seems to be meant. A final doubt: can Quinet’s ‘docteurs’ on p 79 really mean medical men, as the argument seems to require?



aus: Gazelle Review for Literature on the Middle East 7, London: IthacaPress 1980
Who knows when Joseph Siegfried Frederique was baptized?
In the 1960s-80s he was Professor for the Modern Middle East at the University of York -- and left wing.

[1] Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975)

[2] Balfour said, inter alia:

‘Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government … Nations of the West have shown those virtues from their beginning, from the very tribal origin of which we have first knowledge. You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government.

All their great centuries – and they have been very great – have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilization – and they have been great – have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government … The hon. Gentleman (J M Robertson, Radical member for Newcastle) … almost objected to the use of the word “Oriental”, and he objected to my hon. Friend describing them as inferior, because in the opinion of my hon. Friend and of myself it is perfectly absurd to suppose that you can innoculate these races with the particular spirit of self-government which is familiar to Western nations, and, of all Western nations, most familiar to ourselves. You cannot do it …

The time may come when they will adopt, not merely our superfi­cial philosophy, but our genuine practice. But after 3000, 4000, or 5000 years of known history, and unlimited centuries of unknown history have been passed by these nations under a different system, it is not thirty years of British rule which is going to alter the character bred into them by this immemorial tradition. If that be true, is it or is it not a good thing for these great nations - I admit their greatness - that tl1is absolute Government should be exercised by us? I tl1ink it is a good thing …’ The whole debate (Hansard, 5th series XVII, coll. 1103-1160) is well worth reading.

[3] The Oxford English Dictionary is particularly disappointing here.

[4] My own favourite instance comes from the once-celebrated Savoy Hotel murder case in 1923, when the French Mme Fahmy was on trial for shooting her Egyptian husband who, it was alleged, had terrorized and brutalized her, Marshall Hall, defending, effort­lessly ascended to the highest levels of Orientalist racism, and his words illustrate some of Said’s contentions with wonderful explicit­ness. ‘Why was this woman afraid? The curse of this case is the atmosphere which we cannot understand - the Eastern feeling of possession of the woman, the Turk in his harem … that is some­thing almost unintelligible, something we cannot deal with … ‘

‘… as he crouched for the last time, crouched like an animal, like an Oriental, retired for the last time to get a bound forward …’ and England’s greatest forensic actor cowered down at the bar of the Old Bailey to show how. His client was acquitted; but the Bâtonnier of the Egyptian bar telegraphed a strong protest against the insult to ‘all Egypt, and indeed, the whole East …’ Marshall Hall apologized, though in rather graceless terms. See E Marjoribanks, The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, KC (London, 1929) pp 444, 449

[5] It is hard to agree with Said that during the first decade of the twentieth century the general theory expressed by Balfour ‘worked staggeringly well’ (p 36).

[6] ‘Yet where Islam was concerned, European fear, if not always respect, was in order’ (p 59). ‘From the end of the seventh cen­tury until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman, or North African and Spanish form dominated or effective­ly threatened European Christianity’ (p 74).

[7] Wagner’s oracular pronouncements on world history sometimes illustrate this point nicely. Here is a lately-published gem: ‘Recently he spoke about the fire at the library in Alexandria: “There, according to all accounts, the universal spirit had esta­blished a place of eternal enlightment, everything collected, put in order, culture seemed assured, and a Turkish empire destroys it all”.’ Cosima Wagner’ s Diaries, vol I (London, 1978) p 470.

[8] Not primarily concerned with Orientalism perhaps, but rather startling in a book carrying the intellectual armament of this one, are the assignment of Newman and Carlyle to the ranks of liberal cultural heroes (p 14), and the statement that Willlam Whiston the early eighteenth-century Arianizing deist, was expelled from Cambridge for his ‘Islamic enthusiasm’ (p 76). It is a pity that the usually very adequate apparatus cites no authority for this astonishing assertion.

[9] Is it really suggested that Islam was regarded as a religious danger by Europeans in the later seventeenth century?

[10]Talal Asad’s introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973) and his essay in the same volume called ‘Two European Images of Non-European Rule’ may be singled out as giving a succinct, well argued, and temperate statement of several of Orientalism’s leading themes.

[11] The application of this word to myths which, the book everywhere suggests, are exceedingly durable (and, in the passage under dis­cus­sion, go back at least to Renan) is puzzling.

[12] Non-readers of Barthes should be cautioned against supposing that

‘doxology’ and ‘doxological’, which recur several times in the book, have their customary liturgical connotations. ‘Mentalistic prejudice’ (p 254) may also be a stumbling-block.

[13] These words may have prompted some readers to recall a memo­rable case in point - that of the century’s most eminent authority on Islamic architecture, who lived in Egypt, and worked in the Middle East, for over half a century, combining with unrivalled eminence in and devotion to his subject a memorably ferocious and oft-vented distaste for just about every other manifestation of the Orient. See R W Hamilton, 1 Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell 1879-1974’ in Proceedings of the British Academy vol LX (1974) pp 459-476, especially pp 471-4.

[14] That Said quotes, untranslated, the line where Dante makes this explicit, but ignores its significance in his subsequent discussion, seems to me a further illustration of technique no. 1 discussed above. 

[15] It is perhaps disappointing that Said does not deal with the old problem of the two gibberish lines in the Inferno, (7, 1 and 31, 67) which some have tried to decode as Arabic and to inter­pret as Dante’s warning against being seduced by secular learning trans­mitted through Muslim channels. I believe this view has not been wholly abandoned.

[16] That Marx, in his writings on India, displayed some of the charac­teristic prejudices about Oriental despotism and the barbarous torpor of the East is not disputed. But that there is no need to bring in ‘Orientalism’ to explain his thinking in the passage under discussion can be shown by considering other passages where he argues in just the same way about the worsening plight of the European proletariat. ‘They (sc. the British working class) ought to understand that with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society’, (‘Wages, Price and Profit’ in Marx, Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1962) vol I, p 446)

[17]At the risk of seeming pedantic I would point out that if (p 232) nineteenth-cen­tury Orientalists felt themselves to be acting like George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon when he said his mind was ‘like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes’ (Middlemarch, ch. 2) they must have been conscious, as he was, of working under grave handicaps. (Casaubon says this because his weak eyes prevent him from reading in the evenings.) Nothing in Said’s discussion of nineteenth-century Orientalists would suggest that he believes they were capable of this modest degree of scholarly humility.

[18] The book is a kind of archival anthology, and it would be silly to cavil at omissions or inclusions. But I am mildly surprised that W Cantwell Smith’s Islam in Modern History is nowhere mentioned.

[19] Since Lawrence is dealt with at some length, and accused of endow­ing the Arabs with ‘collective self-consistency’ and depriving them of ‘existential or even semantical thickness’ (pp 229-30) it is tempting to quote the following letter, written in 1928, in partial rebuttal:

The Arabic-speaking peoples are as diverse as the English-speak­ing and equally distinct. From Morocco to Mesopotamia is as far, spiritually, as from San Francisco to Aberdeen. Further there’s a world between the beduin at Azrak, and the peasant at Amman: – though the journey is only fifty miles. Only a criminal would wish to make them all alike.

David Garnett (ed) The Letters of T E Lawrence (London, 1964) p 576.

[20] An example of the way in which Said’s partiality for unqualified statement weakens the coherence of his arguments is provided by his handling of Massignon, who is gently chidden for devoting so much time to the essentially untypical figure of al-Hallaj. Earlier in the book we have been told, in that ‘timeless eternal’ tense said to be so characteristic of Orientalist dicta that ‘Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals’ (p 154).

Friday, July 05, 2019

Gay Rights versus Human Rights — Reply to Joseph Massad's “Re-Orienting Desire” (Public Culture 14,2)

The world is changing, and Joseph Massad is not happy about the direction it is taking. The mightiest state on earth imposes its regime on the rest of the world: capitalism (“free mar­kets”), pluto­cracy (“demo­cracy”) and con­sumerism (“the American Way of Life”).
The U.S. fights his people, the Palesti­nians, and destroys their tradi­tional way of live — part of which is a different or­gani­zation of the sexual field: Where­as in the United States 5 % are allowed to be gay (“they can't help it”) and the others have to be straight, back “home” in the Arab world, there are “same-sex prac­tices” (381) without a gay identity, the “passive homo­sexual” has access to his preferred “object choice i.e., ex­clusively active partners” who have the choice bet­ween women and men, and are "part of a socie­tal norm" (384).
All Massad can do for his people is to write articles against the “Euro­pean settler colony of Israel” (369)1 and against “the machina­tions of the Gay Inter­na­tional2,” (380) i.e. Amnesty Inter­national and Muslim Gay Organisa­tions, which makes “real allian­ces …; with imperia­lists” (383).
Since Public Culture has fixed "word limits" for articles, reviews, author's replies ..., and I want to defend myself, and to give food for thought, I shortened my ori­ginal reply. — If you have read the printed version, you might skip some of the crimes.

To show that the assumptions of the Gay Inter­national (GI) are wrong and its actions counter­productive, is not enough for Massad. He revels in kicking at academics who share the “ontology and episte­mo­logy” (355) of the GI, i.e., think that since times immemorial there have been gays in the Arab world.
So Massad attacks John Boswell, As'ad Abu Khalil and Stephen O. Murray. Since they are easy prey — they really believe in a trans­historical Gay Substance —, and it is more satis­fying to get the jury of readers to con­demn inno­cents as well, he attacks Everett K. Rowson, Bruce Dunne and myself, although none of us shares the ahistorical global assumption of the GI.
I will show that Massad not only mis­represent­ed our writings, but is guilty of most of the crimes he accuses us of.

Crime #1: Belonging to the Gay Inter­national
He prepares the foundation for his base­less attack   by saying: the GI has “produced two kinds of litera­ture on the Muslim world: academic litera­ture ... and jour­nalis­tic accounts” (362), “a certain onto­logy and epi­stemo­logy are taken as axio­matic by all of them.” (365 emphases generally added)
Massad “argue[s] that it is the dis­course of the GI that both produces homo­sexuals, as well as3 gays and lesbians, where they do not exist” (363) and that the sexual epi­stemo­logy of the GI ignores “same-sex desires and practices” (ibid.) outside of “homo­sexuals, gays and lesbians.” He comes up with no evidence that Dunne, Rowson, Schmitt share the GI's “ontology and epistemo­logy.”
I had written: “In the societies of Muslim North Africa and South­west Asia ... there are no ‘homo­sexuals’ — there is no word for ‘homo­sexua­lity’ — the concept is com­pletely unfamiliar. There are no hetero­sexuals either.”4 — the opposite of the GI creed.5

Crime #2: Unclear Boundaries
Although Massad speaks indis­crimina­tely of “Arab world” (in the title as well as in 20 other oc­cur­ren­ces), of “Muslim world” (half as often), of “Arab and Muslim worlds” (seven times — always in that order), and 5 times of “non-Western World,” “the rest of [i.e. non-U.S.] the World,” “Third World,” he has the nerve to state: “other pro­blems relate to the fact that the Muslim world [a term neither Dunne, Rowson, nor myself use, A.S.] extends beyond the ‘Middle East’ into Asia and Africa and that the ‘Middle East’ includes non-Arabs and non-Muslims. It is not clear if what Dunne and others [!] describe as ‘Middle Eastern’ applies to all these people or not.” (369 n 28) Instead of ex­plain­ing why he uses “Arab world” in the title but “Muslim” 129 times in his article, often clearly re­ferr­ing to non-Arabs, Massad attacks Dunne, who knows pre­cisely what he is writing about: Dunne includes both Turkey and Israel in his overview article — to square "Muslim world" with "Middle East" seems to be the problem of that spoilt6 Christian Arab in Manhattan, definitely not Dunne's or mine: I never tire to remind the reader: “we restrict our­selves to the geo­gra­phi­cal core of Islam …; The Islamic societies in the Indian sub­continent, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa are beyond the scope of his book.” I notify the reader that I write about "the Arab speaking countries plus Iran and Turkey", and I specify that the focus is on "members of the Islamic civili­zation — which include quite a lot of Christians, Jews, and non­believers.” And most expli­citly: “Please note that this book is mostly concerned with Muslim culture, not with Muslim religion. Indeed it can be argued that the cultural unity between the northern and southern Mediter­ranean is greater than the common traits between Muslim Egypt and Muslim Indonesia or Muslim Nigeria.”7
Not only does Massad attacks us for his own offense, he misquotes me by changing my "Muslim North Africa and South­west Asia” into “Muslim world” (366) although I explicitly exclude “Sub­saharan Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.”8
[to the top]
Crime #3: Ahistoricism
“Schmitt ... makes the essentialist claim that the absence of these categories in the Muslim world [!] is a phenomenon that remains constant over time ... (this is tanta­mount of using studies of the European medieval period to generalize about all Western history). Schmitt, like orientalist scholars ... insists without any scholarly evidence ... …; Schmitt's ahistori­cism ...” (366) “Rowson draws upon Arabic texts written in the eleventh century to conclude [!] that these texts’ ‘concepts can be taken as broadly representative of Middle Eastern societies from the ninth century to the present.’” (367)
  • First, essentialists believe something does not change because that thing is anchored in the nature/the essence of a particular people; to study the history of a region and to find no fundamen­tal change in its mode of production over a period of time has nothing to do with essentialism.
  • Second, I do not proclaim unchangeability—to the contrary: “during recent years ... So if we disregard for the time being the newest development ... Economic and social changes (industria­lisation, entry of women into the public sphere, decreasing influence of the three-generation-household), on the one hand, and the influence of Western ideas (through colonial rule, tourists, media), on the other hand, bring with them a change in the relation­ship between men and women and consequently in the sexual relation­ship between males. Tourism does two things: it makes sex with women easier ...”9
  • Third, it takes a sick mind to believe that Rowson drew conclusions about nine centuries by studying texts from one century only. Rowson cities text from the 8th to the 15th century and has studied more texts. He is keenly aware of the problem.10
  • Fourth, putting Europe parallel with the Middle East for the 15th to 18th century is the sin of ahisto­ri­cism: The rise of Capitalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enligh­ten­ment did happen in Europe and not at that time in South­west Asia or North Africa.
    Throughout his article Massad opposes a time­less West to a changing (i.e., more and more West­ern­ized) East, e.g. he writes how the Western words “sex” and “sexua­lity” influenced Arabic11 (371f.), totally unaware that these words appeared on the European linguistic stages only in the early 19th century and gained their present meaning only at the beginning of the 20th century.12 Massad states: “most non-Western civiliza­tions, including Muslim Arab civilization, have not subscribed histori­cally to [the straight-gay binary]” (383), the desires of Arab and Muslim men are sexually poly­morph (363)13, while it would be nearer to the historical facts to say: before the replacement of most personal links by anonymous market forces, before the creation of free individuals rather than members of pri­mordial soli­darity groups, before the creation of pension funds, societies do not subscribe to the straight-gay binary. Only an ahisto­rian and idealist ignores that it takes anonymous cities with apart­ments for singles for the binary to take root. Only when the state enforces law and order, when one does not depend on the martial posture of the males of the clan, when educa­tion becomes more important than physical strength can men be gay. As a typical Orientalist-in-reverse14 he cuts the World into West and non-West, instead of pre-modern and modern. He is so fixated on what the devilish GI does to the Arab world, that he does not see that before Ston­wall there was much working-class same-sex sex without gay identity, that this is still common half a mile north and east of Columbia among Hispanic and Thugz on the DL.
    His only reference to change makes matters even worse: “Ironically, [increaseed harass­ment by police] is the very process through which ‘homo­sexuality’ was invented in the West. On the invention of homo­sexuality, see Foucault, History of Sexuality” (384)
    a) Foucault’s inventor is not the police, but psychiatry.
    b) Foucault wrote this without a thorough study15
    c) The book was published in 1976 and should not be cited today for its facts, they are wrong.16 The ground for the egalita­rian gay ideal was laid 200 years ago.17 And the acceptance of infertile same-sex sex was helped along by the separation of reproduction and coition by birthcontrol pill and vulcanized condom.
  • Fifth, I am the opposite of an ahistorian: Where I detect change, I name it18 and where I do not find change I point out the underlying factors.19
  • Sixth, it is M who is ahistorical: In his story there is only before and after the onslaught of the GI on the Muslim World. He attacks Rowson and myself for dis­covering stability over a long period of time without ever telling his reader when, where and how change did occur.
[to the top]

Crime #4: Orientalism
And as a typical oriental Christian in Manhattan he takes the moral high ground: “Dunne's work exemplifies a type of anthropology that fails to problematize its own mythical idealized self, that continues to view the other as all that the self does not contain or condone, namely, non­egalitarian sexual relations, the oppressive rule of men, gender-based sexuality, patriarchy, and so forth. An anthropo­logy that cannot abandon the mytho­logical West as a reference point will continue to use it as the organizing principle for all of its arguments.” (370) Besides the fact that Massad’s West is much more mythological than mine (because he does not specify the genesis and the workings of Western capitalism; it just is the West), and that he uses the binary West‐non-West more than any of the writers he chooses to attack, in Dune's article there is not a hint of M's assertions: Not only does Dunne not paint an egali­ta­rian West, he does not even describe the East as non-egalita­rian, just that the norm was such: “Adult male egalitarian homo­sexual relations may have been publicly un­ac­cept­able, but there is evidence that, in the medieval period, men of equal rank could negotiate such relations by alter­nating active and passive sexual roles.”20
While on page 370 Massad castigates Dunne for describing a gender-based sexual dis­course, when he con­cludes he speaks of the two genders in “same-sex contact” without any allowance for a less rigid reality: “the receptive parties in male-male sexual contacts are forced [by the GI dis­course] ...21 to identify as homo­sexual or gay, just as men who are the ‘active’ partners are …; forced to limit their sexual aim to …;22 women or men.”(383)23, “The so-called passive homosexual24 …; will no longer have access to …;25 exclusively active partners, as in the interim they will have become hetero­sexual.” (384) Whereas Dunne and myself show the power of normative discourses, and of every-day language, of religion and the media, but point out that real life is often more complex than theory, Massad reduces the male sexual actors to two genders, and he paints an idyllic picture by omitting boys from the pos­sible objects of “exclusi­vely active” Arabs and ignoring that often there is no sexual desire on the side of the insertee—same-sex rape was and is rather common in many areas between Morocco and Northern India.
Massad: “The orientalist method deployed in this book where Arabs and Muslims can only be object of European scholarship and never its subject or audience …;” (p. 367) Massad's attitude is Damn the Westerners, when they do it, and damn them when they don't! The GI gets castigated for intro­ducing a dis­course into "the Arab and Muslim worlds," and I get vilified for not addressing an Arab audience. Note, that Schmitt/Sofer was published in English and “clearly most Egyptian men who practice same-sex contact [do not] know English” (382) Anyhow, in 1995, the İstanbul Kavram Press published a pirated edition of the book Müslüman toplumlarda Erkekler arası cinsellik ve Erotizm,” hence there is a considerable audience in the Orient. No Westerner received royalties for the book, nor was it financed by the GI; there appear to be Turks in Turkey who believe that Schmitt/Sofer offers so many insights into its subject matter that they trans­lated it com­pletely. Since one of the editors is an Iraqi Jew and about half the authors in the 1995 edition are Turks, Moroccans, Pakistani or Iraqi and some of the other articles are testi­monies/eye­wit­ness accounts (both by Westerners and non-Westerns), Massad’s “only/never”-assertion is not tenable.
[to the top]
Crime #5: Linguistic Incompetence and Inaccuracies
“In fact, contra ... Schmitt, modern Arabic has the verb tanayaka, which does indicate reciprocity ... The language-based errors and mistakes in ... Schmitt's ... book are too numerous to listhere.” (370)
Massad gives no evidence for the use of tanayaka = to fuck each other; Ibn Manzur (born in 1232 A.D.) has only eyelid movement and drowsi­ness—not exactly gay sex. Massad takes advantage of the fact that most of the readers ignore, that all Arab verbs have a virtual form of reciprocity. Therefore, that “Arabic has the verb tanayaka" is a zero statement. He would have to show that it was used, but no dictionary of classical or of modern Arabic has it. I know of no oc­currence in the very rich Arab sex26 literature. When I used tanayaka in the 1970s I met with bewilder­ment, pro­voking the reply: “The woman should not be on top.”27 If Massad can prove use of the reci­procal form from the eleventh or eigh­teenth century, I will have learned some­thing. If he assures us that he and fellow gay Arabs in America use it, that's support for my argument, which M pretends not to under­stand: There is a rich Arabic voca­bulary for sexual acts, but almost all verbs are tran­sitive: they do not refer to what human beings do with each other, but what one does to an other: he rides, beats, tames, inserts, enters, pierces, puts into a hole, over­powers, turns over, insults, rapes, hits, beats, mounts, and he or she is beaten, tamed, over­powered and so on. Of course, M does not ex­plicitly state that Arab sex litera­ture is about having sex with each other instead of being manuals for the inserters. He just insinuates to know better qua being Arab.
I am still waiting for the “linguis­tic mis­takes …; to numerous to list". I hope he is not referring to mis­spelling, for with the editor (John DeCecco) and the publisher (Haworth Press) bear the responsibility—I never saw the proofs. In the meantime, here are some mistakes I found in his article:
“assumes prediscursively that homosexuals, gays, and lesbians are universal categories” (363) for: assumes that “homo­sexual,” “gay,” and “lesbian” are universal prediscursive categories, i.e., categories anchored in human nature.
“Islamic is” not “an adjective referring” only "to the religion Islam while Muslim refers to people.” (370) A look into Webster, or the Oxford English Dictionary suffices; The internet search machine Google provides a good idea about its modern usage by Muslims and non-Muslims. In older Arabic litera­ture “islâmî” is used for somehow pertaining to Islâm, but not being truly "muslim.” M's assertion "Islamic corresponds to Judaic as Muslim to Jewish or [he means: and] Jew” is simplistic: Whereas Islam is the abstract noun to both Islamic and to Muslim, the noun for Judaic is Judaism, for Jewish Jewish­ness (Yiddish­keit). And to say: "Jew and Muslim correspond” reduces Jewishness to a religion whereas most Jews see themselves forming a people as well—the most popular form of anti-Semitism among educated Palesti­nians.
The London-based Arabic newspaper, "al-Hayah" (377) is called al-Hayat, cf. www.alhayat.com; a pedantic transliteration would be a l - ḥ a y a ah .28
Bin Mukarram Ibn Manzur (370 n.32) is ridiculous: Bin and Ibn are the same in Arabic, must be the same in transcription, and to style the author "Aba al-" instead of "Abu'l" is preposterous. Yes, after "See" follows an object and in Arabic the form changes, but in a romaniza­tion that does not even preserve the dif­feren­ces between long and short vowels, between emphatic and non-emphatic letters, any reasonable person uses the nominative Abu only.

Massad misleads the reader. After talking of "white Western males", "white male European or American gay scholars", "white gay sex-tourists" (362), "Western (read white) gay men" (375) he para­phrases on page 380 "foreign (i.e., mostly European and American)" and speaks again of "European and American tourists" (381) while in reality a good number of the foreigners and tourists in question are Arabs, who come from the Arab pen­insula to Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco for alcohol, boys, girls and/or gambling.

Gay Conspiracy or The Forces of Capitalism?
Although I contest the "ontology and episte­mology" of the GI, I doubt that they are really dangerous. Massad sees con­scious forces at work‐"efforts of [Western capital] to impose a European hetero­sex­u­al regime on Arab men" (372) plus all "the machi­nations of the GI" (380)‐, whereas I see hetero­sexu­ali­sation rather as the result of salaried work, the welfare state and "the pro­lifera­tion and hege­mony of Western cultural products" (371). I believe the French popularized cigarettes in Morocco to make money not in order to under­mine the health of the natives, and that Time-Warner is more interested in profits than in spreading the American way of life.

Two questions remain to be answered:
Why does the GI carry on in spite of negative results?

There is a huge difference in the human rights debate between France29 and North America. Whereas in France only the individual has rights, in the U.S. and Canada the concept of minority rights dominates the public debate. Because one belongs to a dis­advanta­ges group (descendent of former slaves, des­cendents of pre-Colum­bian inhabitants, etc.) one is entitled to special protection (or even affirmative action). Whereas in France gays have rights because they are human and all human beings have the right to sexual fulfillment, to non-inter­ference of the state into their private lives, right to form as­socia­tions, freedom from police harassment etc., in the U.S. gays argue that they are born into a group. They do not demand free choice of sex partners for all, but proclaim that they are unfree: Nature forces us! Lesbians and gays form a community like Blacks and Jews; and as these lobby pro-Africa and pro-Israel, LGBT fight for those of their kind. The Moral Majority within the USA makes them fight for gay rights in Pakistan — they do it to further their argument "God created us gay" — the Pakis are means to their real aim. That is why negative results do not deter them.
[to the top]

And why is the Arab reaction so negative?
In "Das jüngste Menschenrecht und seine Unvereinbarkeit mit dem Islam"30 und in "Liwāṭ im fiqh"31 I explain why GI campaigns in the Arab world are counterproductive. Since today hardly anyone seems to read German, here are some of the results of my study of the šarīʿa and of societal norms and beliefs:
  • Sodomy is one of the gravest sins in Islam. However, done secretly, it is not disruptive, since it neither leads to unwanted pregnancy nor doubtful affilia­tion, nor does it shame anyone.
  • Same-sex desire is normal, but pious men should not give in to it.
  • Propagating sin is the greatest crime — it undermines religion and is freely chosen.
  • There is no obligation in the šarīʿa to enforce the interdiction of sodomy in this world.
  • The protection of sex in private is fully compatible with the šarīʿa:
    — difficult to meet rules of evidence in penal trials plus rules against unproven allegations,
    — rules against investigations into the private lives of people, the inviolability of the home [Qur’ān XXIV 27], admonition to Muslims not to stick their noses into other peoples businesses (XXIV 19) and not to speak bad about others (IL 12)32 .
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Notes

1 More than half the citizens if the state of Israel do not hail from Europe.

2 the Inter­national Lesbian and Gay Association, the Inter­national Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Amnesty Inter­national (pace Massad London based), Rex Wockner, as well as US-based Arab (GLAS, Ramzi Zakharia) and Muslim groups (al-Fatiha, Faisal Alam).

3 Here "homosexuals" are one thing, "gays and lesbians" another. Massad's use of the terms is confused: "gays and lesbians" (362), "homosexual and gay" (362), "homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians", "homosexuals, gays, and lesbians", "homosexuals" (all three on page 363 and apparently synonymous), "homosexual and gay" (366), "homosexual and gay and lesbian" (374), "the Western gay movements", "the Western gay and lesbian movements" (both 377 — is there a difference?). He obviously could not make up his mind, how these categories are related.

4 Different Approaches to Male-Male Sexuality/Eroticism from Morocco to Usbekitstan, in Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer (eds.), Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies, (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), p. 5

5 similarly explicit: Bruce Dunne, "Power and Sexuality in the Middle East," Middle East Report 28, no. 1 (1998): 9: "Western notions of sexual identity offer little insight into …;" MERIP

6 I do not talk about the man, but about the author of "Re-Orienting Desire". Ten years ago he read articles about male-male sexuality in the Arab world past and present. He was angry and envious, that non-Arabs wrote about "his" subject. Mervat Hatem told him: Write a better one your-self! This explains why he is kicking in all directions: The main objects of his attacks (IGLHRC, GLAS, al-Fatiha) were not even around, when he started to write "this article" (361 ackn.)—but although I attack the ontological basis of the GI and Dunne and Rowson do not share it, we find ourselves in an article against the gay-rights-for-Arabs-that-do-not-yet-know-that-they-are-gay-campaigners. Behind the attack on Dunne for using the term "Middle East" I detect again a spoilt Christian Palestinian man—he likes "Arab world" better: he dislikes any term that puts him together with the Turks, who subjugate the Arabs for so long, and are now allied with the USA and Israel.

7 Sexuality and Eroticism …;, xiv, 1, 129

8 Different Approaches p. 1

9 Different Approaches, p. 5, 20

10 Everett K. Rowson, "The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists," in Body Guard: Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 51f: "Orientalist tendency to see the East as an eternal un-changing monolith…;"

11 Freud wrote neiher Die Traumdeutung nor Die drei Abhandlungen in English. (371f.)

12 He notes that tawajjuh (direction) does not clearly refer to male or female (380), but he fails to see that orientation is equally undeter­mined. That sexual orien­tation does not refer to a liking of pain in sex (machosism), of seeing or being seen (exhibi­tionism/ voyeurism), to a preference of very young partners (pedo­philia) and so on, but serves merely as a general term for both homo- and hetero­sexuality, is a result of the GI propaganda—but M is blind to see the GI at work in the USA as well.

13 Massad writes "its [i.e., the Gay Inter­national's] poly­morphous­ness" instead of "their [i.e., of Ara men] poly­morphousness". (364)

14 cf. Jalal Sadiq al-cAzm: Orienta­lism and Orienta­lism in Reverse, in Khamsin (1981), 8:5-26

15 The book has no bibliography and just a handful of notes. The only "evidence" on the invention of homo­sexu­ality is full of mistakes.

16 The deathblow was delivered by Klaus Müller, Aber in meinem Herzen sprach eine Stimme so laut, Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel 1991, and for those not reading German: Harry Ooster­huis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, …;, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. — Foucault's History can still be read for its ideas, but since 1976 so many historians came up with new facts, that Massad's invocation of Holy Foucault is pathetic. I recommend: Halperin, Rocke, Weeks, Trumbach, for more see Journal of the History of Sexuality and gayhistory

17 In Germany the Romantics considered women as equal in principle, the realation between hus-band and wife should be geschwisterlich (sisterly) as well. Cf. Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Academic Press,1978

18 e.g. in Schwule? islamisches Recht? Ein Aufklärungsgespräch, in M. Herzer (ed.): 100 Jahre Schwulen­bewegung, Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel 1998, p. 209f. and Sexual Meetings …; Immigrant Communities, in Schmitt/Sofer, p.125-9

19 Liwāṭ im Fiqh: Männliche Homosexualität?, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 4 (2001-2002), p. 1-2

20 Dunne is careful to distinguish between normative constructions/ ideological framework and sexual behaviour, between public persona and private sex live. Examples of exceptions from the binary inserter-insertee: Different Approaches, p. 19 top, p. 20 bottom

21 The original: "are forced to have one object choice" does not make sense.

22 The original: "forced to limit their sexual aim to one object choice" is strange language ‐ somebody not on leave from Columbia would simply say: are forced to chose between women or men / are restricted to either men or women.

23 Strangely, M speaks straight­forwardly of "exclusively active partners" (384) and of "men who are the 'active' partners" (384) but calls their partners "men who are considered passive or receptive parties" (383). Whereas "'active' partners see them­selves …;" (384), their partners are perceived by others ‐ M is faithfully reproducing the old phallo­cratic lore without realizing it. Note that the noun "the homosexual" is only used for the "passive"; his counter­part is "the active partner" - something Duran gets reprimanded for. (376)

24 Note that the noun "the homo­sexual" is only used for the "passive"; his counterpart is "the active partner" ‐ something Duran gets re­pri­man­ded for. (376)

25 In Massad's original "…;access to his previously available sexual object choice (i.e., exclusively active…;"

26 The classical Arab word was bâh: coitus, sexual potency, sexuality-pace Massad, Arabs did not have to adopt genos/genuus to fill a gap.

27 Vorlesung zu mann-männlicher Sexualität/Erotik published in Kleine Schriften zu Sexualität und Erotik, Berlin 1985, p. 16 ‐ Rowson's first publi­cation on the subject is dated "Cairo 1983;" each of us came to similar conclusions without knowing of the other.

28 In Arabic, the femine final a is written: h ه with the two dots of the t ت ; elsewhere in the article Massad uses "ah" as the transcription of this t-dotted h ة , so he can not use "ah" for alif + t-dotted h. In the orientalist system t-dotted h = "a", alif + t-dotted h = "āh".

29 cf. ةric Fassin, Same Sex, Different Politics: "Gay Marriage" Debates in France and the United States, Public Culture 13.2 (Spring 2001)

30 The Latest Human Right and its Incom­patibly with Islam, delivered in German at a Human Rights Conference in Heide­lberg in 1998

31 Sodomy in Islamic Jurisprudenc, published in Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 4 (2001-2002). Pp. 1-59 or just the English summary ot the German text chapter by chapter ⇑

32 A good Muslim should admonish the sinner in private, but not harm his good name in front of others.‐ I am not a fundamentalist who believes that any Muslim should apply qur’ānic directives directly, but these verses are backed up by apostolic sayings and by classical jurists (e.g. Abu Gaclā al-Farrā’ and Muḥammad al-Mawardī). It's just that liberal politicians can justify non-inter­ference by the state as being in accordance with the ¨arīca